The biggest changes in life happen at the most innocent times, blind-sided while idle, spontaneously combusting the warm, gentle world and leaving the bleak, charred prison in which we all are bound, shackled in misery.

“Ready or not, here I come!” Scootaloo excitedly yelled and turned from her position against the tree, blinking her eyes and narrowing them to readjust to the evening sun breaking through the forest’s foliage. She had counted to 50 and hopped happily, peering one way and then the other for the best hiding spots, knowing her friends were there somewhere. Her fledgling wings fluttered like those of a hummingbird in her childish glee, her whole being electrified with the intensity of the game and the friendship she shared with Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. The orange pegasus giggled, the rosy blush of youth dancing on her cheeks, and cantered off into the nearby brush in pursuit of her friends.

Sweetie watched the pegasus from her hiding spot, ducking her head out of sight as Scootaloo looked in her direction and then peeked from behind the tree again as Scoots sped off opposite her hiding place. Sweetie chuckled to herself and crouched, further concealing herself in the tall, yellowed grass. She knew she should be quiet but couldn’t help giggling gently, mirthfully, innocently as the child she was. The world was warm around her and it seemed everything was there for her pleasure; a singing cricket played a melody just for her, Celestia’s sun heated her core and filled her belly with a spreading feeling of safety, and the games with her friends, those comrades she knew would be there with her life-long granted her a peace of mind so succinct that the cold nights of life could not pierce. Sweetie was thankful, as thankful as the most devout worshiper of Celestia, for her friends and yet, above them, was her sister Rarity.

Rarity was her family, her protector, her best friend, and her beacon of hope. She loved her friends, but Rarity was on a whole other level. The bonds of sorority were the most tightly knit and those threads looped within the filly’s soft chest, wrapping her heart and embracing it with the most divine and truest of loves. Sweetie was in the cusp of her youth and yet understood her blessings and celebrated them. She smiled to herself, completely content, and silently thanked Celestia for the life she had as she hid from her friends.

“I see you, Apple Bloom!” Scootaloo’s voice echoed from the far side of the clearing they used to play hide-and-seek and Sweetie giggled to herself, ducking even lower. If Apple Bloom was tagged, she would be it and Sweetie would get to hide again. She already had ideas where to hide next but tried to remain focused or else she may lose the chance to hide again. She heard the thrashing of pony legs roaring through the scrawny underbrush and popped her head up to seek her friends.

It sounded as if they were circling her, Apple Bloom fleeing Scootaloo’s outstretched hoof as she weaved through the trees and attempted to circle back around to the clearing and the safety of the home-base tree. She couldn’t see them very well, just flashes of color illuminated by the lines of light from the canopy, brilliantly jostling glimpses of red, yellow, purple, and orange and the jubilant laughter of their race. Sweetie’s heart bloomed and she lost track of herself as Apple Bloom burst from a nearby bush with Scootaloo in tow, reaching and giggling. They came too close and Scootaloo’s expression changed to bewilderment as they stumbled upon the white unicorn hiding behind the scrawny tree in the yellowed grass. A small smirk appeared on the pegasus’ face and she skidded to a halt, allowing the nimble earth pony to go free having found an easier target.

Sweetie barely had time to move, let alone run, and Scootaloo’s hoof tapped her back. “Got you, Sweetie Belle!” the triumph in her voice was real and she beamed joyously.

“I’m it, I guess!” Sweetie remarked, not bothered by being the searcher; It was fun too, though she did prefer to hide. She looked out at the happily hopping Apple Bloom with her hoof planted safely on home-base.

Sweetie stepped from the grass and marched to Apple Bloom, Scootaloo following her closely. “Okay, I’ll count to fifty while you hide. Make sure you hide well!” She put her forehoof against the solid bark of the tree, pressing her eyes against the silky softness of her foreleg and began to count while the sounds of her friends scampering into the brush was caught in her perky, white ears. She counted, thinking of how much fun she was having and the excitement of searching, finding, and chasing those she cared for. A smile formed on her lips as she listed numbers in an ascending pattern, “ eighteen, nineteen, twenty …”.

She thought about where Apple Bloom would hide; probably inside the old hollow log, letting the shadows conceal her or maybe in the thicket of berry bushes that always seemed to offer plenty of hiding spots and tasty snacks that often enough caused the hunter to find you. “ Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one …”.

Scootaloo would probably go to the rock formation and hide in the natural bowl it made, safe from immediate sight or down by the stream where the babbling sound would mask her movements if Sweetie came to close. Sweetie grinned to herself and thought about them, how she loved them. “ Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine …”.

“Fifty,” a strange voice sharply finished, coming from right behind her and impossible to identify in the instant before Sweetie felt a sudden flash of heat and the world went dark around her. That was the moment that her world crumbled; the moment she was introduced to the stark cruelty of the world; the day her soul began to die.

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Sweetie Belle’s eyes popped open to reveal the dirty, flat pillow, brown-stained sheets, and strewn filthy blankets. The dream had come again, the last happy memory of her life haunted her dreams often enough to sting, penetrating the dead layers that shielded what remained of her hope. It had been a long time since tears had formed in the corners of her eyes to moisten the dark circles that marred her once-beautiful and innocent face. The memory had, long ago, stopped drawing water from the well of sorrow that drowned her heart but reached into its depths to pluck at the obdurate lump in her chest. That time was so long ago, did it really exist once or was it just a dream that belied the harsh reality that caged her? She wasn’t sure she knew the answer to that question anymore. In some ways, she wished it was just a dream, a fancy formulated by her fevered mind; at least then she could dismiss it as a fancy, an imagination, a lie to her enured life; then it might not hurt her.

Sweetie raised herself from the bed, the aches of her young adult body having become normal to the point of numbness. The sheets were a disaster of dried brownish streaks from those who used her, much like her coat. She wore the white of innocence naturally but it had become a dismal mockery of her character now, she was filth, trash, refuse. Her captors did everything to remind her of that every moment of her life.

Time was ersatz in her life, the windowless room did not allow for sunlight or natural darkness, only the false light that came from the overhead lumination tubes, unnatural and inorganic, like her continued sustainment in this mockery of life. She did not know when she slept or how long, to the point where it no longer mattered to her; it was just another thing lost to another life. She was trapped in a timeless survival only dotted with the few routines that gave some semblance of structure to her time. She was dimly aware of the length she had been incarcerated, but those few moments were single sparks in the blackness of the sunless world. She could only see the sunlight in her dreams now, some subconscious image of an outside world as tangible as those images of her friends and family.

And yet as locked in immeasurable time as she was, it did not cease, lengthening her legs and neck, and filling out the child body into that of a late teenager. Her form was thin, gaunt, and shadowed with slight malnourishment, but mostly darkened from the acceptance of her fate. Her lithe form was still attractive despite the hollows beneath her eyes and cheeks, the sullen ghostlike color of her once radiant coat, and the flickerless, lightless dead of her eyes. Her body, unfortunately, was what mattered and not the wormhaunt that resided within. Her head lifted to the spotted yellow wallpaper of her room-like prison as if noticing something different for the first time in years but drooped once more, eyes flittering across the ugly brown carpet dotted with cigarette burns and splashed here and there with water damage where a bottle of some strong spirit had fallen and poured out its guts. Her body quivered lightly and she wished for a few drinks of the burning liquid to suppress the need that was beginning to grip her.

She debated forcing herself up to shower in the only other room of her small prison. Doorless, so she couldn’t hide, it held a stained toilet, steel mirror, wash basin, and a curtainless shower. At least the water was hot and it may buy her some time before the shakes began.

She got to her hooves and walked into the bathroom, adjusting the handles of the shower until a thick steam rolled from the moldy, tiled washroom and she stepped beneath the spraying head. The heat felt good across her body and the quivering seemed to subside. The soap she had diminished to a thin strip of curled and cracked futility had been replaced by her captor, the disembodied voice that called to her from the speaker by the metal door when she had done something wrong or when it chose to mock her. She could not see his face and the speaker seemed to spread the voice out, making it bigger and rustier than it was. She knew it was the same voice that finished her counting that day long ago, but she could never discern the true tonality of it, the distortion too great. That voice still frightened her despite the years of acclimation. She could imagine the beast behind it; the ever-watching thing that had ruined her life.

Her ears perked at a coarse, grating noise from the other room, a sound like grinding teeth across a hoof file. She knew the sound well, the way it forced her spine to tingle, the faint internal discourse it caused. The tinny clash of metal and subsequent splash of thick, viscid liquid meant only one thing; it was feeding time.

The teenage unicorn’s legs had been chattering as they always did when that door opened, ever expecting her captor to reveal himself for one final, bloody moment when she had become too old for use. Such were the threats that she had heard for such a long time and she never knew when “too old” would occur despite her youth. If anything, she knew she could not trust the metallic voice that offended her senses like a rake on a chalkboard. Someday, his threats would cease to be idle and her life would end abruptly, violently. Her existence was a tragedy play but it was still life and the young mare had steeled a tiny piece of her resolve to escape, to hope, to freedom despite the desperation of her situation. Her dim eyes glanced to the tiles below the shower handles and the strange lack of grouting around them. She didn’t know how long he would keep her alive to serve those who sought her sexually but, with a tiny inkling of a smirk in her lips, Sweetie Belle knew she would live long enough.

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Sweetie had woken up face-down on a bed confused. Hadn’t she been counting just a moment ago in the forest, eagerly checking off time before she could begin the hunt for her friends? Her head ached and she could feel a diluted burn filtering through the back of her skull, expanding in little waves of dissolving pain radiating down into her neck. She tenderly brought a hoof to feel, touching a short lump that intensified the seething and bolted a fresh jolt of terrible pain throughout her head. She nearly blacked-out once more, tears forming in her eyes with each thrumming beat of her heart that racked her injury and prompted the young filly to bury her face into a starchy pillow on the hard mattress of the bed with deep breaths and eyes clenched in a weak attempt to guard against the pain. For a long time she lay face-down in the bed wetting the thin blankets with the moisture forming in her eyes against the pain from the rigid, screaming knot. It consumed so much of her energy that for several hours the filly did little more than fade in and out of consciousness.

The painful prodding of hooves on her soft, little body finally brought her from the blackness to the waking world. Her head no longer ached so severely but that was merely at the edge of her perception as her eyes beheld a stallion, black eyes peering lustily down at her, a faint line of glistening drool wetting his lips. At that age, Sweetie knew nothing naturally of relationships more than marefriends and coltfriends, a thing often teased about in her class at school and sex was a subject only breached by her sister in terms of being mindful of strangers because they may want to do “things” to young fillies. Somehow, with only this limited knowledge, Sweetie understood that the stallion roughly pressing her soft tummy was seeking the cryptically spoke of “things” and she let loose a squeal and kicked his probing forelegs away with her hindlegs.

“No! Rarity! Help! Somepony help me!” the filly cried, pushing with her hindlegs at the tan stallion with slick, greased-back mane struggling to control her. She wiggled and writhed, turning about as the larger male fought her to her back.

“Hold still, you little brat! This honor is mine and I mean to have my enjoyment before you are spoiled by others!” His voice was empowered with lust but held a tinge of arrogance, the foppish accent of hegemony. He was weak for a stallion, a sign that he rarely did physical labor, but far stronger than a little filly. Sweetie was turned to face him and held in place, pinned by his thin legs, her own splayed apart and revealing, embarrassingly, her private parts to him. Her eyes renewed a stream of tears and Sweetie could only move her shoulders feebly under this stallion’s weight. She stared up at him frightfully, not knowing what he meant to do with her and in a state of complete discomfiture. She only then recalled the voice behind her in the forest and assumed she had found its source.

“Please, don’t hurt me. I … I just want to go home,” the filly explained fretfully.

The tan stallion was wearing a red tie, something Sweetie had rarely seen and flicked her eyes confusingly to, a large symbol of currency had been embroidered in gold at the widest part of the accessory and Sweetie thought she recognized it momentarily but her gaze was brought back to the steel eyes of the stallion as he spoke. “Stop fighting me or I will clop you unconscious. Give me what I want and … ,” a wry smile splayed across his face and a look that Sweetie did not recognize filled his eyes: deceit. “ I’ll let you go home.”

The filly cried softly, staring up with big frightened eyes and gingerly nodded. “Just let me go home. Let me go see my sister. I won’t … I won’t tell.” She meant it, she just wanted to escape, to find her way home again and whatever she needed to do to facilitate her release seemed a bargain. The filly knew nothing of lust, desire, or sex at that moment and worried for her life not knowing that the stallion had no designs to cease her small heart’s rapid beating.

“You have to call me Daddy. If you call me Daddy, I’ll let you go after I’m finished. You can go and see your sister, Rarity. Won’t that be nice?” The stallion dribbled onto the filly’s stomach as he spoke but seemed not to notice, completely enthralled by the situation. Sweetie noted that this male knew her sister which meant he knew her as well. She tried to remember him, his appearance teasing her memory.

“Yes.” The filly’s heart felt as if it were about to burst in her chest and she couldn’t help but cry harder, her voice narrowly choking out her words. “Okay.”

“Okay, what?”

“Okay … Daddy.”

Sweetie screamed as the stallion took what he wanted from her. It had been the ultimate shock and she thought he was murdering her more than once during the intercourse. All the while he spoke to her and demanded that she answer him in the predetermined term. It wasn’t until his orgasms did he anoint her with a name, one that gave up his identity, and that name was Diamond Tiara. All at once Sweetie recalled the image of her bully standing with her father at school for career-day; a tall business-pony known for shady deals, underhooved practices, and morally bankrupt enough to sell anything. She knew this stallion was Diamond’s dad, Filthy Rich.

Author's Notes:

It's been a while and this is the first shorter fiction to be broken up with chapters instead of being posted all at once. I think these shorter chunks will aid in reading and make it easier to pause and digest. This is also a little different as it deals with something that is conceivably realistic not seen since Our Love, Eternal. Hope you enjoy.