Dear Cozy Glow,

I miss you. I miss our chess games. I miss your smile. I miss the little barbs about my stupid family. I miss your smell; apple and some sort of spice. Maybe cinnamon. I don’t know. I’ve never been any good at identifying smells, but it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m getting sidetracked.

Six months, Cozy. How long can you expect us to go without seeing each other? Without you seeing anyone at all? Your therapist wrote to me. After I wrote to him eight times, but still. He’s worried. And I am too.

Something weird’s going on here in the Empire, Cozy. The Crystal Heart is flickering. One night it almost went out. I need you here. Come and help me solve the mystery. You need to leave that little mountain hut, and I know you hate Canterlot. Come here, instead. Come and be with me. I swear my mother won’t bother us. I’ll get us a flat on the edges of the city. I’ll come home to you every night after court. You can spend as much time as you want out in the snow by yourself. I know you need your space.

Please, Cozy. Come home to me. I want us to start again.

Flurry.

Cozy Glow tossed the unopened scroll into the fire and watched it burn. Sometimes she wrote letters back. Letters saying crazy things like I miss you too or Help me break my mother out of the palace’s statue vault. Help me let her die. She wanted to die.

She burned those, too.

She was better off here. Alone. Safe. No one to hurt and nothing to be hurt by. Just quiet. Stasis, like Rarity. A semblance of peace.

Cozy Glow watched the sun set and the moon rise from her lonely mountaintop eyrie, and she remembered those first days after the bank heist, when Rarity brought her home. When, little by little, she wormed her way into Cozy’s heart. One cup of hot cocoa at a time.

Was it, somehow, Cozy’s fault? Could she have done more? Could she have defended her mother better? When Twilight Sparkle burst in, spellfire blazing in the air around her, what other options did she have? The right arrangement of words to sway a tyrant. The exact combination of swiftness and violence to topple a god. How many tries would it have taken to get it right? She’d only had one, and she’d blown it.

Or perhaps if she had been there for her mother more in the last few years. If she’d spent less time up north, breaking up and reuniting with Flurry. If she’d been more focused. Maybe then Rarity wouldn’t have shared her diagnosis with the mare who claimed to be her friend. Maybe then she would have had the final rest she’d wanted.

Cozy Glow spent time sketching out what she remembered of the catacombs beneath the palace in Canterlot. Her memories of that time in her life were fragmented, like mirror shards. Terror and fury pervaded everything, tinting those years an ugly red. Doctor Healing Word would say it was unhealthy to dwell so much on the past, that it was better to focus on the present, but Cozy didn’t care. She needed those maps, if she was going to find Rarity and escape.

She tried not to consider what came next. How could she unfreeze a statue without command of the Elements? How could she bear seeing her mother like that, locked into her own body like she had been? And if you smashed a statue, would its suffering end? She didn’t know.

Cozy no longer knew much of anything.

Dear Cozy,

What about correspondence chess? Somepony told me about it the other day, and I thought you might like to try it. You sketch out a board and label each square, and you can just write your moves to one another. It would take a lot longer than our usual games, but I thought it could be fun. Or if not fun, exactly, a way to keep our hooves in. Of course, correspondence chess would require you to actually write back to me.

The Heart went out again yesterday. Everypony rallied together and sang, but it took three hours to come back on. And an old stallion in the northern quarter, who couldn’t make it to the community firepit…he died, Cozy. I feel like I’m failing. As a princess, and as a…whatever we are now. Another life lost. Another day I don’t hear back from you.

I miss Rarity too, you know. She meant so much to so many ponies. She touched a lot of lives. You’re not alone in your grief. If you let other ponies in, let them share some stories about her, you might feel better. You’d have new memories of her, at least.

Mother is…she’s being Mother. She introduced me to a mare last night. A lawyer. And her fur is pink. Can you believe it? You’d have been furious, once upon a time, if I told you that. I might have hidden it from you to spare you. Now I think I’d like to see you angry. It would almost be fun if you turned up here spitting fury at Mother, because at least you’d be doing something. At this point these letters to you are starting to feel more like a diary.

Come back to life, Cozy. Rarity wouldn’t want you to die just because she has.

Write back, at least.

Flurry.

Flurry —

She isn’t dead. That’s the whole problem.

A knock at the door, that most alien of sounds. Cozy drifted towards it half-automatically, wondering if the wind could somehow have knocked a pinecone into her door. There was nopony out here to knock. The mailmare only came once a month, and she never knocked. She knew better.

But the pony behind the door, breathing heavily from her long flight, carried no letters. Just a head of wind-tossed pink curls and a crown that hung askew. As Cozy’s eyes slid up to it she snatched it off her head and shoved it guiltily into a saddlebag.

“Cozy,” she said.

“Flurry,” Cozy returned. Her tongue felt heavy and numb in her mouth. When was the last time she had spoken aloud?

“It’s been a year, Cozy. How much longer can you hide here?”

Cozy stared blankly at the mare she had once felt such a tangle of emotions for. Since Rarity was stolen, it was a struggle to feel anything at all.

Flurry was breathing hard. Feelings were obviously not something she was struggling to generate.“I can’t watch you do this anymore. You’re not yourself. Either you come with me right now, or—”

“—Or?” snarled Cozy. Deep in her belly, anger stirred. Old and familiar.

She should have expected this. An ultimatum. For all Flurry’s high-flung protestations of affection, for all her nobility, this was what it came down to. Control. How very trite. How pedestrian.

Princess Flurry Heart should have learned her lesson by now. Nopony controlled Cozy Glow.

Flurry seemed to find her courage. “Or we’re through.”

“And where will we go, if I come with you?”

“The…the Palace.”

"And where in the Palace?”

The Princess was losing steam. “My room.”

“You think your mother will be happy with me in your room, Flurry? With me living with you, one big happy family?”

“N-no, but I can talk her round. You’ll be under my jurisdiction.”

“Flurry, you’re delusional. There’s no way this ends with me anywhere but in the dungeons. Your mother—”

“—No,” Flurry said desperately. “Even if it got — bad — again, she wouldn’t. Only until you calmed down. Until you felt better.”

“And there it is.” Cozy Glow realised that deep down, she had been expecting this. “You’re asking me to voluntarily follow you into jail.”

The door would close behind her, and Cadence and Twilight Sparkle would never let her out again. Flurry Heart might try to save her, but it wouldn’t work.

Being with Flurry would always be a cage.

And Cozy would never be good enough.

But Flurry was still trying. Desperate. Hungry as Cozy herself had once been. “We can…we can go somewhere else, just us. I could stay here with you. I can stay here as long as you need.”

Cozy shook her head. She was through. Rarity was gone, and she had taken everything with her. She had tried to stay alone in the ruins of their home and the life they had shared, but Flurry wouldn’t let her be.

It was time to try somewhere new.

Author's Note

Despite the chapter title, this is not the ending, I promise.