It was a nightmare.
That was the only explanation for what was happening to Twilight Sparkle. She never went on an expedition to Zebrabwe to learn more about Zebra culture. It was a nightmare, and she would wake up soon in her comfy bed inside her tree house. She shut her eyes tight and willed herself awake, but when she opened them, the sight was the same.
She was in a cell, although calling her surroundings a prison would have been paying it a compliment. It was a cage, with bars made of sickly, yellowing bamboo shoots. Her hooves were tied together and lashed to the bar above her, the ropes rubbing her skin raw. She could taste sweat and dirt and other things she didn’t care to think about on the old rag that was shoved into her mouth, choking back her words and making breathing a labor. Centipedes, worms, and other bugs crawled and writhed all around her in the dirt, the occasional spider darting across her body before she shook it off with her thrashing.
She tried to use magic for the tenth time in a row, but it was still useless. No matter how hard she reached, it never came; she was helpless. The fear welling up inside her grew stronger each time she tried and failed to use magic, as did her headache. She thrashed against the ropes again, causing her sore muscles to cry out in agony. She was bruised in several places and her whole body ached, and there was a painful itching and burning sensation on her neck.
The cage was in a small dark hut with wooden walls that had some kind of cloth draped over the entrance, letting barely any light in. The heat was stifling, sweat running down the length of Twilight’s body, tickling her as it went and dripping off of her forehead, stinging her eyes. Twilight had yet to see another living creature save for the bugs since she woke up.
She tried to remember what had happened, how she had come to be here. She thought back to the outset of the expedition with Zecora, the first couple nights in the jungle, and then… nothing. Everything after that was foggy. She took some deep breaths to calm herself down, focusing on thoughts of home for comfort. Her thoughts were broken by the soft sound of hoofsteps.
The drape was drawn aside and Twilight turned her head, trying to avoid letting the light hit her sensitive eyes. A silhouette appeared in the doorway for just a moment before stepping inside and allowing darkness to flood the room again. Twilight squinted at the figure in the darkness.
It was a zebra. His mane was shaved and he had traditional zebrican jewelry protruding from various locations on his head. Twilight looked into his eyes and shivered. She had never seen eyes that cold. She tried to talk, but her words couldn’t get around the gag. The zebra approached the cage, eyeing Twilight like a piece of meat.
He smiled. “And how are we today, meat? Is your room comfortable? Can I get you anything?” He had a thick accent that reminded Twilight of Zecora. Twilight just stared fearfully. “I said, can I get you anything?” Twilight was still and silent. The zebra shook his head. “Tsk, tsk, meat. You will learn to answer me when I speak to you.”
He produced a key and unlocked the cage, the wood creaking like an old coffin as the door swung open. The zebra made his way through the threshold and over to Twilight with slow, deliberate motions. Twilight’s heart raced and she stared, paralyzed with fear.
The zebra raised his hoof toward Twilight’s face and she tensed up, shutting her eyes and whimpering. The zebra’s smile grew wider. He barely made contact with her skin, a perverse imitation of a lover’s touch, gently caressing her face. Then took his hoof away, reared back and struck Twilight across the cheek, making her cry out as much as the gag would allow. “Now,” he continued, leaning forward until his face was inches from Twilight’s own. “I’m going to ask you again. Can I get you anything?”
Despite the pain in her cheek and the zebra’s reeking breath on her face, Twilight managed to shake her head. The zebra grinned, revealing grimy teeth and causing the golden hoops in his lips to spread apart in a frightening mock-smile. “I’m glad we understand each other,” he said. He stood and took a step back. “I’m Hos, and you will refer to me as Hos. Is that clear?” Twilight nodded; Hos smiled. “Good, you’re learning already.” He left the cage and re-locked the door. When he reached the drape and drew it aside, he cast one final look back at his prey. “Welcome to Tartarus, Twilight Sparkle,” he said. Then he disappeared.
Twilight sobbed, hot tears running down her cheeks and stinging the cut that Hos’s blow had left. She cried until it hurt, thoughts of Ponyville and her friends welling up inside her. She had told them that the expedition would take weeks. How long would it take for them to come looking for her? She tugged at the ropes again, thrashing until she wore herself out and the dark embrace of sleep overtook her.
(*)
“Wake up, meat.”
Twilight jerked her head up, nearly stabbing her horn into Hos’s face. She was still in the hut and her neck ached from the position she had slept in.
“Whoa!” Hos said, dodging backward. “Careful with that thing, meat. You’ll put somebody’s eye out.” He narrowed his eyes at Twilight. “Unless you were trying to hurt me.” He grabbed Twilight’s face and pulled it close to his own. Twilight resisted the urge to gag. “You weren’t trying to hurt me, were you, meat?” He shook her head back and forth for her and laughed. “Of course not, that would be ridiculous. Right, meat?” This time Twilight shook her head of her own accord. He released her and stepped back. “I just thought you should know what I’m planning on doing with you.”
He got uncomfortably close to Twilight and put his hoof on her stomach. “First, you starve. I barely feed you enough to keep you alive and you experience the worst cramps of your life as your stomach tries to digest itself. I will feed you just enough to keep you alive and make you hurt every second of it. You will beg and plead for even the tiniest morsel; they all do. Then, the torture. I won’t ruin what I have in store, but I will tell you that it is… unpleasant. For you, at least.” He laughed. “For me, it’s actually quite enjoyable. After that, well, I suppose you’ll just have to wait and see.”
Hos took the gag out of Twilight’s mouth, who coughed and sputtered and retched, but there was nothing in her stomach to come up. When she had brought her stomach under control, Twilight felt anger rising up inside her at her captor. She spit on Hos’s face, who wiped it off with his own hoof.
“They always spit. Why do they always spit?” Hos’s eyes went out of focus and he seemed to be talking to himself. “Do they think they’re showing defiance, telling me that they won’t break? That I won’t get to them? But I will. I always get to them in the end.” He looked into Twilight’s eyes. “I want to tell you a story.
“This isn’t the first time I’ve done this, you know. I’ve captured and tortured dozens, maybe hundreds of ponies.” He started pacing. “Not just ponies, but zebras and griffons, too. And do you want to know what all of them have in common?” He paused as if waiting for Twilight to answer. She just glared at him. “That’s right, they all spit. I remember this pony, a pegasus, who was absolutely horrible with the spitting. Just like you, the first time I took the gag out, he spit. Then, when I hit him, he spit again. I brand him, he spits. I break his wing, he spits. I even cut his tongue out, and he still managed to spit on me. I agonized for days over what I could do to get this pony to stop spitting on me. Should I sew his mouth shut? No, too impermanent. I could’ve sealed his mouth shut with wax, but that wouldn’t be a guaranteed fix either. Eventually, I just had to use these,” he gestured to the piercing through his nose, a long, iron bar, “to seal his jaw shut. I had to hammer them in from below at an angle so that they would protrude and could still be capped, but also so they would secure his top and bottom jaw. Very complicated, very painful. But guess what? He didn’t spit on me anymore.” Hos laughed out loud. Twilight couldn’t tear her fearful gaze away from the sadistic zebra, and he noticed. “You are right to be scared of me, Twilight Sparkle,” he said.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked, her voice hoarse and weak.
“They always ask why, too. Why does any creature do anything? Why do creatures drink, or play, or fuck?” He leaned down next to Twilight’s head. “I do it because it makes me happy.”
Twilight had no response. Hos reached into his one-sided saddlebag and took out an object, tossing it at Twilight’s feet. It was an old, rotting apple, skin sagging like the face of an ancient pony. He left the cage, making sure to lock it behind him, and drew back the drape at the entrance.
“Enjoy,” Hos said before disappearing from the hut.
“Wait!” Twilight tried to call after him, but she got no response.
Twilight looked down at the apple, her stomach growling and cramping. It felt like weeks since she had last eaten, but the cage made it impossible to tell time. She turned her nose up at the fruit, which had already begun to accrue insects, but her intense stomach pain didn’t allow her to ignore it for long.
She tried to lift it with magic, but her powers were still inaccessible. She stretched her back legs toward the fruit, but it was just out of reach. She struggled against her bonds, the coarse rope reopening her wounds as she tried to undo the knot. She yanked and tugged with all her might and her efforts finally paid off when the rope slackened just a little. She couldn’t escape the bonds, but she could reach the apple with her back hooves now. The moment she touched the fruit, trying to roll it toward her mouth, the skin collapsed inward. The interior of the apple was nothing but mush and bugs, and there was no way for Twilight to obtain it.
Twilight settled back, defeated, her stomach still cramping. Her mane was sticky with sweat, her coat was filthy and was starting to become matted, and her bruises and cuts weren’t healing. There was still a burning and itching spot on the side of her neck and it was driving her insane. She closed her eyes and cried, trying to block out her surroundings with thoughts of Ponyville.
She thought of her friends, and what they would be doing. When she had left, Applejack had been just getting ready for the harvest. Twilight imagined what the farmpony would say about the sorry state of the apple in front of her; she could practically hear the down-home country drawl making an amusing euphemism about the fruit.
Twilight latched onto that thought of Applejack, using it to rebuild Ponyville from her memories. She imagined Sweet Apple Acres, and in her mind took the road back to Ponyville proper. She could see Sugarcube Corner and Carousel Boutique, and even her own Golden Oaks Library. She built the fountain, the homes, and the other businesses, all from memory.
Then came the ponies. She pictured her closest friends first, imagining every little detail that made them unique and recreating images of the other Elements of Harmony in her mind. She populated the rest of her own Ponyville, using individual bits of memory like clay to sculpt her own little ponies.
Her work was interrupted by a wooden creaking sound, and Twilight was drawn from her reverie back into the waking world. When she opened her eyes, she was met with Hos’s form standing in front of her. She noticed that the rotten remains of the apple were gone, no doubt carried away by the bugs. There was no trace of the fruit.
How long was I out? she wondered.
Hos just looked at Twilight, who squirmed under his intense gaze. After what seemed like an eternity of the two creatures looking at each other, Hos spoke.
“Have you ever truly felt fear, meat?” he asked. Twilight nodded, and Hos took a step forward. “Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Twilight said. “I’ve faced threats to Equestria you couldn’t even dream of.”
“Is that so?” Another step. “Are you afraid now?”
Twilight gulped. “No,” she said, but she knew he saw through her.
“How brave you are, meat.” He took another step. “If you aren’t scared, then I must make you scared.”
Hos reached into his saddlebag with his hoof and drew it back, suspending the appendage in front of Twilight’s face. She could see a small spider clinging to the underside of Hos’s hoof. She recognized it immediately from one of her etymology books.
“Nocta Terrora,” she whispered under her breath.
Hos smiled. “So you’ve met,” he said. “Then I suppose you know that my friend here has the deadliest bite of any animal in the world. There is no antidote, there is no escape, there is only the fiery fist of agony and the cold hand of death.”
Twilight Froze as Hos lowered his hoof to her hind leg and the Nocta Terrora crawled with agonizing slowness onto her. Her heart sped up rapidly as every muscle in her body tensed up into a quivering equilibrium.
“Are you afraid, meat?” Hos asked. Twilight was too terrified to respond, and Hos reached his hoof down near the spider, threatening the slight bump that would goad it into biting her.
“Yes,” Twilight squeaked out. Hos moved his hoof away.
“Do you know what fear is?” he asked.
The Nocta Terrora was crawling up Twilight’s leg, nearing her hips, tickling like there was a pony blowing small breaths across her inner thigh.
Hos moved his hoof near the tiny death-bringer again. “I said—”
“Fear,” Twilight said, her voice raised an octave in terror, “is a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, evil, pain, etc., whether the threat is real or imagined.”
Hos didn’t move his hoof. “Not quite. I don’t want a definition, meat, I want you to tell me what fear is. What do you feel?”
Twilight’s attention was focused on the spider, which had crested over her hip and was crawling across her stomach. She could see the black spots on its back denoting its species, could almost make out the tiny fangs that would bring unimaginable pain at the whim of the zebra in front of her. She was Twilight Sparkle, wielder of the Element of Magic, the pony who had faced Nightmare Moon, Discord, and the Changeling horde, and she had never been more terrified in her entire life than she was at that moment.
“Please,” she begged.
“What was that?” Hos asked, cocking his head to the side.
“Please, I don’t want to die.” Twilight could feel tears forming in her eyes. The Nocta Terrora was on her chest now, almost to her throat. Twilight craned her neck backward, away from the monster. She felt the tickle pass the itching spot on her neck and she had to suppress the urge to swallow.
“That is true fear, meat,” Hos said. Then, in one swift motion, he snatched the spider from Twilight’s neck and re-deposited it in his saddlebag. Twilight let out a sigh of relief, but it was cut short when she saw the next item to come out of the bag. It was a knife with a hilt of bone, and Hos approached Twilight was the weapon clutched in his teeth.
Twilight clenched her eyes shut, but she was surprised to feel a tug on the ropes above her before they went completely slack and fell away. Twilight regarded Hos with searching eyes as he placed the blade back into his bag and drew out yet another object, which he tossed to Twilight. She fumbled with it for a moment before catching it.
It was an apple. Not a rotten, sagging one like before, but a fresh, ripe apple that looked like it had just been plucked from the branches of a tree in Sweet Apple Acres. Twilight bit into it, reveling in the sweet juices that rolled over her taste buds for only a moment before devouring the rest of the fruit. It wasn’t nearly enough; if anything, it only made her feel hungrier.
When she looked up, Hos was outside the cage, smiling at her in a way that made her spine tingle. “By the way,” he said, “have you wondered why you can’t use magic yet? As you may have been able to tell, I have a fondness for spiders. That’s a nasty bit on your neck.”
Twilight’s hoof jumped to the itching, burning spot on her neck. Her mind went through all she knew about spiders and one species in particular jumped to mind. Banius Cornus, “the bane of unicorns,” a spider whose bite rendered unicorns unable to use magic.
“From the look on your face, I’d say you’ve got it,” Hos said. “Your cage is crawling with them. You wonder why I just cut you down? Because you pose no threat to me, meat.” Hos chuckled and went to the entrance, pulling the drape aside and allowing light to pour in. Twilight shielded her eyes from the suns rays, making Hos chuckle a little louder before leaving.
Twilight got to her hooves, stretching her sore muscles and shaking off some of the dirt that had accumulated. She groomed herself as best she could, trying to drive her recent brush with death from her mind. She chose a spot in the corner and cleared away as best she could all the bugs and muck there, making it as hospitable as she could manage.
She laid down and let thoughts of her Ponyville take her away.
(*)
It wasn’t long at all before the physical torture started.
Twilight was laying in her spot, her mind racing with all possibilities of escape, when Hos came into the hut. It had been days since she had last seen him, since he had nearly killed her with a spider and then rewarded her with an apple. The sight of him brought back the pain in her stomach which she had been trying very hard not to focus on.
Hos had a whip in his mouth.
The cage door creaked open and Hos closed and locked it behind him. Before Twilight could react, he trotted over to her and struck the side of her head with his hoof. Stars exploded in Twilight’s eyes and her world spun. She felt her body hit the ground, followed by her head, but she couldn’t focus. Then another blow, and another, until Twilight’s vision was fuzzy and her mind equally so, her rational thoughts starting to slip away, replaced by the pain.
She tried to fight back, but her body was thin and weak. Hos said nothing, just fending off her pathetic attempts to hit him before seizing her by her front hooves and pulling her to the edge of the cage, dragging her body through the dirt. Hos shoved her hooves through the bars and lashed them together with a length of rope, deftly tying a knot before Twilight realized what was happening.
Twilight’s breathing was labored, and exhausted sweat was starting to mingle with the heat-induced perspiration on her body. She rested her throbbing head against the bars, careful not to let the fresh wound touch anything.
“You get thirty lashes,” Hos said. “Each time you cry out, you earn two more.”
Twilight barely heard his words, still focused on her own pain. Then, all thoughts were driven away by a hot, lancing pain in her back, running from her left shoulder to her right hip. She yelped, writhing in agony, hot tears forming in her eyes. It felt like somepony had cut her back open and set the wound on fire, a thin line of pure, white-hot pain.
The next whip strike cut the opposite way, forming an X on Twilight’s back. She cried out again, heedless of Hos’s words. It was impossible to focus on anything with this much pain invading her mind. She took a deep breath, biting her lip and waiting for the next lash. When she heard the whip whistling through the air, she shut her eyes tight and tried to relax her muscles. Shen the whip hit, her teeth clenched, filling her mouth with the coppery taste of blood and mixing with the salty tears that ran down her face to her lips. But she didn’t make a sound.
The whip struck again and again, each blow more painful than the last, until Twilight’s mouth was completely filled with blood and her bottom lip had been pulverized by repeated bites. With one brutal blow, she cried out again, expelling the blood from her mouth and making her tears start afresh, this time accompanied by sobs.
In Twilight’s mind’s race to find comfort in something, anything, it jumped to her Ponyville. She bit the bamboo rod in front of her and focused on home, drawing her mind away from her torment, and her tormenter. She went far away, concerning herself with her library and finding solace in the company of her imaginary friends. The pain was far away; she was no longer in Zebrabwe. Her mind retreated into itself, making it look to the outside world like she was asleep.
She didn’t make another sound. She could tell what was happening to her, but it was like she was an outside observer, not the mare experiencing it. She saw the whipping stop and she reluctantly resurfaced, her mind slowly coming back into focus as it rejoined her body. Her back still cried out, but she could ignore the pain now.
“I’m impressed, meat,” Hos said. “First-timers usually get a lot more than that. Here.” Twilight heard him rummaging around in his saddlebag but she couldn’t turn her head around far enough to see. Then she felt his presence move around her to cut the ropes, and soon she was free. She retreated as far away from the zebra as she could, going back to her spot in the corner. Each movement sent spikes of pain through her back, like her wounds were full of glass, but she didn’t care. She just had to get away from him.
Hos pulled out a wooden bowl from his bag, tossing it to the ground in front of Twilight. It was full of a lumpy grey substance, some of which spilled out with the impact.
“Dinner,” Hos said before tossing a bottle of antiseptic and a rag to her as well. She eyed them, then eyed Hos. “Wouldn’t want you to die before you could be useful,” he said. Then he left the cage, whip in mouth, and exited the hut.
Twilight’s aching stomach couldn’t turn away the gruel, which she devoured as soon as Hos was gone. It went down like cold oatmeal and tasted like paper and glue, but it was food. Then she went about the arduous task of applying the antiseptic to her own back.
Each time she tried to twist around with the rag in her hoof, her wounds widened and the pain from her whipping returned. Her eyes flooded with tears, more coming each time she managed even the tiniest dab on one of her wounds. The substance stung like acid, making her wounds hurt even worse.
Twilight collapsed into sobs, spilling the bottle all over the ground. She tried to focus on her Ponyville, but the pain overwhelmed her senses. Then, one memory cut through the fog of agony.
It was the memory of the first time Twilight had seen Princess Celestia, when the unicorn was just a little filly. Twilight concentrated on how when she had been so scared, so terrified of herself, Celestia had believed in her, had cared enough to help her in her time of need.
Twilight knew Celestia would come for her. She just had to hold out until then.
