My hooves trot delicately over the tile floor. I’m shorn of my usual regalia, without even my casual crown on my head or horseshoes to protect my hooves. My body is little more than a vague shimmer in the air to even the keenest eyes, and my hoofsteps are silent as the grave.

Heh. Appropriate comparison, considering where I’m breaking into.

The School of Medicine at the Crystal Empire’s Sir Spike the Brave and Glorious University isn’t the best in the world. I’m not afraid to admit it – Auntie Celestia always said that a good ruler is honest with herself about her country’s comparative strengths and weaknesses. I’m not even sure if it’s the best medical school in the Crystal Empire. But, right now, it has just the thing I need: dead bodies.

No, not like that! I’m not going to eat them or… EW! Get your mind out of the gutter!

I must admit that my experimentation isn’t going as well as I’d hoped for. I’ve considered bringing Twilight into it, but… The poor dear isn’t much more socially adept than she ever was. She doesn’t quite grasp the way that Shiny’s suffering in the way I do. She might not be willing to make the same ethical compromises that I am. She might even freak out at me and go running to my aunties. I don’t think they’d like it if they knew that I’m trying to artificially create a soulless alicorn body and put another pony’s soul into it. They might try to stop me. But when I succeed, they won’t have any choice but to acquiesce to it. So bringing her in to help me will have to be a last resort plan.

I never thought I’d wish Discord back early from that extraplanar jaunt he went on, but I could use his help right now. He’s loaded with magical knowledge and power, and not so squeamish as Twilight. He’d probably do it too, just to see the rise it got out of Auntie Celestia. The inevitable centuries of taunting I’d have to endure from him about the “pretty pink perfect pony princess going all goth on us” would be a small price to pay to have Shining back, in the flesh…

My thoughts are interrupted by the sounds of hoofsteps on tile. I freeze where I am, terrified somepony will see through my spells, though rational me says that isn’t likely. I’m quite good at perception-influencing magic.

A unicorn stallion in a security guard’s shirt walks around the corner, his horn casting a simple cantrip to illuminate the darkened halls of the university. The light sweeps over me, and my instinctive brain wants to panic, but I clamp down hard on it. He can’t see me, I know it… I’m right. He walks right past me without a pause or a sideways glance.

I release a breath I didn’t realize I was holding before deciding what to do next. Even if he missed me this time, I’d rather not take even the smallest of chances with this sort of thing. How would it look to the ponies of the Crystal Empire if their princess was caught stealing bodies donated to science, especially shorn of context? I really don’t need a political scandal on my hooves.

My horn glows, and I reach out with a spell to lightly touch the stallion’s mind…

“Aren’t you feeling just a little bit tired?” my voice, barely more than a whisper, wafts over to him like a gentle breeze.

He freezes where he is, and for a split second I wonder if I’ll need a more potent charm, but then he nods his head, slowly but surely. “Yeah. I’m feeling kinda tired right now.”

“You’re a hard worker, aren’t you?”

“I’m a hard worker.”

“It’s two in the morning. All reasonable ponies are asleep at this hour, right?”

“Right. Everypony’s asleep right now. ‘Cept me.” The last sentence bears a trace of resentment. Good. It’s working.

“You deserve a nap, don’t you?” I gently prod him.

He nods, more enthusiastically this time. “Yeah, I deserve a nap.”

“Do you think you should go and take one then?”

“Yeah! I should go take a nap. Who gives a flying buck about this creepy old building anyway?”

My inner refined high society mare winces at his swear, but my spell seems to have worked to perfection. He trots off to find some place to sleep, and he won’t remember that it was anypony’s idea but his own. I hope he doesn’t get in trouble with his bosses for this, but sometimes risks have to be taken. I can’t do much to help him if he does - the princess can hardly intervene in some no name security guard’s disciplinary hearing in the middle of an international summit without raising some suspicious eyebrows. If worst comes to worst I vow I’ll hire him on myself. We always have some positions that need filling. ‘Tis simply a fact of life when you employ thousands of ponies at all times.

With the obstacle dealt with, I trot down the rest of the corridor and take a right, where the guard had come from. A thick steel door marked “Authorized Personnel Only” tells me I’m in the right place. The vault door in front of me opens easily to a simple spell, letting out a waft of cold, smelly air.

Inside the frozen room are two dozen cadavers, laced with magic and pungent chemical preservatives to ensure freshness. These ponies donated their bodies to science before passing away, so that makes what I’m about to do somewhat less bad, right? It’s not exactly what they had in mind, but they are helping to advance the cause of medicine in their own way. I don’t want to rob a funeral home, and I certainly would never kill a pony for their body, but I need to try a different angle on my experiments.

I delicately float a pair of unicorn bodies – a mare and a stallion – off the tables where they rest. With a flash, they vanish back to my prepared spaces. I clean the space as best I can, so it looks like nopony was ever there. I close the vault door behind me and lock it again before I teleport myself back to my lab.

Teleportation is an imprecise art, especially if a pony is moving herself or objects some distance. To compensate, I have some runic circles set up to act as beacons for me. I’m pleased to see that both of my stolen cadavers have made it back intact. I try and stay focused on my feelings of success rather than on the wave of guilt that comes crashing down on my conscience. Look at me now, world. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, grave robber. Wouldn’t Mom and Dad be so very proud of their little filly?

More guilt is the last thing I need, but if it’s for Shining then I’ll bear the burden. It’s not as though I don’t deserve every last bit of it.

When I’m done with these bodies, I swear to myself, I’ll cremate them myself and return the ashes to the families, per university policy. Hopefully, between the alterations to the records I’ve already done and the apparent following of standard procedure, nopony will notice anything happened. I just have to hope nopony has paid too great an attention to the exact number of bodies they have, or comes in asking about the body of their relation.

But even on the off chance that they do notice, who would think to suspect the princess?

Focus, Cadence. There’s a time limit on this. You need to be back up in bed with Shiny before five thirty, or six at the very latest. Time to try something new.

With my efforts to figure out what makes an alicorn out of a regular pony stalling, I’m going to approach the problem from a different angle: bringing a dead body back to life.

No, not like you’re thinking. Resurrection – true resurrection, the reuniting of the body and a soul passed on to the afterlife – is utterly impossible. Even for alicorns. Not even Discord is capable of that. But the body, I know, can live on without the soul. For a time, at least; without a soul the body is a hollow shell with no motivation and no ability to perform any tasks. A soulless body is essentially a brain dead coma patient on life support with no hope of recovery.

Unless, of course, somepony inserts a soul.

I don’t need to waste my strength on a futile quest to reach beyond the veil of death to pull Shining’s soul back. It’s still with me, right where I want it. All I have to do is repair the damage that caused bodily death in the first place, and then give the biological systems a restart. A tall order, but I think I might be able to manage it after some practice.

These are uncharted magical waters, as far as I know. Nopony that I can find record of has ever tried to restore life this way. Many have tried to pull back the souls of dead loved ones through magical might and perished in the attempt. The ignorant would call what I’m going to try necromancy, but anypony educated in the magical arts knows that that vile discipline is simply about animating corpses as puppets, not restoring them to life. My aim is not to produce a zombie.

But this is ultimately a half-measure, at best. Nothing more than a stopgap. Any ordinary corpse I could revive would eventually age and die again, eventually decaying to a point where I couldn’t force its systems back into life. Not to mention it would foist off all the deceased’s medical problems on Shiny. I would have to rotate his soul between bodies fairly regularly, and that would be tremendously hard on him. The one and only time Twilight and I moved his soul from his original body to the golem we made, it took him weeks to be able to function out of bed. It simply wouldn’t do to ask that of him again.

But if I can learn how to force a corpse back to life… My eyes wander to the alicorn skeleton. It’s only part of a corpse, and by all accounts it was a female, but maybe… just maybe…

I shake my head and get to work.

I reappear in our bedchamber just as the first tinges of orange glow are beginning to appear outside the eastern window. My first attempts at bringing back life could have gone better, but I wasn't expecting miracles on the first try. At least I still have fairly intact bodies to work with.

It brings a smile to my face to see Shining asleep, right where I left him. I re-cast my silencing spell and walk carefully over the carpeted floor before slipping back into bed. I snuggle myself up underneath the covers. Like always, our bed feels wonderful.

And I feel like shit.

Sorry. Was that a rude way of putting it? Probably. But I can’t really help it. Princess Mi Amore Cadenza, mares and gentlecolts: neglects her kingdom for weeks on end to watch her husband die, emotionally blackmails him into accepting an eternity in a rock, accomplishes the deed with spells cribbed from dark magic, denies a body last rites because she might need it, lies to her husband and sister-in-law and aunties, and now steals bodies in the dead of night to experiment on. And all that because she’s too selfish to let her very special somepony go.

And just to make everything worse: I know all of this. I know that all that I’ve been doing is wrong, and I rationally, consciously choose to continue down the path anyway. Where will it take me before I manage to achieve my goal? What depths will I willingly sink to in order to craft an ageless body for my husband? I simply can’t answer that, because I don’t know. And yet, knowing what I do, I’m completely convinced that it will all be worth it, in the end. What does that say about me, as a pony and a princess?

You know, life isn’t fair. I deserve to be the statue, not Shining.