CHAPTER 3

What Sweetie Belle had just cooked for her dinner looked nothing like ratatouille, smelled nothing like ratatouille, tasted nothing like ratatouille, and sounded nothing like ratatouille. So nopony in their right mind could've ever guessed what it actually was… or was meant to be. It didn’t seem to bother Sweetie Belle though, as she was somehow eating whatever was on her plate.

What did bother her was Opalescence, who was sitting on the floor to her left, staring. She was looking at the key that was still attached to Sweetie Belle's necklace. She continued staring in silence until Sweetie finally finished her dinner.

“Where did you find it?”

Sweetie Belle almost threw up in shock. She looked over to her flanks to make sure she hadn’t suddenly gotten Fluttershy's cutie mark and learned to understand cat speech. She hadn’t. The cat had indeed just spoken.

“Answer my question.”

“I– I think I deserve answers the most here,” Sweetie Belle replied, stuttering.

“You haven’t asked anything though.”

“Do I really have to?”

Opalescence sighed in annoyance. “Fine, I'll explain. I am Opalescence, though it isn't my real name more than my undercover identity. My actual name is Øpre-S'ion.”

“‘Oppression’?” Sweetie Belle got off her chair and took a few steps back from the ‘cat’ she was talking to. “Are you…”

“A demon? Bingo. I only took this appearance a bunch of years ago. I needed some place to hide in the overworld in case the exorcists were to ‘pop back into fashion’. You catch my drift?”

Sweetie Belle took another two steps back from this ‘Oppression’. “I– I don't understand… Where is– where's Opal?”

Oppression looked unamused. “I'm in front of you, dummy.”

Sweetie Belle was confused and panicking. She took some more steps back toward the door. Before she could leave the kitchen however, one of Oppression's paws turned into a giant, ugly, lanky arm with big, sharp claws that were now holding the key on Sweetie Belle's necklace, threatening to rip it from her neck. Sweetie Belle was paralyzed in terror and could do nothing but watch and breathe frantically.

“This key.” Oppression started fiddling with it using one of her claws. “It belonged to Silver Key. I recognize its scent, its look, its texture…” Oppression's neck suddenly extended up to Sweetie's face. Her head was now bigger, her teeth somehow multiplied by the hundred, and her eyes big and beady, fixating on Sweetie's necklace… or maybe her neck.

“Let me tell you something that you don't wanna know: I was the one who got rid of Silver Key. I did it personally, and I enjoyed EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND. OF. IT. Now let me ask you again: where did you find this Celestia forsaken key?”

Sweetie Belle didn’t say a word. She couldn’t say a word. She was taken by too much panic to think straight, or even think at all. Instead, she just stood there silently, with a headache from her heart beating so fast, pumping too much blood upward to her head.

“The silent treatment, eh? Well that's alright.” Oppression's other front paw, the one that wasn’t already touching Sweetie's necklace, extended into another long, big, creepy arm that was now about to reach for the filly's head. “I will find out, eventually.”

Before her head could be either squashed or ripped to shreds, Sweetie Belle snapped back to reality and summoned a chain from Tartarus, shackling the arm that tried to attack her. Oppression shot an angry glare at Sweetie, then used her other arm that was holding the necklace to rip it from Sweetie's neck. Before Sweetie could do anything to take the key back, Oppression's mouth grew wider and wider before snapping shut in the little pony's direction.

Sweetie Belle managed to dodge the bite that would've cost her life and galloped out of the kitchen. She knocked over some mannequins as she traversed the front boutique. Meanwhile, the feline demon's neck expanded as her head barked and bit while pursuing Sweetie, destroying most of the furniture on its way. As she ran, Sweetie Belle tried to use her telekinesis to open the front door she was heading toward, but Oppression's head caught up and cut her path to the exit, forcing Sweetie to turn around.

Not having many other places to go at this point, Sweetie Belle ran for the staircase and went upstairs. She hesitated which room she would go to next for a second, first thinking about the comfort of her own bedroom, ultimately going to Rarity's workshop instead. Without thinking, she locked the door shut behind herself. She then heard violent knockings and scratchings on the door for a while that eventually stopped after what felt like a long minute. It seemed like either the door was very solid or the demon isn't half as strong as she seems. Though Sweetie Belle remembered having read that some demons can sometimes be stopped with mundane things like stairs, beans, disguises, or even a simple wooden door, which seemed to be the case here.

Sweetie Belle then realized that her book on exorcism, which most likely contained a solution out of this situation, was in her bedroom, which she had decided not to go to a minute ago. She face-hoofed once she was done regaining her breath.

Suddenly, awful banging and scratching noises could be heard again at the door. Sweetie Belle startled. Whatever Oppression was trying to do, she was still clearly after the young unicorn and wasn’t ready to give up. Sweetie Belle looked around the room, trying to look for something. Anything that could help her in the immediate instant would do.

Her eyes settled on the fabric on Rarity's work table. It worked last time, so it should work again, right? Even though this demon is probably of a higher level, it's still worth trying.

****

After banging on it for about half an hour, Oppression finally broke the door open. She looked around the room with her wide, glowing eyes, but couldn’t find anything living. Her face’s expression was undecipherable at this point, but she was clearly out for blood. She was out for sweet little pony blood. Her neck extended further into the room to get a closer look around.

Meanwhile, Sweetie Belle was standing still just beside the doorway, breathing as quietly as possible. She was wearing a dark gray cape like the one from yesterday, covering her face and body. Once she was sure that Oppression wasn’t looking in her direction, she discreetly moved through the doorway, crouching under the demon's still unnaturally long neck. Sweetie then headed to her bedroom, where she took her exorcism book. She then went back downstairs, still trying to move as quietly as possible.

Oppression's neck was all over the house, like a giant snake from which one couldn’t see both ends at a time. It was mostly still, but moved slightly and slowly as the demon breathed. Sweetie managed to make her way into the kitchen, where one of Oppression's paws was shackled in place, while the other paw was stretched up to the ceiling, holding the silver key out of Sweetie Belle's reach. Although she could try to take the key with her magic, the demon's grip looked very intense and would most likely not let it go easily at all. Plus the fact that pulling something so important from her claws would not go unnoticed by Oppression. Sweetie needed a plan.

****

After reading some pages of the exorcism book, Sweetie Belle had come up with a plan. Not because the book itself gave her the plan, but reading it somehow calmed her enough to come up with one.

She summoned another chain to shackle the paw holding the key, which she immediately pulled violently toward the ground, at her level. She then could use her hooves to push the claws apart and take the key with her magic. She jumped away from the demon's claws just in time when they tried to scratch her to death. Both of Oppression's front paws were tied up to the floor, leaving her only with head, tail, and hind legs free. Sweetie summoned three more shackles to immobilize the tail and hind legs.

Meanwhile, Oppression had felt everything. She knew that Sweetie Belle was in the kitchen and that she had taken the key back. Without wasting any second, she unextended her neck from all the way across the house back to the rest of her body in the kitchen. But before her head re-entered the kitchen, a thought crossed her mind that made her stop. If she were to let her entire body in a single room, that filly could easily just shackle her neck and throw her in a portal to Tartarus in one move. Oppression wouldn't let that happen.

Back in the kitchen, Sweetie Belle was surprised to see that the demon hadn’t just brought her head back to mindlessly attack her. Sweetie wanted to sigh in relief, but a second thought quickly brought her back to her guard. She understood that Oppression probably had a plan, but she couldn’t predict what it was.

Suddenly, the neck started unextending again. When Oppression had brought her head back in the room, Sweetie Belle immediately tried to shackle her neck. But the demon had wrapped her own neck with thick layers of crudely stitched together pieces of clothing, preventing the shackle from closing itself around the demon's neck due to the lack of space to do so. Sweetie was shocked and honestly amazed by the makeship cloth armor, then she felt bad for Rarity's dresses having been wasted on this, then she thought that Rarity would probably be more distraught by her cat turning out to be a demon, then she remembered that she was in the middle of a fight with said demon just in time to jump out of the way of a bite attack.

Oppression wasn’t smiling or frowning, but her quiet chuckles made it quite obvious that she was enjoying the situation. She turned toward Sweetie Belle and said: “Oh, my little pony. My little, foolish pony. What did you try to achieve with this? Exorcists are no more; we demons annihilated them. Soon, Equestria won’t belong to the ponies anymore. It will be ours, and you will be dead. You will pay for daring to bring exorcism back. YOU. WILL. PAY. WITH. YOUR. LIFE.”

Sweetie Belle wasn’t moving. She was just looking back into Oppression's eyes, blankly. She was shocked that a simple wrap of cloth was strong enough armor to stop her shackles. It felt dumb. Actually, it WAS dumb. While Oppression was delivering her little speech, Sweetie Belle just discreetly levitated a pair of scissors and used it to cut open the dresses around the demon's neck. The cloth ‘armor’ then simply fell onto the ground under Oppression's neck. Sweetie then shackled the neck, having Oppression immobilized with little effort.

Sweetie Belle's expression was still blank, unable to think of which emotion would be appropriate to the situation. She opened the portal to Tartarus, then pulled Oppression inside with the chains. Oppression was shouting about something, but Sweetie Belle didn’t listen. While she locked the portal back with a turn of her key, she thought about what had just happened.

Opalescence, Rarity's cat who she had been living with for so long, had been a demon in disguise all this time, at least according to her own words. This demon, whose name sounded like ‘oppression’, had tried to kill her in cold blood when she saw the silver key. This demon was also apparently the one who had once killed Silver Key, one of the greatest exorcists of his time who was also Silver Spoon's great-uncle. Sweetie Belle had been living with a powerful murderer all this time. Sweetie Belle had just defeated not just a demon in hiding, but also a crazed, dangerous killer who had once murdered, and with who, for a long time, she had been living with.

At this point, she just needed to sit down.

And so she did: she sat down, looking blankly at the cloth ‘armor’ she had cut open, which was laying on the floor, for the rest of the night.

****

When Rarity came back home in the morning, she was gaping at the sight of her shop in ruins. Furniture was broken all over the place, dresses she had spent days and nights working on were destroyed; it looked like a wrathful beast had been in there.

When Rarity's thoughts came into focus, she panicked. “Sweetie Belle!” she screamed. She rushed inside, ready to look for her little sister all over the place. Luckily, she quickly found her in the kitchen, seated on the floor, looking blankly at a bunch of stitched together, ruined clothes in front of her. She was wearing a dark gray cape and a necklace with a key, but it didn’t matter to Rarity in the moment. She ran to her little sister and immediately hugged her.

“Sweetie Belle! Are you okay? Please talk to me, Sweetie!”

But Sweetie Belle didn’t talk. She glanced up at Rarity, let out a few sobs, then looked down into space again.

“Sweetie Belle.” Rarity looked at her in the eyes. Saying she was concerned would be a huge understatement. “What happened?”

Sweetie Belle didn’t look back at Rarity.
“Opalescence left…”
She didn't speak another word.

Author's Note

Again, I'm really sorry if I take so much time to write. I'm writing this alone and most of my pre-readers are french.

I hope you enjoyed this chapter !