The Head

by mushroompone

Rating: mature
Tags: Trixie, Ocellus, Suicide / Self Harm, Horror, Starlight Glimmer, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Death
Length: 10853

On a chilly morning in early October, Ocellus came to class without a head.

On a chilly morning in early October, Ocellus came to class without a head.

A post-canon fic. Cover by cereal (fimfic | twitter)

Audio reading by CalicoPegasus here

Published 2022-10-30 14:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2022-10-30 14:40:01 UTC

The Head

On a chilly morning in early October, Ocellus came to class without a head.

This was, of course, surprising for her students. Upsetting as well. In the sudden and brutal shock of it, very few of them reacted. Some thought it was a cruel joke, though it wasn’t exactly Ocellus’s style of humor to go around opening up her neck and exposing all the grisly details—changeling or not.

It wasn’t until a young earth pony in the front row, having never seen true gore before in his life, vomited all over his desk that the chaos broke loose. Little creatures running every which way and screaming bloody murder. A body standing all on its own at the front of the room, stumbling this way and that as children scrambled past it and out the door.

The commotion quickly reached the office of the headmare. Wordless screaming and dozens of tiny hooves and claws and paws running full-tilt through the halls.

Her curiosity was, at first, calm and collected. Pranks and scares, especially so close to Nightmare Night, were not entirely unheard of. She sighed to herself, stood, and walked against the flow of sickened, terrified students. She pictured peeled-grape eyeballs, spaghetti guts, some trouble-making griffon feigning death with a pile of sausage links.

Starlight found the body of her former student standing stiff as a board, headless, in the destroyed remains of her classroom. The smell of bile and the sweeter, milder scent of the milky goo which throbbed in her open wound filled the classroom to such a degree that Starlight found it difficult to breathe.

What else could she do?

She called for an ambulance.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” the EMT said, a soft hoof on Starlight’s shoulder.

Starlight chuckled. “Loss? She’s—she’s right there. She’s still alive!” She gestured to the body, though couldn’t bring herself to look at it directly. “We just need to… to find the… well, you’re the doctor! What do we do?”

The EMT shook her head. “Without the head, there isn’t anything we can do for your friend,” she explained. “And, honestly, based on the wound I’d guess her head isn’t in very good condition.”

Good condition?

It was a head, not a buckball rookie card.

“There are some lesions along the carapace consistent with crushing.”

Crushing.

Starlight heard it as the hollow crumpling of a red plastic cup at a party.

“My guess is that her head was caught in something, her instincts kicked in, and she pulled free. Maybe something in the wood shop? Do you guys have wood shop here?”

Pulled.

The horrible scrambling. The sound. Crushing. Pulling. Ocellus thrashing about, head and limbs with separate goals, maybe screaming, maybe silence, maybe just the clack of hooves on linoleum.

“Even then, it’s unlikely that—”

“We’ll find it,” Starlight said. “Just—just don’t go anywhere, okay? Don’t go anywhere. We’ll find her head.”

“Miss Glimmer, I really doubt that—”

“We’ll find it!” Starlight repeated.

The EMT closed her mouth, barely holding back a low sound of dissatisfaction. She didn’t say anything, didn’t give permission either way, didn’t even get to her protestations before Starlight Glimmer had sped out the door.

The search began.

School was dismissed not by the headmaster, not by the vice headmaster, but by Trixie, the guidance counselor, who seemed to somehow have the best head on her shoulders in the midst of the situation. Students were sent home shaken and nauseous and crying. A lingering scent of bile hung heavy in the halls.

The body was locked into Starlight’s office, also by Trixie. She prodded it slowly down the hall like a brainless goat, only making small sounds of displeasure as she did. As if it were a student with a nosebleed. As if she were picking up dog crap.

The three administrators briefly considered splitting up to search the school, but quickly decided that coming upon the remains of an old student together might be incrementally more bearable than finding it alone.

This was one of the last coherent thoughts they managed to force out, though it came in a rush of adrenaline.

What followed was nearly fifteen minutes of witless scurrying about the campus. Starlight could taste metal in her mouth. The picture was very nearly in her mind, but not quite. Some block in her mind—a block she was very thankful for—blurred it all out. A fuzzy mess where the wound would be.

Still.

She ducked under desks.

It could have rolled under here.

She tore open lockers in bursts of magic.

It could have popped off in there.

She flicked on the light in the pool, searching the depths for any sign of a sunken something.

Would a changeling head float?

Would a changeling head bleed?

“Starlight, stop!”

Sunburst flagged the headmaster down in the hall. He was out of breath, too. His face darkened by the sheer power of his imagination.

“We’re not thinking logically,” he said, as if that were some revelation. “What rooms could she have—I mean, where could she be—could it be—”

He couldn’t quite form the thought in as many words, but the concept was clear: where could a severed head sit around for a few hours and not be found?

The gymnasium was not scheduled to be used until that afternoon, but the administrators could tell from down the hall that the lights were on. Someone had been there.

The room roared with the sound of grinding gears and groaning metal. It echoed terribly through the barebones rafters and pinged off every shiny new surface in the place. Starlight plugged her ears with little pellets of magic and pressed forward.

All but one of the sets of bleachers were tucked neatly into their little nooks in the wall. The final set jutted out from the wall at an odd angle, though only just. It gnashed its terrible metallic jaws and tried to clamp itself into its home, but it seemed stuck on something. Something sort of soft, but sort of not. Something with a little give, but not enough.

It wasn’t hard to guess what.

Ocellus’s head was not, as the EMT predicted, in good condition. ‘Pulverized’ was a kind, tame word for the state of the changeling’s face—one eye crushed and oozing a pearly blue liquid down her frozen cheek, the other intact and hanging by a still-slick optic nerve. Her horn had been compressed at just the wrong angle and shattered, sending a spider web of cracks across the young mare’s face and revealing the mass of beige, gelatin-esque matter just beyond.

And yet, it seemed still to pulse with life.

“Get it out!” Starlight cried. “Get it out! Hurry!”

Trixie and Sunburst stood frozen, eyes glazed over in shock, mouths gaping like fish.

Starlight didn’t wait. She shoved past her friends and punched the bleacher controls on the wall with all her might. After a moment of confusion, the machinery began to unfurl itself from the wall.

The remains of the head slipped a few inches downwards, then halted again in a new position on a lower crossbeam. Something slithered out of the open neck wound and connected wetly with the floor. Then the entire head tipped forward and hit the ground like a rotten cantaloupe.

A piece of her shiny blue exoskeleton skittered across the floor and landed at Starlight’s hooves.

Starlight vomited.

Ocellus’s head was not reattached.

“I don’t understand,” Starlight whispered. “That isn’t her. That is a body.”

Elytra sighed. She didn’t look in the direction which Starlight gestured, instead choosing to keep her eyes focused on a small point between her swinging rear hooves. “The point isn’t to understand. The point is to—”

“Respect. And I am,” Starlight corrected. “I won’t keep her parents from collecting her remains. I just want to know why—”

“Ah!” Elytra raised a didactic hoof.

Starlight halted right where she was and held back a growl as she shrank into her seat.

“In changeling culture—a culture, I should remind you, of which I am a member—the changeling isn’t dead until all of the changeling is dead,” Elytra explained. “You’re right. The Ocellus you knew and taught is gone. But a part of her carries on through the nerve agglomerations along her spine and limbs. Why do you think she came to class this morning?”

Starlight glanced at the body on the other side of the room.

It didn’t look one bit like a ‘she’. It looked like a thing.

Its wound had been covered with thick, black cloth. The bleeding had stopped completely in just twenty minutes, not even long enough to show through the makeshift bandage, and so the whole to-do looked like a very odd turban. A length of rope connected the body’s leg to the leg of Starlight’s heavy bookcase, and the body was given approximately two feet of lead to meander about the room as it so desired.

Starlight couldn’t imagine finding peace in spending time with the thing. All it did was blunder about, bumping into things and hunting for a drink of water.

That was what it would die of, apparently. The EMT had told Starlight this before she departed; the wound would clot, the pores in her skin would breathe, the little bundles of nerves would harvest wisps of love… but, ultimately, the body couldn’t live without water. Ocellus would die of thirst.

No, no. That was silly. Ocellus had died when her head was crushed in the bleachers. The Body would die of thirst. And it wouldn’t die—it wasn’t even alive. It would just stop. Like a flashlight with a dead battery.

“There’s some amount of instinct left over,” Elytra went on, having noticed the glazed look in Starlight’s eyes. “It isn’t the same, you’re right. It’s more of… an echo. An aftershock. Little bits of the old ‘ling that are calling out in an effort to, um… well, to survive.”

Starlight’s brows furrowed. “That’s… that’s cruel!”

Elytra sat back, expertly emotionless.

“You’re telling me that this echo of Ocellus—of my student—is going to wander around for a week or more trying to come back to life?” Starlight tapped her hoof firmly on her desk with each spat-out word. “That is unimaginably cruel. Unthinkably cruel. That’s—that’s torture! To no end!”

Elytra held back for a long, quiet moment. She did her best not to grind her teeth, though Starlight could see her jaw pump with the desire.

“That, Headmare Starlight, is my culture.” Stingingly enunciated.

Starlight hesitated a moment, mouth hanging open, poised for a retort.

She pressed her lips back together. A tight, thin line.

“You are a representation of cultural respect in a newly-integrated world,” Elytra reminded her sternly. “Not only that, you yourself are a result of nigh limitless forgiveness and generosity.”

Starlight closed her eyes. “I know,” she said softly.

“I am not here to debate the validity of changeling customs,” Elytra said, her tone relaxing. “I am here to explain why Ocellus’s family should want to retrieve her and take her home.”

Starlight glanced up at the body. Just once. Just to see if it was still there.

“What I will say is that this custom is a holdover from the still-fresh days of Chrysalis’s dictatorship,” Elytra said. Her wings hummed as she did so. “It was a time when death was abundant. Politically-motivated beheadings were not at all uncommon. Time was a valued commodity, Headmare.”

A guillotine. So much faster than what Ocellus has been through. A whoosh and you’re through.

Unless heads went on living, too…

Perhaps crushing was the more merciful, after all.

“I remember those days.”

Starlight looked up at Elytra. Her green eyes twitched ever so slightly over Starlight’s face, but were otherwise shiny and blank.

“I am thankful for the part you played in ending those days,” Elytra said. “But I think you’d do well to understand more richly the genuine effect you had on the changelings.”

She stood. Her chair squealed against the hardwood, sharp and loud. The vibrations must have reached the body, for it did a funny sort of dance—either to get away from it or to feel it out in greater detail. It was hard to tell. Starlight tried not to look.

“Preparations are being made to move Ocellus back home before she passes,” Elytra said. “Until then, she is in your stead.”

The words hardly registered.

Starlight watched mutely as Elytra nodded, turned, and made it halfway to the door.

“W-wait, what?”

Elytra paused. “It will take her family a day or so to make arrangements,” she explained. “Until then, you will need to watch over her. Make sure she stays in this room, and please keep her away from the students.”

“But—but I—”

The words wouldn’t come. It was all Starlight could do not to wail wordlessly at the thought of spending one more single second with the husk, the ponnequin, the lifeless doll which pulled rhythmically at its lead in the corner of her office.

The stump that was her head turned down to look at its bound leg, trying to see with eyes it no longer had.

It tugged again.

Tug.

Tug.

“You cannot be serious,” Starlight said, her voice thin. “Th-there has to be another option. Some sort of—sort of holding cell, or kennel, or storage unit, or—”

“Headmare Starlight, you have been given a blessing:” Elytra insisted. “More time with a loved one. Her family has entrusted you to care for her on one of her final days. And you would kennel her? Like a dog?”

The Body turned itself in a clumsy circle. Its neck twisted this way and that. It may have been wondering why it couldn’t see the way it had just that morning.

“Think of this as an opportunity,” Elytra said. “It’s your chance to say goodbye. Not many have that luxury. Don’t take it for granted.”

Depending on the location, many parts of the changeling might continue to respond to stimuli following severance from the body. Fore legs removed above the knee joint may still kick and writhe for 1-2 days, as do hind legs removed above the hock joint. Wings with enough attached nerve particles may continue to hum or buzz periodically over several hours. Changeling heads are still capable of opening their mouths for as much as 4-6 hours following severance, and may blink or move their eyes for a day or more. In extremely rare cases, a changeling head is capable of producing magical bursts for a few minutes after severance. It is assumed that genuine brain function is greatly limited due to oxygen starvation, though data in this context is limited.

The concept is, in changeling culture, summarized as “persistence”. While there is a general agreement that limbs separated from the changeling’s head / body are no longer considered part of the continuous whole, they are mourned in special ceremonies until they no longer “persist”. Prosthetics are generally not considered an option following loss of limb, as the lost nerve agglomerations controlling both motion and morphing ability have not yet been replicated in a laboratory setting.

Starlight’s reading was interrupted as the Body once again bumped against her desk.

It reacted numbly. A stiff stumble backwards. A little twist of the neck as it tried to get a look at what it had plowed into.

It felt cruel to tie it up any more than it already had been, Starlight thought. It had less space to wander than a guinea pig as it was. To restrict it any further…

It bumped into the desk again, this time forcefully enough that it squealed across the hardwood floor towards Starlight.

“Hey!” Starlight snatched her book off the table and cradled it close to her chest, as if the Body were somehow capable of ruining it.

The Body only stood there. If it had eyes, it might have stared at her. If it had a head, it might have cocked it to one side. If it had a brain, it might have thought. But it had none of those things. It was hardly more than a children’s toy—the sort that knew a command or two and performed them reliably, but would always break down if you looked at them wrong.

Not input. No motion.

Waiting patiently for something to respond to.

Starlight lifted the book in her magic very slowly, then lifted it towards the Body and gently pushed it into its chest. It didn’t seem to notice or care, merely leaned gently into the action and slid across the hardwood floor on shiny hooves.

After a moment, the reaction kicked on, and it stumbled and fell over its own hooves until it finally changed direction and walked away.

Starlight breathed a soft sigh of relief and looked back down at her desk.

A half-finished incident report stared back up at her, as did a partly-written letter of condolences to the students and, as she set the book back down on the desk, a mostly-read chapter of a book on changeling customs and biology.

The incident report was a problem. In a lot of ways. No one had been there. No one could say for sure what happened, or how likely it was to happen again. Did this require repairs? Rethinking of safety codes? Would the bleachers need to be removed and replaced with stationary models? That could be good… but it could also be expensive.

The letter to the students was just as hard to write. Starlight desperately wanted to call on Elytra to handle the first draft, just to get the changeling… stuff out of the way, but felt that she had already exhausted that resource through and through.

And the book.

Persistence.

Starlight looked back up at the Body as it plodded helplessly, endlessly into the solid oak door. “Persistence” was probably the only honest word with any amount of dignity that could describe it.

Starlight looked away. Back down at her papers.

She drew the half-finished incident report closer, scanning over the few sentences she’d managed to throw together in her haze:

Faculty member experienced total decapitation after getting her head caught in mechanized bleachers. Faculty member was pronounced dead by emergency medical personnel. Cause of accident unknown.

Cause unknown.

That was the part that stuck in her craw. It was the part that was going to stick in a lot of ponies’s craws. Accidents with unknown causes never went over well, particularly those that happened around children. She assumed, of course.

Starlight had never really dealt with an accident like this before. She’d had sick students—fainting spells and menstrual cramps and lice. She’d even had hurt students—home-ec cuts and burns, phys ed scrapes and bruises. One student had broken a bone falling off the top of a locker he’d been dared to climb. And all of that was terrible, but it wasn’t this. It wasn’t paperwork. It wasn’t unknown causes.

It wasn’t death, either.

There came a soft knock at the door.

Starlight leapt to her hooves and started jamming any evidence of incidents or condolences in any drawer she could find.

“C-coming!” she called through the heavy door. “Stay right there! Just—one moment!”

“It’s Trixie!”

Trixie.

Thank Celestia.

Starlight dropped her paperwork where it was and darted to the door, narrowly dodging an ill-timed stagger of the Body. It was once again testing the limits of its makeshift enclosure, tugging at the rope gently but earnestly.

She pulled the door open, and there stood Trixie. Surprisingly enough, she didn’t look half bad. Perhaps a bit tired.

“What is it?” Starlight asked, out of breath from her mad scramble.

“Um… I was just wondering how you’re doing on the letter,” Trixie mumbled. “The students are pretty freaked out, especially the ones who were in the room. They want to know what’s going on. I’ve been getting a ton of calls and…”

She trailed off.

Her voice was softer than usual. There was a twinge of something a little more genuine than usual. Not quite sadness. Concern, maybe.

Starlight closed her eyes and rubbed her temple with one hoof. “I know. I know.” She thought of the steadily growing mountain of drafts crumpled up and jammed in the wastebasket.

“Which—well, you can’t blame them, right?” Trixie went on. “It’s… kind of scary. For the kids.”

“Mm-hm.”

“Sunburst told me about the, um… stuff,” Trixie said carefully. “Like, the changeling stuff. Do you want me to keep an eye on her for a while? So you can focus?”

Starlight shook her head. “No, no. I’m not going to do that to you.”

“I swear, I know what I’m doing,” Trixie said, a twinge of dark laughter in her voice. “It wouldn’t be the first time I—”

“I said it’s fine, Trixie.”

Trixie pressed her lips into a thin line. She didn’t answer.

Starlight clenched her jaw and cleared her throat. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Trixie said, and Starlight knew she meant it, even as flippantly as it spilled out of her mouth. She chewed her cheek and glanced down at the floor. “Would you like some company?”

“Trixie, I—” Starlight sighed. “That’s very thoughtful of you. But this is…”

How to describe it?

As if answering the question for her, the Body thudded against the back of the open door. Starlight went stiff as one of its hooves brushed up against her. Feather-light. Still warm with life. Still pumping blood.

“Yeah.” Trixie cleared her throat softly. “I know. It’s hard.”

The words were heavy. Sopping wet with something that Starlight couldn’t identify, weighing down the clothesline of her thoughts.

She shook it off. “I hate to even bring it up, but shouldn’t you be reaching out to her friends?” Trixie asked, her voice twisting into a wince. “Like. Smolder and Yona and—”

“Yes.” Starlight breathed out sharply. “Yes. I-I’ve asked Sunburst to handle it.”

“Okay, fine. So you’re letting ponies help you,” Trixie observed. “I’m helping, too. Step aside.”

Trixie took a small step forward, and Starlight unconsciously gave her the space to enter the room.

She circled the door and stood beside the Body. It was standing still again, still facing the door, doing that long calculation in its head to figure out where it was and what it was doing.

It remembered that it needed water.

It turned around and walked the other direction.

It moved like a marionette, an odd weightlessness in its motions as it skated over the floor, perfectly mechanical. Starlight figured that was probably because it was carrying a bit less weight than usual. It was miscalculations, then; an overestimation of even the simplest things that led it to jerk and jolt like a puppet on strings.

Trixie swallowed firmly. “It’s… weird.”

“I know it’s weird, Trixie,” Starlight snapped back as she closed the door. She then lowered her voice to a harsh whisper. “I don’t like it any more than you do. But there’s really no getting out of it.”

Trixie looked over at her friend, doe-eyed and thoughtless. “Oh. Not this,” Trixie said, gesturing to the Body. “Well. Yeah, that. But what I meant was—well, what even happened?”

What had happened.

Gears ground.

Electric humming.

Mechanical thrumming.

Slow crushing.

Starlight shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m sure we will eventually, but it’ll have to wait until we get some investigator out here or something,” she grumbled. “I’m not looking forward to that paperwork nightmare.”

Trixie grimaced. “Probably shouldn’t have screwed around with the crime scene, huh?”

“Trixie.”

“Sorry.” Trixie looked down at the floor. “It’s just weird. I feel like I can’t picture it.”

Open wound.

Pulsing white matter.

Rotten cantaloupe.

Starlight winced. “Ugh, why would you want to?” She turned away from Trixie and back to her desk, leaning on the firm edge for support. “I’ve seen enough for a lifetime.”

“Not like that,” Trixie said. “Like… how did she get her he-head caught like that?”

She choked on the word. Just a tiny bit. A little tightening of the throat as she struggled it out, poorly disguised.

Caught.

Pulled.

Crushed like an empty can.

Starlight blinked. Hard. “I don’t know,” she said.

Trixie waited for her to elaborate.

The Body remembered it was thirsty and started to once again rove around the room. Its hooves made hollow sounds on the hardwood. With her back turned, Starlight could almost imagine it was something alive. But it didn’t sound like that at all. Not really.

It sounded mechanical. Not like the bleachers, but like a wind-up toy. False. A mimic of a mimic.

“Me neither,” Trixie said. “And that’s kinda weird.”

It was.

Starlight chewed on her lip and tried to recall how the gym looked without all the viscera. All the pieces of the cantaloupe shell and the rotten goop inside spilling everywhere all lumpy and slick and the little chunks of her breakfast dripping down her chin and—

She breathed.

She turned to face her friend.

“What are you suggesting, Trixie?” Starlight grumbled. “That we have faulty equipment? I’m wildly aware.”

Trixie shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Or… maybe something else happened.”

Starlight’s eye twitched. “Like what?”

Trixie opened her mouth, but said nothing. Starlight could practically see the little gears of her mind whirring, searching for the right thing to say. Nothing came to her.

“Look. I have a lot of emotionally-draining paperwork to get through,” Starlight said, circling her desk. “Can we save the conspiracies for another day?”

“I was just—”

“If you want to help with the paperwork, great!” Starlight sat down hard in her chair, shuffled the papers around, and pulled out the incident report. “Finish this one for me. Probably better that the pony who wasn’t in complete shock write it up, anyway.”

Trixie gingerly took the paper in her magic. “Sure thing.”

Starlight made a low sound of acknowledgement.

The Body turned and walked its path once more, like a tiger pacing its cage at the zoo.

Trixie pulled over a chair and sat on the other side of Starlight’s broad headmaster desk. She then glanced back at the Body, examined its length of rope, and slid her chair towards the far edge of the desk, just out of its reach. She worked quickly and quietly, scribbling in her youthful style, treating the printed lines more as suggestions than law. Starlight figured it wouldn’t matter much either way. At least it would be done.

She returned to the letter.

It is with deep regret that we inform you of the passing of Ocellus, Professor of Biology at the Twilight Sparkle School of Friendship, on October 6th, 1036.

Professor Ocellus attended the School of Friendship as an adolescent, and completed her education as a member of our first ever graduating class. Since her first day as a student, Ocellus was

“Starlight?”

Starlight’s quill paused and shuddered in the air. “Yes?”

“Um…” Trixie tapped the page with one hoof. “What do you think she was doing in there?”

“In where?”

“In the gym,” Trixie said. “Especially so early. I mean, nothing was scheduled in there, right? That’s why we looked there in the first place.”

“Mm-hm…” Starlight tried to refocus on her letter. “Just put down that we don’t know, Trixie. It’s the truth.”

“But—” Trixie paused, laid the paper out on the desk, and looked at Starlight. “Look, I loved Ocellus as much as the next pony, but she wasn’t exactly an athlete.”

Loved.

Wasn’t.

The Body stumbled over a wrinkle in the area rug.

“What would she have been doing in the gym?”

Starlight sighed heavily. “Maybe she forgot something? Lost something?”

“What?” Trixie pressed. “When? At all those sporting events she loves?”

“Maybe another professor sent her to fetch something,” Starlight suggested, though her voice was thin. She didn’t quite believe it.

“Why?” Trixie asked. “Who do we know that would send one of our veteran staff members on a gopher mission?”

“Trixie, I—”

“You know it doesn’t make sense,” Trixie said.

Starlight set her jaw. “I know. I know, I just—”

“Do you think this might have been… not an accident?” Trixie murmured.

The words hardly registered.

“N-no,” Starlight stammered. “No, of course not. What are you talking about?”

Trixie looked down at the floor. “Nothing. I was—”

“Not an accident?” Starlight breathed. “What else could it be? You think someone made this happen? On purpose?”

Trixie faltered. “I don’t know, I just thought that we should at least consider—”

“Consider what?”

Trixie swallowed hard. The word was there, practically on the tip of her tongue, but would not fall further forward.

And something changed.

It was a fuzzy feeling, Not at all as direct or attention-getting as it should have been. Just a sneaking suspicion that something was different.

Trixie’s brow furrowed. Starlight cocked her head to one side, silently wondering where the feeling had come from.

The Body had stopped.

Suddenly and completely enough that Starlight and Trixie both sensed it. An unnatural mid-stride freeze that seemed almost magical in nature. Poised like a doll, reaching into a step forward that it would not take. The rope still dangled, still swinging gently in the memory of motion, which only served to make the Body’s stiffness feel all the more surreal.

Trixie turned, slowly as she could bear, and looked over the back of her chair. Starlight peered carefully around her and watched for the worst to happen.

Maybe Elytra had been wrong. Maybe bodies didn’t last as long as a week. Maybe it was bleeding out under that dark cloth. Maybe it was suffocating in it—the cloth, the blood, or both. A slow-motion waterboarding that it could not understand or try to stop. Maybe it was dying.

Trixie’s forehooves came to rest quietly on the back of the chair. She, too, went almost entirely still, watching for the smallest change. Starlight wanted to look away, to duck behind her friend, and hide from the alien thing in her office, but found that she couldn’t.

The Body was still.

The rope came to a rest.

In the quiet, the distant drone of the building’s heat rose to fill their ears, and it seemed that the entire world had stopped with the Body. In awe of it. In fear of it.

Then it pulsed.

Soundlessly. Totally. A full-body throb. An enormous, all-encompassing twitch. A clenching of every muscle that caused her entire structure to contort, but only for a moment. Blink and you miss it.

Trixie made a tiny squealing sound and went stiff. Starlight nearly leapt out of her skin.

The rope swung. But the Body was still again.

“Did it just—” Starlight pointed limply at the Body. “Did it—did you see—”

Trixie shook her head. “That was… that was disgusting.” She put a hoof to her mouth. “Starlight? Starlight, what in the hay was that?”

Starlight didn’t know. She could only sit there, mouth gaping, shaking her head.

“It…” She shook her head. “No. It couldn’t have.”

But it did it again.

As if it were collapsing in on itself. As if something were sucking it into an infinitely dense speck from the inside out. Sudden, certain, impossibly fast. And color, too! Such a small thing against the rest that it was more of an afterthought—a full body change of color, from the familiar baby blue to a loud, dark, mustard-y yellow.

And back.

In an instant.

In a blink.

Starlight, in her shock, shot upright and stumbled backwards over her chair, her head locked dead ahead, her eyes fighting to look away even as she stayed trained on the thing with complete certainty.

And again.

A throb. A clench. Turning puce this time, but in splatters. In patches.

Trixie made a choked sound and similarly scrambled out of her chair and around the corner of the desk. She pulled her cloak up to her mouth in some small attempt to hide herself from the entirely alien creature on the other side of the room.

They had almost heard it that time. The sound of enormous effort, of cellular-level force and power.

Wum.

Again, this time on one side. A concentrated effort. A directed crumpling.

Crumpling like a plastic cup.

Was that the sound it had made in her head? The pressure? The squeezing, crushing feeling, up until the sudden pop when it all had shattered and she had gone away?

Had it sounded like that?

Wum.

Her wing didn’t come back that time. It crinkled into her side like a discarded sheet of paper, like the mountain of drafts in Starlight’s wastebasket, a used-up mess of something just to the right of natural.

Trixie grabbed onto Starlight’s leg. “What is she doing?!” she cried. “Make her stop! Make her stop!”

But Starlight couldn’t.

Well. Perhaps she could have.

There may have been a spell for it. Maybe just the presence of her magic resting on the Body’s shoulder might have caused it to stop. Maybe she could have smoothed the wing out again and set her back to normal.

But Starlight was frozen to the spot as the Body twitched and crumpled.

No longer in one punch of force. No longer blink-and-you-miss-it. This was elongated. This was strain and pain and need—forceful and purposeful.

The Body lifted its foreleg and, even through the grinding and straining, shook it violently. Shook it like you’d shake to get a rabid dog off you. Shook it like it was the only thing that could save it. Shook it hard and crazy and moved it in ways that shouldn’t have been possible, as if it were on fast-forward, in the terrifying speed of a mismanaged nightmare.

The lead dropped.

The frantic shaking stopped.

The hum came to a sudden end, hardly tapering before silence rushed in and the room was deadly still and silent.

The Body stood, rock solid and yet so fragile, at the center of the room, its rope now in a pile on the floor beneath it. It reminded Starlight not of a statue but of a doll—balanced precariously, too light for its own good, a little bit lop-sided from a cheap mold.

It fluttered its wings. Another tiny thrum.

Then it turned and steadfastly walked directly into the heavy wood door.

Trixie gasped softly, a half-baked swear tumbling out of her mouth. She looked at Starlight, a wordless horror in her eyes, and slowly stood to her full height.

“What are you—”

“She’s trying to leave,” Trixie murmured, as if she didn’t quite believe it herself.

The Body paused, processing its failure, and tried again.

It didn’t quite thud the way one would expect. Rather, the Body bounced off the surface of the door with a sound that was almost hollow. Too light to be right. Too all-encompassing in the silence to be wrong.

Starlight’s mouth hung open. She watched as the Body tried a third time, then contorted its neck muscles into what may have been a curious tilt of its missing head.

The black cloth twisted. Like weak baby birds trying to poke through the weave.

It was a good bit like that, actually. Fledglings needing food. The Body needing water.

Trixie stumbled forward, then gasped again, as if the Body might have noticed her.

But it didn’t.

It tried again.

Trixie didn’t even glance back at Starlight. She merely reached forward with a tendril of magic towards the door.

“Trixie!” Starlight scolded through clenched teeth. “Stop it!”

Trixie looked back at her friend, scowling.

Starlight didn’t know what that meant.

The door creaked, low and weary, as it swung out into the hall. The Body did not react. It couldn’t have—it didn’t know where the door was or that it could open or what lay past it. It only knew that it couldn’t go that way. But it would try again.

In the long moment it took the Body to process its last attempt, Starlight did nothing. She could have, of course. She could have slammed the door shut and locked it. She could have leapt on the Body and tied it back up. But she didn’t do any of those things.

Both mares only watched as the Body of Ocellus straightened up and strode through the door.

It took a right.

It kept walking.

Those light little hoofsteps, clicking softly down the hall, echoing across the tile and the cinder block walls. Like doll steps, plastic heels on plastic floors. Like a stiff-legged ponnequin.

Trixie and Starlight exchanged a look, and Starlight finally found her voice:

“Go!”

“But—”

“Follow it!” Starlight ordered, shooing the mare out from behind her desk. “Go! Go!”

Trixie remained imobile, and so Starlight gave her a small shove to get moving. The pair tumbled over one another as they scuttled towards the door in pursuit of the now-rogue Body.

The school halls were dark and warm, which felt out of place given their size. Places like this, with echoes and hard tile and cinder blocks, ought to be cold. But the school’s heat had only just been turned on last week, and so it filled the halls with a musty smell and a stifling warmth that Starlight desperately wanted to escape.

The two mares stalked the Body at a distance. The distance was meant to be safe, perhaps even comfortable, but nothing about the situation felt safe or comfortable in the least.

At times, the Body would turn a corner, and only the sound of stilted, hollow clicking led the mares through the darkness.

“Does Ocellus still live in Ponyville?” Starlight whispered.

Trixie shot her a look. “She did,” she corrected gently. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Well, do you think she’s trying to go home?” Starlight hissed back. “She walked herself to class this morning. Maybe she knows her shift is over.”

“This isn’t exactly the most straightforward way to get to the front door,” Trixie pointed out.

And Starlight had to agree.

The Body was, in fact, walking itself deeper into the school. Towards what, Starlight couldn’t guess. What flicker of a memory could be guiding it this way?

That’s what it was, right?

An echo. Latent programming. Autopilot. Routine. It wasn’t true thought or reasoning, because if it was—

But the routine had been broken. It had been broken the moment Starlight had lashed her to the bookcase. Ocellus wasn’t exactly in the habit of visiting Starlight’s office, after all; what business did she have there?

And yet, the Body had walked itself out.

It was still twitching. Not nearly to the degree it had in the office, but every now and then it hitched. Hiccuped. Just a little fizzle of something forcing its way to the surface.

It was hard to see in the dark. And that was fine with Starlight.

“Her classroom,” Trixie said.

“Hm?”

“Her classroom,” Trixie repeated. “That’s where she’s going. It must be.”

Starlight traced the path in her mind, retracing each twist and turn through the identical, labyrinthian halls. It was with some relief that Starlight realized Trixie must be right—they were on their way to a classroom. Not the front doors, which might require them to wrestle the Body back inside. Not the gymnasium, where they might be forced to reckon with the remnants of violence which still lingered there.

A classroom. A space designed for safety and stillness.

Almost there.

The Body turned another corner and came to a robotic stop before a heavy, wooden door.

It was, indeed, Ocellus’s classroom. There was a little cardstock image of a ladybug taped just under the room number, a tiny symbol of herself. Starlight had always found it a bit funny that creatures without cutie marks tended to adopt an icon to represent themselves.

Ocellus had changed hers frequently over the years. She remembered stacks of books being popular with her for a while, as she had always been quite studious. As her understanding of knowledge and intelligence grew, she had drifted away from books and towards more abstract items: a compass rose for finding one’s direction, an apple for teaching, a magnifying glass for analysis, a quill for writing and understanding.

But, a few months ago, she had traded them all for the ladybug.

“It’s what my parents call me,” she had told Starlight, flaring her wings. “My elytra are red with spots. It’s not exactly creative, but the students will get it.”

Elytra.

Funny how it all came back around.

It had seemed like a resignation to Starlight, and it seemed even more so now, as the Body stood before the door, motionless, waiting for assistance. Staring at the ladybug as one might stare into a mirror.

Or perhaps that was equinomorphizing.

Trixie nudged Starlight.

“What?” Starlight snapped back.

“I think she wants to go inside,” Trixie said.

Starlight scoffed. “Since when are you an expert on what it wants?” she accused. “It doesn’t want anything! It’s just—just looking for water!”

Trixie’s face softened, though her new expression did nothing to comfort Starlight. “Why do you keep doing that?”

“Doing what?”

“Calling her… ‘it’.”

Starlight set her jaw. “We’re taking the Body back to my office. This is ridiculous.”

“But—”

Thud.

Starlight and Trixie ceased their bickering and snapped their mouths shut, turning to look at the door that the Body had thrown itself into.

There was hardly a second to think before it wound up and did it again.

Thud.

Trixie gave Starlight one final, stern glare, and lit her horn to open the door.

“Trixie!” Starlight stuck her leg out in front of her friend and held her back from the door. “I’m supposed to watch it! Me!”

“And you’re doing it wrong!” Trixie argued, shoving Starlight aside and moving in towards the door.

She had to nudge the Body out of the way. Just a little hip-check, but the first true touch since it had been found.

Its hue shifted.

A tiny change from one baby blue to another.

In the darkness, Trixie didn’t even notice it. She only stood there, her body behind The Body, her head where its should have been, and the two became one as the classroom door opened.

It moaned, and the moan shook the floor, and The Body knew to walk forward as its path had been cleared.

Starlight found that she couldn’t quite breathe.

Trixie did not follow The Body right away. She stood still, holding the door for it, and glared past it to Starlight.

“Trixie—”

“Don’t.” Trixie shook her head. “You don’t get it, okay? And, honestly, I’m glad you don’t. I hope you never get it.”

Starlight stuttered something incoherent. “What are you talking about?”

Trixie stalked towards her and spoke in a low, quick voice. “I’m talking about what it’s like to only have a piece of someone you care about,” she said. “You think that’s unique to changelings?”

“Wh-what—”

“My mom had dementia,” Trixie said simply. “I told you that. I told you that before.”

Starlight closed her mouth.

She remembered that now.

How could she have forgotten?

She hadn’t known Trixie then, back when her mother was—well. But every now and then a memory of the mare would bubble to the surface, and Trixie would reminisce. And then it would be poisoned by some unseen, unheard trigger. The warm nostalgia in her eyes replaced by something else. Milk of the past gone sour.

“You follow them around, and you indulge their whims, and you take what you can get.” Trixie huffed. “Okay?”

“O-okay.”

Trixie said nothing more. She followed The Body into the classroom.

It hadn’t taken it long to find a new mission. Thankfully, mercifully, The Body was no longer throwing itself into obstacles. Rather, it was standing behind Ocellus’s desk and kicking repeatedly at the drawers on its left side. The desk was sturdy, but still made a horrid rattling sound with each kick.

Whud.

All the confiscated knick-knacks and loose office supplies jangling around.

Whud.

It sounded kind of like the little pieces of exoskeleton clattering to the tile floor.

Whud.

Trixie rushed in, and Starlight suddenly saw the care with which she approached her students’ remains. With one gentle hoof, she pushed The Body away, and it obliged. She looked at it—not where its eyes might have been, but where the top of it truly was, right into that bundle of black cloth—and it calmed.

Trixie opened the top drawer and began to paw through the mess inside.

Starlight crept just a small step closer, hoping to peer over Trixie’s shoulder. She imagined that The Body, in its hunt for water, might have remembered a drink stashed away. A soda, maybe. An empty travel mug. She tried not to picture what it might look like should it beg for a sip.

Nothing in the first drawer, evidently. Trixie closed it and opened the next.

And she froze.

Starlight edged the tiniest bit closer, but caught The Body shuddering out of the corner of her eye and leapt back.

“What?” Starlight asked.

Trixie did not reply. She sank to the floor and wordlessly lifted something out of the drawer.

“What?” Starlight repeated. “Trixie, what is it?”

Trixie looked over her shoulder at Starlight. Her eyes had gone glassy. Her face stony.

She held up a small, white envelope.

On it, for words in her impeccable script:

to my guidance counselors

The mares looked at each other, and shared two thoughts:

“Us.”

And

“Oh no.”

Trixie eyed The Body cautiously before standing and scuttling to Starlight’s side. Her magic tore the top of the envelope neatly away and tugged out the paper folded inside.

Starlight remembered suddenly that Ocellus had asked where she kept her stationery just yesterday.

The letter was brief.

And yet it took quite a long time to read.

Starlight’s eyes kept going fuzzy. She had to keep returning to the start, only to go fuzzy again a few lines later. She had to keep squeezing her eyes shut and willing away that babbling voices in her mind as she stared down at the paper lit by her friend’s magical grasp.

There was no greeting.

The letter only started, as if in the middle of a thought:

I talked with each of you about my struggles with identity.

I’m not the only changeling to feel as if I don’t know myself. But I certainly think the feeling has lingered on a little longer than perhaps it should have. I’ve tried on many hats, and none have fit quite right. It is what it is.

I won’t bore you with the same old arguments I always dropped on your desks. The feeling of wearing a mask never went away. The feeling of emptiness when I was alone never went away. I’ve always felt like I somehow don’t have object permanence for myself—that whenever you all take your eyes off me, I cease to exist.

The longer I go on this way, the harder I find it to do the things that I must. How can I care for myself when I don’t know who that is? How can I help little creatures find themselves when I still haven’t found who I’m supposed to be? It feels like watering and pruning a finicky houseplant that I don’t particularly like the look of, not even in full bloom.

It’s very tiring. I’m very tired. I’m long past the life expectancy of changelings in the old days, anyway.

I can’t keep expecting others to uphold the myth of my existence. What damage does it do to you all to keep the story straight? I am, generously, a loose pile of threads and I ask you all to make me into a quilt. It isn’t fair.

I’m just very tired.

I’m sorry.

Trixie’s magic shook as she turned the paper over, though there was nothing else to read. She frantically tore open the envelope, searching for more, but still found nothing.

She growled softly to herself, crumpled the envelope into a ball, and threw it hard at the ground.

It made a tiny sound.

The Body stood vigilant. It didn’t know the mares had finished reading. It didn’t know that each was trying not to cry. It only knew that its final whisper of a purpose had been completed, and that it could return to its mission for water.

It turned and walked until it bumped into a window.

Then stood still. Calibrating.

Trixie made a choked sound. “You think it can’t get worse than finding out she’s dead, and then it does.”

The Body turned a near-perfect ninety degrees and walked briskly along the windowed wall until it smashed into the next corner.

Then it stood.

Calibrating.

“Why didn’t she come talk to me?” Trixie asked. Then, as if Starlight couldn’t understand what she meant, she held the letter up to her. “Why didn’t she say anything?”

“That isn’t the point,” Starlight said wearily. She reached out to take the paper from Trixie.

“It is too!” Trixie argued, yanking the letter out of Starlight’s grasp. “We were her friends! We were supposed to help her!”

“She clearly needs a lot more help than we can give her!”

“Stop it!” Trixie pounded a hoof on the floor.

The room went silent.

The Body was still calibrating. Staring—if it could—dead ahead at the wall. It was still the way an insect is still, impossible to ascertain whether it was alive or dead.

Insects didn’t move in the little ways that mammals did. That birds did. Or reptiles. Those tiny twitches of life—noses sniffing, ears swiveling, lungs breathing slow and steady. It just stood there, like a wax figure, like a cardboard cutout!

And, even as Starlight thought it, she heard something.

A tiny sound. Like the paper on the floor.

Like a wheeze.

The soft, distant hhhhhhhe of nostrils whistling.

Starlight swallowed hard. She did not look at The Body.

Out of the corner of her eye, though, she could see it begin to move. It lifted one foreleg, one hoof, with all the grace of a gnarled and arthritic claw attempting to point.

She glanced at it.

She couldn’t help it.

It was shuddering.

Shaking like a leaf on a tree, only cellular. A deep, intrinsic quaking that caused all else to shiver in the way only pony-made things could. Flickering film. Ticking clock.

It collapsed again—

Wum

—and even now, even in the darkness, Starlight could see that it was changing. More than color. More than the crumpling of a familiar shape. It was trying to do something else, trying to force something new.

Wum.

“You have to make her stop,” Trixie ordered through clenched teeth.

“Trixie, I—”

“She’s hurting herself,” Trixie said, pointedly. “Can’t you see that? She’s hurting.”

It shivered. It quaked. It crumpled. Through all of it, the body language of something in deep and serious pain. A sort of hesitancy, a fear that the pain would come again. Like a whimpering, cowering dog, awaiting the next kick.

All facing into the wall.

As if it mattered.

Then again:

Hhhhhhhhhhe

The long, ardent hiss of air through cracked, dry lips.

Starlight did not look at Trixie. She merely strode past her, across the room, and came to stand behind The Body.

It did not react.

It trembled. It crumpled. It seemed hardly of this reality—funny, considering Ocellus’s reasoning for putting her head in the machinery in the first place. Darkly funny. Not funny at all.

Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhe-fuh

Starlight tried to steady herself, but found that undue focus on her breath only made it come out in harsher bursts of warm air.

She gripped the black cloth.

She breathed.

She tore it off.

The thing underneath burbled up at her. A mass of red and white, all of it slicker than it had any right to be following its confinement in the cloth. The holes at the center, which Starlight thought she’d be able to recognize, were not as clear-cut as they’d been in all of the biology books she had so painstakingly reviewed for purchase earlier that semester. They pressed into one another, each severed in slightly different places. Stronger in some ways than the muscle surrounding them, weaker in others.

In reality, it was a mess. A tangle of things torn and twisted, stretched and mutilated.

And it was moving.

The holes flexed, and a thin film of some brand of viscera which Starlight did not care to identify bloomed and popped over them like bubbles.

You never think of speech starting in the throat until you see the throat try to speak without a mouth attached. The motions were as alien as everything else—pulsing, grabbing, flexing, choking. Certainly choking. Choking on itself and on the viscera which it pulled into itself and on the air which was probably too warm or too cold or too dry for a place that had never not been wet.

Yet the sound did not come from the throat.

The Body cringed. Pushed. Bore down on some force that was invisible to Starlight.

And the throat flexed, and air whistled through it, and it said:

Hhhhhhhe-fuh

But, no. Not the throat.

The chest.

Something protruded there. Some small shape, some mass, some growth.

Before Starlight could think about what she might see, she let a tiny wisp of light curl from the tip of her horn and drift down

down

down.

There, on its chest, was a snout.

A small one. A malformed one. Half-thought, half-baked, half-finished. But a mouth nonetheless.

And Starlight remembered that, every now and then, a changeling might sprout a second head. When the occasion called for it. When absolutely necessary, as it was rather tiring.

Its lips pulled apart, tugged unnaturally by their corners into a snarl, a grimace. It said:

Hhhhhhhhhhe-puh

With air forced through the throat and in an entirely new direction, tunneling through the muscle and fat and whatever else was on the inside that Starlight should never have seen. Popping its lips powerfully as it spat out a plosive.

It didn’t sound like Ocellus.

It sounded like wind through an old, rotting oak tree. It sounded like the last gasp of a fish as it drowned in sea air in the sand. Too wet and too dry at the same time. Only speech in the strictest of definitions—not in those which implied life.

“Hhhhe-puh,” it said. “Hhhhhhhe-puh.”

It looked up at Starlight.

And she saw all of its tricks.

The way it trembled and crumpled and warped and threatened to fade away. The wall of red and white sinew where its teeth should have been. A hole at the center which may as well have been gouged out with a kitchen knife. No tongue. No expression. Half measures.

And yet, in that moment, Starlight saw Ocellus.

Perhaps it was the height. The pseudo-mouth fought to exist at a height similar to Ocellus’s height when she was a new student. Starlight recognized the angle at which she had to look down at her.

Or maybe it was the darkness in the room that let her almost believe it was real.

Or maybe it was the way the carapace shifted.

Twisted.

Opened up.

With a wet sound of tearing, the exoskeleton above the pseudo-mouth pulled itself apart and a milky, marbled eye blinked open and looked right up at her.

Just one.

Not quite round.

Not quite right.

An illusion, partly magic, partly physical, trying to convince her and almost doing it.

Its lips flexed strangely and its eye looked up and it said:

“Help me.”

Whispered. In her voice. Pitch-perfect.

Then came a grimace, and the face folded in on itself, sucked itself back inside, and the echoes came again.

Water.

It wanted water.

She wanted water.

Ocellus wanted water.

“Let’s take her back,” Trixie said. “To the office.”

Had she not heard?

The Body walked forward into the wall, and a wet sound accompanied its usual doll-like bounce off the cinder blocks.

It stood still.

Calibrating.

Persisting.

More so than Starlight had known.

Depending on the location, many parts of the changeling might continue to respond to stimuli following severance from the body.

“Starlight?” Trixie asked carefully. “Hey, Starlight?”

“Mm?”

Starlight did not take her eyes off the wound. Still open and moving. Still breathing, or trying to. Still wet. Only living things were wet.

In extremely rare cases, a changeling head is capable of producing magical bursts for a few minutes after severance.

“Let’s take her back,” Trixie said again. “This—you’re right, it’s too much for her. We should take her back.”

Starlight heard the voice that Trixie must have used with her mother.

A lot of lost years.

A bitter taste on the end of each golden memory.

The damage of an imperfect echo.

It is assumed that genuine brain function is greatly limited due to oxygen starvation, though data in this context is limited.

“Okay,” Starlight said. “Sure. Good idea.”

She stared down into the pulpy mass of red and white, all wet and throbbing, and pulled the black cloth back over it. This time, not quite so tight.

Together, they walked back to the office.

The Body walked between the mares. They silently corralled it back through the dark halls. The cacophony of three different gaits bloomed in the silence, doubled up in echoes, and came crashing back down on Starlight.

Her pulse rang in her ears.

She felt very warm. In the face. Tight and filled with blood, as if she’d been hanging upside down and suddenly righted herself.

Like a balloon fit to burst with hot broth.

Boiling.

The Body walked. It seemed it had finished its communication, and knew it.

It simply walked.

“I’m going home,” Trixie said softly.

She had been quiet for an hour or so now. Just scratching away at the paperwork. Starlight wasn’t sure if she’d decided to keep it vague or be as honest and open as the letter allowed her to be.

Being honest, she didn’t care either way.

“Alright,” Starlight said.

She kept working. Another line, scratch it out.

Trixie paused for a moment, then stood and gathered her things. She did so quickly, as if she were in a rush to leave. That was honestly fine with Starlight.

With all of her things in a pile, she huffed softly. She made no move to leave.

Starlight waited patiently, but Trixie only stood over her.

“You okay?” Starlight asked.

Trixie blinked. She didn’t answer. “Are you… staying here?” she asked.

“For a while,” Starlight replied. “I need to finish this.”

“Okay…” Trixie glanced at The Body, then back at Starlight. “Don’t stay here too long.”

Starlight frowned. “Why?”

“I just mean—” Trixie stopped herself short and sucked in a deep breath. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

Starlight looked at her.

She was ragged. Her eyes were glassy and red from holding back unproductive tears. The bags under them tugged at her face. She seemed, in all ways, worn down. Starlight thought that it was probably more than just today’s events contributing to her weariness, but decided not to mention it.

Starlight nodded. “Okay.”

Trixie nodded back. Just once, sharp. “Okay.”

And she left.

And, once again, Starlight was alone with The Body.

It didn’t know it. Well… perhaps on some level, in some echo of an echo of a thought, it did. Some memory it didn’t know it had of Starlight’s hoofsteps. The particular nuance in taste of Starlight’s love. Who knows what other sixth sense might fill that void?

Whatever it knew, it didn’t show it.

It just stood there.

Staring dead ahead.

It had changed.

It was starting to feel less like ‘The Body’. The phrase, which had gained some conspicuous capital letters in Starlight’s mind, felt off. Wrong. Twisted. She couldn’t have said it out loud. If she tried, she figured her tongue wouldn’t let her.

But Starlight couldn’t say it truly felt like her.

It was more than The Body. But less than Ocellus.

And perhaps it was this realization that festered in Starlight’s chest: that you could be less than alive but more than dead. That all the things which make life wonderful—taste and sight and smell and love and thought, real thought—could fade, replaced by a pale imitation of life, a colorless void. Not even black. Simply nothing.

It was not comforting. Not in the least.

And that tiny voice, that childlike “help me” which had squeaked out of her…

Was there time in the space between life and death?

Did she know how long she’d been there?

Did it feel like a day? Or like a year? Or longer?

Could she see the light at the end of the tunnel? Had she only traded the agony of life for the agony of a slow, endless death? Was release coming, or was this all there was?

It is hard to say when exactly the idea formed in Starlight’s mind. It was sometime after Trixie left, and sometime before the sun came up. Regardless, after some time had passed, the cloud of fears and wondering solidified into a simple thought:

She is hurting.

She doesn’t deserve that.

The unimaginable cruelty which had shaken Starlight that morning—previously no more than hypothetical—had become all too real.

She didn’t overthink the how. Ocellus had chosen crushing for a reason, after all; it was what destroyed you on a small enough level that nerve agglomerations could no longer retain that echo. A complete death necessitated pulverization.

And so, thinking logically and mercifully, Starlight pulverized The Body of Ocellus.

She did so quickly. Behind the bookshelf she’d been lashed to all day. It took a little preparation and an explosive burst of magic, but Ocellus was crushed like a bug between the bookshelf and the wall.

When Starlight pulled the bookshelf away, Ocellus was a headless smear on the grey paint. The outline of her body was still easily discernible, gruesome as it was.

Her beige-and-red innards had first escaped from her open neck wound, creating a funnel-shaped splatter on the wall. Then, when the pressure had become too great, the neck had split down the front, and a smaller explosion dripped forward. The ripped seam continued down her stomach and contributed to the smashing flat of her whole self, allowing the exoskeleton to collapse completely (though it peeled away slightly with the removal of the bookshelf).

Her wings remained. Almost exactly as they were. Almost perfect.

Starlight sighed in relief and allowed her horn light to go out. One can only imagine this was because the smell hadn’t quite reached her.

The relief was almost long enough to feel good.

Then her foreleg twitched.

Just a little thing. Maybe not even a thought. An electrical impulse. Something running haywire, short-circuiting, some trick of the light or of exhaustion or—

Forelegs removed above the knee joint may still kick and writhe for 1-2 days.

Starlight smashed the body again.

There now.

There.

That should do it.

She pulled the bookshelf away once more to find that frighteningly little had changed. A dark halo had appeared around her on the paint, but the exoskeleton had hardly changed, meaning the insides had hardly changed, meaning—

The hind leg kicked.

Definitely.

—as do hind legs removed above the hock joint.

Starlight smashed her again.

This time, after pulling the bookshelf away and seeing no changes, Starlight wasted no time in grabbing the hindleg and tearing it off.

It came away so easily. Hardly a pop or a crunch or an effort at all. Only tearing muscle—shockingly easy.

She pulled it off and dropped it to the floor and used the desk to grind it there like a spider under her hoof. Twisting and pressing and smearing. Separating all the little pieces.

And she was hardly finished that before the wings buzzed.

Wings with enough attached nerve particles may continue to hum or buzz periodically over several hours.

But it wasn’t nerve particles. It was her.

It was her, and she was stuck, and she needed help. She begged for it.

And Starlight tore off the wing.

And Starlight ground the wing and its attached nerves and muscles and pink-beige everything into the periwinkle carpet until only brown stains remained. Brown stains and perfect little flecks of stained glass.

She worked methodically.

She did not cry.

She did not stop.

She did not gag at the smells or the sights.

Starlight Glimmer, headmare, took the body of her former student apart and ground it into stains on her carpet.

It took her hours.

The sun was rising. She was just beginning to wonder if she might need to light the stains on fire, to truly and finally and completely destroy each and every atom of Ocellus, to at last free her of the damnation she had trapped herself in, when someone knocked on the door.

Author's Note

Edit: fixed some serious formatting errors. Sorry to early readers! It was a bad import