Letters to the Princess

Flurry found the mountain hut empty on the third week after the debacle in the palace. She’d been trying to give Cozy space, but as soon as she arrived she realised she should have come sooner.

She stayed there another three weeks. Another two beyond that, until the second panicked missive from her mother arrived.

The Heart is flickering again, Flurry! Come home. No one else has your connection to it, and we need you here.

Guilty and frightened, Flurry returned. But she stationed a guard permanently in a little camp across the valley from Cozy’s mountain home. He was her swiftest pegasus, and he swore he would fly straight to her the second anyone came or went from the hut.

It was something, but it wasn’t enough.

Months passed. A year. The Heart beat unsteadily, and Flurry Heart sickened alongside it. Doctors and mages alike could not help either of them, and Flurry could not find the will to forget the mare she loved. Could not, as Cadence asked, cut her out of her heart.

“The auras are so tangled up I don’t know if it’s her making the Heart sick, or the Heart making her sick,” Cadence said, her voice edged with terror. “Shiny, I can’t tell.”

Cozy was dead. She had to be dead, because if she were not nothing could keep them apart. They were two halves of a whole. Two sides of the same coin.

Cozy would never willingly leave her. There was something granite about her. A bone-deep loyalty that ran true through love, through hatred, through every emotion. No matter what Cozy felt, she would never stop needing Flurry. That was one thing that Flurry believed with her whole heart.

The fifth time the Crystal Heart went out for more than three days, a foal died. Frozen to death. Her little limbs as cold as Flurry felt when she went to give the royal regrets to the parents. It was a thousand times worse than the occasional old pony too weak to climb down all the stairs, though Flurry had once thought that was the lowest she could ever sink.

There was only one path of action left, and Flurry took it.

The Heart glowed dully, a mere wisp of its former radiance. The cold pulled at the edges of Flurry’s perception, there but not quite there.

It had worked.

The Heart was cut off from her, but its connection to Cadence and the Crystal Ponies remained. They could fuel it — enough. They could provide what she no longer could. The Empire would live a half-life, a shadow life, but it would live. It would survive. That was all that mattered.

It's Princess, though? That was another story.

Flurry looked inside herself, and found only cold. True cold, icy cold, empty cold — far more vast and far more frightening that ever the cold of the glaciers outside the Heart’s protective bubble could be.

Flurry looked at the wasteland that had once been her heart, and she wondered. Was this what Cozy Glow had felt like, all of her life?