The Most Horrible Hearth's Warming EVER: A Candy Mare Tale

"By my beard! What in the name of harmony happened here!?" Starswirl exclaimed, aghast.

It was not difficult to find their way to the unicorn castle town or pick up Luna's trail, which had led through Castle Bullion to the throne room. The frozen devastation that they passed along the way was to be expected for the abandoned kingdom, but the sight that awaited Starswirl and the rest of the Guardians of Harmony in the throne room was another story entirely. It was awash in a sea of frozen blood and crumpled dead bodies, the ceiling crusted with gore-slick icicles that steadily dripped their putrid filth on the floor below and even in this cold the abattoir stench was unbearable. Each of the Pillars coughed and gagged as they waded their way through the hoof deep slurry of viscera and sludge, trying not to dwell too much on what it was that they were squishing beneath their steps.

At the center of that lake of putrid corpses lay side by side two relatively fresher ponies, each facing the other, splayed out like two halves of some bizarre representation of yin and yang.

One was unmistakably Princess Luna, though she was strangely garbed and there was something foreboding about about the smile that still stretched across her unconscious face. She was badly injured but still alive, barbs of candy jutting from oozing wounds. Mage Meadowbrook and Mistmane set to carefully extracting the cursed candy and treating the alicorn's wounds. While no cure had ever been discovered for the candy curse, the Meadowbrook had discovered that a tincture made from a certain star shaped fruit that grew in the Everfree Forest that could prevent the curse from setting in on those who had merely been injured by the Candy Mare or her minions. It was imperative, however, that every last piece of candy down to the smallest spec was removed and the wounds were salved thoroughly with the faintly glowing concoction. The earth pony shaman carefully poured on her precious salve and bandaged what wounds she could while Somnambula mopped Mistmane's brow, the aged unicorn concentrating all her magic on the delicate process of removing the tiny shards of candy from the rest of the wounds on the princess's body.

While the trio of mares focused on saving Luna's life, Starswirl and the other stallions kept their attention focused squarely on the Candy Mare. The bearded sorcerer rifled through the pages of his tome, searching in vain for answers to the new questions that had suddenly sprung before them. He had studied multiple different Equestria's throughout the multiverse, across both time and space, yet what the Pillars had stumbled across defied everything that he had encountered thus far. There was dark magic here, darker than he'd encountered anywhere else, but it was woven together in such a complex way that even with a lifetime of study he doubted he'd ever find a way of unraveling it. The Gordian Knot of dark power was just that dense.

Although Rockhoof's shovel was at her throat and Flash Magnus held her down with his shield, the Candy Mare remained motionless not by any intervention of their own but rather by one such aspect of the fiendish powers at play here. The candy corpse's lollipop eyes were glazed over, yet they still glared at Princess Luna with a death stare filled with hate. She stared unseeing, Starswirl's hoof waving in front of her face provoking no reaction, and the micro-twitches of her eyes told the elder unicorn that against all reason the dead creature was dreaming. In his experience the undead no more needed to sleep than they needed to breathe, yet here she was clearly seized by a horrifically deep enchanted slumber that made the spell that had been placed on the encampment earlier that day seem like a child's nap by comparison. There was no spell or cantrip known to him that was of significant enough power to accomplish such a feat, that could make even the restless dead sleep, for if he had known of one he could have put an end to the Candy Mare's terror long ago! It was as if someone had designed a spell from scratch just to put a creature that was already dead into a coma! Such a thing was not only unheard of, it was patently ridiculous!

"It's obvious that the sleeping spell that afflicted us and the rest of the encampment is similar to the spell that now effects the Candy Mare, although it is far deeper and more powerful than the enchantment that we woke from. " spoke Starswirl at last, shutting his tome with grim finality, finding no answers. "I can only assume that this was somehow accomplished by Princess Luna, yet I cannot fathom the monstrous amount of power that would be involved in afflicting such a complex hex on a creature already so cursed as the Candy Mare.

"Such a spell carries great risk," chimed in Mistmane, pausing in her work. "The subconscious is a delicate place, influenced as it is by the thoughts and feelings we carry with us. The Candy Mare is already a creature driven by hatred and a hunger for vengeance. In doing this her rage may only be concentrated, distilled into a more pure and primal form, unleashing an even more unspeakable evil upon Equestria should she ever wake from her spellbound slumber."

"I say we destroy the beasty now!" insisted Rockhoof, the blade of his shovel pressing further into the Candy Mare's throat. "Strike her down while we have the chance!"

"It's no less than what this monster would do to us, given the chance," agreed Flash, the soldier's neck muscles tight with the tension he felt this close to the fiend who had murdered so many of his friends. "This thing is a merciless killer. A remorseless cannibal. I can't imagine it being worse than it is now, but if what Mistmane says is true then we have no choice but kill it before it wakes!"

"But what if in the attempt we inadvertently break the spell that binds her?" asked Somnambula, the pegasus drawing uncomfortably close to the prone candy coated cadaver. "The combined might of Equestria has been trying to destroy her for some time now, and she has proven time and again to be quite resilient, even against the things that seem to harm her. Tear her to pieces with magic and the pieces simply rejoin together. Burn her with fire, she melts away to return shortly after as a drippy mass of melted candy and hate. Normal weapons have no lasting effect on her. Feed her to some unfortunate creature, and the Candy Curse simply takes them over and she is reborn from their innards! Whatever foul magic animates her also preserves her against harm. In attempting to destroy her we may simply be freeing her from whatever power now holds her fast."

"I am afraid I know too little about the spell that has been placed on her," admitted Starswirl, "And you are right that we do not have a full-proof way of ensuring her complete destruction. Even were we to bury her under this crumbling castle, there is no guarantee that she would not eventually awaken to take her revenge. Banishing her to another dimension would just make her someone else's problem, and in time she might return. My Limbo spell might still work, but if she should wake during transportation to Ponehenge then I fear we would have no way of preventing her escape. Truthfully, as long as she slumbers like this, the cost of using that spell is too forbidding in any event. I'd rather save it as a last resort. No, we will have to think carefully about another way to dispose of this creature. It will need to be something fulsome and lasting but also as secure as possible."

"I have an idea..."a weak voice, barely on the verge of hearing, floated up from the floor.

"Princess Luna!" gasped Meadowbrook, "You mustn't move in your condition!"

Luna tried to rise, but her hooves could not yet bear her weight, so instead she slumped against the concerned shaman with a shuddering sigh. Despite Meadowbrook trying to ease her back to the floor, Luna resisted, her eyes blazing with unnatural vitality that cowed the earth pony into submission. For the moment Luna would stand, with the healer's aid.

"First, give me your shovel," commanded the Princess of the Night, her voice brooking no denial. "And Flash, do me the favor of emptying Meadowbrook's medicine bag, won;t you?"

Starswirl couldn't hide the concern in his eyes as the dark aura of Luna's magic took hold of Rockhoof's shovel. Before he could say anything, the princess swiftly and unceremoniously brought the spade down on the Candy Mare's neck sending a spray of black blood and sugary gunk in ever direction as she chopped through her candied flesh. Undeterred by the splatter, Luna continued chopping away, crunching through the prone Candy Mare's neck-bones with the edge of the shovel until the head had been completely decapitated and removed from the rest of the body. The princess was not yet finished, however, and brought the digging tool down again and again, severing limbs from torso with a loud crunch. Then she started to break up the torso into several chunks, spraying more black blood and foul flesh in every direction, until the thick dark slurry ran down her own grinning face. The Guardian's of Harmony looked on in horror as Princess Luna at last used the excavating tool to dig into the Candy Mare's exposed chest cavity, bending back the ribs with an audible snap before she carefulled scoop out the creatures still beating heart!

Dropping the shovel, Princess Luna seized the pulsing lump of meat with her magic, and this time the dark aura that burned around Luna was unmistakable, but no one said a word as she squeezed the shriveled muscle. As she did, the dismembered pieces of the Candy Mare writhed and wriggled around on the ground in seeming pain, as if even while they were detached they were somehow still connected to one another. The Candy Mare's body parts tried to slither and drag themselves toward's Luna, but their movements were feeble at best.

Luna's sick smile at the sight would haunt the Pillar's dreams for some time to come...

Not one of the Guardians had remained unshaken by the harrowing sight of Celestia's younger sister dismembering the Candy Mare. They followed her now less because they trusted her and more because they were afraid to go against her wishes without good reason. Although the candy coated cannibal was the obvious clear and present danger to each of them, even now, secretly they felt that Luna might in truth be the more immediate menace. But they had done as she commanded and gathered up every wriggling piece of the Candy Mare and placed them into Mage Meadowbrook's medicine pack. Every piece that was except for the monsters heart, which Luna insisted on hanging from a bit of string, which she now wore dangling from around her neck.

When Meadowbrook had balked at being handed back the now dripping pack, stuffed with the Candy Mare's remains, Starswirl had elected to be the one to carry the grim parcel. Even now he could feel the slight tug as the dismembered parts of the Candy Mare's corpse tried in vain to reach her heart. The old bearded unicorn must have been quite the terrifying sight himself right now, come to hat, his wide hat and long robes that chimed merrily with the tinkling of tiny bronze bells in contrast with the squirming sack hefted on his back. The fact that it was soaked through with black blood that dribbled a grotesque trail behind him certainly wouldn't help him look any less terrifying. Likely he appeared like some bogey out of Stygian's folk tales!

If Starswirl was to be mistaken for some boggart or ghast, then surely Princess Luna would be taken for a living nightmare. She was wrapped from head to hoof in bandages that staunched the flow of her bleeding wounds, but were themselves dripping with the bile the Candy Mare had instead of blood, and yet she insisted she was fine and didn't need to wipe off the dreck. She also insisted on walking under her own power as they left Castle Bullion behind, leaving the Guardians of Harmony to trail in her wake. With the Candy Mare's shuddering heart proudly displayed against her own breast, the princess paraded through the streets of the ghost town as if she were some conquering hero. Maybe once upon a time that might have been true, but her aura had changed to one far darker than it had been previously, likely from the stress of the ordeal of fighting the Candy Mare alone. The way she carried herself now, Starswirl could easily see an illustration of her gracing Stygian's journals next to drawings of the Headless Horse and the dreaded Windigoes, her presence was that intimidating in and of itself.

But thinking of Stygian distracted Starswirl from the change in the princess and made a dark cloud settle over the elder unicorn's own heart. He was still processing the younger pony's betrayal, and it would be some time before he would even be able to think his former friends name without it dredging up unwelcome emotions. Instead he tried to focus on the task ahead. Soon they would be back at the campgrounds and there they would reunite Luna with her sister, hopefully that act alone would go some way to dispelling the darkness that clung to her and bring her back to her old self. Shortly after that they would make the announcement to the soldiers about the 'great victory' that had been achieved over the Candy Mare, leaving out the more sordid details of course. Not one of the Pillars would speak of how that victory had been won or of the precautions that they had taken on Luna's order to ensure that the horrors of that night would not be repeated, but so long as they kept Meadowbrook's pack well out of sight they would hopefully keep any awkward questions to a minimum.

They just needed to make it back to camp and they could put this entire dark chapter of Equestria's history behind them. That was why Starswirl's old heart jumped in his chest when he saw the two soldiers standing at the top of the trail. Surely these were guard's posted to welcome them back!

Except... They had not been walking long enough to have already reached the encampment. Indeed, Castle Bullion was still well within sight, squatting gargoyle-like on the horizon. What was going on?

As the ruddy moon drifted from behind the clouds to illuminate the pair of Royal Guard's, Starswirl's heart sank.

It would seem that this chapter was not yet over.

"Commander Hurricane!?"

Starswirl's shocked exclamation caused Flash Magnus eyes to go wide. Yes, he could see it now... He recognized his fellow pegasus in both of these grim sentries. Well, half of him anyways. It seemed that in all the confusion caused by the sleeping spell and the theft of their artifacts, no one had thought to properly dispose of the fallen commander's bisected body. Indeed, he must have slipped away while they were sleeping, the candy curse having seized his flesh, but instead of bringing him back whole it had brought him back in halves!

Hurricane's left and right halves looked exactly how Flash had seen them last, lifeless, eyes glazed over in death with. Yet now each half was mirrored perfectly in candy, the left by a pony made of a flakes of pink crystallized sugar and the right by a matching jagged confection in blue. They seemed to be somewhat unstable as both halves snapped and fizzled, pieces of candy shearing off in thin razor sharp sheets or exploding into dust that drifted in the air. Although they stood still, they were constantly in motion, the candy side twitching and jittering about as the dead flesh flopped nervelessly in kind. Even so, one of the split candy ghouls gripped the commander's mace while the other held a sentry's spear, which made it obvious that as misshapen as they were they still intended to do battle.

Was this the Candy Mare's last desperate attempt to escape her fate?

"Tsk! What a sore loser," spat Luna, though if she meant Commander Hurricane or the Candy Mare herself, it was hard to say for certain. Despite the severity of her injuries, it appeared that Luna was herself up for a fight, her eyes and horn blazing with dark power, "Accept your defeat!"

"Princess, you are far too wounded to face this evil!" warned Starswirl, "Mistmane, Meadowbrook, guard the princess and guide her to safety! Somnambula, fly ahead and report back on the condition of the camp! Flash and Rockhoof, we'll deal with these malformed malcontents together!"

"Looks like you really did have one last fight left in you after all, eh Commander?" commented Flash as he took Netitus from his back. "Let's make sure it's a good one, right Rockhoof?"

"I'm right behind ya laddy!" cried the barbarian champion, raising his shovel high.

"Have at thee!" cried Starswirl, glowing magic glyphs igniting in the air around him.

Of course no mere candy ghoul, even a pair that had in life been the leader of the Royal Guard, could be a match for the Guardians of Harmony. They would make short work of the unfortunate Hurricane and many other desperate candy coated corpses that rose from the frozen north to try and steal back the Candy Mare's heart.

In time the heart itself, and each of the other pieces of her corpse, would be sealed inside stone statues that the feeble efforts of the dead could not break. These would be inlaid with carefully crafted magic spells to keep the Candy Mare dormant. Thus, her existence would be erased and her memory would fade from history.

As for the Pillars, they would in time fall into shadow, their own selfishness and faithlessness spelling their doom. Likewise it would not be long before Celestia would discover Luna's secret, her presence doing little to heal her younger siblings mind, and in turn she too would draw the ire of Nightmare Moon. The pairs epic falling out would end in the younger siblings banishment, but I think you've already heard that tale.

But that's a story for another time...