Shadow Heart

by AugieDog

Rating: everyone
Tags: Adventure, Stygian, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Other, Cozy Glow
Length: 9820

Cozy Glow can't remember the last time she'd felt the need—or had the ability—to blink. But with Stygian standing in front of her and saying that she's Equestria's only hope? That definitely deserves a blink or two.

Cozy Glow can't remember the last time she'd felt the need—or had the ability—to blink. But with Stygian, a pony she vaguely recalls, standing in front of her and saying that she's Equestria's only hope? That definitely deserves a blink or two...

An entry in the 2023 May Pairings Contest, this story received one of the five "Judge's Prizes" in the final results.

Published 2023-05-29 20:40:01 UTC
Last updated 2023-05-29 20:40:01 UTC

Shadow Heart

"Rock to gravel," a gentle, slightly accented voice was suddenly whispering in her ear. "Gravel to sand. Sand to dust."

The sound of it flowed over her as smooth and sweet as ice cream but a whole lot warmer. Except, a part of her brain quickly pointed out, ice cream didn't flow. And how could it even be ice cream if it was warm?

She started to consider this, then jerked to a stop. She could consider things again, something she hadn't been able to do since—

Since she'd been turned to stone.

"Dust to raindrops," that voice was going on, still soft and quiet. But the words were definitely affecting her, triggering various of her bits and pieces to wiggle and pulse. "Raindrops to trickling water. Trickling water to flowing streams. And flowing streams to pumping blood."

Pain tore through her, and Cozy Glow sprang up with a gasp. Her wings barely fluttered, though, and she dropped onto whatever hard surface lay beneath her, her lungs flopping inside her like a pair of fish on the bank of a river.

Which was nearly as strange an image as the warm ice cream thing, that same part of her brain noted. The rest of her meanwhile coughed and flailed and sputtered, flat on her back with no idea where or how or—

"Shhh!" Legs wrapped her barrel, another pony's warm, supple hide touching hers, a sensation she hadn't felt in...in—

Her time as a statue floated in her memory like a cork in the too-wide mouth of a bottle, and she shook her head, tried to get her brain working. What was with all these weird similes? Was it just because she hadn't been able to think in so long?

The legs holding her had dragged her from the hard surface, and when she blinked, something she'd almost forgotten how to do, a gray unicorn stallion's face came into focus, his startlingly blue eyes looking upward and to the right. "Careful," he muttered. "If she hears us—"

"Stygian?" a mare's voice called, and the laugh that followed was phony in a way that Cozy recognized: she'd laughed just like that herself plenty of times. "Are you up here, you little scamp?"

The stallion—Was he Stygian? Cozy knew the name from somewhere, she was sure—Stygian's chin quivered, then firmed. "Ten feet behind us," he murmured, "at the base of the stained glass window with Chrysalis's image on it, the lowest pane of glass all the way to the right is loose. I'm going to go out and get Her Highness's attention, and you're going to creep as quickly as you can to that window and push your way out." He focused on her directly for the first time, a white rim of desperation clear around those blue eyes. "Here's hoping your wings start working before you hit the ground."

"What?" Cozy tried to say, but everything about her mouth seemed thicker than she remembered. The room around her was growing clearer with each blink, though, the walls curving and made of stone, the space everywhere filled with weird, spiky objects covered with cloth. They loomed up to cast shadows in the already dim light coming through the stained glass windows that dominated her recovering vision.

The colors dazzled her even in the semi-darkness, but she could still make our an image of Tirek, all bloated and reared back on his hind legs, partially blocked by the irregularly shaped piles. A window displaying the Storm King stood beside Tirek's, then a window showing a grey, pony-shaped cloud, teeth jagged and wings spread—the Pony of Shadows, she guessed. And beside that—

A window with an image of her, red fire crackling from her eyes and horn, her front hooves pressed together before an expression of manic glee that sent Cozy's blood sparking just as surely as Stygian's spell had. She leaned forward, but her view was partially cut off when the stallion himself moved into sight, making her ears perk and the curls of her mane bristle. Had he just said something about wanting her to jump through one of these windows?

"Surprise!" Stygian called, weaving around the piles and out of sight, dust puffing where his brown coat brushed the coverings. "Or, well, not so much of a surprise at this point, I imagine."

The mocking laughter that came from the other side of the room twisted Cozy's stomach with the realization that she couldn't put that same power into her own laugh any more. Turning away, she almost froze again to see Chrysalis glaring down at her, but it was only another window: Cozy was already telling herself that she hadn't thought it was the real thing for even as much as half a heartbeat.

"Oh, Stygian." The mare's laughter resolved into words, but the unhinged quality of the voice kept Cozy's hackles risen. "What am I going to do with you? Other than pull your head off and bathe in the cascading fountain of your blood, I mean."

Starting some basic wing stretches, Cozy stepped lightly across the stone floor to the window. The lowest panel on the right, Stygian had said.

Stygian's chuckle somehow had less humor in it than the mare's laugh. "You can certainly try, Your Highness. It won't be the first time, after all."

"Yes, yes, yes." Each repeat of the word sounded more annoyed than the last. "Still, a girl can always hope."

Cozy pushed at the edge of the glass pane, felt another gust of ice through her when nothing happened, then pushed a bit harder and had to stifle a gasp as the thing swung outward.

"Hope?" The little noise that followed, Cozy realized, was Stygian clicking his tongue several times. "I think you've forgotten the portfolio you adopted when you took the throne."

"Silence." The mare's voice had gone flat and dead, lacking even the hatred that had come through so clearly in everything she'd said so far. That hatred seeped back in as she went on, though. "Yes. Silent and dark and weighty. How long has it been since I last buried you under several tons of rock?"

The ledge outside the window was just wide enough for Cozy to slip sideways onto it. The darkness above held a watery light: either just before dawn or just after dusk, she guessed. She could make out woods below her a couple hundred feet, and she realized she was at the top of some very large tower.

"Please, Your Highness." Stygian's voice drifted to her from inside. "Don't go to any trouble on my account."

The mare gave a snort. "Oh, it's no trouble at all! And really, I should've destroyed this place decades ago..."

Knowing an exit line when she heard one, Cozy didn't bother wondering if her wings were up to it yet; she just stepped off the ledge into the empty air.

A couple things happened at once, then, and as much as Cozy was expecting them, she was still a little too woozy to be entirely prepared.

Dropping, for instance. Yes, she'd known about gravity her entire life, but feeling it wrap around her and start pulling her downward while her wings vibrated ineffectually, that was something new. And while she'd known beyond any doubt that the room she was currently plummeting away from was about to explode, the white-hot ball of incandescent gas that burst into being behind her with an ear-ripping roar was at least two orders of magnitude larger and faster than any she'd have thought possible.

The force of it pushed her forward, though, easily overcoming the pull of gravity, so that was one good thing. The shards of flaming stone, on the other hoof, whistling past her even as the air heated up and expanded under her wings, that made her grit her teeth against shouting a number of foul words that she'd never once allowed herself to say no matter how many times she'd really, really wanted to back when she was dealing with Twilight and the School and Tirek and Chrysalis and all of that.

At least this current activity was forcing her to come awake, forcing her to start thinking and flapping and dodging and stretching not just physically but mentally. She was alive and moving, something the solidly frozen ice cream of her previous self had resigned itself to never experiencing again.

She let the tiniest smile wriggle across her lips at reusing her weird metaphor from earlier, then dove for the darkened treetops beneath her. Taking cover in the forest would be smarter and safer than flitting around out in the open, especially if, as Cozy suspected, the alicorn back there had indeed blown up the entire tower.

And it had been an alicorn, too. Cozy knew that, knew it in ways that made her throat go dry. Stygian had called whoever it was "Your Highness" for one thing, and, well, Cozy had been an alicorn all too briefly, hadn't she? And she would never, ever, ever be able to forget the glorious sensation if that power filling her...

A tumbling chunk of something slightly larger than she was herself whooshed past her and slammed into the branches just ahead, the crunching crash of it audible even through the continuous rumble she'd been hearing since that first blast less than a minute ago. Quickly folding her wings, she slid into the jagged hole the boulder or whatever it had been had carved through the tree canopy, jogged right when she came into the space below the leaves but above the ground, then followed the trunk of the largest tree down to the forest floor.

She sat then, the leaves and dirt slightly cold and damp against her haunches, and decided that she didn't need to worry much about shrapnel. Whoever this princess was, she'd said that she wanted to bury Stygian, so she no doubt would've channeled her power in a way that would keep most of the rocks at the site of the tower's collapse.

At least, that's how Cozy would've done it.

Of course, Stygian's death left her in an awkward position. She didn't know where she was, didn't know when she was, and had no idea who the psychotic princess she'd just missed meeting might be. It hadn't sounded like Twilight Sparkle or Celestia or Luna, damn the whole lot of them to Tartarus, and Cozy wasn't sure she'd ever heard Cadance speak: her memories still weren't quite as clear as she would've liked...

A groan sounded off to her right, and a pony-shaped figure stirred, rising to its hooves in the not-quite darkness of the forest. "Well," a familiar soft baritone said, and Cozy stared as the figure trotting toward her became Stygian. "That actually went better than expected."

"No talking yet: just follow," he'd said twenty minutes ago, then he'd turned and started off into the woods.

Cozy had followed, of course, but staying quiet now that she could once again make noise had almost proved to be more than she could stand. Approximately every two and a half minutes—and she was counting the seconds now that she'd regained the ability to do so—she would have to clench her whole body against the desire to leap into the air and shriek "I'm alive!" at the top of her lungs. Only the knowledge that such a scream would likely lead to her not being alive any more kept the urge contained.

As they passed the twenty minute mark, though, she found it harder and harder to bottle it up. Two minutes, she guessed, maybe three, and she would be screaming, hurling questions and comments at the damn unicorn still pacing steadily along just ahead of her.

She was about to inform him of this in as low a voice as she could manage when they came out of the tree cover, the edge of a large gully ahead, cutting an empty and ragged swath as wide as a multi-story building through the forest. "There," Stygian said, pointing at a cave mouth halfway up the other side of the gorge. "Once we're inside, we'll be as safe as it's possible to be in Equestria these days."

"These days?" Cozy had to cough to clear what felt like gravel from her throat. "How long was I—?"

"Inside," he repeated. His horn flared, and he vanished in a puff of cobalt-blue light.

Less than half a second saw a glow of the same color appear in the mouth of the cave, so Cozy pushed herself off the edge, glided easily across the chasm, and settled just inside the hole. Stygian was standing there with his horn glowing like a nearly spent ember; he nodded and started deeper in.

A few quick steps caught her up to him. "How long?" she asked again.

He cocked his head. "Well, let's see. You were turned to stone for your crimes against equinity just before Princess Twilight acceded to the throne upon the retirement of Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, correct?"

It took more than a little effort for her not to smash a hoof into that smug little face of his. "How long?" she asked once more.

His left eye twitched. "Princess Flurry Heart would've still been in diapers at the time, so your first fifteen years as a statue would've been spent while she grew into a sullen teen."

Cozy's memory was sputtering less and less, so she came up with the information. "Flurry Heart. Cadance and Shining Armor's daughter. Heir to the throne of the Crystal Empire." She blinked as his last words registered. "Wait. A sullen teen?"

Stygian coughed the tiniest laugh Cozy had ever heard. "Is there any other kind?" His gaze lost focus. "We'd all gathered up north for her sixteenth birthday: myself, the other Pillars, the princesses and their various hangers-on." Another twitch pulled his eye. "I'm still not sure when or how Princess Flurry Heart contacted my old roommate, the Pony of Shadows. Perhaps it contacted her." He shrugged. "Still, it would've known exactly what to say to inflame a heart already seething with imagined injustices: trust me on that."

"Ah." Cozy swallowed. "So that thing that just tried to kill us was—"

"Tut, tut, tut!" Stygian's glowing horn flared, and Cozy felt something press upward against her chin. "I've had no pony to tell this tale to till now, so no interruptions, please!"

A part of her wanted to fight the force, but a larger part of her wanted to know the details. "Go on, then," she pushed out through clenched teeth.

He bowed his head toward her. "The most powerful beings in all Equestria were gathered in that banquet hall when Princess Flurry Heart appeared among us, smoke and kohl-black eyeliner billowing around her like fog." That smug little smile tugged his muzzle again. "She'd apparently picked up a trick from your old roommate Tirek, too, for as soon as she announced that she was now to be known as Shadow Heart, she sucked the power from everycreature in the room and potted the whole lot of them straight off to Limbo."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "The whole lot?"

"Yes, well..." His ears perked, and his face brightened. "Ah! Here we are! Home, sweet home!" A little bundle of sparks shot from his horn, and Cozy craned her head to follow it as it arced across a dark space in front of them and landed in what she saw was a fireplace. The sparks flared when they hit the wood in the hearth, and the rest of a room came into view as the wood began to crackle and burn.

Colorfully woven carpets covered the stone floor, the tapestries on the walls displaying scenes of ponies playing in pastures under clear blue skies.

Which was when it occurred to Cozy that, even though they'd walked for twenty minutes through the forest outside, the day had never gotten any lighter or darker. The open sky over the gorge as she'd flown across it, too, had shown the same neither-sunrise-nor-sunset glow as she'd seen when she'd first opened the tower window.

"It's not much," Stygian was saying, padding across the carpets toward a pile of large pillows, "but I credit this little redoubt with keeping me as sane as I've managed to stay." His hornglow plucked two cushions from the stack and set them in front of the fireplace. "You may find yourself with a differing opinion on my sanity once we've spoken, of course." Shaky was too small a word for his smile; he dropped onto one of the pillows like a tree falling, then gestured to the other. "Have a seat, and I'll continue my riveting narrative."

Cozy glanced at the tunnel behind her. "And we're really safe here?"

"Oh, no, not at all." His horn flared again, and two battered metal cups appeared on the floor. "If Her Highness knew you were alive and kicking, as it were, she'd tear this whole section of the world apart to get to you and your magic." He shrugged, raised the cup to his lips with his forehooves, and swigged the whole thing down. "It's just water," he said, setting the cup back down. "So feel free to indulge."

Wishing she had another choice, Cozy stepped carefully onto the rugs, ready to jump into a hover if anything underneath tried to grab her. Not that she really expected it to, but the tension in the air made her want to be ready for anything. "Thank you," she said, settling onto the cushion and reaching for the other cup. "You were telling me how you all got sucked into Limbo."

"Ah, yes." He made that little clicking noise with his tongue that she'd heard earlier. "Turned out there was one little fly in the ointment of our newly rechristened princess's plans." With a giggle, he tapped his own chest. "Perhaps you know that the Pony of Shadows and I have something of a history? Well, in magic, there's a principle known as thaumatic affinity. Normally, it doesn't really come up unless you're building artifacts, but there's nothing normal about all this, so I suppose we should've expected it." More horn flaring made water splash in his cup, and he drained it dry.

Another weird image came to Cozy's head—Stygian made entirely of balloons about to pop. Trying not to scowl, she wondered how long it would take for her brain to stop doing that and get back to normal. "The Pony of Shadows couldn't affect you?" she asked, hoping the question wouldn't prove to be the equivalent of a pin.

His eyebrows went up. "Full marks, Miss Glow. The beast and I had become entangled on a fundamental level, and as long as it remains, so do I." Another of those twitches wrenched the whole left side of his face. "Whether I want to or not..."

Connections clicked in Cozy's head. "So this Shadow Heart can't take your magic, can't send you to Limbo, can't kill you or even hurt you. Is that right?"

"Yes," he said, and the hollowness of the word roused her from her thoughts and made her look over at him, his gray face somehow grayer, his gaze fixed on the fireplace. "But only me. Every other semi-sapient creature in the entirety of Equestria, above it, below it, under the sea, et cetera, et cetera—" He flicked a hoof. "They're all gone, bled dry of their magic and chucked into Limbo. Every living being but her and me." His neck almost creaked as his head came around to point wide eyes at her. "And now you."

Which, as far a Cozy was concerned, brought everything back to her first question, and she leaned toward him, enunciated the words in the hopes that he'd actually answer this time. "How long?"

Stygian touched a hoof to his chin. "It took her about three weeks after her birthday to make the world's populace powerless and shove them into Limbo, and after that?" He nodded. "Just over forty-six years, now, I believe it's been. Give or take a couple moons."

In the silence that followed, Cozy didn't shout, didn't yell, didn't scream or rant or fly at him with the intent of slamming her hooves into his head as hard as she could. But it was a near thing.

"Forty-six years?" she asked after giving herself enough time not to do any of the things she wanted so much to do.

He shrugged again. "It's a bit difficult to keep track of time when the sun stops rising and setting, but yes. After all, if it had been a full half century, I think I'd be making a more concerted effort to kill myself." He did some more shrugging. "Not that that ever works either, of course."

"You mean—!" The words had emerged as shouts, and Cozy clamped her mouth shut before any more could get out. A few swallows put her back in control. "You mean," she went on in a more reasonable tone, "that you can't die at all." She didn't make it a question for fear that the rising note a question required at the end might set her to screaming.

"More's the pity." He picked up the cup, and it rattled in his hooves. "I'd often fancied myself a hero, you know, back when the Pillars and I were going about the countryside. It's what attracted the Pony of Shadows to me in the first place: the soul-shriveling despair of watching others save the day while I guarded their coats and shawls and such. But when I was thrust into a situation where the entire world was counting on me, well, you can see how that's turned out..."

It would've taken more strength than Cozy currently had to keep the edge out of her voice. "No, actually, I can't see how that's turned out! All I can see is that you've dragged me into this nightmare with you! I mean, what'm I supposed to do? Shadow Heart can't kill you, sure, but I'm—!"

"No, no." Stygian was looking into his cup. "Killing in general doesn't seem to interest her." His horn flashed, and the cup had liquid in it again. "Back when she had the whole world helpless, all she did was send them to Limbo." Whether it was a smile or another twitch that pulled his lips, Cozy couldn't tell. "I seem to be something of an exception in that regard, but, well, I'm the only authority figure left, aren't I? And for all the decades that may have passed, she's certainly still a sullen teen."

"But why me?" Trying so hard not to shout, Cozy couldn't keep herself from whining. "Why did you have to drag me into all this? What can you possibly expect me to—?"

"Thaumic affinity," he said, dropping the empty cup with a clatter and fixing those feverish blue eyes on her. "It's taken me nearly five decades to figure out how to do it, but your affinity for alicorn magic makes you Equestria's only hope."

Lying on her back with her wings stretched across the carpet, Cozy let the last of her chuckles tickle their way up her throat. It had literally been more than five hundred moons since she'd last laughed that hard and that long, hadn't it?

"Finished?" Stygian asked from his spot on his cushion.

Cozy took a breath, and when more bursts of frenzied laughter didn't steal the air from her lungs, she sighed. "I think so." She rolled over, pushed herself onto all fours, and turned to face him. "But I don't think you understand. Saving Equestria isn't really my 'thing.'" She used her wings to make sneer quotes.

"On the contrary." He was edging toward the smug look that tightened Cozy's midsection. "You want to save Equestria for yourself. You want to rule the world as its one and only autocratic alicorn, do you not? Or have you given up on your childhood dreams after a mere half century encased in stone?"

The desire to kick him hard and repeatedly bubbled up again inside Cozy, but she knew that wouldn't help anything. So instead, she gave a more extravagant sigh and took her place on her pillow again. "Being a statue was so very restful, actually. I imagine it's a lot like being in Limbo." With the ease of slipping on a familiar hair bow, she pulled out her "sweet 'n' innocent" act: wide eyes, cutesy voice, front hooves pressed together in front of herself. "Golly! Maybe I oughtta go ask Princess Shadow Heart to send me into Limbo with everypony else! If you're the only one she wants to kill, well, it'd be awful rude of me to get in the way of that, now, wouldn't it?"

The twitch was pulling more regularly at Stygian's eye. "You can't fool me, Cozy Glow. I've been a monster myself, and I know what it's like."

"A monster?" Cozy dropped her act and wished it was something heavy enough to injure his hoof. "I was a princess, damn it! An alicorn like none the world had ever seen! I was on my way to being the most powerful thing in Equestria, and I would've made it, too, if I hadn't had a couple idiots in my way!"

"And now?" His smirk was back. "You're cowering at the bottom of a hole instead of retaking that power and regaining your rightful place at the top."

Glaring at him, Cozy didn't want to feel the yearning that gaped open like a chasm inside her, didn't want anything to do with what this crazy loser was offering her.

Except, oh, she wanted it so very, very much...

"I won't lie." Stygian slid forward on his pillow, that feverish glow igniting his blue eyes. "The spell I've concocted will require a very specific set of conditions in order to work, but they're conditions I'm certain we can create. My thaumic affinity will then let me peel the Pony of Shadows away from Princess Flurry Heart, and your affinity will let you pluck out her alicorn power."

A few lines creased his forehead. "Again, I won't lie. The one variable for which I can't definitively solve is whether the power she stole using Tirek's spell will accrue to you when you take the alicorn power. It should all come away at once, but if it doesn't, she'll be stunned by our attacks, and, well, the power of five alicorns ought to give you a fighting chance even if she does still retain the rest of Equestria's magic."

Her whole traitorous body was quivering at the thought—the power of five alicorns! Forcing herself not to leap into the air screaming, "Yes! Yes! Yes!", she instead pushed out through gritted teeth, "You can't be serious."

"It's the only way," he murmured. "You can then open a portal to Limbo, and—"

"What?" This time, she did scream and leap, glad to have something to focus on other than that horrible, glorious, throbbing desire. "Open Limbo? Why in the wide, wide world of Equestria would I want to do that?"

"Because of the sort of monster you are." He nodded toward the tunnel. "You saw what it's like out there: not another sapient creature anywhere across the face of the planet. So, yes, the power of all Equestria's alicorns will be coursing through your veins, but who will you lord it over? Me? A broken and confused Flurry Heart?"

Those blue eyes fixed on her, and he slowly shook his head. "You need ponies to bully and frighten, Miss Glow, or what's the point of having that power? So you'll open Limbo and let out everycreature currently imprisoned there while I shove the Pony of Shadows inside." He shrugged. "You then close the gates, and we all get on with our lives."

Hovering there, Cozy felt like a bundle of dandelion fluff, winds blasting at it from every direction till it ended up floating in place, unable to move.

Damn stupid weird similes!

Settling onto the pillow, she clenched her teeth some more and muttered, "You're lying. It's some kind of trick."

Stygian shrugged again. "Perhaps you'll feel differently after a few years dodging around, trying to avoid Princess Shadow Heart's gimlet glare. Unless, of course, you'd honestly just rather give up and let Her Highness slap you into Limbo. Of course, if you did that, you couldn't blame anypony else for your failure, could you?"

Everything inside her tightened at the thought. But— "I don't trust you! You're a Pillar of Equestria! You'd never let me keep my power after I brought everypony back!"

He gave another of those humor-free laughs. "Even if we manage to pull this off, you'll be the one brimming with alicorn magic. All I'll have is the Pony of Shadows, and that foul creature's only interest is in making Equestria a dark and depressing wasteland of twisted trees and silent skies. There's literally nothing I can do now or could do then to affect you in any way. Every choice you make from here on is yours and yours alone."

The room didn't exactly go quiet after that. The fire crackled in the hearth, for instance, and Cozy could hear her heart hammering against her ribs like an angry bird in a cage.

There. There was an extremely appropriate simile. Maybe her brain was finally getting back up to speed.

Arguing against that, though, was the way she couldn't stop herself from entertaining the notion, couldn't stop herself from saying slowly, "You really want me to believe that you'd rather live in an Equestria with me in charge?"

"This right now?" His voice shook. "This isn't Equestria. This is a nightmare where the only other creature in the world tries her best to kill me every time we happen to meet. A world ruled by you would have other voices that I could hear, would have air with other living scents in it that I could breathe, would have food in it that didn't taste like dust, dirt, and ashes." He reached across to take one of her hooves in both of his. "Please, Cozy. Take control. Take Shadow Heart's power from her and free me from this horror show..."

Hating him, hating herself, hating the world and everything in it, Cozy whispered, "What do we have to do?"

"This'll never work," she said, walking along beneath the dark and silent trees as close to Stygian as she could without wanting to try her hoof at killing him. She hadn't taken a shot at it yet, though she'd thought about it multiple times over the last few days.

Not that there were days, of course, and that more than anything else kept her from lashing out at Stygian. Yes, he was a coward and a whiner and as contemptible a creature as she'd ever spent time with—and that very much included Tirek and Chrysalis. But Shadow Heart, having amassed all the power in Equestria and then absolutely squandering it for decades and decades and decades?

She was lower than low, foul, pustulant, useless, and worse than all that? She was standing in Cozy's way. Stygian at least had brought her out of her stony prison and was giving her a chance to get back what she deserved.

Just not much of a chance...

"It has to work," Stygian said the same way he'd been saying it since telling her the plan: with determination in his voice and that twitch at the corner of his eye. "It's our only hope."

"Hope." Cozy almost spat the 'p' sound at the end of the word. "Hope's the most pathetic thing in the world!"

"And yet?" He smiled sideways at her. "The Pony of Shadows has dedicated its entire existence solely to destroying hope in any way that it can. So there's evidently some value attached to the concept."

Cozy kept trudging along, and even though she knew the answer, she still asked, "Are we there yet?"

"Very nearly." And just as he was speaking, just as Cozy was sure would happen, they stepped out from under the cold shadows of the tree canopy into the cold shadows of the open sky.

The clearing was dominated by the massive heap of shattered stone in the center, piled up somewhere close to thirty feet tall, Cozy estimated. Nothing remained that would make a pony think it had once been a tower and even less to suggest that the tower had once held—

Quickly, she put the brakes on that train of thought. It was all Stygian's fault anyway that Shadow Heart had blasted the place, so Cozy refused to feel any guilt about the jagged shards of Chrysalis and Tirek that no doubt lay scattered among the chunks of the tower.

Why exactly Princess Twilight had placed the statue that held Cozy and the other two in a tower rather than some neglected corner of the palace garden, Stygian claimed not to remember. "There may have been some threat," he'd said, rubbing his chin as they ate some tasteless boiled tubers during what Stygian called supper that first night. "But whether it was a threat to shatter you or revive you..." He'd shrugged, another of his habits that Cozy had began to find annoying almost immediately. "She put you in the tower with the pieces of the Storm King, and there may have been a few others she'd turned to stone in there as well."

Staring at the wreckage, she didn't want to ask him anything. But she didn't want to hear the faint rustle of the breeze in the skeletal trees, either. "And you really think she'll come?"

"In theory." Stygian had continued across the stone-strewn clearing toward the mound of rock. "Her Highness has strung a network of detection spells across the entire world centered upon those spots where she feels I'm likely to make an appearance. I've discovered that she keeps those spells active in locations even after she and I have met there and danced our destructive little pas de deux, so my arrival here should trigger her to—"

"Shut up." Cozy had started growing tired of his murmuring little voice about an hour after first hearing it, and the past few days of him coaching her about the plan had built that tiredness into something approaching total revulsion. "Just shut up."

He stopped and turned, probably narrowing his eyes at her. But she was very specifically not looking at his face. "Remember your part," he said after a moment of nothing but the damnable skritching of the branches behind and above her. "Remember what you're gaining, not what you're leaving behind."

A shout started rising in her throat, but she wasn't sure if it would have any words in it. She just went back to hating it all: hating that she would try something so obviously stupid in the hope—foul word!—that she might feel alicorn magic inside her once more; hating that she had to rely as always on somepony so obviously unreliable to reach her goal; hating that she couldn't stop the useless, pathetic sorrow that this place got bubbling in her guts from showing so obviously on her face that even an idiot like Stygian could see it; hating that—

"Well, now!" the mare's voice from the other day called out, bright and cheery without a single dram of actual brightness or cheer in it. "Stygian! You've found us a new playmate!"

To Cozy's left beside the remains of the tower, an empty spot of gravelly dirt began to waver like a stretch of road on a hot day. Shadowy clouds condensed roiling through the space, glommed together, then parted to reveal an alicorn, her hide as gray as an overcast day. Her mane and tail continued the whole billowing cloud motif, and Cozy almost rolled her eyes at Shadow Heart's lack of style and imagination.

That she didn't roll her eyes, she ascribed to the creature being twice as tall as Celestia—or at least twice as tall as Cozy remembered Celestia being—and to the absolute madness that buzzed and flickered around the alicorn's head.

Because Cozy knew madness, knew it as surely as she knew how to do her hair up into adorably deceptive curls. She'd touched madness, had felt her own and Tirek's and Chrysalis's flowing out and over and around her like...well, yes, like warm ice cream. She'd even briefly held Discord's tooth-churning power inside her, the very definition of madness.

This Shadow Heart, though? She was pumping the stuff up from an entirely different level.

"Sorry," Stygian was saying, and how he managed to make himself sound so bored while looking at that unhinged smile, those too-wide eyes, Cozy couldn't for the life of her figure out. "We've got something other than playing in mind."

"Goody!" Shadow Heart clapped her front hooves together, and all Cozy could think of was the empty clatter she imagined a couple skulls would make when knocked against each other. "Still, I have to say that I'm a little surprised, Stygian. With all the mommy issues you have to work out, I rather assumed that you'd be depetrifying Chrysalis. Unless—" She batted her eyelashes, her eyes gray and swirling with just the tiniest spots of black right in the center. "Perhaps our Miss Glow has some daddy issues you're helping her with?"

Cozy grabbed hold of Shadow Heart's disdain and let it buoy her mind back up to where she needed it to be. "Actually?" She batted her own lashes. "You're the only one who can help me, Your Highness."

"Of course!" Shadow Heart's power flexed, and two boxes appeared, one of light-brown wood, the other of dark-brown, both floating in the slow-motion storm clouds streaming off her. "Would you prefer a plain pine box as a coffin for your early grave? Or would you rather something fancier?" The dark-brown box began sprouting brass handles and filigree.

Leaning forward, Cozy savored the aroma of alicorn magic, crackling and fresher than the air after a lightning strike. Very carefully not looking at Stygian and the glowing pattern of the spell that was winding in a blue lacy bundle around his horn, Cozy let a bit of her own old familiar madness touch her grin. "Just make it a double wide," she said, nodding to the big mare. "You won't be able to fit in it otherwise."

Shadow Heart's head went back. "Insolent swine!" she shouted.

But off to Cozy's right, Stygian was aiming his horn, planting his forehooves in the dirt, and firing the blue woven sphere of sparks straight at Shadow Heart's side.

"Ha!" Shadow Heart glanced in that direction, shot a lightning bolt at Stygian's spell, and the thing exploded into colorful shrapnel. "I'm a thousand years younger than you, Crowbait, but even I know an old trick like that! She distracts me while you wave your floppy little horn around trying to—!"

Which was when all the little specks of confetti spun sideways and swarmed over Shadow Heart like angry gnats. Cozy took a big breath as the salty stink of fear swept through the gorgeous, white-hot scent of alicorn power. And with legs and wings outstretched, she leaped for Shadow Heart's suddenly wide eyes, not caring at this point if Stygian's spell worked or not. She couldn't imagine a better way to die than with this air in her lungs.

Except, as Stygian had explained, she needed to blow that air out, needed to send her own scent out to mingle with the scent of her prey, needed to trigger her thaumic affinity in order for the spell to work. So— "Mine!" she shrieked, shoving her face into the whirling ring of lights that had sprung up around Shadow Heart's head. She sucked in a breath to shout it again—

And sheer, unadulterated magic rocketed through her, shot from the tip of her nose, down her spine, and flared at the end of her tail. Filling her, it stretched her hide, bulged her muscles, thickened her bones, bristled her feathers, forced a scream from her lengthening throat that was at least as much pleasure as pain. Because this wasn't agony: agony was every second of every minute of every hour that she'd had to endure deprived of this wonder, this glory, this power.

"Mine!" she roared again, but this time, she was able to put some echo in it, some depth, some of the solid eternal truth backing the word and the concept. "All, all, all mine!" Her voice crescendoed until that last word made the air and the earth and the ethereal effulgence that encompassed all things resound within her; Cozy threw back her head, spread her wings and her forelegs, and laughed with a volume and robustness that would've revivified all petrified beings in the vicinity if the others hadn't had the misfortune to get themselves shattered before they could hear it.

When she next deigned to notice the world around her—and it felt so unbelievably good to use the word "deigned" again and actually mean it!—she was hovering easily, her huge, red-tipped wings holding her aloft with the most careless and gentle of strokes. Sweet reddish light billowed from the horn she could once again feel on her forehead, its warmth whispering softly of the deeds she could accomplish now with the merest thought, and she let a smile spread across her muzzle as those thoughts turned to the revenge she would now mete out upon...upon—

The current situation struck her like a bucket of cold water, and she blinked, focused on what was actually in front of her: the wreckage of the tower, and a young and lanky alicorn sprawled unconscious across the stony dirt. Then where was—?

"I'm here, my dear." The words flowed smoother and cooler than any ice cream ever could, would, or should.

Cozy Glow shook her head to try once and for all to dislodge that useless image. "Damn it, Stygian!" But when she turned to glare down at him, he wasn't himself anymore. Instead, he was a creature at least four times her size—even though she knew she was larger now than she had been just a moment ago—his hide darker and billowing like a pony-shaped thunderhead. Vaporous wings jutted up from his sides, and his horn, long and curving backward slightly, looked so much like Chrysalis's, Cozy almost felt a chill.

She didn't, though. She had no reason to feel a chill ever again. Not even because of something like the Pony of Shadows...

"Don't worry," the thing's jagged slash of a mouth said in a voice that was deeper and more resonant but still recognizably Stygian's. "I've learned a few things from the last time this P.O.S. and I shared a physical form. So I'm still the same lovable old Stygian to whom you feel ever so grateful for freeing you from your stone prison and returning you to your alicorn status."

A part of her whispered that she should strike him down now before he had a chance to strike her down, but it was a small and easily ignored part. "I'm not ungrateful," she allowed. "But the rest of your plan, I have to say, still doesn't quite make sense to me."

He shrugged broad but amorphous shoulders. "Behold, then, your kingdom, Your Majesty." A sweep of his hoof included the silent trees, the destroyed tower, and the darkened sky. "You could try digging up the sun and the moon with all your free time and power now, I suppose, but, well, I doubt they'll cringe when you raise your voice at them the way a pony would." Cocking his head, he stepped toward the only other being in sight: the teen-aged princess who'd apparently started all this. "Poor Flurry Heart. I wonder if this experience has left her enough of a brain to even function as a proper minion?"

Glaring at him some more, she knew to the bottom of her own shadowy little heart that this was a trick. That sardonic lilt to his voice—

But then Stygian always sounded like that, really, both annoyed and annoying at the same time. Maybe all this Pony of Shadows stuff was just amplifying that.

It was just— Her! Cozy Glow! Pulling all the world's creatures out of Limbo! It didn't make the slightest bit of sense! She couldn't help thinking, in fact, that if she'd known about Limbo during her attempt to drain Equestria's magic, she could've used the place! It would've made everything run so much smoother! And now she was supposed to—!

"Don't worry," Stygian said again, settling onto his stomach with his eyes partway closed and somehow looking more like a giant cloudy cat than any sort of pony. "After a few years, the sheer, unmitigated weight of the silence everywhere stops slapping you awake when you're almost asleep. And you'll have it better than I did, certainly: I used to track down the princess here and taunt her into trying to kill me just so I could hear a little noise. But you and I, we can chat and chat and chat like this for decades and decades and decades and decades."

Damn it, damn it, damn it—

"Damn it!" Rearing back where she hovered, Cozy let her horn flare and used its fire to trace the pattern above her that she'd memorized back in the cave. "You'll pay for this, Stygian! I'll make you my prime minister and force you to deal with all the complaints I get!"

"I look forward to it eagerly," she heard him say under the rumble of the sky trembling around her as she directed the power of five full alicorns toward the task of tearing the local fabric of space and time in a very specific way.

Stygian's plan called for her to split the side of Limbo open like a knife cutting a long, straight slash into the side of a five-hundred-mile long watermelon. That would allow, he said, all those billions of creatures sealed inside to step out more or less simultaneously between the ruins of the tower just outside Ponyville and the far-off west coast of Equestria. Prolonging the process would only give Flurry Heart more time to wake up and use whatever non-alicorn power she'd retained if she still had a mind and a desire to fight.

For her part, Cozy disliked how easily and almost joyfully her mind had latched onto the peculiar image of splitting open such a massive watermelon. It suggested that she still had more than a little gravel rattling around inside her head. But, well, carrying out his plan proved it much more obviously.

The problem was, of course, that Stygian was absolutely right. Flexing her neck, she sent the fireball crackling away through the woods to the west, reality itself unzipping as it went, and couldn't stop her imagination from running wild. Because her being Queen Cozy would mean nothing—would mean less than nothing—without vast herds of ponies, griffons, minotaurs, changelings, and others chanting that name day and night beneath the windows of her palace. If she couldn't threaten Twilight Sparkle with summary execution for polishing the throne room floor incorrectly, then all this power was so much warm ice cream: soggy and sticky and useless.

Along the trail of the fireball, a black jagged slash began opening, quadrupedal figures stirring within. Cozy took a breath, saw a woozy Twilight Sparkle step out onto the rocky dirt, Celestia, Luna, and Cadance unmistakable behind her, and she didn't even try to rein in the laughter of pure triumph that rose giddily from her chest.

"Oh, yes." Stygian's more resonant voice slithered again against her ear. "Perhaps I should've mentioned this earlier, but the spell that used your magical affinity to draw all that alicorn power to you? Now that the original owners are back, the spell will be using their magical affinity to return their power to them."

For half an instant, Cozy froze, the words not quite making sense to her. Then a hot-red scalpel stabbed her forehead, slicing deep and hard and sharp. And everything made entirely too much sense.

"Damn you!" she shouted, but power was already gushing out of her, pulsing and spurting like blood from a nicked artery. Trying to reach out for it with her remaining magic just seemed to increase the flow away; all Cozy could do was stare at the pastel and rainbow colors pouring down to splash over the ponies below her, slowly regaining their horribly familiar sizes, shapes, and hues, the princesses rising to all fours and shaking their heads.

"Damn you all!" she tried to shout, but no sound came out. Her body had gone all floppy and weak, a paper bag emptied of its contents, worthless and nothing but a plaything for every passing breeze. Unable to focus, move, or think, she was dropping, she was fairly sure, falling from her spot in the sky. But darkness swallowed her before she could feel herself hit.

At some point after that, Cozy discovered that she was awake.

At first, she refused to believe it. How could she possibly be lying back on something obscenely comfortable, a clean white blanket all warm and snuggly around her? But blinking showed her white walls, cabinets, dressers, and curtains, these last billowing slightly in the breeze from what had to be an open window.

Blinking also showed her Stygian seated on a cushion beside her bed, a beam from his horn setting a book to floating in front of him.

"I'll kill you," she managed to get out through the dust-dry desert of her throat.

An insufferable little smile tugged at his insufferable little face. "I hope you'll try," he said, his magic setting the book down and his blue eyes twinkling. "I've gotten so used to Princess Shadow Heart's attempts that I've found things rather dull here the past few weeks without her or them."

Possibilities for what had happened after she'd passed out batted at her mind like moths against a flickering lantern, and she couldn't decide what she hated most: the uncertainty or the whole moth-and-lantern image. After discarding several questions the answers to which, she figured, would only infuriate her, she summoned enough moisture to ask, "Why aren't I stone?"

Stygian shook his head. "The princesses made quite the compelling case, but I'm afraid that I remained adamant." His jaw tightened, and a sternness came over his face that Cozy didn't think she'd seen there before. "Unlike some ponies, you see, I'm not a sullen teen. I feel gratitude toward those who help me, and I act to express that gratitude."

Only one response seemed appropriate. "I'll kill you quickly, then." The last word threatened to choke her, and the coughing fit that followed tipped her onto her side in the bed and doubled her over, helpless to move for the better part of a minute.

When her midsection finally allowed her to straighten, Stygian was still sitting there, a cup of water floating in his hornglow. He didn't offer it to her—she would've done her best to kick it back into his face if he had.

Taking it from him, though, seemed appropriate: he had taken everything from her, after all. It was harder to do than she would've liked, but she did finally manage to grasp the cup between her hooves and dump the water into her parched gullet. It felt like shattered glass going down, but she didn't mind at all. She couldn't imagine anything not hurting until she once again regained her rightful alicorn power.

"I doubt that," he said, and she almost dropped the cup, wondering how he'd read her thoughts. "That you'd kill me slowly, I mean," he went on with a smirk. "No, the next time you get me at your mercy, you'll prolong the agony of my death for as long as you can possibly manage it, fresh waves of pleasure rolling through you every time I gasp or cry or even cringe. Because that's the sort of pony you are."

The loudest part of her wanted to leap up and roar her agreement. But the rest of her was tired, so very, very tired. "I hate you," she muttered though she couldn't find any real heat to put behind the sentiment.

Stygian's mouth went sideways. "You hate everypony, Cozy, my dear. Or rather, you hate everycreature." He touched his own chest with a hoof. "I, however, betrayed you most foully when all you wanted to do was help me. I tricked you, lied to you, deceived you, took advantage of you, and then robbed you of the martyr's death you feel you so richly deserve." His tongue made that same clicking sound she'd heard him make toward Shadow Heart when all this had started however long ago. "Certainly what you feel toward me is something more than just your standard sort of hatred."

Cozy found herself praying—to Celestia, to Luna, to Twilight Sparkle, even—for just one last little jigger of magic to blast into his smiling blue eyes. "You're right," she said, her voice sounding less like a wall about to collapse than it had just a few minutes earlier. "I will kill you slowly."

"That's my girl." His horn wavered again, and something splashed below her; glancing down, Cozy saw that her cup had more water in it. "Now," he said, his ears perking a bit. "Since you're dying to know what happened but would rather tear your own head off than ask, I'll tell you. You lost consciousness when the princesses' power was drawn back to them, and once all the creatures of Equestria successfully emerged from Limbo, I stuffed the Pony of Shadows inside. By that time, the princesses had recovered and were more than happy to close the place off, so that, as they say, was that."

The increasing pain in Cozy's jaw made her realize that she was grinding her teeth. "I don't care."

"Nor do you need to." Something rose from the table beside her bed, and she saw that it was the same battered cup he'd used back in the cave. "Princess Flurry Heart fair to melted in her wailing shame and remorse and has been taken in hoof by her Aunt Luna to begin the long road to rehabilitation. And I?" He brushed at the weird, brown, cape-like thing he'd been wearing since the moment Cozy had first blinked her vision clear to see him back in the tower. "Well, I chose to take on the problem of you. So as of now, should the magic that's been cast upon the two of us detect that we're more than fifteen yards apart, you'll turn back to stone."

Her jaw froze. "What?"

Taking a sip from his cup, he nodded. "You see, I thought to myself, 'What's the one thing Cozy Glow would hate above all else?' And the answer came back almost immediately: being shackled to me for the rest of her fleshy existence. I therefore worked with Starlight Glimmer and the princesses to develop—"

"Are you insane?" Again, she wanted to leap roaring from the bed with the intent this time of also wrapping her forehooves in his lapels and shaking him till his teeth rattled.

All she managed to do, though, was raise her voice a little and drop her cup, but Stygian's magic swooped in to encase it before so much as a drop speckled her blankets. "We're tied together?" she wheezed more than shouted, but at least it had some volume to it. "You were a thousand years old before I was even born! What sort of a pervert are you?"

"A similar sort as you, I've come to believe." He set her cup down on the table. "We both long for power that isn't ours, that can't be ours, that shouldn't be ours. I tried to borrow power from my friends for what I told myself were good and noble reasons and ended up nearly swallowed by a legend. You tried to steal power for what you admit were selfish and despicable reasons and ended up a garden decoration." Narrowing, his blue eyes became harder than any stone could ever have been. "I was a monster, but you're the greatest threat Equestria has ever known. So while you intend to kill me, I intend to neutralize you."

"I'll fly." She was shaking too much to keep her voice from cracking, but whether she was shaking with fear or rage, she couldn't quite tell. "As soon as I can, I'll head sixteen yards straight up and let my petrified body shatter when it falls."

His smile stank of guilt and hatred and self-righteousness, a mixture Cozy knew all too well from her own scent. "Ah, but you won't," he said, even more of a lilt in his accent than before. "I outsmarted you, remember? I deserve nothing but the slowest and most painful death you can devise, and I have every confidence you'll devise something worthy." He cocked his head. "After all, you'll be a sullen teen fairly soon, won't you? I certainly can't imagine that I'll survive that."

Something as small and painful as a pinprick jabbed her chest, and for all that she despised hope, Cozy couldn't stop herself from nurturing the thought of his screaming in the grip of some trap she'd built for him. "Are there any scissors here?" she asked, pulling herself across the mattress to where he'd placed her cup.

One of Stygian's eyebrows arched. "To stab me?"

She shook her head, swigged down the water, then and raised a hoof to the curls that bounced below her ears. "To cut these things off." Her smile, she knew, was as sharp and stinky as his. "If I'm gonna be a sullen teen, I need to look the part."

He smirked, his magic opening a dresser across the room and levitating a pair of scissors. She smirked back and put scissors on the mental list she'd begun compiling for his eventual demise. The Pony of Shadows, too: it would prove a useful tool if she could summon it, merge with it, and beat down its desire to stupidly destroy everything. Blasting Stygian with his own former powers over and over again while his thaumic affinity kept him from dying? That picture was as sweet and cold as ice cream in her head.

Oh, yes. And she'd have to see about getting him to buy her a triple-scoop cone of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla once she was up and about.