Yesterday was a long day of helping Ceadda with my campaign to increase my influence over the land. Merging the cultists who worship the Machine and, by extension, me with the army has proven a time-consuming task. Furthermore, while the ponies of Viirad have been pacified, dissent and disobedience run amok. Organizing systems of reward for the slaughter of the nonbelievers has proven messy as sifting the cons from the devout is an adversarial game of cat and mouse.

Verifying killings did happen requires writing the name of the killed. Of course, with how poor birth records are around here, sometimes it’s impossible to determine if the pony killed was real or not. Adding requirements for ears was a logistical hassle, and cons simply used ears from graveyards and the recently deceased. Any decomposition in the ears could be explained away as the effect of the slowness of the mail system, and there have been many complaints from mailponies about the smell.

Removing the requirement for ears led to a balloon of what I would call “paper murders”, but it will suffice as most appear to be real. Better we cut too eagerly than leave a live heretic. Rudimentary checks of suspicious ledgers against the limited records available has shown success and many of the cons have themselves now been killed.

I have instructed Ceadda to take a census of all the ponies in Viirad as he cracks down on dissent. We wish to kill at least one pony at each settlement to send the correct message, which makes it the perfect opportunity to catalog the residents of our former Wittenlandian province. Twenty thousand or so have been killed so far, and organized groups have largely petered out, but I calculate we’ll need at least another ten thousand to have a proper dent in the resistant population. Something tells me once the crackdown is complete, the remainder will be more open to worshiping me.

The messiness of this whole process irritates me. So many hours in correcting errors, dealing with poor records, slow travel causing slow logistics and information transfer all on top of parties actively trying to sabotage my efforts. Viirad will be a well-oiled machine of ticking perfection, but for now I must deal with how there are still no telephone cables in most of the country.

Combined with my lack of progress in mind control, I’m feeling a distinct lack of control. I have such power but when a Kasan partisan steals the ammunition from one of my depots, he goes unpunished for weeks. I hold the nation in my hooves, but I am not a griffon and have no claws in which to grasp it.

I need some entertainment. Mind control has thus far shown itself to be imprecise. I could make it more precise though. If I ignore the mind altogether, I could control just the body directly with levitation. A nice diversion, but I require a subject.

I plucked this pony from the street of some town in northern Elisay. He looks to be some kind of laborer, a miner perhaps. He looks fearful but is not yet lashing out in any violent way. I believe I’ll begin by using levitation to hold his entire body still. Yes, it appears to be working - he remains entirely rigid, eyes unblinking, no signs of life. Let me start off by fixing those eyes with a careful downwards pressure on the eyelids. I must say that my level of precision in levitation has vastly improved since my ascension. Gently up and down. I feel a steady increase in resistance, which has caused me to realize that I have forgotten to keep him breathing. As of now, his lungs remain perfectly still, diaphragm waiting for my command to contract.

This is quite a delightful departure from the imprecision of verbal instruction. I contract the diaphragm and allow the lungs to inflate. There are so many intricacies to keep track of, and I realize I am limited by my knowledge of pony biology. His lungs are not expanding even though I’ve released my grip. Assuming ponies are like deer, I move what should be his epiglottis out of the way of his windpipe. It seems I’ve applied too much force, as I feel what was once one piece of flesh split into two. I have reacted fast enough to stop blood from flooding out, but it seems he will be eating smaller bites from now on.

I release the severed half of the epiglottis and move it down the esophagus, mimicking the act of swallowing. Problem solved for my purposes. The feeling of the numerous involuntary muscle contractions from the intense pain he seems to be feeling right now is quite the sensation. It is akin to wind blowing over a grassy field where one cannot predict exactly where the wave will start from but can confidently assert the general direction and amount the wind will blow it.

I am now confident he will not immediately die of asphyxiation. The next step shall be just that: a step. I realize I do not know how exactly the muscles in the leg need to contract to make such an action happen, so I will first attempt something more like puppetry. I relax my influence on the front right leg and focus on the hoof. As I levitate it up, the loosened leg follows the path of least resistance and bends accordingly. Unlike a normal step, there is no force from within the leg with no tensing whatsoever and the action is driven by my external force allowing each part to move.

And now down. I lower the hoof to a position in front of where it was when I first began to lift it. I feel a pop somewhere along the leg. In retrospect, it is obvious. The leg has not gotten longer, so in order to be placed down in front of where it was before, something had to give. In a standard trot, the body usually moves forward to compensate for the change in position of the hoof. With a gentle tug of the torso, I’ve corrected for the error. One of his back legs seems to be lifting up automatically now as well now that the torso has moved forward.

I should probably correct this dislocation. From feel, it must be in the lower joint of the leg. I move the ball back into the socket. Lucky for him he is also an ungulate or I wouldn’t know what to do. I can’t imagine trying this with a griffon. I feel a grinding of bone against bone. Perhaps I was a bit too zealous with the correction.

For this back leg, I do want to try a muscular approach rather than this puppeteering. My goal is to raise the back left leg and move it forward in a walking position. First, I have to release weight by bending in the hind quarters and bending the knee. Does the metatarsal movement on a pony differ from my own during walking? This pony’s metatarsus is much longer proportionally than my own. Walking is such an unconscious behavior that without doing it myself, it is difficult to guess how the metatarsus should behave. I had better bend it upwards just to be safe.

After guessing the approximate positions of the correct muscles to contract, I begin the movement as 3 simultaneous contractions in an intricate dance of sinew and ligaments. Immediately, the weight shifts on the pony and I have to prop up his body with my levitation to stop him from tipping to the left. The movement is largely successful. The final part is to lower the limb back down, but this time I remember to move the torso forwards again the appropriate distance.

By slightly offsetting the contractions, I reverse the movement done prior to lower the limb to the ground, but as I do so, I feel a strange, fleshy crunch as the thigh fails to bend. It seems my offset was incorrect and that I have torn a random bunch of muscle and flesh in the leg. However, the nature of the damage leads me to the location of the correct muscle, and I am able to reapply weight to the leg as it lands back on the ground.

As before, waves of involuntary muscle contractions dart around the pony’s body. I counteract them as they come, but only after they have some visual effect. I see his eyes are still moving independently of my control - not the balls themselves, but the pupil dilation is changing. I wonder what he’s thinking about inside there, trapped inside his own body. Is he wishing I chose a deer so I could have had a higher likelihood of success at locating specific muscles? Is he praying to whatever god these Riverlanders pray to that he’ll live? Actually, there’s no need to wonder, I have telepathy spells after all.

Well, that’s not very interesting. Apparently, his internal monologue just consists of screaming most of the time. When he isn’t screaming it is a mess of incoherent gibberish. Let me see if I can fix these errant pupil irregularities. I apply some pressure from my magic to freeze the iris in place, but the precision of my control at this scale within another object tests even my abilities. The iris is remarkably thin. I see blood pooling in his left eye. I must have cast my net of levitation too wide and broken a nearby blood vessel. No matter, the eyes serve no functional purpose as I cannot see through them anyway.

This has been intellectually stimulating, but I am limited by my knowledge of anatomy. I’ll have to talk to Leopold. I’m sure he has books about griffon biology given his mechanical augmentations, but I’d wager he has one or two tucked away about ponies too. As for my subject, there is a chance I’ve permanently maimed him and removed a healthy worker from the population. However, the entertainment I’ve received is worth far more than the work of any one of these ponies is able to produce. There are at least a hundred thousand just like him in Viirad.

As I release him from my levitation, he collapses, but doesn’t scream in pain or thrash violently. He is mostly twitching his uninjured legs and is beginning to sob quietly, left eye closed. Good. I hope more subjects will get the memo that violent outbursts are disruptive to my work. Well, I suppose that is why they do it in the first place. I should hope instead that they are more cowed by fear of retribution. I teleported him back to the village he came from.

Author's Note

Man, I had to look at so many anatomical diagrams of ponies and deer.

Also, I'm realizing that the descriptions of the pony's body parts breaking are a bit graphic so I'm adding the gore tag just to be safe.