It can’t end like this. She can’t leave thinking you’re a complete and total shit stain. You’d betrayed her, disappointed her, and hurt her feelings, and that was just tonight. You feel like you’ve been run over by a train after running a marathon, though, and who’s going to know if you call it a night, curl up in the field and hope she calms down by the time you wake up?

Except she has her bag. It’s not going to be there on the counter anymore, scrunched by your jacket while you drink your Mountain Dew in the morning. The teakettle won’t be whistling at six in the morning, and the strange bittersweet herbs she makes her tea with wouldn’t fill the apartment with their trippy botanical garden scent. Her snail trail of blue hairs would be gone the next time you vacuum, sucked into the dustbag along with any chance you have at happiness.

And you never had recorded her voice.

The spirit link is almost dead. You push yourself to your feet one more time, figuring out what you’re going to say as you stagger after her.

Everything hurts. It’s got to be way past eleven now. Most of the lights of the tents and rides have gone out, so only the orange glow of the restroom lamp and the faint sparkling of Luna’s tail are left to guide you as you race into a thickening maze of fog. She’s almost to the trees, her hoofsteps muffled by the long, unmown wildflowers and the clamor of the tree frogs. You have to catch her before she goes into the forest. After that, you know for sure you’ll never see her again.

She doesn’t hear you running up behind her, still out of breath from trying to catch her before. Now is your chance. Now you’re going to turn it all around. You reach out to give her tail a tug.

“Wait! Before you go, I just need to …”

Your foot catches on something. A hole, or a log, or just a stray tree root. Your words die in your throat as you flop downward.

As you fall, your outstretched hand makes contact with Luna’s rump, brushing down the warm, smooth coat where her immaculate crescent moon sits amid its mottled patch of black.

A second later your face slams into the ground. Dirt and clover wad through your broken teeth.

Fuck moles. Fuck clover. And most especially, fuck your goddam life. Why can’t you just have a normal conversation with your … what? She’s not your waifu, she’d said, and you’d proven you’re not good enough to be her son. Your grip your trembling hand, still tingling from when it had passed over Luna’s silken hide.

You had made a mistake. You had touched her when she did not wish to be touched.

And you had touched her ass.

“Enough!” she cries. Before you can brace yourself for the beating you’re sure is coming, she grabs you between her forelegs and ignites her horn. There’s a loud crack, and the snickering of the frogs is replaced by the layered chorus of an endless sea of crickets. And Luna’s holding you, tight between her hooves, looking down on you with the stars of her mane and the clear night sky flaring behind her.

A hug! She forgives you! She loves you after all! She had just been playing you like girls do on Youtube when they pretend to slit their wrists in the bathtub and the boyfriend comes in and thinks they killed themselves, and …

She lifts you up into the air like you’re a toddler and slams you down onto something long and flat. Before the shock reaches your brain, she slams you again, crushing the wind out of your burning lungs. All of your sprained joints and broken bones jar at once, searing the moment of impact into your thoughts. When you try to curl onto your side, you feel her hooves hook around your shoulder, pulling you onto your back. She pins you down under her shoulder while you gasp to recover your breath.

The spirit link comes crashing back, piping Luna’s hatred through the burning walls of your psyche, a black wellspring flooding the bottom floors of your soul.

Her face descends over yours, blotting out the dim clouds. Never before had you appreciated just how big she is. Her bared teeth are inches from your throat, the threat unspoken, but real. The only thing you can do to shield yourself from the wrath she’s blazing down on you is shut your eyes and turn your head.

“At last you’ve shown your true colors, you obnoxious, muck-eating worm!” she hisses into your ear. “I knew you were simple. I knew you were a coward. But a deviant? I cannot believe it. You lack the gall. No, this was a joke. A bawdy game you wanted to play, to spite me before I could escape this sloshing chamber pot of a world. You are less than those pigs at the carnival!”

She pinches your face between her cold hooves, her fury winding up to hurricane strength. “By assaulting me you have committed treason. Therefore I declare your life forfeit.”

Forfeit? The word is familiar, but not one you used enough to know what it means. Lawyers used it on those daytime court shows your mom watched when you were a kid. When the defendants lost they … they had to pay …

When you feel Luna move, you open your eyes. You’re on a cot, it looks like, with a line of rolling pins or something instead of springs. The ground is worn dirt and stone a few feet below your head. Luna’s sweet mane is swishing against your ear as she jabs at something out of sight.

A motor sputters once, then roars to life.

Luna turns back to face you, smiling now. “There are ponies I know for whom this would be but a minor inconvenience. Let us see how well you fare.” She rises, just enough for you to see where the noise is coming from.

In the faint moonlight you can just make out the outline of your feet in front of a chute. A ribbon of motor exhaust drifts by.

Luna hadn’t forced you onto a cot. You’re on a conveyor belt. The chute is the metal hood of a wood chipper.

You freeze, unable to move or breathe. It’s the one she’d asked about on the drive to the fair. She’d felt happy when you’d told her what it was. Maybe she’d been imagining killing you this whole time. Maybe she’d made up her mind weeks ago. And you’d gone and given her plenty of reasons.

She places her giant silver shoe against your shoulder and nudges you forward.

Still you wait, hoping she’s playing, hoping she’s just doing this to scare you, and that she’ll laugh and you’ll be able to hear gentleness in her voice again, and she’ll take you back to your apartment to your Mountain Dew and Doritos and everything will be …

Something knicks the tip of your sneaker.

It isn’t the sound of the cut that gets you, or the way Luna’s joy surges at your mounting terror. It’s the way the blade went through as if your foot hadn’t been there at all.

You flail to roll off onto the ground, shimmying beneath Luna’s steepled legs and body. It only takes her a second to notice. She falls on you with all her weight, a landslide of muscle collapsing onto your face and chest. Your ribs crackle, breaking like a pile of wet sticks.

It’s too much. You can’t breathe.

Her words rip through your panicked thoughts as she slowly walks you forward.

Suffer, worm, as I deliver you to Tartarus.

The magic of the spirit link changes. Now your feelings are bending to Luna’s intent, becoming the picture of despair that she demands them to be. As your feet enter the blades, she plunges your soul into a lake of boiling oil.

You start to groan into the black, crushing silence of Luna’s shoulder. Your feet are shaking, too hard and too fast to be out of fear alone. It doesn’t hurt much. Rapid warm tugs, papercut tingles, a lightening of the load … you deserve … you had earned … no …

Every thought leads to her. There is nothing to know but what she commands.

You deserve this and more, and if I had you chained in Canterlot’s dungeons I would give it to you. Day after day I endured your buffoonery, and the shame your cowardice heaped upon me. I came to you as an ambassador of peace. I offered you the most precious gift I had to give. I opened my mind and my heart to you, and after all I tried to teach you, in the end you rejected them in favor of a moment’s jest. In favor of flesh and bone.

Pressed flat under her terrible weight, you feel her grow warm with exertion, her onyx breastplate rising and falling like a guillotine as she breathes, cutting into your shattered ribs and stomach. The spirit link had become a catalyst; every new burst of hatred she feels becomes your own. You hate yourself as she hates you.

And there is no better way.

The pain consumes you like a fire gone out of control, and you squirm to fan the flames. The stumps of your feet scrape against the steel housing of the threshing turbine, giving you more of what you deserve. Yours is a life that was never worth living. Yours is a mind that does not belong in a world of beauty, peace, and dignity. Her world. She is cutting you out of it, and you want nothing more than to help her.

She pauses, delighting in your brokenness, savoring the view of what the turbine is doing to you. What little is left intact of your sanity swirls through your inner chaos.

No … no … I didn’t mean it … I just wanted to …

Before you can finish your plea, two loud cracks reach your ear over the machine’s vibrations carrying through the conveyor belt. A second later your calves wrench into knots, the ankle tendons severed loose.

The scream bubbles out of your throat before you can stop it, only to fail against the bulk of Luna’s shoulder as it forces your jaws apart, a bouquet of lilacs, lavender and jasmine crammed into your mouth.

I shall give you what you wanted.

Luna’s joy blooms as your muted scream goes on and on, her weight forcing your jaws wider and wider open. She leans back to increase the pressure on your head, still pushing you deeper into the machine. Something crunches in your spine at the back of your neck. Stars flash in the suffocating darkness just before your jaw cracks at the joints, separating from your skull.

There’s no time left. You’re almost out of gas, giving in more and more to Luna’s overwhelming assault. Still, your instinct for survival remains; the primal need to keep living no matter how miserable living would turn out to be. Maybe that’s all you’d ever had.

What do you want? Please, tell me what you want! I’m sorry!

Luna gets up at last, stepping back to evaluate her progress. Blood is trailing down her chest and forelegs, dotting her coat in spatters and dripping stars. She regards you with a faint smile.

“What do I want? I want you to disappear.”

She raises a hoof high above her dark crown, and brings it down on your face with enough force to break your nose. More blood erupts from your newest wound, cascading through the fragments of your front teeth, down the top of your mouth and into your throat. Your guttural, shapeless shrieks become high-pitched gurgles as you try to cough it out.

Luna’s voice is soft and calm over your frenzied spluttering. “You are rubbish. And so, I am disposing of you.”

She hammers your head and neck, unleashing her fury anew. Blow after blow finds your unprotected face, and as the skin flays and strips away from the bleeding muscle beneath, she pumps raw despair into your heart through the spirit link, flushing out any hope that still lingered there.

When she stops she laughs, appraising your disfigurement. Satisfied with her work, she steps closer, scooping up your useless legs in one foreleg.

She brings her muzzle close to your ear. “In olden times, we would ensure that the worst criminals would suffer as much as they could endure without perishing, before completing their execution. I will serve you in the pony way.”

With the blade of her free hoof, she starts hacking at the tattered ends of your shins, chopping and folding the meat up toward your knees to reveal the bone. You lie still, trying with all your might to feel the despair she wants you to feel.

She knows you’ve given up. She knows the pain is giving way to shock, which is why she’s going to reawaken it.

She presses her hooftip against your exposed nerves, crushing and twisting them against your naked shinbones. A piercing agony you could never have imagined races up and down your spine, igniting the phantom space that used to be your feet with electric agony. Your legs kick in a reflexive need to get away from what was damaging them, to run from the danger. Luna hugs them to her chest, letting you squirm in her grip while she resumes picking and scraping. She turns her gleaming sea-green eyes to your face, drinking in your hopelessness, rejoicing in the interminable minutes of your abject surrender.

Satisfied, she places a hoof against your sweat-soaked hair, still suspending your legs in the crook of her foreleg. Her wings and mane surround you, their sweet scent mingling with the warm night air and the exhaust leaking out of the motor and the iron-on-iron stink of your blood on the hot hammers and blades of the turbine.

Without a word she pushes your head, jamming it into your fractured neck to slide you again into the reeking hood. This time it costs her some effort to keep control. She clamps tight to dampen the juddering of the blades as they grind against the thicker bone and gristle of your knees and thighs. She releases the flood of despair into your soul once more, and the liquid rasp of your weeping mixes with the flatulent roar of the blades as they puree your flesh.

She smiles down on you, cradling you within the storm of metal.

For a moment, you see your mother, hovering over you after you’d fallen from your bike years ago after a long day of fishing at the creek. She would clean up your scraped knees. She would gather in the fish that had spilled out of your bag. She’d hold the washcloth full of ice cubes against your bruises, and sing you to sleep.

Your jaw wags in its rent socket.

Mom?

Luna stops, peering into your eyes. “Mother? Still dithering about that, are you? Look!” she spits, forcing your head up to give you a view of the black, empty space that was unmaking you.

“This is your mother.”

Blood is flowing over the sides of the conveyor belt, gushing in rhythm with your pulse. It won’t be long now. The pain is fading into a calm background ache. It would be good, and easy to sleep. But you have to try to stay awake. You have to please Luna as best you can. You have to suffer more.

“Yes, worm,” she says, reading your worried thoughts, “I will give you more.” She lets your dismembered thighs drop at the cusp of the turbine, dips her head, and rams her horn into your gut, all the way to the razor edge of her crown. Grateful for the new pain, you wail to let her know she’s still able to hurt you.

Deep inside you feel her magic working. Your guts are shifting, bulging your stomach as they churn. You watch the shapes stretch your skin, wondering what new horror she’s creating within you.

The magic ceases for a moment. Luna withdraws, smiling as if struck with a thought that amuses her.

“Was this what you wanted?” she sneers, blinking your blood from her eyelashes as it drips down her brow. Her eyes are blue now, it seems, cut ice in the moonlight. “Something like this?”

You search the edges of the hole she’d made in you with trembling fingers. “Ngo … ngo … ngo …” you moan.

She lances downward again, and again you feel your insides start to squirm. This time, when she tears her horn out of you, they don’t stop moving. It feels like there’s an animal inside your guts, biting and scrambling to get out.

You’d seen Alien. You know what’s coming. You’re going to be an incubator. In a few minutes something out of your nightmares is going to splatter through your stomach, screeching like a newborn and hungry for its first meal.

So that’s it. After all this, you’re going to be baby food.

Luna laughs, a delicious poison you’re desperate to drink. “No, cretin! I have conceived no monster within you, though such a fate would suit well a waste of flesh like you.” She steps to the control panel.

“I have doomed you to live. To live, as long as it takes for this machine to have its way with you. I have changed you. Your innards will feed from one another, sharing blood and fluid so that you might be aware to the very rending of your pusillanimous heart.”

She’s going to kill you! At last she’s going to kill you! And you’ll be able to share your last breath with her. She’ll have the satisfaction of …

“Your final moments will be spent alone. That is your sentence, for I know my absence is what you dread the most.”

And with that, the spirit link breaks. No gentle fading, no warning. She’s gone.

You rasp through the blood clogging your windpipe, flailing for her, needing to touch her soft, star-strewn mane. Needing her hatred within you. You couldn’t have lived without her, and now at the end you fear to die without her. Now the space inside she had filled with her thoughts is empty.

Now there is only silence.

She taps a button on the control panel, and turns a knob. The conveyor belt starts rolling, inch by inch into the darkness. She smiles, radiant like the moon, and speaks.

“Suffer.”

Suffer. That is the path you had chosen. As you watch her turn and walk away into the field, you understand the reason she’d chosen this as her final word to you. You weep, a soft, bloody gurgling to accompany the ecstatic praise of the moon that the crickets are pouring forth. There is no joy like her wisdom.

In the distance, a circle of light has appeared. As it grows, you can see bright sunlit clouds within, and distant mountains topped with clean white snow, and fields of wildflowers of every shape and color. It’s a different world. A world unspoiled by humans and their petty greed and wars and skyscrapers and asphalt. A world of pure joy.

The heat and the noise, and the fumes of exhaust grow stronger.

Luna reaches the circle and stops, turning her head one last time to watch you. There’s more beyond, in the other world. A city in the mountain haze, a place of peace and riches. Farmlands and orchards stretch for miles below it, tilled in long perfect furrows, full of life and bounty. There is no worry there. No worry, and no fear.

The last thing you see before your head enters the hood of the blades is Luna smiling, happy at last as she waits before the portal to that bright green world filled with sunlight and birdsong you think can only be paradise.

Author's Notes:

Awww yeah! Nothing like some good old fashion enkillenation, am I right? I don't know about you, but I can't think of a better way to die than to be tortured to death by Princess Luna.

What's that, you say? You were hoping the Night Princess would be the one to get her comeuppance? Huh. Well, if you don't mind a change of scenery, I'd humbly direct your attention to my story "Life is a Party". It should provide what you're looking for.

Technical note:

This chapter was mildly influenced by the "Lover's Vow" segment of the 1990 movie Tales from the Darkside.

Musical epilogue/visualization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqugo1Y7z-M