Dear Princess Celestia,
—
Quiet. Fluttershy loved the quiet, generally speaking. She loved certain kinds of quiet. There was the peaceful babble of a brook that slowly dissolved into white noise, there was the quiet of the first snowfall of the season as the entire world slowed in response, there was the quiet of a night spent wrapped around a good book. These were the quiet moments Fluttershy had come to revere as an animal caretaker. Brief moments of simplicity that served as the foundation her otherwise busy days stood upon.
This was not one of those quiets. This was tense, fraught with static and fear. Her brain told her the air was copper and every little flicker of sun across the still-wet grass was a powder keg waiting to explode. That was absurd, of course, but the dread wouldn’t leave her mind. It only sank further into her psyche as a young brown squirrel tugged on her fetlock, trying to pull her down a path to her right. She acquiesced, following him down and away from her mornings work.
She had come to understand the animals and their particulars as she spent more time with them. Not just them personally, of course; the average wild animal wasn’t nearly as long-lived as a pony. Instead as she helped shepherd generations of new wildlife into fruitful lives, she had built a familiarity with the quirks of many different species. Rodents, in her experience, were skittish. This wasn’t skittish.
This was terrified.
—
I… don’t really know where to start. Or if I should start at all. I just know that after all these years, there’s something I really need to tell you. I have a few questions I want to ask first. You don’t have to answer them right away; just spend some time thinking about them while you read the rest of my letter.
The first question I had was: has a pony ever brought another living thing back from the dead?
—
The first thing that she noticed was the smell. She had smelled death and all its attendants before. She had stumbled upon corpses, two weeks rotten, bloated with all the filth of decay. A dead animal should not smell like this. She gagged, dragging her trembling hoofsteps closer to the source of the stench. She was grateful it was obscured from view for now as her stomach gave way, heaving her breakfast into the bushes that lined the path. The squirrel that had been guiding her had long since fled the scene.
She couldn’t blame the little guy. She felt awful that any other creature besides her had to be the first one to stumble upon whatever she was about to see. The horrid odor continued to mount, mingling with the stale and silent air to form an oppressive blanket of rot. She wished it could’ve just stayed that — a smell. She wished on everything in the world, as she puked a second time, that it would have only ever been an awful smell.
—
I know that’s not the best way to open a letter to the Princess but… I don’t feel like I have much of a choice. Do you have nightmares? I do. About all sorts of things. It’s usually really mundane things, like being late for school or my friends all leaving me alone to go to a party. Sometimes it gets really bad and it makes it hard to sleep for a couple days. Sometimes I get nightmares that don’t leave me for weeks on end, that haunt even my daydreams and twist them into something that not even Princess Luna could save me from.
What I’m about to tell you is a lot like one of those.
—
Fluttershy recognized a corpse when she saw one. She could tell apart their causes, even. An animal dying naturally was different from an animal killing another. This wasn't a natural death. This poor rabbit, splayed spread-eagle across the packed dirt, had met a far worse fate. As she stood transfixed by its mangled remains the smell seemed to fade into the back of her mind.
All she could think about, all she could keep in her rattled and panic-stricken mind, was the image of a dead rabbit and the sound of birdsong. Birdsong? She tore her eyes away from the grisly scene and scanned the treetops around her. There wasn't a single flighty friend to be found but still a jumbled haze of birdsong crashed into and through her thoughts.
It was telling her something. She could do nothing but listen.
—
I've never seen anything like it. The poor thing was split open, from neck to groin, and all the parts of it were pulled back. Like something had been studying it. Every organ was neatly organized and folded in ways that I knew they weren't supposed to be.
Animals don't do that. Ponies, I hope, don't do that. I don't know what does and I pray to never find out. That was bad enough already but… but then the singing started.
—
Fluttershy couldn't think, she couldn't speak, she could hardly see. Her vision was encompassed entirely by gore and viscera, her hearing stolen by a tangle of song, her thoughts a roaring wave of static and one word, over and over.
Live.
She cried out in pain as that word found its way to the forefront of her mind, drilling through her brain and threatening to burst from her fragile skull.
Live.
She crumpled to the ground, tears streaming down her face as she felt a single bony protrusion claw its way through the taut coat that wrapped her head.
Live.
She howled, her voice ragged with pain and sorrow as a horn burst from forehead with a sickening snap. She howled until her voice frayed and gave way, choking out a desperate wordless cry as pain coursed through every nerve in her trembling body.
Live.
Until the pain stopped and she sat, watching as magic reached out to seize the slaughtered rabbit. Her magic, she surmised, blinking the blood from her eyes.
Live.
She spoke the command, as much as her ruined voice allowed her to speak, and she saw the threads of life begin to stitch the ruined corpse back together.
—
It never happened again. The noise, the blood, the smell… it happened all at once then never again. Like it was a nightmare, my own private slice of unreality. I know it was real, though. The rabbit I saved is… he’s still around. Far longer than he’s got any reason to be. The horn was gone when I woke up the next morning.
So I guess I wanted to ask… do you hear the singing too?
