The World Zolt Lives In

Nearly a week had passed since Zolt had first woken up in Bandicoot and his mother’s — Sweet Tooth’s — home. It had taken her several days to decide that she really did want to remain a part of the household. Guilt had overrun her for those first few days. Every time she ate their food, she felt like she didn’t deserve to do so. Every time she slept in their guest bed, she felt that she was only wasting their precious space. Often she was compelled to do some kind of work for the family to justify her presence in their home, but most of the time she was prevented from doing much by Ms. Sweet herself.

“You’re only ten years old,” Ms. Sweet had reminded Zolt repeatedly, “ten-year-olds don’t have to do hard work. You've been through enough as-is. You're allowed to take a break.”

But Zolt was stubborn, as was her guilt.

So, after the young filly’s continuous efforts to help around the house, she and her new guardian had made a compromise: Zolt was now to accompany Sweet Tooth on her grocery runs to the nearby town (and the further city, when needed). While the meat the family ate came primarily from Sweet Tooth’s hunting, this wasn’t the case for all animal products. Even the nuts and berries gathered from trees, bushes, and shrubs didn’t make up the remainder of the family’s diet, either. Things like milk, bread, beef stock, and carrots still had to be purchased from a grocer, or a farmer directly. Zolt was fascinated by this information. She had never been to a market for food before. The only kinds of markets she had ever seen back in Gardenia were for magickal supplies or medicinal products - maybe the occasional booth for crafts, like baskets and woodcarvings. Zolt didn’t even think she had had milk before. Since out-of-state imports weren’t permitted in Gardenia, she would have had to access milk through a cow farm within the state, and she was inclined to believe that those didn’t exist. She had never even seen a cow in pony before.

Zolt and Bandicoot were now preparing for Zolt’s first-ever grocery run, and she couldn’t be more excited.

When he had learned that Zolt was going on the grocery run with his mother, Bandicoot inexplicably decided he would come along too. Ms. Sweet had teased him for “not wanting to be away from Zolt”, sure, but it would be worth it to… well, not be away from Zolt. He had been enjoying her presence over the last few days, but it wasn’t in a weird way like his mother seemed to think. He had never really had any sort of close friend before. Or friends that were allowed in his house, for that matter - upon learning that his mother was a ‘friend to the Gods’, his peers always had way too many annoying questions about his mother, her personal life, and by extension, Bandicoot and his personal life. How many deities had he met? What were they like? Were they really as powerful as everypony said? Which deities were his favorite? None of it was what Bandicoot had any interest in talking about, especially since it quickly became the only part of his life that anypony had any interest in learning about. Everything else became obsolete when they knew that his mother had met the Great Goddess Soleil herself.

It was impossible not to know that Ms. Sweet was involved with deity-related matters when entering the Sweet-Bandicoot home. Ms. Sweet loved taking photos and even photo-editing as a side hobby. As a result, pictures were strewn everywhere throughout the house whether they were organized in expansive photo albums, hung in varying patterns along the walls, or polaroids lying in random piles on bookshelves or nightstands. Many of these pictures involved her interactions with the deities, or even deities in different settings themselves. It was a bit strange having a picture of Teñuni, the War Goddess, hanging in the living room, but the pictures did look nice. Bandicoot would never tell his mother that, though. He let her believe he disliked them.

Bandicoot was trying to attach a horseshoe to one of his back hooves, trying to get the placement just right, when he suddenly stopped, staring intently at the glass door. Much of the walls on both opposing sides of the living room consisted of enormous glass walls with smaller sections of glass delineated from the rest - proper sliding-glass doors, accented with black plastic. Bandicoot, seeming to have seen something unusual, gawked at the glass door to his and Zolt’s left; the one leading to the backyard area. His horseshoe hung forgotten in one hoof.

Zolt, putting on a pair of warm socks Ms. Sweet had gotten her, paused to follow Bandicoot’s gaze to the glass door. But it was such early morning that darkness still enshrouded the world outside. She couldn't see anything at all.

“What's wrong?” She asked, pulling her final sock as high up as she could and reaching for her brand-new light blue jacket.

“I saw something moving. It looked as big as a pony.”

Zolt looked at Bandicoot with mild suspicion, then back at the glass door, unsure of how to feel. The eye could play lots of tricks when it was dark out; she had lots of experience with that. But she didn’t want to discredit him so quickly, as others had done to her in the past. There were a few natural things it could have been, after all. Like bears, and non-sentient deer! Maybe even wolves…

“What did it look like?” Zolt asked, pulling her new jacket (“new” meaning “newly hers” in this case — the jacket previously belonged to Bandicoot) on and fumbling to zip it up. She quickly became distracted with the task, thinking about how much she liked the jacket’s color. It was a rather specific shade of blue. She then started to wonder what exactly this shade of blue was called. She liked to know the exact shades of different colors, particularly those she liked. When she finally refocused on Bandi’s words, she’d missed half of what he had said.

“ — but just black. And big.”

“Hmm.”

It happened quickly. From the bedroom hallway across the room from the two foals, Bandicoot’s mother started to enter the room. Right as she had crossed the threshold between hallway and living room, the glass wall that Bandicoot had been looking at exploded inwards, shattered glass flying in towards them.

Ms. Sweet was the first to react, leaping through the air to try to grab both children and shield them from the blast. Zolt was the closest to her and the only one she caught. Bandicoot was just a bit too far away, and Ms. Sweet fell to the ground with Zolt clutched in her hooves and wings. By the time the world settled, Bandicoot was gone, and the gaping hole in the wall let in a noticeable cold chill. There was icy blue light, bright enough to illuminate much of the visible outdoor area, emanating from the horn of a cloaked pony. The light was painful to stare at directly, making it hard to decipher what was near the light. But what Zolt could make out made her blood freeze. She saw Bandicoot clutched onto by the neck, with a gleaming blade held uncomfortably close to his stomach. It was an incredibly unwelcome sight, as far as she was concerned, and it made her own stomach do somersaults.

Without intention, a burst of energy erupted from her body, knocking Ms. Sweet off of her. Before she could process what was happening she was standing, staring at this strange figure she had never before seen. It spoke, in a somewhat feminine-sounding, authoritative voice.

“I do not wish to harm the sunrise. Only the dusk,”

Zolt didn’t understand what this weird pony was talking about. The cloaked pony seemed to understand this – even, perhaps, revel in it.

“Step forward, little one, and the orange one won’t be hurt.”

Zolt had no reason to trust the apparition that had not only violated her fledgling sense of safety but threatened to hurt a pony that mattered a lot to her.

Yet, even despite this lack of trust, she felt she had no other choice but to do as they said.

Zolt took a few cautious steps closer. An arrow from one of Ms. Sweet’s bows whizzed past her, heading straight for the cloaked pony. She instinctively dropped to the ground even though the arrow was doomed to miss her anyway. It nearly struck its target, but a simple levitation spell practically scooped the arrow out of the air before it could break clothing or skin. A whiteish-blue aura surrounded the arrow, not gripping it particularly tightly — the arrow bobbed around gently in the magical field.

Even despite the colored aura, Zolt could see that the tip of the arrow was dipped in a deep bluish or purplish color. She also knew that Ms. Sweet had some different types of arrows with magical or poisonous effects.

Evidently, this one had both.

After only a few seconds of the pony’s magic grasping the arrow — loose as the grip was — and right as the strange cloaked pony had started to speak, a dark, spindly energy started to creep out of the arrowhead until the pony’s entire magical field was blackened. They screamed in apparent pain the moment the poisonous shadow made an appearance. Zolt realized, with swelling admiration, that Ms. Sweet had not intended for the arrow to burrow itself into the flesh. Mrs. Sweet had known that the pony, being a unicorn, would be capable of seeing and stopping the arrow. She wanted them to. That, it seemed, was how the ‘venom’ was activated: contact with an aural field. And activate, it did.

The arrow fell meekly to the ground when even the pony's horn was surrounded by this new magical poison. The arrow now seemed completely normal aside from a few scorch marks. It lay there innocently as though it had not just debilitatingly injured a living being. The pony strained themselves to cast a spell but failed.

This strange hooded pony, in a rage, threw Bandicoot to the gravel with as much force as they could muster. The guttural grunt that left Bandicoot as he slammed into the small, sharp rocks was gut-wrenching. Zolt’s prior satisfaction at realizing Ms. Sweet’s ingenious move was immediately obliterated and replaced solely with worry for her closest friend.

She instantly saw red. But this monster apparently did, too. They launched towards her, lifting two shaky, long-sleeved hooves. “Soleil will revel in your bloodshed!” The pony's voice was raspy, furiously insistent, and horrifying.

“Soleil wouldn't revel in anypony’s bloodshed!” Ms. Sweet shouted defiantly from far behind Zolt. At the same time, Zolt was jumping back with a flutter of her wings to avoid being grabbed and throttled by this… this thing. The pony’s coat was navy blue, judging by its hooves. It was hard to tell what the rest of it looked like aside from the fact it had a long, sharp horn.

“Soleil, our Goddess, might act as though she doesn't want anyone to suffer, but we know it is an act. We are connected with her in spirit! We know that she wishes every day for every rotten demon to be expunged from the earth!”

Another arrow zipped past Zolt, expertly aimed for the deranged pony’s shoulder. The pony didn't seem to react in time to dodge, not used to having to dodge things directly. The arrow embedded itself with a strange noise Zolt had never heard before. Schnk! Zolt winced, immediately feeling her own shoulder tingle at the thought of such a thing happening to her.

The cloaked figure screamed, lunging forward once more and this time catching Zolt off guard. Its hooves wrapped around her neck and squeezed so tightly that Zolt thought her neck might be crushed like an empty soda can before she could ever even choke. She tried to scream but no breath came out, and the all-too-familiar red-hot searing bloom of pain started up in the back of her neck, where her scar was. She tried yet again to scream — hating the feeling of her breath bubbling at the bottom of her throat where it could not pass the now-narrow passage through her throat —then to wriggle free, but the pony was too enraged, too filled with adrenaline and brute strength, to let that happen.

Ms. Sweet was running towards the assailant, preparing to stomp it with all the force that she could manage with her front two hooves. She could do a lot more damage if she bucked with her back hooves, and she knew it, but she wasn't as accurate with this kind of move and she could accidentally hit Zolt instead on the attempt. So the more accurate, less powerful hoof-slam it was!

But before Ms. Sweet could reach her target, the sound of a bloodcurdling scream froze her with terror. Her eyes darted to where her son had landed on the ground moments before, terrified that the scream had been his. Alas, Bandicoot was gone, nowhere to be found, and the scream hadn’t seemed to be his after all.

An enormous dark gray head, almost reminiscent structurally to a bull’s, had emerged from the back of Zolt’s neck, attached by a tapering string. Where the string was closest to head and neck, it thickened into a black-and-white striped cone. In parts not closely attached to either head or foal, this line connecting the two beings was so thin that no striped pattern could be observed there, inspiring Sweet Tooth to think the thicker striped pieces were functionally like nails keeping slabs of wood attached to each other.

This head on a string was so powerful in its expulsion from Zolt’s neck that the thick part of the strange striped line pierced clean through the hoof that had been choking her. One moment, the hoof was intact, and the next consecutive moment there was splintered keratin, chunks of hot flesh and hoof and bone flying as though they were as light and free as water itself. It made no physical sense - how had this huge head passed through the pony’s hooves without blowing them clean off? Whatever it was that had happened, it had left the hooves just intact enough to experience what must have been an insurmountable amount of pain.

This dangerous cloaked pony was now physically attached to Zolt, its hoof now functioning like an earlobe molded around a piece of jewelry that had pierced through it. It was a horrifying thought and an even more horrifying sight.

So that's her demon, Ms. Sweet thought, taking in all the visual details she could. Immediately, the demon’s power was overwhelming to the senses. Ms. Sweet subconsciously took a few steps back, a wing unfurling with discomfort as she looked around for her son. He was still nowhere to be found. Where is he? Where’s my son? Anxiety flooded her mind and made it hard to think about anything else except protecting Bandicoot.

“Y-you cut off my hoof!” The cloaked pony screamed, sounding much too… genuine. Too much like a normal, reasonable pony would in this type of situation. The pony was clearly an evil sort that Ms. Sweet did not want to pity even in the slightest. But the agony they were surely feeling at this moment made it difficult not to. But not impossible. Flashes of the sight of her son being held by the neck, a knife to his stomach, was sufficient in making all sense of guilt trickle away.

The huge gray head had one blue eye and one yellow eye, just like Zolt, but the colors of these were much more desaturated and dark than Zolt’s — including its mane. Its right eye was blue, though, in contrast to Zolt’s. These mismatched eyes looked somehow surprised and terribly bored at the same exact time. The creature whirled itself to point downwards, looking intently at the cloaked figure’s hoofwound, now starting to ooze as the string moved with the floating head’s movements, widening the hoof’s hole even further as it wriggled around. “That doesn't look ‘cut off’ to me,” it said, its voice surprisingly cool, feminine, and pony-like. None of these three adjectives were what Ms. Sweet would have expected. Ms. Sweet had expected hisses, snarls, and growls, but to see this animal speaking articulately, with an identifiable calmness… Something about it was more unsettling to her than if it had been a feral, incomprehensible beast.

The creature had very flat, broad teeth when it initially spoke. But it left its mouth open while deciding to… change its teeth. It was a fascinating, yet upsetting, thing to witness. The teeth themselves morphed, with two of its flat teeth becoming canines and then continuing to grow into large, curved fangs, reminiscent of a Sabertooth Tiger. The other teeth receded into smaller curved points, reminding Ms. Sweet of cat claws. Zolt thought they were like sharp waves in an ocean.

The cloaked pony wriggled with discomfort, near-shouting with fright.

“This would be ‘cut off’!” Zolt clenched her eyes shut and looked away as the demon shrunk itself down to a size more suitable for slicing through hoof with its newly-sharp teeth. A grotesque snapping squish commemorated the official separation of bone and flesh, nerve and joint, tendon and ligament. Zolt’s ears flattened as tightly as they could against her head, partially to block out the sound as much as possible but also to prevent the spattering blood from infiltrating places it shouldn't. It was a good call — soon the feeling of thick, wet warmth was sludging against her skin, coating nearly half of her face and a significant amount of her shoulder and chest.

Her mind started to shut itself off. She could tell that it was. She knew she should feel so much more panicked. She should maybe even start hyperventilating, screaming, crying, thrashing. But instead, here she sat, dead-silent, as though moving or reacting put her at risk somehow. She was completely and utterly shell-shocked; her mind was trying to force itself away from what she could see right in front of her. What she could feel, dripping slowly down her cheeks and shoulder.

She closed her eyes, a tremble starting at her core. She tried to imagine some happy memory, some anchor to hold her mind down and prevent it from flying away. Yesterday, she and Bandicoot spent nearly the entire day together as he taught her the mechanics of several different “video games”. Zolt was so new to them, and new to being around another pony her age for so long all at once, but both were a pleasant new. An enjoyable new. This… this was no such kind of “new”. It was incredibly difficult to hold onto the feeling of safety, warmth, and happiness. It felt as though this small little world she had managed to find herself in had now been bastardized, ruined, and snatched away from her. She feared she would never have a day like that again.

The cloaked pony, now free from its attachment to Zolt, used its new mobility to stumble backward. It looked like it wanted to run away, but had no balance or sense to do so. With a pathetic grunt, it collapsed to the ground. A multicolored aura sparked up around Zolt’s demon’s… horn? Ms. Sweet saw what looked to be a pumpkin or apple stem barely emerging from the creature’s hair. She had no idea that that was supposed to be a horn until it had produced its own magic. Ms. Sweet, in her own miniature state of shock, found herself unable to do much except gawk at the rainbow glow the demon produced. She never thought that a demon could have such a colorful magical field. It seemed too… well, innocent. Light. Cheery.

A long, sharp icicle began to form amidst the colorful energy. In seconds, it had been as vivid and clear as real ice, as though all the different hues had stacked on top of one another to build the perfect icicle. Ms. Sweet wondered if it was real ice or if it was merely an illusion; a mockery of ‘real’ ice magic.

Without another word, the body-less beast shot this spike of cold straight into the neck of the cloaked pony, ripping through its clothing and its skin. There was only a short gurgle before everything about it stopped: its movements, its sounds, its thoughts. Its life.

Zolt let out a terrified sob, turning away with a mind to run absolutely anywhere other than there. Once again escaping. Once again finding somewhere else to be. The demon and her weren’t the same soul, but they were connected souls. That which the demon did, Zolt was in some way responsible for. If Zolt had been quicker, if her mind had been working better and she had dodged the cloaked pony’s attack the second time, maybe the demon would have never had to show itself. Maybe… this pony would still be alive. She killed a pony. It was just like—

A small “battle cry” knocked Zolt out of her thoughts. “Hyaaaah!!” She looked up to see a blur of orange flying through the air, propelled by inexperienced wings. Bandicoot was holding an axe that was much too heavy for him. He barely managed to keep his grip on the very end of the handle, the blade at the complete mercy of gravity. He tried to use the momentum of his flight to throw the axe into the hooded pony, but it was incredibly ineffective. The blade barely nudged the pony’s clothing before clattering onto the gravel beneath.

“Oh. It was already dead,” Bandicoot said with such an innocent tone that Zolt almost barked out a laugh. She might have been able to, if it weren’t for the searing pain in her neck returning; the demon was leaving its physical state, something that caused Zolt a lot more pain than she wished it did. Once it had finally gone, Zolt felt completely exhausted. She didn't think she could run if she had wanted to. Certainly, her legs ached to just go, her wings twitched with the desire to carry her into the air and miles away from here. But any attempt to actually move her legs was met with a great deal of protest. Her mind, her spirit, her body… all of it was failing her all at once. She wanted to lay down right there in the dirt and sleep the entire day away.

“I'm sorry,” she blurted out, horrified that, now that Bandi and his mom had seen the demon show its face, let alone what the demon had done, she would be ostracized. She was fine with the idea of running away herself, but being sent away? That had a whole other sting to it.

“Why?” Ms. Sweet asked, grabbing the axe off of the ground with a level of ease that clearly embarrassed her son. She looked around, although it was hard to see much in the darkness. The sun was soon to make an appearance, as evident by the deep blue that was beginning to break through the blackness of the sky. She knew that this psychotic unicorn had to be a member of some sort of cult, in which case, there were likely many more members. Was this pony acting alone as a result of some sort of mental break? How did it know that Zolt was here? Were they still in immediate danger? Would the other cultists soon arrive to take their revenge?

“I-I just killed a pony! Don't you care? I didn't think I'd ever… it's just…” Zolt wobbled. She tried desperately to get her thoughts in order, but the pressing matter of standing was more important. She stumbled a little, kneeling on the ground as Bandicoot dropped everything — even his own embarrassment — to support her weight against him and help her stay balanced.

“You were protecting yourself and us,” Bandicoot said, watching as his mother started to undo the clothing wrapping the corpse’s body.

“All we've learned is to never put our hooves on the back of your neck,” Ms. Sweet said, a small laugh leaving her. The laugh seemed to be more closely related to stress than mirth.

The dead pony’s clothing was removed, and Ms. Sweet dug through the pockets to find several sacrificial blades, a small bag of strange herbs and sticks, a bright green feather, and a tiny dead mouse. Bandi immediately asked to see the mouse, which Ms. Sweet obliged. She got up and walked towards the snow, picking it up in heaping hooffulls and bringing them back to the body. Zolt thought at first she was going to bury the body in the snow, but instead, she packed the snow down into a wide, flat, rough square. It took several trips for her to do this, in which Bandi looked at the mouse from every angle. He seemed more distraught about the mouse being dead than the pony, and Zolt almost had to agree. The mouse had a clean “X” shape carved into its chest, the intersection of which had been punctured through many times by some tiny object, judging by the smaller holes. The mouse’s eyes were gone, its fur still mostly intact.

“I hope they found the mouse already dead,” Bandi mumbled. “Killing it is just mean.”

With a sigh, Bandi took the mouse to a designated spot and buried it shallowly in the snow. Zolt didn't want to be the one to tell him that eventually, the snow would melt, leaving behind rotted mouse, there for all to see (and smell).

Ms. Sweet had taken one of the twigs from the bag of herbs, inspected it closely, and then used it to draw a strange, detailed shape in the short snow “platform” she had packed next to the corpse. Zolt wanted to ask rapid-fire questions about what Ms. Sweet was doing and why, but she also needed to bathe and/or sleep as soon as ponyly possible.

“I have to get this stuff off me,” Zolt said, the exhaustion finally making an appearance in her voice and expression, “is it okay if I just go do that?”

“Okay,” Bandicoot nodded, hoping his mother would have agreed with such an allowance. He was just glad that she hadn’t run away. She looked like she had really wanted to for a second there.

*~*~*

The shower had been long and filled with stress. She spent most of the shower’s duration sitting in the tub, water hitting her from above, idly scrubbing at the parts of her body that had touched blood. Her coat seemed to be stained with it; it took two or three different soap-washes to get out most of the reddish pigment, and even still, she could feel the blood still sticking on her. Her mind kept flashing back to how it had felt, what she had seen, and the fact that a pony that had woken up that morning, with thoughts of their own, assumably a family of their own, and ideas, aspirations, dreams, was now dead. Something that had been a working machine was now empty and soulless, broken down and left somewhere. All because of her.

She thought about how she might be imprisoned for what she had done, although she knew that foals were rarely incarcerated. She also had two credible ponies who could stick up for her if anyone asked questions. Still, the idea of being taken away to a stone-cold cell was extremely worrying, especially if she was thrown in with criminal stallions. Those were her least favorite types of ponies to be around.

She didn't want to run away, as much as her body urged her to. She reached the ultimate conclusion that she should wait until she was sure that the Sweets wanted her gone for good. She decided that they would probably be too nice to outright banish her, so it was up to her to discern what they were really feeling.

She scrubbed herself down one last time, trying hard to stave off the mental images of death, and exited the shower, drying her coat a bit too thoroughly with the towel. After the shower was said and done, her coat was practically rubbed raw and had a splotchy pinkish tinge in the places she had given the most attention to. And yet still she didn’t feel clean.

Sighing, she tossed her towel into the bathroom hamper and crept into the living room, anxiety fizzing up in her chest. Bandi was sitting on the couch, his back facing her, staring at the broken window. Zolt was shocked to see that, although the window was broken, the gash was only a few feet wide now, as though the cloaked pony from before had only punched a hole through it instead of blasting the entire thing open. Even the door was mostly intact.

“What happened?” Zolt asked, and Bandicoot jumped, twisting to look at the filly.

“W-well, uh… Mom left to get the groceries… and she told me to watch to make sure you were okay. But you were showering, so…”

“I meant the glass. How is the hole smaller?”

Bandicoot turned to look back at the window, as though he had been noticing it for the first time. “Before Mom left, she summoned Giz— well, a family… friend? His name is Gizzard. He eats pony flesh,”

Zolt already felt her head spinning and she had only been engaged in conversation for mere moments. “Wh— hang on. What?”

“...Well, Mom used a summoning glyph to summon one of the creatures she has an alliance with. His name is Gizzard. He's a ghoul demon, so he has to eat the flesh of a sentient creature at least once a week, but he doesn't like to kill anything. So in exchange for us giving him the cult pony’s body to clean up, he's fixing our window.”

Zolt heard a crunch of glass and turned her gaze lower. She saw a stout, hairy creature that she had never seen anything like before. It was roundish, with four stumpy legs that had three blunt claws each. It was chestnut brown with markings in different brownish shades; it opened its mouth much wider than it looked like it should be able to, revealing many layers of sharp, curved teeth and a huge tongue. One of its eyes was a soft pink and the other was a pastel yellow, making Zolt think of strawberries and bananas. If it hadn't been for the rows of sharp teeth and the unhinging jaw, Zolt would have thought Gizzard looked completely non-threatening.

“So your momhas an alliance with the demons?” Zolt asked, her resolve decaying at the news. Bandicoot looked incredibly uncomfortable at this accusation.

“N-no. I mean, not with every demon. Demons are a diverse group … some of them aren't all that bad.”

For the first time, Gizzard seemed to notice her. It stared at her with wide eyes for a few moments before getting back to its task — it placed a shard of glass back into its rightful place with its tongue, its saliva seeming to glue the pieces together with surprising efficacy. Then it began the process of sniffing out the next piece it needed. The cracks in the mended pieces began to slowly disappear, explaining how the hole of missing glass had shrank while she had been gone. “It eats flesh!” She cried, louder than she had intended.

She felt her heart twitch as Bandicoot’s ears fell back, a look of hurt flashing across his expression. She felt bad for speaking louder than she had needed to, but she was upset! Why would Ms. Sweet side with any demon? There was never any reason to do that! There were probably millions of ponies that existed that could have repaired the window just fine, and they wouldn't be monsters. How did Bandicoot know that there were demons that were good, anyway? Just because this thing hadn't tried to eat him yet?

“I-I know,” Bandicoot spoke quietly, his eyes darting between Gizzard and Zolt, “but he isn't evil. If he was, why wouldn't he just kill ponies for every meal? Even for fun? Clearly, there is something about Gizzard that just… works differently than yours does.”

Bandicoot hadn't meant it to sound insulting, even accusatory, but it had. So what? Good demons existed, and somehow, some way, Zolt had managed to encounter a rotten one? Not only that, but was now soulbound to it?

This idea brought a great deal of frustration to the gray filly. “So there are good demons and bad demons. What crazy nonsense are you gonna tell me next? That bad angels exist too?”

“Probably!” snapped Bandicoot, clearly getting a bit frustrated himself. After a tense pause; “If you have a group of ponies that are all unique, you're going to have some that are better or worse than others. So it just makes more sense. You know, that’s just how being different works. I-I don't know for sure, okay? It’s just what I feel.”

Seeing Bandicoot so agitated made Zolt feel as though her stomach lining were made of solid lead. It forced her to take pause, to consider what he was saying, and to - even despite her inner objections - accept that his idea did make logical sense and that it was a reasonable conclusion to come to. It felt like a wrong, blasphemous conclusion, but surely in time his hypothesis would be dashed by the sheer number of evil, heinous demons that they may encounter or learn about in their lives. If demons could be good, then what made a demon a demon? And, likewise, if angels could be bad, then what distinguished an angel from the rest of ponykind? The whole point was for them to be good!

Zolt sighed, looking back at Gizzard. She, at the very least, had to accept that this demon didn't seem to have evil intentions. It was doing them a service by fixing the window and door, and it seemed to be pretty efficient at its job. Even though she wasn't the fondest of the prospect of another demon being so close to her, she didn’t believe that Ms. Sweet would intentionally endanger her.

She slowly walked back into ‘her’ bedroom, casting a glance at the TV screen she had been so fascinated by over the last few days. In Gardenia, ponies had access to a plethora of books from “The Outside”, but not really any other kind of media. There was electricity and heating/air conditioning, but she realized that the only time she had ever seen a screen of any sort was in the different facilities she’d been to. Nobody had explained to her what the weird flat colorful moving thing was. Zolt had been interested in it at first, but she had no control of what was on the screens and there had been several times the images and sounds had frightened her and shown her things she didn't want to see. So, rather quickly, she had reached the conclusion that it was some kind of mind-wiping manipulation device and had done everything in her power to ignore everything that appeared there.

Bandicoot must have been freaked out when, the first time he had turned the screen on in front of her, she had yelled. Zolt imagined what she must have looked like then; clamping her hooves over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut as tight as possible, and immediately positioning herself into a spherical shape with surprising effectiveness. It had taken a lot of explaining for her to understand that this was a different kind of screen, one that Zolt had a level of control over, and that it wasn't the same as whatever she had been forced into watching before.

Now, she looked back at her own reflection in the sleeping pixels.

She went to the fireplace, stoking a fire all on her own. Even though she had a lot of experience with it, fire still scared her almost as much as it comforted her. Any flame beyond the size of a candlelight was, as far as she was concerned, inherently dangerous. But there was something beautiful about it, too. She sat, staring at the way the fire interacted with the logs of wood, slowly eating away at them. As she stared, she contemplated whether there would have been any way, before she had run away, to light her facility ablaze without hurting any of its patients.