Only Human

A bang, then the wet sound of bullets hitting warm flesh as time began to slow. Searing pain filling a body that was soon surrounded by cold, blood falling onto the floor and the feeling of hooves buckling and armor chinks stabbing against flesh. That was just one of the things Celestia felt as she shambled through the wilderness underneath the searing sun, the discomfort from it and her cut up feet being completely drowned out by her mental agony before it slowly abided, letting her body collapse into the tundra. For a few seconds there was silence, blessed silence, she took a few deep heaving breaths out of instinct though she no longer needed to. Then in a flash the voices started again, their impact on her like a jolt of lightning forcing her up from her brief moment of respite and into her same shambling walk. The messages were the same as they usually were, a few voices blaming her for what they did and declaring their total innocence. Some telling her how stupid she was for attempting what she did, some wailing over the fact that they were separated from their dead loved ones. Yet most were simple to the point of being monosyllabic, though just as effective. "Bitch!", "Your fault", "Murderer!", were a couple of favorites though others got more creative with their insults. Not that that mattered, the fact they were inside her meant she could feel their exact emotions when they talked to her.

Hate, hate, hate, that just about summed up how they felt about her. In the beginning she found them ungrateful, she was meant to be loved, to be adored and idolized by her wonderful perfect little ponies. For the first year she argued with them, screamed at them for their ingratitude for everything she did for them. She gave them a perfect society, superiority over the other species, and this is how they repaid her? The fact that she even helped them in the first place let alone didn't attack them should be cause for gratitude.

Next came wailing, loud sobbing wails at the universe at how she didn't deserve this and how it was truly mankind's fault. That was the one time she stayed still, sometimes laying down and writhing in misery for weeks on end on the cave floor she called home. But then the anger turned to mockery, she tried to convince them that goddesses shouldn't suffer instead it was the domain of mortals, this simply caused more mockery. As time went on, she soon began to realize that the worst part of her curse wasn't the anger, or the conflict, but the sheer fact the yelling didn't stop. Propensity for mental illness was once one of the reasons she considered mankind inferior and in need of uplifting, but now she was experiencing it firsthand. The noise was so great that her mind almost split, with one side processing the agony and another simply focusing on base needs such as her never-ending hunger. One that made her not only into an obligate carnivore but the most vile kind of carnivore at that.

The thoughts of hunger caused her to scramble harder, hands still clawing at the ground as hunger burned her stomach just as the rays of a sun, quite like the one she once controlled, burned her skin on all sides. The rags she had on barely offering protection as she began to climb the rocks in a shockingly ape like manner. Above her was a forest, Celestia wasn't that familiar with earth's ecology or geography, but a forest meant life, and right now life meant food. She hadn't drunk in quite a while, her last meal being a particularly slow deer she caught last week. Even in the respite of feeding, she never enjoyed the taste and most likely never would. It was a curse after all, and a thousand years of gourmet cooking certainly didn't help with the matter.

As she neared the top her ears, though weaker than those of a pony, heard a scurrying noise coming from a nearby crevice. With an awkward swing of her arm she scraped her body against the rough and cold rocks towards the hole, curling her toes tightly to make up for her now free hand. Her fingers, dirt encrusted and raw though still dainty felt blindly until a bite caused her to wince. She clamped her hand with catlike speed before pulling the squeaking, squirming furball out by it's thick tail. It was big, bigger than a Manehattan sewer rat but with a cleaner coat. In an instant she shoved it head first into her mouth, and bit right through its neck. Its blood gushed into her mouth as she alternated between gagging and lapping it up greedily, it's body continuing to spasm as nerves its fired their last pulses.

When it was finally dry, no longer twitching but dead and cold as the rocks she clung to she loosened her hand. The rodent fell unceremoniously landing with a muffled thud. The voices again mocked her or reacted with disgust, a few comments about all aristocrats being blood sucking parasites. She scratched at her face with her free hand before continuing to climb, the sharp and sudden pain distracting her as she collapsed onto the top of the small cliff. After a few minutes she got up and scanned over the horizon so as to make her the mare she had nicknamed shadow wasn't following her. She called this mare shadow not because of her dark blue coat but because she was almost always following her and lately, she had begun to get too close for what little comfort Celestia had left. She hissed and spat at the perfectly white vista in front of her, a purely ceremonial gesture to scare off her shadow but, nonetheless an empowering one.

She heard a noise, laughter....... human laughter. In a panic Celestia ran behind a tree so as to avoid detection, humans were monsters after all, so she could never be too careful around them no matter what harmony said. The first human came into view, it was small, foal sized and too bundled up to have any discernable gender. She hated seeing human foals, despite the illusion of innocence the fact that humans continued to breed was simply salt in her many wounds. She waited for the creature's parents to come as it gormlessly wandered around but as the minutes went by none came. The human foal was alone, and it had at least another weeks worth of blood.

She froze, would she really eat a creature barely out of its infancy? A small, buried part of her said no, that life was precious and that she should beat her enemies by being morally superior to them. It was a voice she had ignored for centuries, the voice that let Luna turn on her so of course she didn't listen. A more pragmatic side of her was worried about punishments, what if Harmony punished her worse? What if the child's parents found out? The voices too were against it, but they were against her anyways. She shrugged her shoulders feeling several torn muscles, it's not like things could get any worse.

It was daytime and no matter how rough and ragged she appeared she was still supposedly a beautiful woman, at least for a race as hideous as humans. She moved slowly towards the chubby cheeked youth, letting herself come into its focus. Its eyes met with her as she put on a smile that hopefully masked the sheer hunger and contempt, she felt for the thing that lay before her. Perhaps it worked, perhaps it didn't, either way the child stood still asking her questions nervously in it's squeaky voice. If she remembered rightly the language it was speaking had a name similar to 'rushing', unfortunately one she did not speak and never planned to. After all, like in Equestria beforehand, she would enforce a unified monolingualism on the populace so as to make things easier.

The child stood there still paralyzed as she got within striking distance, wrestling a large animal to the ground was rarely successful but this was still a babe that could easily be overpowered by a full grown woman. Soon she was towering over it, the child was now completely engulfed in her gracile shadow. She smiled once more, this time a more malicious one as she reached striking distance. She had them sized up perfectly, she'd pin them down and slash their throat to ribbons. Just as she was about to execute the plan the voices turned their disorganized insults into a screaming crescendo of anger. She reared up and screamed once more clawing at her body to get them to stop, her screams soon devolving into inhuman howls as the blood of her last meal dripped from her mouth. The child, of course ran off presumably back to their parents, all while Celestia fell to her knees in defeat, hands plummeting into the icy snow.