Sorry for the delay, fillies and gentlecolts. They didn't want me to continue my memoirs, not after they saw this latest entry. But even in my current, diminished state, I'm a rhetorician of some skill, and I was able to wear them down. It's just information, after all. A confession, even. Coming clean, after all these years. Isn't Honesty one of the Elements of Harmony?
Anyway, I'm sure you've all been on the edge of your seats wondering how I escaped these masked zebra - there's really no way around it, although I detest the word - cannibals. Well, the short answer is that I didn't. The cannibals seemed to have judged me strong enough to work, because they set me to chores at once. For a day, I was just sweeping and tidying up, but then they also got me stirring the Draught - the vile brew that I now knew got its brown color from the aged blood, fat and marrow of zebras. Its coppery vapors made my head spin and my stomach turn, and for a while I considered running that day. Not to eat Fish or Flesh; that is the Law. I knew it as well as any foal, and to eat another speaking, reasoning creature was a high offense. But I didn't have the guts, or maybe I was thinking too clearly. I was fairly certain these zebras were stronger and faster than I, and I knew they had the advantages of numbers and the home terrain. Besides, I had already broken the Law without knowing it. I was already damned, so what was the harm?
Instead, I stayed with them, and drank their Draught, and ate the grains they mixed with it, eating as they did. They only slightly shifted their masks to eat, never removing them entirely. Occasionally they would eat a zebra's cooked meat, as well; the third time I saw this, they offered me some, and I accepted. I learned their language, slowly, painfully, word by word. My qualms with eating zebra flesh and drinking their blood faded with each passing day. It was amazing how quickly I grew strong again - stronger than I had ever felt in my life. The Draught, I learned, as I saw them add carefully chosen herbs to it, was not merely a dietary supplement, but a potion. Cannibalism, in every culture that has it outside of starvation conditions, is founded on the idea of absorbing the strength of the dead, and I think the Draught serves as a mechanism to make that belief reality. I carefully memorized the recipe, fascinated. I had never considered potion making - "the people's magic," as Star Swirl the Bearded famously called it.
One day, having learned enough of their language to satisfy myself, I asked one of the two mares. "Why did you not kill me?" I asked.
The mare, who normally answered to questions she understood, was silent. When I repeated the question, she left the room. I didn't push my luck. I was gaining their trust, though. I was taught to skin, tan, and prepare a zebra carcass myself, and then to create the Draught. Finally, there came a night over a month after my capture - a night of the full moon. I was told to drink with them from a special version of the Draught - a version that used fresh blood and shone crimson in the moonlight. My memories after that are⦠hazy. I remember my skin split open all over my body, shallow wounds across my limbs, back and face, blood dying my fur as a zebra's stripes. I remember charging into a zebra village whilst screaming, my knife in my teeth. I remember being knocked over by a zebra mare protecting her foals, wrestling the mare, my knife flashing. When my memory returned, it was broad daylight. I had no wounds. I was outside the masked zebras' hut complex. There were two dead zebras next to me, a mare and a stallion, and no masked zebras to be found. I waited there two days, but they never returned, so I departed as well, belly full, a large clay jar of freshly brewed Draught on my back. I laughed at how the pony who had left home all those months ago could never have carried it.
He doesn't mention it explicitly, but this is when Red Velvet got his Cutie Mark - four red hearts, slightly darker in the middle and brighter at the edges.
Oh, and Island of Doctor Moreau reference because it seemed appropriate to an implicitly vegetarian society.
