Some days, when the torturess goes easy on me, when the chef makes edible food, when I can open my port-hole and stare at the sea, I can remember what it was like to be alive. I remember my mother, my Aunt, the real sun in the sky. I remember him. Blueblood. He should be given a royal title for what he did to me. Blueblood the Traitor. It has a nice ring to it. I should have left him back in Equestria. I should have listened to Candice that he was untrustworthy. Oh, who am I kidding? He was a 22-year old blank flank. I couldn’t help but bring him along. I wanted to help my younger brother out. But how could I have known he would be my undoing? That he would learn dark magics, that he would learn the secrets of death? That he would rip the mark from my side and banish me to a premature grave? How can I express my misery as I was pulled into the darkness and the shadows? Blueblood needs to pay for his crimes, crimes that I could have prevented.

I don’t know what time is anymore. I feel like I have lived a century, yet I do not age a day. My hair does not grow white, nor do wrinkles adorn my countenance. The scenery outside the ship is always the same, and I grow weary being stuck in a floating dungeon, the victim of a crazy torturess in employment of a greedy queen. If only I knew how to escape. If only I could feel Blueblood’s flesh against my twin swords as I cut him to ribbons. I cannot ever make peace with the traitor that stole everything from me.

They are coming back. I must go.

Novus closed his diary as hoofsteps approached. The white alicorn stuffed the journal into a large pile of hay that served as his bed. He ran a hoof through his black hair. Two uniformed marines appeared, dragging his cellmate, a purple horn-less unicorn, back behind bars. Novus watched silently as the guards deposited the unicorn onto the hard wooden floor, slamming the gate behind them. The unicorn rubbed her stump with her hoof, feeling the remains of her magical focuser. Novus had tried his best to patch her up.  A bandage was slung over her stump, as was over her left eye. He had applied ointment to her cuts, and wrapped her bruises with salve. The guards didn’t mind. They ripped the bandages off every time she went back to pain, taking with it scar tissue and scabs that had barely formed on her wounds. Through all this Novus watched as his cellmate slowly deteriorated, her once merely dejected attitude rapidly becoming bitter and mocking, rage building up inside the little purple unicorn. She refused all food, the only nutrients she ever got was when the tourturess force-fed her whatever slop the chef made today, covered in boiling-hot spicy sauce. She would laugh as the unicorn screamed, her mouth burning with both piquancy and pure heat, and would throw her back into the cell for Novus to fix.

Slowly, but surely, Novus would find out smatterings of his cellmate’s life. She was Celestia’s student in the real world, and had defeated Discord, the dragon of chaos by freezing him into a statue of stone. She would not tell Novus her name, nor would she speak of who she knew. Every so often, however, she would throw herself against the cell door as marines dragged a pony to the torture chamber. Novus observed who she charged at, and soon discerned that an orange earth pony with long, straw-yellow hair and a yellow pegasus with wide, tearful eyes and a pink, rolling mane were her friends. He carefully wrote all this down in his journal, careful to keep the book and the nub of a pencil he used to write hidden from the guards. He knew these kinds of security programs: tough, brawny, and low on brainpower, not like the more advanced ones that crewed Her Majesty’s ships and fought her wars. He had touched one on occasion, and found that they were made out of endless streams of ones and zeros, a security program, and not truly alive. The torturess, on the other hand, she was solid. Once, when Novus had kicked her, she only fell back. There were no ones or zeros, no endless lines of an indecipherable code. Only a shock of fluffy pink hair that flew out from under her hood as she fell back. He would try to explain all this to his cell-mate, but she would not listen, only rubbing her stump or rolling up into a ball, tears rolling down her face.

Once a week, the guards would let all the prisoners into the water to swim. They would deploy a huge net first, so the prisoners couldn’t swim away. Snipers still stood on the deck, their rifles at the ready. Once a week, Novus would meet with several other prisoners and discuss mutiny. They would talk for the entire exercise period, the guards ignoring them, only firing a warning shot or two when they got too close to the net. Slowly, over the course of a few days, Novus hatched an escape plan. Six other ponies agreed to try it: A burly, strong hulk of a unicorn, an orange pegasus with an eye-patch, a green earth pony with scars over his left eye, a thin, tiny, malnourished pegasus, a white unicorn with two-tone blue hair and deep blue eyes, and the orange earth pony that seemed to be friends with his cell-mate. He had learned her name, and the orange pony was glad to tell him his cell-mate’s name. Applejack told Novus about their adventures together,  about how Twilight, his cell-mate, rescued her from an illusion world, about how they both rescued the yellow pegasus Fluttershy from the spine of the Reaper. Eventually, Novus was able to befriend a message parrot, and wrote to an old friend of the burly, mustached unicorn. Captain McGregor himself personally wrote the letter, giving the wet paper to Novus to send by parrot. He watched the bird fly away as the sun set, confident that the friend would arrive in time.

With the plans ready and the phases all set, finally Novus decided to begin his heist. It was a black night, and the cellblock was snoring away on their haystacks. Novus sat on his hay, watching his cell mate silently cry before he prodded her with his magic.

“Twilight.” said Novus.

Twilight turned from where she was lying, supported by the haystack. “Huh? H-h-how did-”

“Applejack told me.”

“H-h-how did y-”

“Swim time.”

“Oh. Okay.” She turned back around, and buried her face in the hay.

“Twilight.”

“What?” She turned around again, her eyes bloodshot and red. Novus looked at her with his pale blue ones, free of any red veins crisscrossing across the whites.

“I know how we can be free.”

“Be free of what?”

“This prison that we call home.”

“How are we ever going to get out of here? The doors are locked. The ship’s in the middle of the ocean. What are we going to do, swim forever?”

Novus reached into the haystack and pulled out a wax key. The lump of white candlestick was molded into a perfect copy of the cell key, Novus having memorized the design from the countless openings and closings of the door that he had experienced. He looked around, seeing the two guards asleep at their stations. He fiddled with the key, the wax having dried after endless days of being left outside dangling on a string, the sun baking the wax and hardening it. He looked again, confident that both guards were asleep,

“Never mind that now, Twilight. We can get out of here right here, right now. No more pain. No more torture.”

And with that, Novus reached around the bars. He stuck the key into the lock, and to Twilight’s surprise, unlocked the rusty gate. The door swung out, creaking on its joints. Again, to Twilight’s surprise, the guards did not hear the squeaking of the door. Novus silently crept out, magic muffling his movements as he silently slipped the keyring out of the guard’s hoof. He crept to the nearest cell, and unlocked it. He went to the next one, and unlocked it. Slowly but surely, Novus unlocked every cell in the block, waking the prisoners and shhhing them. Twilight watched in awe as the alicorn released the prisoners, and then, without a warning, he shouted.

“PRISON BREAK!”

I will have my revenge on you yet, Prince Blueblood.