Um, okay, wow. I'm actually almost afraid to show my digital face around here again, considering how long I've been gone...sorry? Anyway, to anybody who still cares about this story, please accept a chapter full of the most twisted things I could dredge out of my mind as an apology.
"Are you coming, Twilight?"
Celestia's lyrical voice bounced off the stone walls, making Twilight's head spin even more than it already was. Metallic hoofsteps moved off into the darkness, getting more and more distant, as her three remaining legs shook with shock and agony. She could no longer feel her ruined hind leg; that was probably a bad sign. She knew that that should probably scare her, but she was mostly just grateful that so much of the mind-wrenching pain was gone.
"Twilight?" The hoofsteps stopped.
No! No, leave me alone! she cried piteously inside her mind. Out loud, she just whimpered a little as her legs gave way, dumping her onto the chilly floor. She felt more blood rush out of the mangled meat of her hind leg with every beat of her heart, a spreading, sticky puddle that soaked her tail and overpowered the stench of rot in the air with its own coppery scent.
Celestia sighed. "Honestly, Twilight, do I have to do everything for you?"
Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and felt them burn with tears of pure terror. The feather-light touch of magic surrounded her, lifting her into the air. A gentle pressure on her leg stopped the flow of blood.
She drifted through the air, and cracked her eyes open when she came to a stop. She was surrounded by a cloud of sun-gold magic, with the same weird red tinge as before. Celestia's while muzzle was inches from her own purple one. Twilight stared dumbly at her mentor. Only one lavender eye was visible, reflecting the light of her magic. The other was covered by her flowing mane.
This can't be happening, Twilight thought hazily. Her mind felt sluggish. Not really. Celestia didn't bring me down into a creepy equine-sacrifice chamber under the castle...she didn't tell me she tortured Luna...she didn't shove me into an iron trap and just watch it while it crushed my leg.
"I'm getting tired of cleaning up your messes," Celestia said sternly, her horn flaring brighter. "First that 'want it need it' spell in Ponyville, and now you can't even deal with your own leg."
I bet I fell asleep while studying, Twilight thought. Or maybe Rainbow Dash came in for a landing on my balcony, and knocked me off, and I'm in a coma in the hospital. I should really talk to somepony about this dream when I wake up, something this twisted can't be normal.
The slight pressure on her leg increased. Twilight blinked, forced to tear her mind away from her complete disbelief that Celestia could be capable of what she seemed to have done. She flicked her blood-soaked tail and moved her forelegs, opening her mouth to speak.
"Princess-"
Then the pressure clamped down on her leg, and agony rocketed through her body. Her stomach lurched, and she tried to scream, but her throat ached, and nothing came out but a breathy whistling. She felt magic sinking into her ragged, torn flesh, probing at the cracks in the bones of her legs and the marrow that was oozing out of them, and tugging, almost business-like, at the gushing veins and arteries that had come loose from the meat. The white face of the alicorn in front of her blurred as her eyes welled with tears of pain so intense she couldn't believe she was still conscious. Twilight sobbed, tears spilling down her cheeks as she tried to keep her leg steady. Maybe that would help with the pain. A hideous pain knifed through her throat, and she shook.
Celestia smiled beatifically.
Hours seemed to pass before the torture, finally, ebbed. Twilight hung limply in the cloud of magic, her mane and tail matted her her body with sweat and tacky blood, her hooves dangling pathetically above the stone floor. Her eyes were wide and staring, tears still dripping from them and sticking the fur on her cheeks to her skin. It was the salt that did that, she remembered numbly. Her face would be crusty with it when the water evaporated.
"All done," Celestia announced, and then the magic holding Twilight up vanished.
"No!" she cried, terrified, but when she landed on her hooves, her weakened legs held her. She panted, trembling, and tried to work through her amazement at the fact that she was standing. Something was odd. Besides the obvious. It took her a second to figure it out.
She was standing on four hooves.
With her mouth falling open slightly, Twilight looked back at her hindleg. She shuddered at what she saw. Golden-red magic had taken the shape of a perfect leg, glowing next to her other one. The magic went all the way up to her flank, where it branched into tendrils, coiling around her cutie mark and wrapping over her haunches. With a wave of nausea, Twilight realized that some of them...oh, goddess, some of them went under her skin, delved inside her. She could see the golden glow through her fur, pulsing gently like a hideous blood vessel.
Tearing her eyes away from the things that went inside her-she didn't want to think about them-Twilight examined the magical prosthesis a little more closely. It was a marvel of mystical engineering, and, under normal circumstances, she'd spend days discussing all the details with Celestia. It was transparent, and she could see what was left of her real leg floating in the center of it. Ragged edges of flesh fluttered pathetically, and veins and arteries drifted like macabre strands of seaweed. She even spotted a bone fragment bouncing idly off of the walls of the constructed limb, and then she had to turn away, shuddering.
"Come with me, Twilight." Celestia's spiny wing descended on her, and she twitched in horror and disgust. "I have so much to show you."
The princess began to guide the unicorn out of the chamber, Luna's rattling breaths fading behind them. Twilight moved like a mechanical pony. She walked in the direction that her mentor wanted her to, deeper into the horrifyingly dark tunnels that stank of blood and equine suffering. Her mind was frozen. She couldn't function, but somehow, she noted that the magical leg worked just as well as her real one had, if not better. All of the pain was gone.
As Celestia led her into the darkness, where the ominous golden-red glow of her horn was the only light, Twilight looked up at the alicorn who had been her teacher, best friend, and surrogate mother for most of her life. Her expression was just as serene as ever, despite a smear of scarlet gore on her jaw. It must have come from Twilight's leg.
"Princess," she began. She felt tears sting her eyes again as she asked, in a trembling voice, "What's wrong with you?"
Celestia gave her the same gentle, indulgent smile she always did. Was it Twilight's imagination, or was there something more sinister at the corners now?
"There's nothing wrong with me, Twilight," she murmured, leaning down to nuzzle her student. Her mane flowed over Twilight like a liquid, and her muzzle automatically wrinkled in revulsion. Celestia's mane stank of blood and iron. "Anyway, we're here."
Her horn brightened, revealing a stone doorway framed by pony skulls. The unicorn affixed to the keystone was larger than the others, with a more elongated muzzle and an elliptical shape to its cranium. Like Celestia and Luna. There was only an impenetrable, solid shadow behind the doorway, which Twilight couldn't understand until the corner of it lit up with Celestia's magic and it was pulled back like the curtain it was. Golden-red light spilled out, along with a stink even more severe than in the chamber that held Luna. Twilight dropped onto her haunches and clapped both forehooves over her muzzle, eyes watering. Rot, blood, fetid waste...she didn't try to pick anything else out.
Celestia nudged her to her hooves. A spiny wing cupped her haunches, and shoved her into the room.
Pony skulls of every tribe, age, and gender lined the curved walls of the circular chamber. It was from their empty eye-sockets that the light oozed, pulsing gently to the beat of some alien rhythm. Twilight saw that the horns had been brutally ripped off of some of the unicorns, and in the mouths of a few earth ponies, their teeth had been replaced with wolf-like fangs that had been shoved in hard enough to crack the bone of their jaws.
Oh, goddess, I hope that didn't happen while they were alive...
She looked past the skulls, at the other contents of the room, with dawning horror. There were racks and tables, stone and wood and all spattered red and black, for strapping ponies to. Instruments of torture hung from pegs. She didn't recognize most of them. There were buckets of decaying flesh, flayed organs hung from the ceiling and rained maggots at the slightest touch, and cages filled with bones held together by strips of dried meat were scattered everywhere. But the worst thing, by far, were the ponies themselves.
There were seven in all. She thought. It was hard to tell, in some cases. Like where one pony lay sprawled in a cage, his skin stretched so taut over his body that every bone could be seen. All the excess skin had been cut open and then sewed shut around a bundle that Twilight was almost sure was another pony, trapping it tight against the muscle of his back. Neither were moving.
A unicorn stallion lay with his upper body strapped to a stone table, his hindlegs dangling off. His flanks, sides, and back looked oddly sunken, and Twilight soon saw why. His mouth was forced open so far that the skin had torn raggedly at the corners. A tangle of organs spilled out of his jaws, resting in a jumbled pile on the table in front of him. Stomach, liver, intestines-she even spotted a heart and lungs-all still miraculously hooked together, and to their owner, judging by the cobbled-together network of veins and arteries. The heart beat, and the glistening gray-pink intestines pulsed. The organs were still functioning, and the pony they were attached to was still alive.
A mare was slumped against the wall, in a spot where there were no skulls. Apparently, there was no longer any need to restrain her. Her chest and belly were a jigsaw of puckered sutures, and her mouth hung open, slack. Her eyes were open, as well, though-Twilight fought down panicked screams-the raw, empty sockets were lined with...teeth. Small, bloody, mismatched fangs. Twilight couldn't tell if they'd been shoved root-first into the bruised, mangled tissue, or if they had grown there.
There was a pegasus in a cage, mere feet from her. She could only tell it had once had wings because of the thick muscles of the shoulders, neck, and chest, a structure that she saw every day on Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy. There were no wings now. Oozing, obviously-infected sutures criss-crossed its back, and all four of its legs had been viciously broken, until shards of bone sliced through the skin. But there were more legs, from another pony, anchored to its shoulder blades by crude stitches where the wings used to be. All five of those were intact.
And, there, on another table, was the earth pony mare that at least four of the legs must have come from. She was just a head and a torso, with pus-filled sores where her limbs used to be. Mercifully, her chest wasn't rising up and down. This pony, at least, had been allowed to die.
A low moan of pure horror worked its way out of Twilight. She had never seen anything like this, hadn't even known that such things could exist. That anypony would be capable of doing things so vile and twisted to other ponies. How...? Why...? Those questions kept echoing in her head, even as she looked to the seventh victim, whose large hooves were strapped tight, holding him to a rack.
His head was bowed, orange mane hiding his face, but, wearily, he raised his head while she watched.
Her first thought was that the pony was wearing the front of a skull on his face, like a mask. Then, with a horrified shock, she realized that the blood-streaked bone was his face. All of the skin and muscle had been stripped from it, making his green eyes bulge desperately and exposing his tongue in his mouth.
Twilight stared at his red coat, his solid build, the apple cutie mark on his flank. Her heart dropped into her hooves.
"Big McIntosh," she whispered.