Author's Note (August 26, 2015): Hello! I'm sorry I haven't been able to post anything for the past couple of days. With school again, I've been pretty busy but I haven't forgotten this story at all! This chapter incorporates more information from the plot developed in the series' canon from both the St. Olga's and Mewnipendence Day episodes. I hope you enjoy, and I'm sorry if you wanted to see more Star and Marco, but they won't be mentioned in this particular chapter. They'll be back being the cute dorks (or sappy cinnamon rolls I've made them) in the next chapter. 150% less depressing! I promise :)


"Toffee, I have heard much from you and your desire to remove the royal family from the throne," Miss Heinous said, her back turned against him, staring outside the window.

"I would do everything in my power to undo the great injustice the Butterflys have caused for all of us," Toffee said. Around him stood his army, and in a corner, Ludo was sitting on a stool, still bound by rope and gagged.

"The contemporary version of St. Olga's Reform School for Wayward Princesses most are accustomed to, as you know, was established by me, to teach disorderly royal girls to become subservient, dutiful leaders of their nations."

"All of us are quite aware of it," Toffee said succinctly. "Your work has helped many."

"Yes, but that is what most would like to believe. Princesses come here bashful and rebellious, but they leave quite well-mannered and decent. Alas, rumors spread, making the institution seem as if it were a bad thing."

"Well, you must admit, it is just about any teenage girl's nightmare."

"Oh yes, but their individuality, that is something royal teenage girls cannot afford to do."

Miss Heinous turned around, darkly crooning. "I find my work quite enjoyable, but, I have ulterior motives. Common interests between you and I."

"One of your guards, he told me just about everything this academy desires. The revolution, the assassinations...the prophecy."

Miss Heinous' eyes narrowed deviously and murmured, "So you know?"

"I know only enough with what your guard revealed to me." Toffee leaned closer with a sly smile. "I am all for it."

"Come, we have much to talk," Miss Heinous said warmly, standing up with a cup of tea in her palm. "Your men, they may rest in the dining chambers. The girls are all asleep now and shouldn't be going about to bother you all. The guards, they are quite efficient in their work. Not a single incident in months."

"I'm quite impressed with the security here."

"The best part of it all, is that none of them need to be compensated for their services."

"How so?"

"Observe. Jasper!" she cried. A bulky guard ran up to her at once with his chest puffed out, ready to demonstrate his loyalty to her. Miss Heinous grabbed Jasper's neck and forcefully twisted his neck, revealing intricate wires and machinery within the detached head and the stem.

Toffee looked with intrigue and said, "Well I must say, between this and the anti-magic crystals, I do not know which of the two is better. Who are the geniuses behind these technological marvels?"

Miss Heinous gave Toffee a crooked smile. "Geniuses? You're staring right at one of them. Oh, you must see my laboratory later on. I am a master of her craft in metallurgy and alchemy. Some research...and a little magic along the way has helped me wonderfully."

They continued on their conversation down the hallway, small talk over Miss Heinous' work as an administrator and a scientist, but Toffee was distracted by his concern of working with whom he perceived as a clear enemy. She seemed to rival him in intelligence and brilliance, that he had not expected. She had more leverage than he had, and he loathed the thought of becoming merely a pawn, of what he had grudgingly accepted, as a capable, dangerous foe.

They arrived to the end of the hallway, which led them to a wide rotunda with hallways in all directions. Each arch was held in place by sturdy, polished columns of dragon-headed statues, and a dim light shone from above. Toffee stared and gasped, surprised.

"You are familiar with this portrait?" Miss Heinous asked, as if she had expected Toffee's reaction.

"I have seen similar, but not as impressive as this."

"I know you've been through it."

"Know what?"

"You were born during the wars. The wars between Mewmens and the monsters, your kind."

"The Great Monster Massacre," Toffee scowled lowly.

"Only one of the many atrocities committed at the hands of the Butterfly family."

Toffee gave her a cold look. "You don't understand."

"Perhaps, I have not," she replied aloofly, wrapping her hands against her back as she walked slowly across the floor. "Have you wondered why this portrait is here, of all places?"

"No."

"You know what I, we, want?"

"I do."

"What is it?"

"To reunite the Dark Lord and his bride, and to cleanse Mewni and all worlds."

"Ah, but that is merely the simple answer." She looked up, admiring the artwork, and studying the finer details, before looking back at Toffee. "This pays homage to the judgment to come. These are your ancestors, your people, enacting retribution against all those who have caused you all misery and suffering."

"But from my understanding, would we not be destroyed as well?" Toffee was genuinely curious, although cautious not to evoke Miss Heinous' suspicion of his doubtfulness.

Miss Heinous grunted dismissively but said kindly, "Now why on Mewni would we wish upon ourselves mass suicide? Cleansing the worlds does not total to utter annihilation. Only those who have wronged the innocent shall fear the end. The Dark Lord is not evil, nor will he seek to destroy the world we know. Just as day and night comes, he is change, change for the better to come. But change does not mean the removal of the old...only an improvement. That improvement...begins with the heads of the Butterflys on the plate of revolution."

Toffee still had his doubts, and Miss Heinous recognized this, but continued. "I know what horrors your people have faced." She stared at his scaly skin pitifully and looked at him. "I know you, and the others, they were not always like this."

Toffee stared at her in disbelief. "You know?"

"Oh yes, quite indeed I do. The Queen, she placed the curse on you all."

Toffee sat down and combed his hair with his claws, frustrated at the very sight of them. "Look...look at what she had done to us."

"Your people, the people of the Detrix, they were kindhearted and simple folk. Independent-minded and well-spirited."

"But the Kingdom came, and demanded tribute, forcing us to surrender our crops, food, clothes, and homes."

"You all resisted, and started an uprising, but in the end, you were crushed because ill-equipped peasants stood no match against a well-fed army...aided by magic."

Toffee glared, and painfully choked, "Then...then they began killing off the men...my father."

Miss Heinous stared at him sympathetically, the first instance that night that her face showed an expression other than sternness or rigid smiles. "I tried to stop them."

"What do you mean?" Toffee asked, confusedly.

"You may not know it...but I, I am partially responsible for all the horrors that ensued. I am sorry."

"You don't mean to say…"

"I am...or, I was, I was a member of the Butterfly family," Miss Heinous said solemnly.

Toffee stood up and growled, "You did this? You did all of this to us!"

"You have every right to be angry, but believe me, I wished I could have done better."

Toffee, realizing that Miss Heinous had, to this point, been hedging for the downfall of the Butterflys, and not to mention the fact lived and led a heavily armed school that he was in, calmed down and sat back on the floor, to hear her out. "I apologize."

"Do not be," Miss Heinous said assuringly. "The guards, the living ones, they know, they know that I am of royal blood. I finally revealed to them this not too long back."

"By what relation are you to the Queen?"

Miss Heinous' face turned grim. "It would not be hard to guess but that I am her one and only sister."

"You are Princess Luna?"

"I was, and I would have become queen of Mewni."

"I had always, or rather, everyone had thought that you died in a horse carriage accident prior to your coronation."

"It was merely a cover-up by my mother," Miss Heinous said rather hushedly, as if she were wary of the presence of others nearby. Her eyes darted around before she looked at Toffee. "You might not see it in me now, but as shocking as it is, I used to be a wayward princess."

"Irony."

"I was the most repulsive princess there ever was, and never once cared for the affairs of the court or the palace. My mother disapproved of my conduct severely, and feared my ascension would spell disaster for the kingdom."

"Had you ever held or even used the wand?"

"Of course I have, it is custom for the princess or prince to receive it on their fourteenth birthday. Immediately starting off with it, I used it and decimated an entire village."

"Decimated?"

"Turned all the townspeople into frogs, but the damage dealt would have been just as severe as vaporizing them."

"So what led to where you are now?"

"Ah, that journey was a long one. As you are familiar with, my supposed death rendered my birthright to the throne obsolete. The line of succession would pass through my younger sister, only a tender age of seven at the time, rather than through me. I was forced off the palace, despite my pleas, and sent away to this very academy, not as a princess of Mewni, for I was dead, but as a maiden-servant.

"My rebellious spirit at first, could not be contained, but over time, I learned, and learned to control myself, almost completely purging all that defined me. I wanted to prove to my mother, my family, even though they never came or knew how I was doing, that I was worthy to be queen." Miss Heinous frowned sadly, clubs appearing on her cheeks.

"Clubs…" Toffee acknowledged. "So it is true."

"Indeed," Miss Heinous sighed uncharacteristically. "My sister, Moon, she was coronated on her eighteenth birthday, thereby removing any hopes of me becoming queen. I was devastated, here I was in these very hallways, scrubbing the floors, destined to be queen, only to be disowned, discredited, and disregarded. The whole world believed I was dead, an unfortunate but anecdotal mishap of the Butterfly lineage.

"Finally, after I had risen in the ranks of the school staff hierarchy, I finally received a call by my family, to summon me to attend an event held by my sister. I was thrilled, and prepared to return back to my family. I did not care for the throne anymore; I only wanted my family once more.

"It turned out, this event, it would be an event that would forever change my outlook in life, and haunt me." She gave Toffee a somber look. "It was the day she had sent the order to punish your people. She knew I had, for a long time, wanted the crown, and she didn't believe that I was a changed person. She thought I was still the impulsive girl she had grown up knowing briefly, and then hearing from the scorn by parents said. She wanted to crush my hopes, and show me what it was like to be queen. She made me her 'representative', and forced me to oversee the orders."

Toffee frowned, sighing heavily. "That damned bastard."

"And so I went, blindly so, not fully articulating just how horrifying her orders were. I watched from above a tower, to give the queen's orders, to commence the executions, and to commence the pillaging. I was about to, until I saw the children, I saw the town's children, all running up toward me, crying for forgiveness and mercy. Soon all the townspeople came, dragging along their...oh." Her clubs darkened, and her eyes watered.

Toffee held out a hand for comfort but Miss Heinous kindly declined, clearing her throat. "Ah dear, thank you. But, there they came. I could not bring myself to do it, but the guards warned me, even if I did not do the order, they would proceed to kill them, and then they would kill me for defying the queen.

"I told them right there, I told them that if that were the case, I'd die with them, and that if my sister were here, she would have seen what wrongs she had committed." It was the first time I had shown defiance and stood based upon my conscience in years, and my cheeks, they flared and revealed my clubs. Up until then, even the guards had not known of my disappearance and believed I was dead. They were horrified, and stowed me away back to the palace. The last glimpse I had of your village, I saw only red and heard the cries of the...of the." She paused, trying to recollect her thoughts. "The children."

Toffee winced in pain, recalling the day. He remembered clearly, everything that Miss Heinous, Luna, had said. His memories, they were fuzzy and unclear, but the one memory that struck him on that fateful day, was his father on the bed, who was terminally ill. The soldiers were surrounding their cottage, and his father instructed Toffee to hide beneath a haystack.

"Stay there my son!" his father weakly begged. The door bursted open as Toffee tried muffling his screams, as the soldiers dragged his father out of the bed, and stabbed him multiple times, his entrails falling out and dropped his still moving body sacrilegiously on the floor. His father stared directly at Toffee, trying to take a last good look at his son, before his eyes drifted away.

The next instance, Toffee found himself pulled out of the haystack, and brought out to the streets, where his neighbors, he remembered faintly, were fighting against other soldiers leading them to their deaths. Beating him, the soldiers jeered and taunted him, reminding how they had just killed Toffee's father. One of the soldiers went bold by whipping out a sword, grabbing Toffee by the right hand, and hacking one of the small boy's fingers. He let out, he recalled, a bloodcurdling scream, as he tried to wrap around his gushing wound, and it stung.

"And then she came," Miss Heinous said. Toffee listened attentively, wishing to hear more of Luna's side of the story. "Moon, she came. She apparently knew I could not carry out the order and arrived to assess the damage. That day, to cast an everlasting legacy and warning to all those who dared oppose the kingdom in the realms, she cursed your people. She condemned to become ugly, brutish creatures, the same form as the monsters Mewmans had fought against since Mewni's foundation. Ironically, many of these monsters were ones your people had fought so often. Tragically, they suffered the same unfairness that the original monsters had as well."

Toffee did not remember the exact moment he had transformed into the reptilian appearance he now possessed. He knew, that it were only a few days after the attack that he woke up to find himself scaly and slimy. As if it were not enough to lose his father and his finger, he was malformed into a sickly beast. He had every reason to enact vengeance upon the Butterflys.

"I returned to the palace, and my sister had all the guards who knew of my identity to never speak of it, and I was sent back to the school once more. Not even a dinner, not even a night to stay. She merely had me come to see the massacre take place, almost as if she sadistically enjoyed my suffering." Miss Heinous said gloomily.

"I was traumatized. I could still hear the screams and remember the faces, and knew, and knew I could have done more. I had fully learned the wrongs my family had done, and did everything in my power to get myself to forget both my heritage, and of that day.

"I began fully embracing the princess mentality, and wished upon the same blissful ignorance and duty expected on all other princesses. I suppose, one could say, through the years, I had grown into an entirely new person, almost completely separate from the past I came henceforth.

"I became a new individual, but I did begin speaking to my sister again, but always never in person. Always by mirror, and she had the look of shame and contempt at me. Never once did I ever please her, and she cared not of my own accomplishments, and she never even acknowledged the work I did for the kingdom. She never appreciated me in the least bit.

"Finally, the cracks began to show up again, the signs of rebellion, the roots that defined who I am returned, slowly but surely, and then, I began to realize all my life, I had been trying to repress myself in favor of a cause, a lost cause, and evil cause. The crown was mines, and the kingdom had suffered enough at the hands of a maniacal tyrant.

"When I learned of my niece, I knew there had to be a way to put an end to my family's rule. My sister spoke of sending her off here if she failed to use her wand responsibly, and so I tightened security here and held a firmer grasp of order and discipline here. But at the very same time, those compelling thoughts of defiance and individuality, they began working their way up. The thoughts returned to me as fresh wounds, and I broke down, broke down thankfully in private, in the laboratory, but the guards, they knew. They saw the clubs."

Miss Heinous had been pacing herself as she spoke, walking back and forth across the floor. She now stopped, and said to Toffee. "Look at the floor, and look at what you see."

Toffee stood up, and observed, finally noticing the unusual designs that spanned across the floor. He was sitting atop a sun with an eye juxtapositioned in the center of it, and near Miss Heinous was an encircled star. Around them, there was crescent moon, with various symbols drawn along it.

"Has that crack been there?" Toffee asked, pointing towards a sizable fissure running through the center of the moon.

"It appeared last week," Miss Heinous said curiously. "We had no idea how that had happened. But this all here, this school, it was built by an order of masons who were sworn to secrecy. They were knights of the stone, but were fascinated by the occult, and consulted with spirits and used sorcery. They produced this room, at the heart of the school, to hold their meetings, but they left countless of work suggesting visions predicted by their soothsayers."

"These have something to do with the Dark Lord and the bride?"

"We believe so, at least since the school soothsayer began receiving premonitions for the past three months."

"And why do you believe her so readily?"

"Because she has accurately predicted the future several times before already."

"Where is she?"

"I will show you," Miss Heinous said, once again leading the way, this time, to a different hallway.


Author's Post-Chapter Note: Leave behind your thoughts and reviews! I appreciate them greatly and I thank you all for being patient with me. Waiting for this is still not anywhere near to horrible as waiting 2 more weeks for the latest SVTFOE episodes and 3 weeks for the SEASON FINALE! That'll be exciting, but I guess (most of us) will have to suffer through school/college first. Let's embrace it; we can make it! Until next time!