And I Hope You Die

Chapters

Our Few Remaining Friends
A Fail-Safe Plot
Past the Last Exit
A Few Blocks From Here
The Rising Black Smoke
This Town Again
Bleeds All Day Long
Before the Sun Rises
Dark Forever
Blink Before I Do
One Good Thing to Say
The Strength to Walk Out
Drowning
No Sign of Land
Coming Down With Me
Hand in Unlovable Hand
I Hope We Both Die

Our Few Remaining Friends

The Crystal Empire looked like a picture on a postcard: glossy, colorful, and perfectly still. There were no sounds of a bustling modern metropolis, no shouts from cart drivers or clatters of hooves on cobblestones. There was just silence, and shimmering crystal, and a brilliant arcane glow emanating from the castle at the city’s center, casting long shadows over the silent streets and drawing tracks of tears from the eyes of ponies who—open-mouthed, breathless, frozen perfectly in place—could neither blink nor turn away from its blinding glare.

From a thousand feet above her castle’s central spire, Princess Flurry Heart surveyed her kingdom and home. Fortunately, the unequine magical blast had done little in the way of structural damage. There had been no shockwave or displacement of air as it spread across the city—if anything, the exact opposite. Even this far off the ground, she had to push hard to force her wings through the stationary molecules that normally would have been imperceptible, and she could feel them parting languidly around her as she made her way downwards. It felt like swimming inside a dream—like her brain remembered the concept of water, but none of its properties.

It felt like a nightmare she couldn’t wake up from.

When she touched down in the courtyard encircling the castle’s main pillars, the sound of her hooves on the ice-cold crystal rang in her ears like a cannonshot. The area was still packed with bodies—guards and dignitaries, tourists and locals on breaks from work, all in the same places and positions now as they’d been an hour ago. A few had been caught in mid-stumble. Some weren’t touching the ground at all. All of them looked afraid—terrified of whatever they’d seen before the spell went off.

But of course, Flurry already knew what they had seen—who they were running from. And she knew what she would have to do when she confronted her in a few moments.

Auntie Twilight had never told her about this part of being a princess. Neither had her mother. Neither had anyone else. She had never been taught what it felt like to be helpless—to have all the power in the world, and no way of wielding it in a way that mattered. She’d had to figure that out for herself, through schoolyard fights and poor test grades, in headaches after nights out and bruises in places she couldn’t reach. There were limits to magic—to friendship—to love. She had learned a lot of them as she was growing up. She was learning another one now.

She stepped forward, and a shape to her right caught her eye. A mare was crouched over a cowering foal, eyes shut and teeth braced as if bracing for an unseen blow. Beneath her barrel, the foal—her spitting image, down to the rounded shape of her snout and the cerulean stripe in her pastel pink mane—had her cheek pressed to the ground, and her forehooves wrapped around a scrape on her knee. She must have tripped while trying to run. The wound had formed a puddle on the ground beneath her—unable to clot, still able to bleed.

Flurry could try to help her. She could tear off part of a guard’s tunic and wrap the cloth around the child’s cut, cast a spell that would keep her alive for as long as it took to get her to a doctor. But even if she did all that, the wound would keep bleeding. Her body wouldn’t heal. The foal would stay frozen, and time would keep flowing around her. That was the nature of this kind of magic. That was what Flurry knew would happen until she stopped this.

She should have felt hatred, disgust, even a pang of regret or guilt. Instead, she felt annoyed—exasperated at how pointless this all was. The pony who’d done this knew it would accomplish nothing. There was no way this was ever going to work, no possible scenario that ended with anything other than miserable defeat. She knew that. So why do it anyway? Why cause all this pain, all this needless suffering? For its own sake? For her own sake?

It didn’t matter. She had gone too far. This was beyond the capacity of any pony—any princess—to forgive. She had to have known that too. She’d done it anyway.

Flurry Heart sighed—the air thawed as it entered her lungs, overwhelmed by her untainted magic—and resumed her approach of the castle’s front door. She left the foal and her mother where they were. If she did this quickly, they might still have a chance of surviving.

A Fail-Safe Plot

After knocking three times and hearing no answer, Flurry lit her horn and opened the thick wooden door herself, unraveling the host of security spells and intrusion alarms embedded in the lock as she did. They weren’t particularly complicated, nothing even a moderately capable unicorn couldn’t have gotten past. But according to her mom, the lock wasn’t meant to keep this pony inside her room, but rather to keep other ponies out. It had only been a few days since she was unfrozen, after all. Some ponies might not understand why she was being set free at all.

She was sitting on the bed at the room’s far side when Flurry entered, atop a pile of rumpled sheets that didn’t look slept in so much as deliberately twisted into an unruly mess. Physically, she looked about Flurry’s age, short and compact with her mane done up in primped blue curls and her disheleved pink wings raised and twitching along her back.

But she wasn’t Flurry’s age, not really. Maybe she had been years ago, when she was first turned to stone, but now… Flurry didn’t know what she was now. All she could settle on was what she looked like—and despite what Mom had said, she looked more than anything else like a prisoner.

“What?” Cozy Glow intoned once Flurry stopped at the room’s center, about a dozen feet from the foot of the bed. In response, Flurry nodded at the cart she’d tugged in behind her, and specifically at the plate on top of it laden with fresh fruit, pastries, and a bowl of scrambled eggs.

“I brought you breakfast,” she said.

“I’m not hungry,” Cozy Glow replied.

“Mom told me you’d say that,” Flurry informed the little pegasus. “She said you might be… uncomfortable.”

A rough, unsettling sound emerged from Cozy’s throat. It took Flurry a moment to recognize it as laughter. “Did she?” Cozy crooned. “What else did Mommy tell you about me?”

“Not much,” Flurry admitted, but without blinking or turning away.

“Did she tell you what I did? What I’m capable of?” Cozy leaned forward, her face contorting into a sneer. “Are you here because you didn’t believe her, or because you did?”

Mom had reminded her of the basics: Cozy’s alliance with other bad creatures, her brief time as an alicorn, the magic she’d stolen and the punishment Celestia and Luna had given her for it. Mom had never lied to her before. But Mom also hadn’t told her just how small Cozy Glow was.

“Do you wanna be friends with me, little Princess?” Cozy went on, every word soaked with baleful condescension. “Once your mommy fixes me, you wanna play dress-up and have tea parties together, and pretend everypony gets to live the same perfect life as you?”

Flurry didn’t say anything. Cozy took that as an answer. “No? You just wanted to gawk at me, see what was worth all that trouble? Well, now you have. Good for you. Now do what we both want, and piss off.”

Flurry couldn’t help but cringe, though she did her best to straighten up back up before Cozy noticed. “Mom told me you might swear. She said it might be how you express your feelings.”

Cozy made her awful laughing sound again—like a mix between a chittering songbird and a drowning cat—and flopped onto her back, kicking her sheets out from under her with her back hooves. “Of course,” she sighed. “Stars forbid I get my feelings hurt.” After a few moments, she craned her neck and looked at Flurry again. “I can’t help but notice you haven’t pissed off.”

In fact, Flurry hadn’t moved at all. In every way possible, Cozy was exactly what she’d been told to expect—and maybe that was what intrigued her. Nopony was exactly like someone else described them. She was sure Cozy wasn’t either.

“I understand why you’re mad,” Flurry said. “I would be too.”

“Oh, what a relief,” Cozy growled back. “The pampered princess understands me. Go ahead and freeze me for another decade, because I feel positively liberated.”

“What the Princesses did to you was wrong,” Flurry continued after a deep and shaky breath. “We can’t go back and change that. But we want to do what we can now to make things–”

“You totally could, by the way,” Cozy interrupted. “Go back and change it. Starlight Glimmer still around? Ask her about it. Maybe discuss it over some sympathy cocoa, or whatever.” After a beat, she waved her hoof and let her head fall back onto the bed. “I’m sorry, you were making yourself feel better. Don’t stop on my account.”

Flurry grit her teeth, but kept her nerve. Mom would be furious with her if she got in a fight with their “guest”—but stars, did she want to. Even if it was just what she knew Cozy wanted. “You don’t have to like us,” she told Cozy. “You don’t have to like me. But we’re going to help you anyway. Because that’s what good ponies do.”

For a long time, Cozy said nothing. Then she whispered, “Good ponies…” under her breath and, in a whirlwind of displaced linens, threw herself to the ground and stalked forward until her nose almost bounced off Flurry’s.

“If you were good ponies, I wouldn’t be here,” she seethed. “Your parents wouldn’t be royals, your aunt wouldn’t be a god, and you’d just be a snot-nosed, spoiled little brat with a head too big for her giant moondamned wings. Oh, wait a minute, you already are! How about that?”

Flurry’s hooves itched—the way they had when Briar Spring had tugged on her braids during recess last year, and when that pony in the street had yelled at Dad that Auntie Twilight was a murderer. She felt her heart racing, and her face filling with heat—and finally, she understood why she’d stayed, and what Mom hadn’t told her. Cozy Glow was an obnoxious, abrasive, infuriating criminal—and she was smart. She was so good at being who other ponies expected that it was like she’d been spawned from a preformed vision in their heads.

Flurry wanted to be like that. She knew she’d have to be, if she wanted any chance of being a real ruler one day and not just a spoiled brat with giant moondamned wings. And the first step was proving to Cozy Glow that she wasn’t just another stuck-up princess who wanted to “fix” her.

“Yeah, I am,” she said to Cozy, feeling braver than she’d ever felt before. “And you’re stuck here with me. How about that?”

She turned around and left before Cozy could reply, restoring the magical locks behind her. When she returned later that day with lunch, the plate she’d left behind was clean.

Past the Last Exit

Breaking through the wards surrounding the castle proper was child’s play. They were thick, pumped full of enough raw energy to power the Empire for years, but brittle, woven haphazardly by somepony with a less than basic understanding of what magical strength looked like. With a little pressure in the right places, the matrices inside them spun apart and dissolved, leaving a gap big enough for an entire company to walk through. Flurry wasn't surprised. This was more or less what she’d expected: a flashy display meant to be noticed with no concern for form or future function, like a foal’s crayon scribbles on a plaster wall.

The inside of the castle looked a lot like the outside. Staff members and daily visitors were scattered around the cavernous halls, preserved like museum models where they had been at the moment of the blast, and the crystal walls and floor made the glow from the central hall as bright as the sun. Flurry had to shield her eyes to navigate around her frozen subjects, first with her hoof and then with a spell that filtered the light through a darkened magical film over her pupils.

Eventually, she reached the archway connecting the foyer to the castle’s main chamber, where she usually received supplicants and ambassadors—when she’d been that morning, just like always, until she’d been called away to the northern border to investigate a windigo sighting. By the time she’d learned there was nothing to see and nopony around who could’ve made such a report, she’d seen a flash on the horizon behind her, and she’d known without thinking what had just happened and who had caused it.

The moment she crossed the hall’s threshold, the overwhelming glare winked out, leaving her blind for a moment until her eye-shielding spell adjusted to the lack of light. Of course it was just a façade. It was meant to keep other ponies out—to make sure she was the only one who could reach this place. So far, so predictable. Exactly what she knew she could expect, and what she’d hoped beyond reason that she wouldn’t see.

Flurry Heart looked up, and the pony who’d done all this—who’d attacked her empire, who’d tricked her into leaving it undefended for a few moments too long—looked down at her from the room’s central dais. She was sprawled across the royal throne, hind hooves kicked up over the side, and in her forehooves she held a shimmering, shuddering hunk of the shattered Crystal Heart.

It normally floated above the throne, held there by the magic of the crystal ponies and their love for the family bestowed with the privilege of ruling them. It still floated now, but in a thousand jagged pieces that jutted out in every direction, torn apart and then held infinitely in mid-explosion by the sacrilege wrought upon it.

Normally, the Crystal Heart could break without causing too much lasting harm. It had in the past, in fact, more than once because of the mare who now protected it. But the Heart wasn’t broken now. It was desecrated. It had been ripped open at its core in a way that no invader or terrorist could ever have been capable of.

This—the frozen ponies, the fundamental breakdown of environmental entropy—was what the Heart could do if deliberately misused, if it was told to use love as a weapon instead of a salve. Flurry had only ever met one pony who could possibly imagine attempting something like this, and she was grinning down at her now, eyes alight with unholy magic and devilish glee.

“Hey there, hot stuff,” Cozy Glow said, swinging herself upright on the throne and twirling the Heart shard in her hooves. “Miss me?”

A Few Blocks From Here

Flurry slammed her bedroom door behind her and threw her saddlebags across the room, not even looking to see where they landed before heaving herself onto her bed and slamming her face into the pile of decorative pillows on top. Immediately, she felt a twinge of pain above her eyebrow where it pressed into the knot of a macramé tassel, and that just made her even angrier. What was the stupid point of having a million stupid little pillows that you couldn’t sleep on if they weren’t even good for slamming your stupid face into when you really, really needed to slam your stupid, dumb, idiot face into something?

She groaned, then let the noise grow into a throaty yell, muffled only slightly by the horde of tastefully coordinated cushions around her. Mom had probably heard that. Now she’d have to deal with her too, and tell her that everything was fine and she was just tired after school and to please shut the door behind her when she left her alone forever.

“Well, some-Princess is a little pouty today.”

Flurry squeezed her eyes shut, tensed all her muscles, and very strongly considered banishing herself to the moon. She’d probably miss her target and spend eternity floating helplessly in space, but even that would be better than sharing her room—or really, a whole planet—with Cozy Glow.

“What’sa matter? Gala dress not the color you wanted? Oh no, is Prince Charming charming other princes?”

Flurry grabbed the nearest useless decoration and squeezed it overtop of her head. Despite her best efforts, a low and livid growl escaped her chest.

“Wait, is it actually the Prince thing? Come on, it’ll all be arranged for you anyway. What’s a little loveless marriage between just friends?”

“Shut up,” Flurry snapped, raising her voice so Cozy could hear it through the pillows. “Leave me alone.”

“Why? This is the funniest thing I’ve seen all day. You know the tips of your ears turn bright red when you’re mad?”

With a snarl, Flurry flailed herself into a seated position and chucked the pillow she’d been holding as hard as she could at Cozy’s head. It sailed well past her and through the doorway she was standing in, skittering harmlessly across the hallway outside. Cozy’s grin got even wider. Flurry’s ears turned even redder.

“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Cozy said, hopping up onto the bed next to Flurry and, despite Flurry’s best efforts to avoid it, hooking her forehoof around her shoulder. “Plenty of fish with lower standards in the sea.”

“You’re one to talk,” Flurry said through a wrinkled nose, trying to shove Cozy away but helpless under the filly’s surprisingly strong grip. “When was the last time you showered?”

“The last time I wanted to,” Cozy replied. “Which waaaas… not today! Or this week. I think I got caught in the rain once last spring. That probably counts.”

Finally, Flurry extricated herself and fluttered to the door, pointedly showing it to Cozy once she’d landed. “Out,” she ordered her. “I don’t go into your room, so stay out of mine.”

“Fine,” Cozy sighed as she hopped down from the bed, evidently bored with Flurry already. That was hardly a surprise. Cozy had gotten “bored” of going to school pretty quickly too, judging by how quickly the Crystal Empire was running out of ones she hadn’t been expelled from yet. Now she just hung out at the castle all day, bothering the maids and making Flurry’s life a living hell at every possible opportunity. At least this opportunity had ended quickly.

“Seriously, though, why do you care so much?” Cozy sniped as she crossed the threshold. “It’s just a stupid colt.”

Or not.

“He’s not a… it’s not like he was my boyfriend or anything!” Flurry spewed, cringing as the words left her mouth within Cozy’s earshot. She’d been stewing over this for hours now, though. The stopper wasn’t going back into this bottle of raging hormones. “I didn’t even want to date him, I just thought it’d be nice to go to the Spring Fling as f-friends and…”

“Friends?” Cozy intoned.

“Friends!” Flurry screamed. “Acquaintances! I don’t know, whatever he would’ve been comfortable with! Of course, not like he could even tell me what that would actually be. Stars forbid he just talk to me like a normal pony, like I didn’t grow a second head and four extra eyes the moment I asked him a simple question!”

“So he’s a beta,” Cozy said. “So what?”

“So he goes and gossips about it like a little beta bastard, that’s what!” Flurry said, wincing again at the harsh language. Cozy Glow was rubbing off on her in all the wrong ways—or just ways in general. There were hardly any good ways Cozy did anything. “And now I’m off the yearbook committee because I’m making things awkward and Coconut thinks I’d be disruptive if I kept editing his photos, which is rich coming from Little Miss Tyrant who micromanages everything and thinks everyone doesn’t know what she and Briar are off doing while I’m singlehoofedly keeping us on deadline for three moondamn months!”

Flurry ran out of breath with her final vengeful shout, and as her vision widened from the tunnel it had narrowed into, Cozy cut back in. “So what are you gonna do about it?”

“I’m going to… I don’t know. Why do you care? When have you ever cared about anything but yourself?”

“Oh, never,” Cozy answered. “Glad you finally noticed. But when you storm in all pissy and wake me up from a very nice nap, that affects me. Ergo, I care. So are you gonna fix this, or should I?”

“I’ll fix it. You will do nothing, except leave me alone.”

Cozy shook her head. Her simpering grin was back. “You’re not gonna fix it,” she said. “You know how I know that? Because ponies who run home and cry into their pillows don’t fix things. They whine and complain and bother all us hard-working folks just trying to get some well-earned sleep, and then they pretend nothing happened and live completely irrelevant lives doing exactly the same thing forever. Now me? I fix my problems. And I make sure whoever made that problem for me doesn’t make any more.”

“That’s what you call being a lazy delinquent who naps all day?” Flurry snapped. “That’s solving problems?”

Cozy winked. “Can’t nap all day if you don’t have free time. And you get free time by solving problems. Little Miss Tyrant’s name is Coconut, you said?”

Flurry’s heart turned to ice. “What are you… don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Whatever you’re thinking about, don’t. I’ll handle this. Go away.”

“I’m thinking about going back to sleep,” Cozy said as she turned to leave. “Good luck handling things.”

Flurry never even got a chance to try. When she got to school the next day, everypony was standing out in the front courtyard, and fire-ponies were streaming into the annex that housed the Yearbook Club office while Coconut wailed on her hooves and knees in front of their frowning headmare. Somepony had left the laminator on overnight, and a jam had started a fire that burned the room and everything in it to ashes early that morning. Coconut—and Briar—had been the last ones there the night before. Nopony else could possibly have been responsible.

With months of labor destroyed in an instant, the club had to triple their weekly meetings and work through weekends just to make their print deadline—and when Coconut resigned her role as president in disgrace, Flurry was forced to step in and steer the club back on track. It was exhausting and thankless work, and it was admittedly super awkward to share an editing bay with her sheepish lead photographer.

But in the end, they made their deadline. And when they voted on who would lead the club next year, Flurry Heart was the unanimous choice.

The Rising Black Smoke

“Took you long enough to get here,” Cozy said, hopping off the dais with what Flurry could tell were unnaturally enhanced reflexes. Another sin atop a mountain of them—she was using the Crystal Heart’s magic for herself, stealing it right out of its pulverized natural vessel. Even without a horn, she was as strong as any unicorn who’d ever lived now, and probably twice as deadly. “I thought I might have to blow up the castle too.”

Flurry said nothing. Her gaze remained stoic, even as Cozy’s eyes glowed brighter and the Heart shard rose from her hoof to hover beside her head. “Fine, don’t talk,” Cozy went on. “Just do what you do best: stand around, do nothing, and try to figure out some way that this is all gonna work out fine.”

There was venom in Cozy’s voice now, a hatred that burned deeper and blacker than anything Flurry had ever seen in another creature. She already knew this wouldn’t work out fine. She still hoped Cozy would realize that too.

“I can’t believe you just let this thing sit here,” Cozy scoffed, nodding up at the pieces of Crystal Heart still floating outside either pony’s reach. “More power than any normal pony could ever dream of, and you used it for what? Keeping the lights on? Tricks at parties? You could’ve conquered Equestria, the whole damn world. But no, that wouldn’t be proper. That’s not what a Princess would do.”

Cozy had begun pacing back and forth, dragging her Heart shard along the ground and drawing sparks out of the pitted crystal floor. “Princess,” she said again, even more bitterly. “Not a Queen, not a Duchess. ‘President’ would’ve at least sounded polite. But that’s not what you are, is it? You aren’t a pony who wields power, you’re a pony imprisoned by it. A coward. Just like your parents, and your dear Auntie Twilight.”

Suddenly, Cozy stopped. A flash of malevolence passed through her eyes. “When I’m done with you,” she said, “I think I’ll kill her next.” Then she lunged at Flurry with unnatural speed, shard extended before her, face contorted in a snarl.

Flurry leaned to the right, and Cozy shot past her, the razor-sharp chunk of crystal missing her throat by inches. Panting, weapon still raised, Cozy stood stock-still for a moment—then the shard clattered to the ground, her shoulders sagged, and she turned around as peals of laughter reverberated off the castle’s walls.

“Aw, hell, it was worth a try,” Cozy Glow sighed after a few moments, still chuckling as she walked back towards the throne and nudged Flurry in the ribs as she passed. “C’mon. If you’re gonna be a killjoy, at least spot me a drink before we do this for real.”

This Town Again

The alley was cramped, even by alley standards. Flurry had to suck in her breath to squeeze around a pile of old shipping pallets coming in, and even now she had to lean back against the wall just to fit length-ways into the narrow strip of space between a barbershop and a crappy pizza place. If she’d stood on all four hooves, her nose and lips would’ve pressed against the opposite wall. Aside from being disgusting, it also would’ve defeated the purpose of coming back here.

“So of course, she gets on my ass about it,” Flurry said, pausing between sentences to suck a mouthful of smoke from the cigarette Cozy had “acquired” from someplace or other. Probably the same place she’d “acquired” her stash of full-size candy bars and her infinite supply of half-bit coins in wrapped paper rolls.

“And of course,” she continued, once she passed the cigarette over to Cozy and blew a roiling white cloud out of the side of her mouth, “I get all of three words out before she’s yelling over me, going off about how I’ll get suspended and it’ll show up in my permanent record and whatnot. Like any college is gonna trash my application because I copied one homework assignment before one class.”

“Like you even need to go to college,” Cozy added after taking a puff herself. With the cigarette trapped between two of her primaries, she shook it a bit until the gray dot of ash at the end fell off and scattered in the drafty alley air.

“Right? Like, what am I gonna major in, Princess Studies? Kissing Ass 101?”

“Maybe they have a seminar on despotism,” Cozy suggested as she passed the cigarette back. Flurry snorted as she grasped it with a tendril of magic. “Y’know, an elective. Not committing or anything, just trying it out.”

“Yeah, I’ll tell her that next time,” Flurry said, swallowing back a cough as her next pull went a little too deep. “That’ll freak her out even more.”

As she floated the cigarette back into reach of Cozy’s wing, Flurry rolled her tongue around in her mouth and drank in her surroundings. If she was perfectly honest, it sucked back here. The walls were rough and damp, the ground was sticky with ages-old grime, and she’d seen three rats scurry under nearby trash piles in the short time since they’d come back here. Nopony in their right mind would go out of their way to find an alley as drab and depressing as this to hang out in. Especially not ponies who should’ve come back from their lunch period a half-hour ago, and instead were skipping calculus to smoke a stolen cigarette with a mare who had literally been to Tartarus and back.

Then again, the suckiness was what made it so special to her, so totally unlike any other place she’d ever gone in her life. In the real world, she was a capital-P Princess with a 3.8 GPA that could’ve been a 4.0, and a promising life ahead of her that her mom just couldn’t resist getting way too involved in. But back here, she was just another wayward teen making poor choices with their free time, complaining about her parents and choking down a stick of unflavored tobacco that was, in perfect honesty, about the worst thing she’d ever tasted. But more than enjoyable, it was illegal. And more than illegal, it was something that would drive her mom crazy.

“So are you grounded, or what?” Cozy asked, holding the cigarette near her lips but not yet taking another drag. “Actually, can you ground a Princess? Is that… I don’t know, legal?”

“If you’re a bigger Princess, sure,” Flurry grumbled. “And if I’m not grounded now, I probably will be after today.”

“It’s really that big a deal?” Cozy sounded genuinely surprised. “I thought everypony copied homework once in a while.”

“Yeah, everypony does,” Flurry said pointedly. “But not me. Not even once. That’s not…”

A jumble of derogatory alternatives for “Princess-ly” got mixed up in her mouth, and through the lingering sour sting of cigarette smoke on her tongue, she couldn’t settle on one long enough to say it aloud. Instead, she just sighed, and reached for the cigarette, and took a pull big enough to throb behind her eyes and nearly make her gag.

“Well, at least you’re handling it well,” Cozy wryly remarked, accepting the cigarette back but still not partaking. “Your mom even know you still hang out with me?”

Flurry shrugged—an earnest answer. “Who cares?” she mumbled less earnestly. “Screw her.”

“Only if she buys dinner first,” Cozy said. She started to lift the cigarette to her mouth, stared at it for a moment, then looked at Flurry. “This tastes like ass, by the way.”

“Ugh, it really does,” Flurry agreed, encouraging Cozy with a nod to toss the nasty thing on the ground and stomp it out. “Can’t believe grown-ups actually like those things.”

“At least it was free!” Cozy said with a wink, before leaning back against the grimy wall and huffing out a sigh. “Well, now what? You feel like going back to class?”

“Nope,” Flurry replied. “You feel like becoming a productive member of society?”

Cozy grinned. “Hell no. Let’s go break stuff.”

And then they did. And Flurry got in huge trouble for it. And it was totally worth it.

Bleeds All Day Long

Flurry didn’t know where Cozy had gotten a bottle of scotch from. Maybe she’d lifted it from a liquor store on her way to the castle. Maybe Dad had a not-so-secret stash in here for diplomatic emergencies. Wherever it had come from, though, it had apparently come with a well-stocked bar cart, complete with ornately designed tumblers and enchanted never-melt ice cubes to fill them with. Cozy set one of the glasses on the arm of the throne, poured herself a half-hoof, considered it for a moment, then chucked it over her shoulder and drank straight from the bottle.

“So,” Cozy said, flopping back across the throne with the neck of the bottle—an exorbitantly expensive one, judging by the year on its label—hooked in her foreleg, “how are your folks doing? What’s the tea from Royal Retirement?”

For the first time in a while, Flurry spoke. “They know you did this. I told them I would handle it.”

Cozy lifted the bottle in a mock toast. “Good for you. How about here? What’s it look like outside?”

“Ponies are hurt,” Flurry said plainly. “You hurt them.”

“Didn’t kill ‘em, though,” Cozy shot back, interrupting herself with another giant swig. “That’s called professionalism,” she added, grimacing past the whiskey’s burn. “Maximum impact, minimal collateral.”

“There’s a filly in the courtyard,” Flurry continued. “She’s been bleeding for an hour. She might die.”

Cozy stared at the bottle’s label, seeming to read and reread the flowing text. Several seconds passed before she replied. “I did say minimal,” she said, a little quieter than before. “She’ll be fine. Won’t she, Princess?”

“I don’t know.”

Cozy sighed and rolled her eyes. “You used to be way more fun, you know that?” She wriggled in her seat, grimacing from the effort. “And you know something else, this chair is extraordinarily uncomfortable. No room in the royal coffers to buy yourself a cushion?”

“It’s not supposed to be comfortable,” Flurry said. In response, Cozy blew a raspberry.

“You don’t believe that,” the pegasus scoffed. “At least, you shouldn’t. Guess it would explain a lot, though.”

Flurry shut her eyes and took a slow breath, in through her nose and out through her mouth. Cozy wasn’t stalling. She was trying to get Flurry to do it for her. She wanted her to be upset—to yell and rant and scream. She wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

“I know why you’re doing this,” the Princess said. “I’m not gonna do what you want.”

Cozy pursed her lips in mock thought, then took one last drink before tossing the bottle in the same direction she’d thrown the tumbler. “Well, that’s a shame,” she said as she stood from the throne and stepped off the dais, her tone low and bitingly bitter. “‘Cause one way or another, I’m gonna make you.”

Flurry couldn’t help herself—she smiled. “You never made me do anything,” she told Cozy, nose to nose with her again just like she’d been half a bottle of scotch ago. “Not that I didn’t enjoy watching you try.”

Cozy grinned too, and in the same moment raised her right forehoof and held it frog up in front of her. Her eyes flashed, and the shard of the Crystal Heart she’d discarded snapped back to her side, shivering with lethal and barely restrained intent.

“Guess you’re gonna enjoy this, then,” she murmured. Then the Heart’s magic glowed in her veins, and she attacked.

Before the Sun Rises

Author's Note

CW: Implicit reference to child sexual abuse

Before the Sun Rises

From a thousand feet in the air—or somewhere around that, Flurry had never actually measured it herself—the Crystal Empire looked like one of those holiday models that fancy department stores put up around Hearth’s Warming. In every direction you could see lights twinkling and little ponies puttering around, hear laughter and the sound of music wafting out of restaurants and dancehalls and the occasional bedroom window—and yet none of it actually felt real.

This far away, you couldn’t see the breath clouding in front of ponies’ noses or feel the warmth radiating from the buildings. You just had to imagine it, like you might imagine the miniature lives of plastic figurines that only saw daylight for one month a year. It was eerie and exciting all at once—and as the rest of her 18th birthday night had taught her, alcohol made it feel so much better.

“Why do you still call her ‘Auntie’?”

It was the first time Cozy had spoken in a while. For most of the evening, she’d hung out at the fringes of every pub and club Flurry and her birthday entourage had visited, nursing the occasional vodka soda and seeming satisfied with just watching everypony else party. But as the night waned into the early morning, more and more acquaintances had trickled away to other parties or to their beds, and now it was just her and Flurry left, perched on the parapet of the Crystal Castle’s highest tower and sharing a four-pack of crappy beer with their hind hooves dangling a thousand-ish feet above the ground.

“Twilight, I mean,” Cozy clarified after a moment. “The God-Princess.”

“‘Cause she’s my aunt,” Flurry replied, tilting her can up to get the last sip or two out. “And she’s not a God-Princess.”

“She could be, though,” Cozy mused. Her can was still half-full. She stared down into it as she went on. “And that’s not my point. My point is she rules all of Equestria… like, the whole thing. It’s just her. And I know you’re a Princess too and all, but when you talk about her I picture this all-powerful, invincible… God-Princess, and then you call her ‘Auntie.” And it’s weird. To me, anyway.”

“Yeah,” Flurry murmured, conceding that it was at least a little weird. “I don’t know. I guess she always treated me like her niece, so I still just think of her as my aunt. I don’t see her… be a Princess a lot, y’know? And the Twilight Sparkle I know, she’s not invincible.”

Cozy raised her eyebrows as she raised her beer to her lips. “She kicked my ass pretty good,” she said, her voice echoing inside the can.

“You were twelve,” Flurry countered. “And you were an orphan. Which…”

Cozy glanced at Flurry over the rim of her beer can, and Flurry felt the lowest scum on the planet. “Shit, sorry. I’m so sorry. That was stupid, I didn’t mean…”

“To be honest?” Cozy said, though she sounded more amused than upset.

“That was so shitty, seriously, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“And seriously, no big deal,” Cozy assured her. “Trust me, God-Princess magic hurts more than words. For the record, though, I wasn’t an orphan.”

Still reeling from the emotional roller coaster she’d undone her lap bar on, it took Flurry a moment to process what she’d heard. “You… I didn’t know that. I mean, no one ever told me.” After another moment, she added, “You never told me.”

Cozy’s eyebrows twitched up again. “Well, I’ve never been much of a sharer, so…”

She trailed off, and Flurry was more than happy to assume that was that. She cracked open her second of the four beers they’d brought up with them, and Cozy finished her first without another word. She was two sips into her second when she suddenly spoke up again.

“I was six.”

Flurry turned her head towards her friend. Cozy was staring off at the horizon, where just the slightest blue divot in the sky’s inky blackness betrayed the coming arrival of dawn. “I was six when my parents split up,” she said. “My mom had a crappy job, my dad didn’t, so he got custody. Few months later, he gets a letter from some hospital about still being Mom’s next-of-kin. They hadn’t finalized that part when she got sick. By my seventh birthday, it was just me and him.”

Cozy took a long pull from her beer, seeming to hold the mouthful over her tongue for long enough that the carbonation must have started to hurt. Once she swallowed, the shudder that rolled down her spine landed in her forehooves, jittering the can just enough to shake droplets of condensation off into the thousand-foot abyss.

“For a while, a few years at least, I just assumed it was my fault. No one told me that, not even him, but… y’know, what other explanation was there? For Mom leaving and then dying and… everything else. And a kid that young, family to them is just a fact of life, like grass being green. Whatever your family does, that’s love. That’s just what families are. And if you don’t like it, if you sleep better when your dad brings another nameless mare home, because that means he won’t…”

The whispered words escaped Flurry’s throat with the last of her breath. “Holy shit…”

“It’s your fault,” Cozy said. “Whatever happens, you have control over it, and so you… control it. And if you can’t control it, you run, so… I ran. Got picked up by a beat cop at a train station not even an hour later.” She chuckled. “I didn’t know you needed a ticket for those. They asked me why I ran away from home, I said… something, I guess, that tipped somepony off, and then no more Dad. I never saw him again.”

“Cozy, I…”

“You know what the really fucked-up part was?” Cozy interrupted. She still didn’t sound upset, just impatient, like Flurry had tried to butt in before she was finished telling the whole story. “At this shelter afterwards, they put me in this group therapy, right? Whole room full of mares and a couple stallions who went through shit, and then me, this nine-year-old kid. And I just listened to them talk about how scared they were, how they couldn’t control what happened to them and they didn’t know how they were going to move on, and you know what I thought? I thought they were fuckin’ wimps.”

Cozy laughed again, pausing only for a quick sip of beer. “That’s where my little messed-up head was. It was the only thing I had to cling to, this vague idea of what control was and this unshakeable belief that I still had it, and I clung to it. And now… I don’t know. I think I’m in control of my life. More than I was as a statue, anyway.”

For the first time in a while, Flurry remembered to breathe, but she couldn’t think of anything to do afterwards but hold onto the wall beneath her and wait for Cozy to continue.

“Couple years ago, I looked him up. Not sure why, I guess… curiosity. He had friends in the right places, so he never saw prison or anything. Instead, he just kept going, kept doing business, told anyone who asked that I was living with a relative. And then one day, he drops mid-shift. Heart attack. I could’ve gone to visit him in the hospital if I’d known.” She looked down at the can in her hoof, shaking it slightly to see how much beer was left inside. “I wish I had. I wish I could’ve seen him before he died.”

There was a long pause, broken only by the breeze and the sounds of a new day beginning in the city a thousand miles below. “What would you have done?” Flurry finally asked.

Cozy tipped her can up, drained it in two gulps, then tossed it onto the landing behind her. She looked serenely at the newly rising sun, and answered.

“Killed him myself.”

Dark Forever

Cozy Glow fought with animalistic rage, slashing and stabbing with all her strength and trying to make every move a killing blow. A normal pony would have tired out quickly, especially after Flurry kept ducking around wayward swipes and parrying closer ones with magical shields spawned only for the milliseconds she needed them. But even before being supercharged with stolen magic, Cozy Glow hadn’t been a normal pony. And now, with who knew how much power coursing through her, she only got faster, stronger, and more furious with each unsuccessful attack.

“Come on!” she spat during a brief lull between chains of attempted blows. “Even for you, this is pathetic!”

Flurry didn’t react, except to sidestep Cozy’s next swing and send her flying past her with an extra push of magical force—only enough to trip her up, nowhere near enough to hurt her. When Cozy whirled around again, her face was cherry-red, and her sweat-sodden hair hung stringy and low over her eyes.

“You fucking coward,” she seethed, summoning two more shards from the frozen space above her head. “Unlimited power, wasted on a shallow, snivelling, useless piece of shit like you!”

With a roar, Cozy sent all three shards flashing across the room, one after the other. Flurry rolled away from the first, cocked her head so the second just passed by her ear, and split the third in two when it was just inches in front of her eyes, each piece glowing red-hot from the arcane force that had sliced through it. With the same tendril of magic, she pulled a fresh shard down from above and brought it crashing against the one Cozy had thrust towards her throat, sending both clattering harmlessly away.

“I used to think you’d be different,” Cozy hissed. “I thought you’d be anything other than a figurehead hoarding magic she was too terrified to use. Well, congratulations, Princess. You’re just like your mother, and every other feckless waste of wings and horns before her. Short-sighted. Impotent. Worthless!”

With every successive insult, Cozy swung at Flurry harder, first with more shards and then her bare hooves. Each time, Flurry took another step back, keeping herself just out of Cozy’s reach. Finally, her tail touched solid crystal, and Cozy’s pupils vanished beneath a white magical haze. Flurry flared her wings and shot up off the ground, and Cozy’s glowing hooves crashed into the wall, leaving twin craters six inches deep.

Flurry twisted in midair and landed on all fours facing Cozy, bracing for another attack that, for a moment at least, didn’t come. Cozy still faced the wall, crumbling chunks of crystal showering off her forelegs, her wings and shoulders shuddering from recently expended effort.

“I wanted you to be different,” Cozy said, her voice shaking with fury. She pulled herself free of the wall and turned around, deep furrows of loathing etched across her face. “I did everything I could to make you different, but you just wouldn’t listen. I could do anything to you, to everyone you care about, and it wouldn’t matter. You wouldn’t fight it. Not in a way that matters.”

Cozy took a step forward. The floor shook as her hoof made contact with it, vibrating with the sheer amount of energy pulsing through it in increasingly bright flares. “I could kill everypony in this city, cut their throats and pull out their hearts and rip them limb from limb, and you wouldn’t stop me. You’d lock me up, you’d throw away the key, but you wouldn’t stop me. I’d find a way out, and I’d do it all over again.”

Every step was a bit faster than the one before—a bit brighter. “Millions of lives in your hooves, and you’d waste every one of them for an ideal you can’t even explain. You’d let a pony like me into your life, into your home, just to watch her destroy everything you love through depths of cruelty you can’t even imagine. All because you won’t do what a real leader would’ve done years ago.”

Cozy was a few yards—a few feet—inches away. Her hooves were barely touching the ground anymore.

“All because you won’t–”

Blink Before I Do

“Fight back!”

Cheek stinging and ego bruised even deeper, Flurry spun around and faced Cozy Glow again, dripping with sweat and sucking in shallow breaths that barely kept her upright. The air in the tiny space they occupied was stuffy enough to be stifling, and the dismissive look Cozy gave her across the pads on the sparring dojo’s floor was enough to spur Flurry forward and put a bit of extra strength into her next swing. She never even got close to making contact. Cozy swatted her outstretched hoof again and smacked her on the back of the head hard enough to make her vision go blurry.

“Stars above, is this really the best you can do?” Cozy growled at her. Her tone wasn’t sour enough for her words to qualify as a taunt. Instead, she sounded disappointed, like a mother scolding her foal for not applying herself in school, and that hurt so much more than any insult ever could. Flurry growled, streamed forward again, and bit her lip hard enough to draw blood as Cozy slammed her down to the ground.

“Not even close!” Cozy snapped, circling around her adversary and already preparing for another blow. “You’re better than this. You call yourself a monarch, and you can’t even…”

Suddenly, Cozy stopped, standing stock-still and cutting herself off in mid-sentence. She’d noticed that Flurry hadn’t gotten back up. She’d seen that the droplets splattering onto the mats below her weren’t sweat anymore, but tears.

“I know,” Flurry said through gritted teeth, her eyes squeezed shut and her whole body shaking. “I know I’m not good enough, or strong enough, or… I’m trying. So just shut up about it, okay?”

Somehow, hearing that wiped the dismay from Cozy’s face, replacing it with something that also looked like confusion. “You’re not… what?” she said. “You think you’re not good enough? Are you kidding me?”

Flurry managed to stand up, but it took just about every scrap of energy she had left. She couldn’t keep doing this. She couldn’t keep struggling through these hoof-to-hoof combat sessions that Cozy had talked her into weeks ago, the brutal and exhausting beatdowns that she couldn’t even explain why she still subjected herself to, except that Cozy wanted to try this with her and she wanted to try whatever Cozy wanted. But that wasn’t what Cozy reminded her of next.

“Flurry, do you have any idea how easily you could kill me?”

Still gasping for breath, Flurry couldn’t put enough air in her lungs to respond, nor could she have found the right words to respond with even if she’d been able to say them. Cozy relaxed out of her fighting stance and approached her, still visibly baffled by what her opponent had just admitted. “You’re a natural-born alicorn, Flurry. The first ever, as far as anypony alive knows. You have enough magic in half a hoof to rip me into pieces and cook my brains inside my skull, and you think you’re not strong enough? What are you talking about?”

Flurry sighed. She could feel her face warming, both from her echo of her previous actions through her body and her belated recognition of why Cozy had insisted they come here three times every week, and why she’d answered every complaint with an assurance that self-defense was just a modern mare’s responsibility to learn.

“You keep fighting like the rules apply to you,” Cozy continued. “Like if you use your real strength to beat me instead of sparring like you’re supposed to, some unknowable higher power will chew you out for not fighting fair. There is no fair way to fight. There are no rules to the battles you’ll have to win if you want to rule anything well. There’s just who survives, and who doesn’t.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Flurry said, unable to keep her voice from sounding a lot like a whimper. Cozy rolled her eyes and huffed out an impatient sigh.

“I’m not gonna give you a choice,” she replied. “Nopony worth fearing will, no matter what your mom or your aunt or anypony else tells you. And if you try to fight fair anyway, if you try to be kind and smart enough that the world has to be kind and smart back, you’ll lose. The world will eat you alive. And if it doesn’t, you’ll do things by accident that are worse than anything your enemies could do on purpose.”

Suddenly exhausted, Flurry slumped onto her haunches and let her weight fall onto her forelegs. Instead of attacking, Cozy just trotted closer, until she was near enough to put a hoof on Flurry’s shoulder.

“Flurry, I know I can’t beat you in a real fight. Nothing on this planet could. But none of that matters if you don’t believe you can beat me, if you don’t own who you are and use it for the right reasons. That’s what the rest of your family couldn’t do. It’s why they sent me to Tartarus and sealed me in stone: because they didn’t want to be as strong as they knew they could be. You’re stronger than them, you’re more capable than them, and stars help me, I’m not gonna let you think anything different.”

Cozy dropped her hoof a few inches and propped it under Flurry’s chin, pushing up until the alicorn met her unblinking gaze.

“You’re a Princess. You run this place. Now act like it.”

One Good Thing to Say

Instead of dodging Cozy’s attack, Flurry rooted herself in place. And instead of blocking the incoming blow, she just stopped it—grabbed hold of Cozy’s body with her magic, froze her in mid-lunge, then twisted, crumpled, crushed her down to the ground. She heard the breath leave Cozy’s lungs, the distant groan of the impact rattling through the castle’s foundation—and then she hit her again.

She didn’t give Cozy a chance to counter, or even to get back upright. When Cozy lifted her head, Flurry met it with an amorphous mass of energy moving fast enough to shatter teeth. When Cozy ducked and tried to spring into a crouch, Flurry pulverized the floor beneath her hooves, and sent her and the broken pieces of crystal flying away from her. Even when Cozy summoned every Heart shard in the room and slammed them together as a makeshift shield, Flurry just tore right through them, her horn glowing white-hot, her gaze flat and disinterested like she was choosing shoes to wear to Cozy’s funeral.

Soon, sprays of sweat and spit become streaks of blood, marring what little of the castle’s throne room hadn’t already been destroyed. No matter what Flurry threw at her, Cozy kept trying to fight back—but with every titanic strike that would’ve turned any other mortal pony into a mess of bones and mangled flesh rent from them, Flurry could feel Cozy weakening. The Crystal Heart’s magic made Cozy stronger than a mortal pegasus could ever hope to become, but it couldn’t make her an alicorn. And it couldn’t come close to the power that a natural-born one could wield.

Finally, instead of impacting against Cozy’s impossibly resilient form, Flurry’s magic pushed straight through her. Cozy slammed against the far wall hard enough to bring pony-sized slabs of crystal crashing down on top of her, and when the dust settled, she didn’t stand back up. Flurry cleared the debris with an errant flick of her horn, and she saw Cozy Glow suck in a breath. She was bleeding from a dozen places, battered almost beyond recognition, but she was alive—and as she weakly looked up at the Princess, Flurry saw the light of the Heart’s magic still shining in her eyes.

“That’s… more like it,” Cozy wheezed, flashing chipped teeth stained crimson as she glared and grinned. “But it’s... not enough. You know it’s not.”

“Just give the magic back, Cozy,” Flurry ordered her, quelling the lightning inside her horn just long enough for its lingering thunder to force some sense into Cozy’s thick skull. “It’s not too late. The Crystal Heart’s been broken before, I can put it back–”

Cozy Glow interrupted her with coughing, sputtering, hideous laughter. “Oh, honey, it’s way too late,” she said. “You think I did all this, froze your entire empire, just by borrowing the Heart’s magic?”

Flurry furrowed her brow. Cozy spat on the floor, leaving a fresh red stain that trickled into the shape of a twisted smile. “I didn’t break that thing, babe, I destroyed it,” Cozy said. “My heart is the Crystal Heart now. And that magic isn’t coming out of me unless you have the ‘nads to take it.”

She was lying. She had to be. Even Cozy wasn’t that crazy. Even she would know better than to absorb the Heart’s power completely, to meld it so totally with her body’s natural magic that one couldn’t exist without the other. If she'd really done that, then that magic really wasn’t coming back. Flurry couldn’t move it back to its original vessel without destroying the new one—and left unchecked in Cozy’s body, the magic would grow in strength and influence until, in a matter of days, it overwhelmed her. That wasn’t a foolhardy plan for world domination, that was suicide.

“I kept trying to tell you how this was going to end,” Cozy said, her voice just a tiny bit softer than before. “Well, now you know.”

Oh, Celestia save her, this was suicide.

“Only one of this is leaving this room alive, Flurry. And if I had to guess, I don’t think it’s gonna be me.”

The Strength to Walk Out

“What the hell is wrong with you, Cozy?”

All too characteristically, Cozy answered a question other than the one she’d been directly asked. “I mean, I thought I handled things well, all things considered.”

“Are… are you being serious right now?” Flurry sputtered, furiously waving a hoof before Cozy could come up with another smart-ass deflection. “No, forget it, I know you’re not. You never are. Not when it’s important for me, not even when it’s important for you.”

Standing in the doorway to Flurry’s bedroom, looking in her yellow satin cocktail dress like exactly the smug prick she loved being at every opportunity, Cozy just smirked and nonchalantly shrugged. “Got me there. It’s really a problem, isn’t it?”

Flurry’s own dress hung from her shoulders and flanks like a curtain tossed over a couch—an unavoidable consequence of hours spent chasing down party guests, apologizing with drinks and small gifts and assurances that this would never happen again, and finally trudging up to her castle chambers and finding Cozy waiting there for her with that simpering, infuriating smile on her face.

“What were you thinking?” Flurry snapped at her. “And don’t even start talking about what you wanted to accomplish or how you meant for it all to play out. I want to know, literally, what thoughts went through your head tonight.”

Cozy glanced up towards the ceiling, deep in pantomimed recollection. “Okay, well, first I thought, ‘Damn, Flurry’s ass looks great in that dress,’ and then I thought, “This is the most boring thing I’ve ever experienced,’ and I was trapped in stone for a decade so you know I meant that. And then, maybe I’m getting the order mixed up, but I’m pretty sure I thought, “Hey, that stuffy rich asshole’s head looks like it could use a punch-bowl swirlie,’ and… straight up, after that it was just pure instinct.” She looked back at Flurry, and her grin returned. “C’mon, you used to love stuff like that. What happened to the fun Flurry?”

“She grew up,” Flurry seethed. “She asked you politely—begged you—to pull yourself together for just one night. Not for my parents, not for some stuffy rich assholes, for me. For one night that was really, really important to me. And you never thought, even for one second, how acting like a childish idiot might affect me.”

There was a strange look in Cozy’s eyes—not amusement or chagrin, but something more like melancholy, like she really couldn’t believe they were having this conversation. “I never had to before,” she said. “What makes tonight any different?”

Flurry felt bile rise in her throat. She swallowed it back and laced its sentiment through every one of her next words. “You are just a perfect asshole, aren’t you? I mean, it’s genuinely impressive how much work you put into it. Every chance you have, every single moment where you could maybe be a functional pony, you just sprint headlong in the opposite direction. Honestly, I’m an idiot for expecting anything else.”

Cozy twitched her lips and glanced up at the ceiling again. Her eyes still held that strange look, even more noticeable now than before, but her tone was just as sardonic as ever. “You said it, not me,” she said.

“I trusted you, Cozy,” Flurry told her. “Celestia help me, I really did. I thought if you didn’t care about anything else in the world, you at least cared about me. And you don’t. I know that now, and I should’ve known it before, but I… I thought it all meant something. The last few months, what I’ve told you, what you said back… I thought it was real. I thought you thought it was real.”

Flurry couldn’t look her in the eyes anymore, so she couldn’t see whether Cozy’s expression had changed. She grit her teeth, squeezed her eyes shut until the tears prickling under her eyelids were gone, and forced herself to meet her supposed marefriend’s gaze. Cozy said nothing. Her expression hadn’t changed.

“Are you gonna say anything?” Flurry asked her, stupidly. “Are you gonna apologize, or tell me that anything I just said was wrong? ‘Cause if you’re going to, now’s your last chance.”

Flurry waited several moments for a response, each one longer and more devastating than the last. Finally, Cozy Glow blinked, and her lips parted.

“You’re so hot when you’re angry,” she said.

Flurry slammed the bedroom door so hard the whole castle shook.

Drowning

Flurry stumbled back a step, her mind racing and her lips moving without making a sound. Of course Cozy knew what she’d done. She was too smart not to. She’d done it on purpose, to manufacture this specific scenario—and to force her to play the leading role in bringing it to an end.

“Why?” she whispered.

“You know why,” Cozy said. She wore a thin smile, and a strange melancholic expression that turned Flurry’s stomach to look at. “You know exactly what I want. I’ve wanted it for years.”

Suddenly, the ice in Flurry’s chest exploded into flames. “What the fuck are you talking about, Cozy?” she yelled. “You didn’t want this! You were happy, I… we were… fuck you, Cozy!”

Cozy let out a wet cough, running her teeth around her mouth and spitting out more blood before she replied. “Go ahead. Say what you want to say.”

“Why are you dragging me into this?” Flurry said. “If you want to kill yourself, then do it. Just give up on life, on everypony who cared about you, and end it. I can’t stop you. But this… you dragged me into this. You’re making me do it for you.”

“I’m not making you do anything, Flurry,” Cozy murmured. “I’m giving you a choice. Me or your empire. And we both know what the right call is.”

“Oh, go to hell, Cozy!” Flurry snapped.

Cozy’s smile took on a wry tilt. “Kinda already did. It’s not as bad as you’d think.”

Flurry whirled away and began to stalk across the throne room, stopping after only a few steps to tap her hoof against the ground and suck in deep, shaky breaths through her nose. Finally, she settled herself with a firm sigh, and turned back around.

“Why?” she asked again. “Why are you throwing everything away?”

Cozy had rolled onto her back while Flurry was composing herself. Her head rested on the flat side of a piece of crystal debris, and her breath came in shallow gasps, each one making her veins glow a bit brighter through her tightened, translucent skin. “It was never mine,” she answered, tilting her chin down just enough to meet Flurry’s eyes. “You were never mine. I just borrowed you for a little while.”

“To do what?” Flurry said, drawing nearer again to where Cozy had fallen with every embittered word. “Was I just a target to you? Somepony to lead along until your master plan was ready? What was I good for, Cozy?”

Cozy’s eyes shone—but not with magic. “Everything,” she said, and the weight in the word—the heartache, and the sorrow, and the fear—sent Flurry reeling more than a punch in the gut ever could. “You were everything to me. Stronger and braver and better that I thought a pony could possibly be, and good through every inch of your heart. You deserve to be a Princess. You might be the only pony who ever has deserved it. You made me happy. And if I’d kept that happiness for myself, if I let you love me like I loved you, I would’ve ruined you.”

Flurry had closed the distance between them, and still she felt miles and miles from the mare laid out before her. “All I could ever be for you was a liability,” Cozy went on. “Not because I would betray you, or because I wouldn’t take every punishment imaginable just to keep you safe. Because if someone worse than me came along, and they told you to choose between me and your empire, you might have chosen me.” Cozy coughed, and grimaced, and choked back a noise halfway between a growl and a sob. “Millions of ponies might die, because of me.”

“Cozy, stop,” Flurry said. “I would never… t-there’s a way out of this, I can…”

“You can’t,” Cozy said. “You can’t be like the rest of them. You can’t give up the power you have to protect everypony else, to protect yourself, for the sake of one pony you love. You have to be stronger. You have to be great.”

She pushed herself up with a shuddering hoof, and hooked the other around Flurry’s neck. Flurry felt something thread through the crook of her forehoof, and she gripped it instinctively. She looked down and saw a shard of the Crystal Heart clutched in her grasp—hovering, wrapped in the Heart’s stolen magic, over Cozy’s chest.

“I will make you great,” Cozy told her. “I will make sure you survive no matter what I have to do. That’s all I’m good for. And it’s what I want. It’s the only thing I’ve wanted since the day I met you.”

Flurry looked at the shard. Cozy lifted a shaking hoof and placed it over Flurry’s. “Do it,” she whispered. “Please.”

Silently, instinctively, Flurry made her decision. She closed her eyes, leaned forward, and–

No Sign of Land

There was a knock at the door.

Flurry had almost fallen asleep by then, and the sudden sound startled her like a half-awake dream of falling. She rubbed her eyes, waited until her pulse slowed again, then got up and opened her bedroom door. Cozy Glow stood outside, still in her cocktail dress. She smelled like river water and upturned earth. The edges of her fetlocks were stained and damp.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, staring at the ground.

“Good for you,” Flurry tersely replied, and she moved to shut the door. Cozy stuck a hoof out to keep it from closing, and she added something else.

“I’m sorry I lied about what I was thinking.”

Cozy was a long way from earning forgiveness, but to her credit, she’d at least aroused Flurry’s curiosity. Flurry swung the door back open, and Cozy silently filed past her, sitting delicately at the foot of Flurry’s bed so she touched as little of the mattress as possible.

“You were right about me,” she said once Flurry sat down beside her. “I’m a perfect asshole, in every way and in every possible situation. It’s how I control things. If other ponies hate me, if I figure out exactly what they want and exactly how to ruin it for them, then I know how they’ll treat me, what to expect from them. I’ll… I’ll feel safe.”

Cozy fiddled with the hem of her dress as she spoke. In the dim light from her bedside lamp, Flurry could see it was wet like Cozy’s hooves were. “For my whole life, as long as I can remember, I’ve been like that. Even when I was a foal, trying to take over Equestria with half-cocked plans I was too angry to think about, in the end it was all just trying to get an edge over the world. I’d lie, steal, burn every bridge I could reach and every safe place in front of me, so long as I was the one holding the torch. So long as if anypony ever tried to hurt me, I could hurt them first.”

Cozy sighed, and Flurry could hear something sticking in the mare’s throat—something she was trying to say, and couldn’t quite force out just yet. “And then I met you, and I hated you. I mean, I didn’t really like anyone, but I hated you. Rich and powerful, lived in a castle, parents who loved you… everything I’d never had. And now I had to live with you if I wanted to live anywhere, and all I could do with that life was wait for somepony to decide I wasn’t worth the trouble after all and put me someplace I’d never escape from. So in the meantime, I just pushed everything… everyone away, and when you wanted to be a little teenage rebel, I thought ‘sure, Princess, I’ll drag you down to my level.’ I thought that for sure would get your parents to take care of me for good.”

Cozy sighed, and looked up at the ceiling, and laughed. “And then I learned who you really were, how you were so different from all the Princesses I’d known before, and from the world I knew them in. And way, way too late, I realized that I wasn’t angry when I was with you. I told you things I’d never told anyone before, taught you things nopony else would’ve taught you. I didn’t try to hurt you, and it… made me happy. I was happy in a way I never knew I could be. And that fucking terrified me.”

For the first time in her life, Flurry saw tears in Cozy Glow’s eyes. When Cozy turned to look at her, two of those tears slid down either cheek. “I couldn’t control you,” she said. “I couldn’t control how I felt about you. And the thought of you finding out who I really am, of ever giving up on me… I could handle everypony else, the whole world, but not you. So I did it myself. I ruined your night, and I said everything I knew would upset you the most, and I made moondamned sure you would see exactly who you’d wasted your time with. And then I…”

She didn’t say what she’d almost done next. Flurry didn’t make her. She’d pieced it together without it being said aloud—from the glistening droplets in Cozy’s hair and the mud in her fetlocks, a shade of brown she’d only ever seen on the bank of the river north of the castle.

“I guess I just wanted to tell you why,” Cozy finished. “I know we’re done, and I’m… I’ll be okay with that. But you should… you deserved to know that I lied. And that I’m sorry.”

She sat in silence on Flurry’s bed for a few more seconds, then got up and walked to the door. She didn’t turn around until Flurry spoke up.

“Cozy…”

“Don’t.” Cozy Glow faced her with eyes as wide as the full moon. “Just… don’t forgive me just because of this. Don’t put yourself through that. You know it’ll happen again, that I’ll… that this isn’t over. You know who I am.”

Flurry stood up and closed the gap between her and Cozy. Her eyes never left Cozy’s. Cozy didn’t look away.

“I do,” Flurry whispered. Her hoof brushed over Cozy’s cheek, gentle and soft and impossibly strong. “I know exactly who you are.”

Then she pressed her lips against Cozy’s, and Cozy kissed her back, and soon there was nothing between them but moonlight…

Coming Down With Me

And she plunged the shard into Cozy’s heart.

Hand in Unlovable Hand

From exactly one thousand, one hundred and six feet in the air, the Crystal Empire looked like it was doing pretty well. The castle grounds were open to the public again, and a few extra attachments of guards had done enough to make the city’s residents feel safe strolling through on lunch breaks and showing their kids around on weekends. The tourists and ambassadors from afar would return in time. After all, it had only been a month since a full-blown terrorist attack, and diplomatic relations were still testy in some places after that disaster of a reception at Flurry Heart’s coronation the previous year.

“Hey there, ladybug,” came a soft voice from behind where Flurry stood, at the edge of the landing atop her castle’s tallest tower. Princess Twilight Sparkle of Equestria stepped up to the balustrade next to her niece, using the pet name she’d settled on years before and never quite gotten around to giving up. “Quite the view up here, huh?”

The ponies of the Empire had barely been unfrozen for a minute —and in a few cases, rushed to hospitals for belated but ultimately effective treatment—before they had swarmed around their Princess, knowing without asking that they owed their salvation to whatever heroism she’d performed while they were trapped and unaware. They’d asked her what had happened, who had attacked them, and was she feeling okay, because she looked a little strange and seemed a little quiet. She’d told them they were safe, and that the Crystal Heart had been restored.

“I heard about what happened. I’m sorry. I really, truly am. I can’t imagine how hard that was to go through. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

And it had been restored in every way that mattered, despite the grumblings of older Crystallian subjects with a lingering affection for the Heart’s original shape. It had actually been a heart under Cadance, some had taken to muttering, and not whatever metaphorical modern art her daughter had transformed it into: some ugly mess of spiny crystal shards that only sort of looked like a pony if you squinted at it from the right angle.

“Sometimes being a Princess is like this. I wish I had a better way of saying it, but… it’s the truth. Sometimes you have to make choices that nopony should ever have to make. And sometimes none of the options feel right.”

And on top of that, there was the matter of its new location, and how inaccessible it was to just about anyone but the Princess herself. Sure, the Heart was sensitive to damage and necessary to protect them, but more than a few ponies wondered whether the Princess really had to put it at the very tip of her castle’s tallest spire, so far away from the ground that—even if you squinted—you couldn’t see that what some ponies considered a gaudy self-portrait actually had much smaller wings than the Princess did, or that none of the spikes comprising its head was large enough to resemble a horn.

“I remember fighting Tirek… being forced to choose between my friends and the magic of all the Princesses. I remember thinking that either way, I wouldn’t be able to live with myself afterwards. Either way, I was sacrificing something I couldn’t bear to give up.”

But even the new Crystal Heart’s aesthetic detractors couldn’t deny its practical effects—how much more brightly it shone now than before, and now much more energy it provided the city that depended on it. And if they had other questions about what exactly Flurry had done in that infinitesimal gap in time, and what she’d done with whoever had caused all this trouble, and why there’d been no body or even a newly occupied cell in the darkest corner of a dungeon, they just had to live with them. The Princess wasn’t answering those questions. The Princess just told them to trust her, and… well, what else were they going to do? She had saved them, after all.

“But afterwards, I realized that the important thing wasn’t what I chose in the moment, but the fact that I did choose. I wasn’t paralyzed by the weight I had to take on. I did the most important thing for a Princess to do: what I thought was right.”

And yet, there were still questions, still half-formed memories that Flurry had yet to resolve into facts. Had Cozy used the Heart’s magic to tug Flurry’s hoof down, or had Flurry killed her all by herself? Had their last kiss—delicate, breathless, marred by the tastes of copper and salt—been an apology, or just a bitter farewell? When the light had faded from Cozy’s eyes and the warmth from her parted lips, had the Crystal Heart rejected its old shape of its own volition, or had Flurry directed the shards to envelop the fallen pegasus and bind together around the final vessel for the magic of an empire?

“And I’m sure you did too. Even though… even with the way it ended. Sometimes there’s just no other way. I learned that the hard way too.”

Maybe all her memories were real, or perhaps none of them. Maybe she had imagined that a mentally ill, misanthropic war criminal had a specific reason for terrorizing her subjects and torturing her. Maybe that reason was the only thing she had left of the only pony she’d ever truly loved.

“I just… I want you to know that I understand. Maybe better than anypony else ever could. And no matter what, I know that you’re a good pony, and that you made the best choice possible.”

Or maybe it didn’t matter what the truth was. Maybe at the end of the day, all that mattered was that she was the one telling it. That she was the one who could protect her subjects in ways that nopony else could. That she was the one in control.

“Flurry? Ladybug, you can talk to me if you want. Are you doing okay? Really?”

Flurry Heart smiled, and answered the question she’d just been asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Thanks for stopping by, Twilight.”

With a nod, Flurry Heart spread her wings and took off into the air, leaving her fellow Princess blinking mutely in her wake.

I Hope We Both Die

Flurry Heart was almost asleep again when she heard Cozy’s voice rise from underneath her chin.

“You know something?”

Flurry shifted up a bit until her shoulders rested on her pillow, and her head was at an angle that let see Cozy’s head nestled against her chest. In the corner of her bedroom, just barely illuminated by the moonlight streaming in the window, she could see both of their coronation dresses crumpled in a heap and probably ruined beyond repair, the last remnants of a disastrous reception that—to be perfectly honest—she couldn’t care less about now.

“What?” she asked Cozy, whose shoulder tensed against Flurry’s forehoof as she shifted a bit under the covers.

“You’re the only pony I’d ever let kill me,” Cozy tenderly replied.

Between late-night exhaustion and afterglow, Flurry didn’t have the energy to unpack the absolutely batshit thing Cozy had just said. Instead, she just narrowed her eyes and mumbled, “Well, that’s… morbid.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Cozy said, with such a sincere depth in her gaze that Flurry couldn’t imagine arguing the point. “Think about it: I’m me. Y’know, hot-headed, stubborn, empirically unbalanced. Maybe there’s a few creatures somewhere big and mean enough to stop me, but I wouldn’t let them kill me. Not unless it was you.”

“You have an awfully high opinion of yourself,” Flurry observed.

Cozy smirked. “I am dating a princess,” she shot back, leaning up at the same time to plant a kiss on Flurry’s lips that the Princess happily accepted. “Sorry, I know I’m making it weird. What I mean is that I trust you. More than I trust myself. And if you decide that I’m worth keeping alive, then I believe you. And if I’m not, then… whatever happens, I’ll go out protecting you. I’ll leave you a better mare than I found you.”

Flurry kissed Cozy again, and kept kissing her until she had to pull away to draw breath. “I think you already covered that,” she whispered, her lips brushing Cozy’s just enough to tickle.

“Hmm…” Cozy hummed. “I think you can get better, though. I’ll figure something out.” She yawned and settled back into Flurry’s shoulder. “Maybe start a war or something. Those always make rulers look great.”

Flurry couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a psychopath,” she told her marefriend.

Just before she nodded off, Cozy’s lips bent into a smile. “Every great leader is,” she murmured as sleep overtook her. “Some of us just make it look good.”

Author's Note

Apparently this song's popular on the Tik Toks now. The teens today have good taste.

(Also, yeah, I know it should've been "Hoof in Unlovable Hoof," but that wouldn't have rhymed. Blame it on Bonnie Zacherle.)