"Let's start with you telling me why you were in the Palace."

"..."

"Why were you inside my Palace, today?"

"...I, I work here. The Night Guard. I work for your s-sister."

"Oh my. Do you now?"

"..."

"Do you now?"

"...Y-yes."

"Are you asking or telling me?"

"Y-yes? I mean yes! I do, I do! For the ISND, in the Night Guard, you can ask anyb-pony there, I do. P-Princess Luna knows too!"

"Oh my. Is that the truth?"

"Yes, yes."

"Is it the complete truth?"

"Yes, it's the truth, you can check, I swear, I promise!"

"And is that also the truth, now?"

"Yes. Y-your majesty."

"What were you doing outside the Night Guard section, then?"

"N-nothing!"

"Oh my. Nothing?"

"Nnonono, not like-! I was going back! I was there, for a trial, the court, P-princess Luna was there! It's the truth."

"Is it the complete truth?"

"Yes. Please."

"Why were you at this trial?"

"W-why?"

"Yes, why indeed were you at this trial?"

"B-because I was summoned. But I'm innocent! I was acquitted, completely acquitted! I swear, Princess Luna can verify everything, she was there." Prey begged.

This is how it began.

"Let's start with you telling me why you were in the Palace."

The baking heat of a cloudless, midsummer day.

The dry heat filled every inch of the doorless, windowless room. Prey didn't know where he was. He didn't know where he'd been taken. He wouldn’t know in which direction to flee even if there had been any exits. A glow pervaded and lit the room, a soft gold. It seemed to come from the very air itself.

He was scared. He was so, so, so frighteningly, bone-shakily scared.

The room was hot. The air was hot. The bare stone of this featureless room was hot. It couldn't not be hot, because of the radiant white presence of the only other person in the room. But Prey was shivering uncontrollably, his shaking legs almost unable to hold him upright, cold clammy sweat beading on his scalp, and his stomach filled with a slush of ice and terror. His ribbon was gone, left behind, beyond his desperate reach.

And there was a golden dome of transparent light over him, adding to the pervading lighting. Prey cowered in the very middle, and dared not move in case he brushed up against any portion of it by accident.

"Why were you inside my Palace today?" Celestia, the all-powerful solar alicorn repeated quite calmly. She sat there, impassively looking at Prey, and he was so scared.

She was seated on the only furnishing in the otherwise bare stone room. An enormous red satin floor cushion, which she had materialised or summoned just after she'd teleported them in here. Wherever here was. And after she'd first sealed him helplessly inside this golden barrier. The additional shield was unnecessary. He'd be cowering in the farthest corner even if the shield wasn't there. Even now, Celestia was maintaining the spell without even a thought.

If Prey touched it by accident, would it burn away his hoof to the bone, blackened muscle and nerves left exposed to the air? Was she going to start shrinking it smaller and smaller?

Prey didn't dare to move. He could scarcely breathe he was so scared.

The huge alicorn with her enormous, perfect white wings folded comfortably at her sides on the cushion, patiently waited for him to give her answers. She didn't seem to be in any hurry. She was an immortal, she had all the time in the world.

It would have been obvious to even a blind person that Prey was terrified of her. Celestia's beautiful features only showed a polite sort of mild interest in the situation she was causing. She would have the all-important answers she demanded, one way or another.

She was waiting for his answer.

She wasn't going to stop waiting.

Prey did not want this. He did not want those vivid magenta eyes to see him. He did not want to be here.

It took more courage than Prey knew he possessed to crack open his dry mouth and whisper his desperate answer. He didn't know where the courage came from, but it wasn't his, it couldn't be his. He needed his ribbon back. He was going to be sick.

" ...I, I work here. The Night Guard. For your s-sister."

And then Celestia had continued, and Prey could have cried. He just wanted to be left alone, not here, not imprisoned, and not by her- the Sun Wolf.

But Equestria's glorious daytime sovereign, with golden-clad hooves the size of his head, and a mask as immaculately maintained as every strand of her alabaster-white fur, showed not a hint of impatience. Nor any kindness, or mercy. Just the same slightly-smiling, polite interest.

While wearing that marble mask, her billowing rainbow mane and tail drifting all about the empty room, Celestia continued to mercilessly press him. She was going to get every answer she wanted. She held all the power here. There were no limits- not moral, physical, or any other kind, that she could not completely ignore if so she fancied.

"How did you hide what you are from my sister?"

Celestia should not be resting so comfortably on that satin pillow, not as she so callously crushed Prey. It was wrong. The air was so hot, and Prey's mouth so dry. Despair was only a sobbing, powerless breakdown away.

"H-hide what?" He croaked.

"Hide that you are not one of my little ponies."

Prey stared in wide-eyed, horrified stupidity at the source of all his fears. How did he hide he wasn't a pony? She was taunting him, she had to be. She couldn't mean that question seriously.

But again came the same patient, unyielding question, "How did you hide that you are not one of my little ponies from Luna?"

"But... I'm, I'm just a sheep." Prey whispered.

"Oh my. Is that the truth?"

Prey didn't understand what she meant. He was beyond scared. "I'm n-not a pony. I'm j-just a sheep."

"Is that the full truth, now?"

Prey didn't know what other answer he could give, "Yes."

And so for the first time, Celestia did something other than maintain the calm mask she'd worn since trapping them inside this unmarked room. She sighed, an unusually gentle sound coming from so large a pair of lungs, "Oh dear. So that's how it is."

There was a silence as the hated, terrifying sun alicorn continued to patiently observe him, her aurora mane and tail still drifting lightly across the floor and walls. Her magenta eyes simply watched, and she waited.

Prey found out that it was possible for the alicorn to become even more intimidating simply by so placidly doing nothing. Was there any air coming into this room? Prey couldn't see so much as a single vent, no opening to cycle more in. Uncomfortable memories of a night at the base of Canter Mountain hovered at the back of his mind.

Was Celestia going to suffocate him while she watched? His chest felt like it was being squeezed in a vice at the thought. A dark landscape of terror resurfaced, dancing on the edge of his vision. Of another night, a night in Mayflower.

At his back the dark waited, hungry and insatiable. Nothing tangible stood between him and it. His skin crawled. It was just him, the finite wood pile, the fire, and the dark.

If this was a dream, then it was a nightmare. But Prey wasn't dreaming.

So why then, could he hear Gossamer talking to their mother? And why-oh-why did the memory only come now, when he was so scared and tired?

He strained, desperate to remember. Faint, oh so faint. Half a sentence.

"You're my sweetie, my only sweetie, when skies are grey........ and when the stitches fall apart, you'll be hanging by a thread........"

His life was well and truly hanging by a thread now.

An interminable hour later, or it might have been just a little over a minute, Celestia finally spoke again, "I'm putting a pin in that for later. Instead, let's hear about you. Tell me all about yourself."

Prey's shivering got worse. She had no right to demand that. Tell her? Tell the hated, arrogant, selfish, jealous, uncaring immortal alicorn of his private, miserable life?

'Tell the alicorn who will kill me if I don't.'

She was still calmly waiting as he shivered and trembled.

Prey couldn't. He wouldn't tell her. He couldn't even tell Crimson his darkest secrets, so how could he tell someone as unworthy as Celestia?

Rushweed. The Resistance. A tiny, forgotten farm. The Deeper Green. Captain Fire Strike. Runes and mind magic. He couldn't tell her that.

But she had the power to force him to. She could torture him, burn him, mutilate him. Prey hated pain. So he opened his dry, cracked lips and told her a different story instead.

The story of what had happened since coming to Canterlot and being pressganged by Luna.

He abbreviated. He skipped parts. He alluded to having come from a still-living village on the border. He stuck to the established background he'd woven, and he prayed.

Celestia had a kind face. On so many statues, paintings, and photographs the world over, her face and her kind smile were famously depicted. The golden crown which Celestia wore upon the brow of that face, too big for anybody but her, was more or less a holy relic to ponies everywhere. Who among them would not be eternally thrilled at a personally directed, benevolent smile and kind nod from that wise, eternally beautiful face?

There was no kindness to be found on that famous face now. Just the calm, serene, contented patience of someone who had all the time in the world. And who knew that you didn't.

'The patience of a wolf.' Prey drew the parallel miserably. He was shaking, not just on the outside, but he felt like he was shaking internally. Like he might fall to pieces at any moment.

Prey lied.

Of course he did. He doctored his story, he had no option. It was a lose-lose disaster scenario. He couldn't tell Celestia or she'd smite him, but he had to tell Celestia or she'd smite him.

So he spoke and stuttered, his mind jumping ahead trying to edit the story he was going to tell even as he told it, trying to keep all the lies and deceptions straight. He could not afford to even slightly slip up.

His editing didn't seem to help. Celestia had a preternatural knack for interrupting right when he was struggling to think, to press him with a pointed question.

She kept doing it, over and over, asking the same questions in a dozen different ways to torture his mind and make him struggle.

She just kept asking and demanding answers, while all Prey wanted was to be left alone, but she wouldn't. Celestia kept turning the handle of the vice tighter and tighter, as Prey shrunk lower and lower. And she kept saying that same damned phrase, until the words were rattling in Prey's head and caused him to flinch every single time he heard it:

"Oh my. What made you think pulling that lever was a good idea?"

Followed by; "Is that the truth, now?"

And then; "Oh my. What about the damage caused to the lumber yard?"

Followed by; "Is that all of the truth?"

And again; "Oh my. Didn't you think about the ponies who might get crushed if the warehouse's doors were to collapse?"

And yet again; "Why didn't you think about it sooner?"

Celestia kept calmly asking questions along the same vein, over and over and over, and Prey knew he wasn't providing the Sun Wolf with satisfactory answers, because she just kept asking. But she wouldn't let up, and it was so hard to think straight when he was shaking with fear, and could only keep repeating the same desperate answers.

"Oh my," She would say, with all the detached emotion that a butcherbird dismembering a field mouse piece by piece might display, "Why did you lead your squad into these Wolfing Woods?"

"You didn't, you warned them away? Is that the truth? Is that the whole truth?"

"What is inside a Wolfing Wood?"

"Oh my. Are you positive you don't know? Think hard."

"Still no? Perhaps you should try thinking harder. I would very much like to know what this threat to my little ponies is."

"Oh my. You're not holding important information back from me, are you now?"

"And are you telling me the truth? The whole truth?"

Mayflower. The deer holt and the old buried road inside the pine trees. The scarecrow and kindersnatches, into the Reaper King. Prey repeated the established official story, resolutely sticking only to what the Night Guard believed had occurred. About how he and Crimson had been separated after being chased by two huge insect monsters, and he didn't know what had happened to the warlock, only that he was found dead, seemingly by suicide. He couldn't afford to waver for even a second in his retelling. The golden shimmer of his magic prison was always there, only ever a flex away from Celestia crushing him into a pulp of ruptured flesh.

People say the truth will always win out. That it's a weight off your chest to finally tell your full story, to speak to a willing ear.

They lie. They don't understand. They didn't know what Prey knew. They didn't have things they wanted to keep secret so desperately that they would kill for it, over and over again. They didn't understand what it was like to know you were going to die, and die horribly. Or what it was to experience boundless fear.

"Oh my. The griffin ambassador, yes, my sister said something about that. But why don't you now tell me all about it in your own words?"

"Oh my. The undercover mission to Griffonstone was very... daring, yes. I spoke with Luna about it afterwards at quite some length, with regards to restraint and trust. And what did you think of this idea?"

"Did you support the idea? Why didn't you speak up? Why hold your peace and stay silent then?"

"Are you sure that's the truth? All of it?"

"Are you quite positive, now? There's nothing else you want to add?"

"Nothing else at all? Come now, are you sure that you're sure?"

"Nothing else about the griffins at all comes to mind?"

"Nothing else?"

"Oh dear. Nothing at all?"

Prey's heart was pounding. The air was hot and his eyes were burning, but he didn't dare blink first. Celestia was looking at him a certain way, now more than ever projecting that she knew Prey was not telling her something about the griffin incident, and wouldn't let him continue his story until he admitted it.

There was no one else in the sealed room but him and the Sun Wolf. Maybe there was no one else in the entire world, even.

Prey gave in, "There was, there was... an, an accident in the town of Ponyville that night. The ambassador... a trick, Corporal Sharp Tang was supposed to warn Princess Luna..." His words came out as a rasping croak, but so far Celestia had not ordered him to speak up or repeat himself even once. She must be able to perfectly hear everything inside this shield bubble, another spell woven into the golden magic.

"Oh my. Do tell."

Luna had ordered him into silence that night. Prey blurted it all out to Celestia, as proof that Luna had known and hadn't killed him yet, so there was no need for her to kill him either. He told her about witnessing the Elements of Harmony resurrecting the pink Element of Laughter.

"...and then she put me to sleep. And, and I woke up in the barracks." Prey finished, burning with shame and hate at having retold that most private of failures, but fear stilled the outrage on his tongue.

Aside from her ever-drifting mane, Celestia didn't move for a long minute. Prey had been flinching and waiting for her to immediately ask him if he was telling the truth, just like she'd done every time before. But this time, she just observed him from her relaxed position on the floor cushion.

Her real face was hidden behind that polite but utterly meaningless mask. What was she thinking? What had she taken offence to now?

'It's not fair. It's just not fair. I escaped the false trial, so why now this? It's just not fair.'

"You told nopony else, just like my sister made you promise. Is that right?" Celestia finally spoke, tone even.

"Yes." Prey lied. He'd told Crimson, but other than that, nobody.

He thought Celestia believed him, or maybe she didn't care, because no one else would believe him over an alicorn. "When a pony's time has come, they must move on. Everypony only has one life, and you mustn't hold on to a pony when that time comes. It is a sad fact that holding on only hurts you more. It is the cycle of Harmony. It is not something to be feared, but rather embraced. Do you understand that?"

It was the first time Celestia had made a statement so far, not just scrutinised and broken him down with ceaseless questions. Prey's mouth worked in shock. Did he understand? What was there to understand?

'Understand that Luna tried to force that same plate of spoilt, bloodied waste down my throat? Understand that an immortal alicorn is telling me it’s wrong to want to live forever? That I was evil for begging Luna to save my family? While in the same hypocritical breath completely skipping over that one of her precious ponies got to come back to life?'

Yes, Prey well understood all of that.

It was like Celestia was saying; 'Do you see? On this side stands the resurrected pony. She gets to cheat death because she is a pony, and a bearer of an all-important Element of Harmony. Now look to the other side. Your loved ones will stay dead because they're not important to Harmony.'

Now look over here. Do you see? Here resting comfortably upon a cushion sits the immortal, beloved, and powerful alicorn. Now look there. Prey's hooves were full of the relentless stabbing pain of magic from being trapped inside this bubble, forced to bear Celestia's every whim, and hadn't once stopped shivering.

'I hate you. I hate Luna. I hate Luna more than I have words. And I hate you too.'

It was unfair on a cosmic scale. He had saved Canterlot, twice, secretly destroying the changeling war swarm which had been only days away from attacking and then once more after Discord. Him, Prey. No one else. Not the Royal Guard, not Nighthawk, not Luna, not the oh-so-special Element Bearers, not even Celestia! They hadn't even suspected a single thing! And nobody would ever know, nor would they thank him for it.

The very ruler of the wealthy, golden city he so hated but had still saved was reclining on a red satin cushion right in front of him, and he didn't dare breathe a single word of it or she'd immolate him on the spot.

He'd murdered so many changelings, enough to crush him with the weight of the sin, once intentionally and then once by accident, trying to save his own life. And he'd never be thanked or forgiven for all the ungrateful pony lives he'd saved in the process.

"Little lamb-", Hearing the name from the Sun Wolf's lips, Prey never wanted to ever be called that again, "-can't you see? When a pony's time comes, let them go."

Prey should nod. He should give some sort of false agreement to appease Celestia. He should pretend to bow to her wisdom.

But his throat seemed frozen, his head wouldn't nod. Because she was telling him to give up on his mother and Fleece. Or rather, Gossamer's mother.

'Never.' Prey could never do that.

But he could definitely lie and pretend to give in. So why wasn't he? The ever-burning, all-powerful Sun Wolf was looming right in front of him, he should grovel and do anything it took to survive. He'd lied to appease Luna, hadn't he?

But survival was only ever second, on The List.

Prey opened his mouth. Nothing came out of his dry throat. Why couldn't he just say the words?

"Let go. There is a time to live, a time to love, and yes, sadly, a time to die." Celestia ordered.

Prey licked his lips and tried to form the lie once again. But still nothing came out of his mouth.

Celestia's patient gaze turned into patient disappointment.

"Let go. You need to stop holding on." She repeated.

Prey felt so small and weak, a tiny ant under the magnifying glass just waiting for the sun to rise and scorch him.

"No." The one word.

"I'm talking," Celestia chided him like a misbehaving foal, "-about you. You need to let go and move on."

She shifted on the plush satin to point one massive golden-shod and polished hoof at Prey's chest, "It's you. You need to move on to the next step. I almost missed it, if I hadn't checked on a hunch I wouldn't have ever seen it, but I can now see the dark magic coiling around your heart. Tell me, how many extra years have you stolen?"

The Jaw of Hearts. His secret was out.

His real age, something he'd lied to and deceived everyone about, even Crimson.

His secret. No one else's. And Celestia had just laid it out in the open.

'No. No No. NoNoNONONO!'

No, no, no! She couldn't be allowed to know, not her! Anyone but her!

He couldn't breathe, he couldn't hear, he couldn't even stay standing. His legs folded and tipped him onto the stone, sprawling on his side.

A deafening humming was ringing in his ears. He couldn't feel the freezing cold of his ribbon, because it wasn’t here when he most needed it. His whole chest was quivering with spasming breaths, in sympathy of being discovered. As if the Jaw of Hearts was simply giving up now that Celestia knew.

The ringing buzz went on. It kept filling his head and his ears. He couldn't focus on or hear what Celestia was saying anymore.

His secret was exposed.

Celestia knew.

She was going to kill him.

Completely against the last of Prey's will, his face crumpled up and he began to wail.

The deepest of shame and self-hatred squashed Prey into the stone floor. To break in front of his first and greatest enemy, to cry in front of Celestia, the Celestia, the Sun Wolf and architect of all he has endured, the humiliation was too much.

Tears burned his eyes. Messy shivering sobs wracked his lungs. Prey hated himself so much in that moment he wanted to die, just like Celestia was telling him to roll over and do.

But only for a moment, before the shame was swept away by unending spite. Celestia was telling him he should be dead? Well then, there was no greater motivation to remain alive. The forgotten half of an unforgettable memory rose with his thoughts, unbidden.

He wanted to be anywhere else. Not here, not trapped with the Sun Wolf, not alone with her and about to die. Exactly like when Luna had been drowning him in a muddy ditch, he wanted out, he wanted to be gone!

But even the old pincushion couldn't get him out of this, with no more charges left in it.

Prey had wished to get to the stream’s bank, back then. That was it. He'd wanted to get out of the water which was killing him. So he'd wished for the closest salvation he could find, and that had been the bank. So he had wished, not in words, but in desperate feelings.

And in this new desperate moment, Prey remembered remembering the time when he'd seen something once before.

The curtain pulled back. The world of cloth and tangled threads, tying everything together. And he remembered again the dreadful horror. That in-between space.

Prey's own stitching had been pulled out and opened up. He'd been full of stuffing and straw, and he remembered a threaded needle coming down-

The hot stone under his aching, shuddering chest. Back in the execution room. It felt like he was trapped behind his own eyes, inside his weak runt body as it blubbered and shook on the floor. He felt the unending shame, felt the black and withering hate for crying in front of her, but his mind was finally floating free of it.

"-and when you've run your race, it's time to rest and let the next generation run, without any lingering obstacles to hold them back."

And the bastardess Celestia wouldn't shut up! Even now she was still droning on that he had lived past his time, that he should have moved on and that dark magic was wrong.

"-haven't moved on as you were supposed to, and you haven't kept true to Harmony. Dark magic is never the answer."

She said all of it with that same calm, detached, patient look on her stupid immortal face.

"I have had the sad duty of sitting down those few ponies who were too scared to move on, and talked it through with them until they saw the error of their ways, and finally stopped holding on. Death isn't to be feared. It's natural to be scared of the unknown, but all my little ponies make the brave choice in the end. However, you are not one of my little ponies, and you have already walked Equus for far too long."

How long could you cry? How long before you ran dry of tears?

There is a point where they run out, a time past which your body finally stopped responding to the emotions it was feeling, too tired to physically react any further.

How long could you continue crying, if what awaited you was death once you finished?

And how long before your executioner ran out of patience?

Not Celestia. Not the immortal ruler of millennia. She never ran out of her seemingly infinite patience. The softening at the edge of her eyes even showed hints of pity for the distress she was witnessing. But not even one hint of mercy.

Celestia was famous throughout all of Equestria for her kindness. She was held in awe for her willingness to offer mercy and grant second chances even when her subjects had made grave mistakes.

There were centuries of well-told stories of this documented fact, from Celestia forgiving a lumberjack who accidentally started a forest fire, to a noble who’d had a change of heart and had confessed to raising his rents until he'd driven a destitute family he wanted to replace out onto the streets.

But she didn't offer a single ounce of kindness, mercy, or forgiveness to Prey here.

It was like her eyes didn't see a lamb in front of her. Like she didn't see a living person at all.

Celestia lay on her plush cushion, her magic trapping Prey in, and simply watched him until his tears dried up.

And then she resumed speaking as if the terror-induced breakdown she'd caused had not just happened.

"I have yet to meet even one of my little ponies who did not know what they were doing was wrong. They fear discovery precisely because they firmly know in their hearts it is wrong. And the further they linger past their appointed time, the worse the burden of guilt becomes. It eats them up from the inside day after day, secretly crying out for somepony to convince them that what they already know is wrong deep inside truly is, and to help set them right."

She sighed in old sorrow, "Nine times, and nine times too many it has fallen to me, as their princess, to be the one to set them right. But all of them thanked me and said goodbye in the end. Unnaturally extending your life is not a blessing, it is a curse. Too late do my misguided little ponies realise the greatest anguish isn't confronting their own end, but remaining behind as everypony else they love leaves them behind. And a life devoid of friendship is not a life worth living. It is a lesson even I have had to learn."

"...'iar." Prey croaked. He lifted his swollen red eyes to brokenly glare at Celestia.

He swallowed, and tried again, "...Liar." He finally warbled out.

Celestia delicately raised her eyebrows, as if to silently humour him. 'Oh my, do go on', She seemed to be saying.

Prey's hoarse voice strained like the note on a badly tuned violin string. "Liar. You're immortal. You never have to fear dying. All the time in the world. How dare you stand and judge? Hypocrite."

Celestia didn't get angry. No, that wouldn't have fit with her longsuffering patience.

"It is precisely why I must stand as judge. I have the experience nopony else has, to look further down the path than any other pony can see, and so I have a responsibility. Harmony sets everypony where they need to be in life, and this is my place as Princess. And that is why you are wrong again. I have seen far more lives come to an end than you can possibly imagine, which is why I can judge better than you could ever understand. I don't boast when I say I know better than you."

And just like that, Celestia glossed over and dismissed everything Prey had said. She used her immortality as both excuse and justification for anything she did. Because she was older and more powerful, she therefore must also be wiser.

That was arrogance. That was blind, tyrannical arrogance. Celestia had centuries of believing her own justifications, and there would be no way Prey could convince her of something different.

Prey hated her. He hated her so very much.

"Then why don't you t-teleport down to Ponyville and tell your p-pink Element Bearer the same thing?" Prey hissed, voice cracking.

Celestia gently shook her head in disappointment, "This is not about Pinkamena, why are you angry because of her happiness? She is the embodiment of Laughter. Shame on you. You haven't been listening to the answer I've been repeating; it is because it is your time, and it was also not her time."

Circular logic. Because the pink mare had cheated death with Harmony, it must have been destiny. If she'd died instead, then it must also have been destiny. Because he had cheated death without Harmony, it was past his time.

You couldn't even begin to reason with someone who thought in circles like that.

Pointlessly, Prey tried anyway, unable to do anything else, "It's never a-anybody's time Celestia, the future isn't set in stone. She was dead. She came back to life. It's the s-same damn thing."

"Princess Celestia." Celestia patiently corrected him, a gentle reminder that was still iron, about who was in charge here, "And it was not her time." She simply repeated.

Circular logic at its finest.

The golden dome shimmered around Prey. Celestia impassively looked on, obviously waiting for his next pointless objection.

Prey sunk lower onto the ground, hugging his legs to himself and yearning for his ribbon. She wasn't listening, she wasn't listening to anything he said! But what choice did he have but to try again and again? Celestia meant to kill him at the end of this. She wasn't going to listen, and she was going to kill him. She had already decided and carved it into stone in her heart. The Wolf had made him her prey.

The realisation of that inevitability greyed out Prey's mind in a fog of terror. And like any lamb caught in a wolf's jaws, he kicked and struggled.

"I have a r-right to live. I've as much right to live as any of your ponies. I want to live, I have friends waiting for me, I won't leave them forever just because you say so. Princess."

"Oh my. You've found friendship? That's wonderful, truly. But it does not change reality. The balance of Harmony must be protected. But please, if you have a last message you want me to carry to your friends, tell me to whom and what, and I will see it delivered. I assure you, my recollection is excellent and I can repeat it word for word." Celestia offered from her satin pillow.

The shivering got stronger. Prey wasn't getting enough air. Her offer sickened him. He tried begging next:

"I don't want to die. Please, haven't I done so m-much for your sister? I've served the Night Guard faithfully. Please, please can't you understand? Why?"

The air was too thin in his lungs, his words shook, "Why should I die? I'm begging you, please don't do this. What do you want? I'll do anything. What do you w-want from me? I can change, I c-can follow orders, I can do whatever you want. Please, please, please."

Celestia pursed her lips, settling further back on the satin pillow. The huge feathers on her gigantic white wings rustled softly with the movement, "I see my words are not registering. The only thing I need from you, is for you to stop holding on." She said quietly.

"Please."

"I'm deeply sorry, but the answer will always be no."

It wasn't working. Nothing was working. The walls were closing in. All his runes and arrays were who knew how many miles beyond his reach! It wasn't right, this couldn't be right, this couldn't be it!

He had to do something.

"Where are we?" Prey choked out. Were they still in Canterlot? Or were they on the moon?

Celestia smiled patiently as her mane drifted, and gave no answer.

Prey stared at her, at that merciless smile on her perfect features. He hated her. As he hyperventilated, he hated her! You fear what you hate, and hate what you fear. And Prey hated her so very, very much.

She was sitting there, and decreeing he would die.

"You're n-nothing b-but a m-murderer."

Celestia didn't seem to feel even the slightest need to dignify that with a defence. Why would she? She was Celestia.

The towering blackness strangling Prey somehow grew even higher in the face of her complete dismissal.

"Murderer. You s-sent him, don't lie. C-Captain Fire Strike." He spat.

"Oh my. Who?"

Prey choked. Who? She asked 'who', as if she didn't know. Or was it that the timeframe didn't match up with anyone she thought he could be referring to?

"Stop lying! You know, you know who. C-Captain Fire Strike, that racist m-murderer. You a-appointed him, fifty-nine years ago. The Resistance, the Deeper Green! Captain Fire Strike of the Border Guard."

Celestia just blinked at him, "Who?"

Prey couldn't. He could only stare, eyes red, nose running, and ribbonless.

No. She didn't know? No, that couldn't be. She had to know, it was her Border Guard, one of her very own Captains. It was her responsibility to know who was running one of her military bodies.

Did she not care that Fire Strike had run wild? Of the night-time raids of homes and the arrests he'd ordered? Of how those arrested villagers never returned? Of the martial law he'd enforced, of the war he'd enflamed? Of the firestorm he'd unleashed on the Resistance on the hill? Or that he'd been a filthy mind leech just like Prey? Or that he'd abandoned Rushweed in the end to the tender mercies of the Resistance?

Celestia knew, she had to know! She had to, it was unthinkable that she wouldn't.

But she didn't.

She didn't know who the Resistance had been. She didn't care. They'd been too small and far away from the golden heart of Equestria for her ever to take notice, far over the Ridgeback and sequestered away where nobody of importance were threatened. No significant pony settlements.

Nothing more than an unfortunate and regrettable border skirmish.

"Captain Fire Strike. Of the Border Guard. Fifty-nine years ago." Why did his words sound almost like a plea?

Celestia just bemusedly shook her horned head, "The name does vaguely chime with memory, but I don't appoint any Guard Captains aside from the Royal and Solar Guard. I don't recall ever meeting this… Fire Strike."

Jump, jump, shift. The world slid out from under Prey's hooves yet again as everything he thought he knew shifted with it.

The Sun Wolf hadn't ever known. Celestia hadn’t ever cared.

It had never been out of hate or malice. Not even a mistake. Celestia had simply never bothered to take an interest in the small war on her border. Had never bothered to even know what happened.

Laying on the floor, Prey held up his shaking hooves before his eyes. He'd committed so many sins with these cloven hooves. They should drip red. Or black. They didn't.

'It changes nothing, just like with Luna. She could have cared. She never did. She looked the other way and let everything play out exactly as it did. I wouldn't do it all again if I could go back, I'd do it worse.'

"But fifty-nine years ago you say," Celestia repeated in thoughtful consideration. Her mouth firmed, "Another confirmation, if I needed another. Not of the unearned years you've stolen, although that too, but of who you came from."

Prey could barely drag his eyes up from his shaking hooves. It seemed so unimportant, whatever it was the sun tyrant was saying, but he had to focus.

"Going back and removing that pin in our conversation. I understand, you think you've been afflicted with a tragic life. If you were a real pony, I would pity you. Actually, I do pity you in some ways, because you think you're a pony, and that's sad. But you're not a real pony, and every one of my little ponies you've interacted with have all been deceived by you, intentionally or not. That lie ends today, I'm afraid."

And there it was. Words from the solar monarch’s own lips. Only ponies mattered, every other species in the entire world was worthless.

'Because pony blood doesn't run in my veins. But I have plenty on my hooves!' Enraged hurt surged up through his chest.

"The Resistance will return. And again and again. You're going to make it come back. Because we're people, not slaves. I'm a person. I'm not a pony, I'm a person! But you can't even understand that, can you?"

Prey kept speaking despite Celestia smoothly interjecting something. He didn't listen to her words, just more immortal elite racism. She could magically silence him, he would mouth it anyway. His voice shook like a doddering old ram's.

"And my words don't matter because oh, I'm still not a pony. So your little ponies are going to die, again and again, as your slaves rise up again and again. You're the rotten heart of this entire rotten country!"

He was left panting, not because he'd shouted, but from the choking hate he'd had to breathe out with every word. The dry air in the enclosed room jumped a degree even higher in heat.

Celestia softly shook her great head, rainbow mane drifting in a trailing afterimage of the motion, "Oh my, no. No, not at all. Your utterly vile vision of revenge aside, you don't understand me at all. Every being in Equestria is one of my little ponies. Griffin, yak, diamond dog, they are all my citizens. I am not as shallow as you falsely accuse me to be, so while most of my nation may be populated by ponies, every person is equal."

She actually said the word, said 'person' instead of degrading everyone to 'pony'. The grand leader of ponykind, she'd corrected the pervasive arrogance of ponykind's grammar just this once.

So everything Celestia had said just now had been with the intention of 'person', and not exclusively 'pony'. But her personal meaning behind the word did not excuse the centuries of causal racism she'd perpetuated and helped spread throughout Equestria's ponies, simply by not bothering to speak up even once to correct them.

It did however cast a new light over every sentence she'd so far spoken. Yet why then had she accused him of not being a 'pony' if she meant 'person'? In the burning light, Prey's exhausted, failing mind still managed to take the next step and work out what that meant. And what it meant was even worse.

'She said I'm not a pony. And she meant person. So she doesn't even see me as a real person.'

He wasn't a person in her condescending eyes. He was no higher than a dumb animal.

The temperature climbed another degree as Celestia continued to unconsciously make her annoyance known. Or perhaps it wasn't unconscious. There was no person or power to hold her accountable even if it wasn't. Pony, person, or otherwise.

"Your deliberate misconstruing of my character aside, it is past time I brought this to an end. Dragging this painful scene out is helping neither of us, and I dislike needless cruelty in any form. It will be better if I give you the push you need to take the plunge."

Celestia leaned forwards and set herself very deliberately across the pillow. Her face rested only inches above the transparent, golden shield. Prey wanted to recoil, but there was nowhere left to go inside the shield.

She spoke each word slowly and clearly as she made Prey meet her deep magenta gaze:

"You aren't a person. You are a thing."

In the silence after her proclamation, she kept watching him as Prey glared fearfully and hatefully while backing up. She was studying him, looking for a reaction to her words.

Whatever it was, she didn't find it in his wordless contempt for her utterly retarded claim.

"I see..." Celestia said at length, "You don't believe me. And you need to believe me to truly understand."

She pulled back from the shield, her long horn finally not hanging over Prey like a drawn sword, yet a thousand times more deadly. She took a moment to knead the bit of pillow between her large hooves.

"You're not real." She stated.

"Then you're holding this conversation with your inner m-madness." Prey spat.

"Shush." Celestia ordered, a single golden spark dancing at the tip of her horn warningly. But a single spark of magic from an alicorn had Prey immediately biting down on his lip.

Satisfied, she went on; "You aren't a real sheep, you never were. Your body isn't real either, you merely think it is. It deceives touch, the eyes, and scent. It even bleeds, although it isn't real flesh and blood. But you don't see what I see, because you believe you're real. You can feel pain, you can catch an illness or even die because of one, as if you were living, but... you aren't alive."

Celestia's words were an anomaly. They contradicted each other and didn't make any sense whatsoever. Something even she seemed to realise, for she sighed in frustration, even that sound still somehow coming across as aggravatingly patient.

"It sounds like a paradox, I know. 'I think, therefore I am', but you don't think your own thoughts, you're somepony else's older, twisted thoughts, and always have been. You aren't you, you are a murdered soul trapped in a shell."

Prey's tear-reddened eyes were wide, wide open. He stared, struck dumb. He'd called Celestia mad, but now it turned out she really was mad. The sort of cracked madness you never saw until the cover was ripped off. Prey knew madness. Madness was insanity that thought it was reason.

Celestia's mouth drew down. Subtle distortions of heat began to ripple the air all around her alabaster-white fur, "It's despicable, what black magics a pony can stoop to. Even worse, how they can dare claim their actions are out of desperate love. I don't understand it, I just can't. How a mare can foalnap and murder another's foal, mock the very sanctity of life by trapping the murdered soul in a shell, and then call the abomination their foal and pretend to love it?"

It took a moment for the dots to connect. Then another to process Celestia's madness. Then:

"What did you say about my mother?"

"You don't have a mother, you never did. You were not born, you were made out of some poor foal's murdered soul, birthed from another mare!" For the first time, Celestia raised her voice.

And for the first time, Prey wasn't afraid. There was only unyielding fury as he screamed right back at the solar goddess, "What'd you DARE say about my mother?!"

"You never had a mother, you had a witch, a dark sorceress. One that is finally gone and will pollute the cycle of Harmony no longer." Celestia's huge wings were twitching at her sides, wanting to flare open, "You have no idea of the misery she perpetuated for nine decades, hiding from me. Twice she slipped away, twice! I thought her finally dead after twenty years of nothing, no signs, and then she came back only to spread things like you! Do you even have any idea what she did?"

Celestia didn't wait, she was caught up in her anger. Controlled anger, but still blazing hot even after all these years, "That witch was the worst of the worst. She preyed on grief-stricken mothers when they were at their most vulnerable, tricking and tempting them into performing her black magic. Do you know what she did when their child was stillborn, the dirt not yet even settled on the small graves? She tricked them into stealing and murdering another's foal, tricking them into believing they could replace their own lost one! Making nothing but a cursed lifeform! And she claimed she did it all out of 'love'. There is no forgiveness in Harmony or Tartarus for that kind of evil."

Prey's mouth moved. He was so far beyond any fury for the lies Celestia was accusing his mother of.

"I will bReaK you." He whispered.

Prey never tortured, never. He hated pain. He had never willingly tortured someone simply for the sake of torture, the desire to inflict hurt. He may have thought it in the dark privacy of his own mind, but he'd never actually done so. He'd murdered many, many people, but he'd never tortured out of any sadistic desire to cause pain. They might die in agony, but only as a by-product of the method used to kill them. Their deaths had always been the end goal, or their suffering a requirement for it, not their suffering being the goal itself.

Yet now, torture was what Prey promised Celestia. Promised that he would do anything and everything he could manage to cause her pain, to make her suffer, to break her. Burn Canterlot, poison every one of those little ponies she cared so much about that he could reach, unleash a flesh-eating swarm of corrupted, zombie parasprites in Ponyville. Anything to hurt the immortal alicorn which he couldn't physically kill.

That was what Prey promised her in that moment. To spite her so badly that a millennia from now, she would still wake up in bitter sorrow every morning at the memory.

It was a thought, not formulated in his outer mindscape, but born down in the lightless depths of the inner; 'I hate you. So before the end, you are going to hate me. Now, and forever. I'll make it fair.'

It was the only possible response to such lies. Celestia meant to execute him at the end of this, but it was still the only possible response.

Those were lies about his... about Gossamer's mother.

The seas could boil. The stars could fall, continents crack and be ripped asunder. But Prey would never stand by and allow this slander. Gossamer's mother had been the kindest, most pure, important person to have ever lived.

"Lies."

"The truth." Celestia contradicted, with all the ringing certainty of the dawn.

"And now that you know what I already know, next you must truly believe it. And the only useful method towards making you believe, is to make you understand. You're blinded at the moment by the same dark magic effect which animates you. But once you can finally see, once you finally understand... then the dark magic will break and you'll know I speak nothing but the truth. But you can't break free of the dark if you can't understand."

"Now," Celestia announced with sudden finality, "There is actually a very simple method for removing your blindness. And I won't do a thing, it will all be your own understanding."

Lies. It didn't matter how deeply Celestia believed her own madness. They were and always would be nothing but lies.

"That monster who pretended to be your mother; do you know her name?"

Prey laughed at the Sun Wolf in sheer disbelief. Did he know her name? Did he know his own mother's name?!

Celestia's face didn't change, "Then can you tell me what it is?"

"Khe-he. Why yes of c-course! It's, n-none of your damn business!"

Again, Celestia didn't react to Prey's impotent fury, "Can you tell me?"

Prey bared his teeth at her, glaring hatefully, but not bothering to repeat himself.

"Let me repeat the question. Can you tell me?"

Could Prey? Of course he could. Would he play Celestia's little game? Never.

"Allow me to rephrase; are you able to tell me that witch's name?"

"She wasn't a Zoma'Grika witch!"

"Then tell me her name." She commanded.

"You're not worthy of hearing it."

"I already know the name of the thing that told you it was your mother. A child who has known nothing but hate confuses it for love. I know what that witch truly was, and I know who she was."

Then Celestia said a name.

"Wrong! Completely wrong." Prey crowed gleefully. It was an empty, spiteful glee, but it was the only thing left to him, to mock this alicorn hag.

"Is it wrong though?" Celestia asked knowingly, "Is it really?"

"Utterly! Completely! Totally."

"I want you to think of her name, then. Hold it in your mind."

Prey's mind immediately flashed to do just that before he could prevent himself. Then he stopped himself out of pure spite. Not that it mattered if he did or he didn't, because Celestia was wrong.

"What is your mother’s name?" She asked.

Prey knew his mother's name. He'd always known it. And it wasn't the same.

"Tell me. Tell me her name."

"Get stuffed."

The alicorn who could burn him to a crisp merely pursed her lips, "Are you capable of even speaking her name? Are you physically able to even repeat it to yourself?"

Of course Prey could. He could say it at any time, but Celestia wasn't worthy of hearing it, and she'd use magic and overhear him even if he whispered it. He wasn't going to humour her insane, crackpot delusions.

"I am not going to stop asking. What is your mother's name?"

Where he lay, Prey crossed his shaking, stinging hooves on the stone in front of him in defiance, and glared.

"Fine then, repeat the name I said just now instead."

Prey's mouth twisted sourly, "Selenia." He spat.

"The witch Selenia." Celestia echoed with disdain.

"You mean the Great White Witch, Selenia." Prey tried to take whatever glee he could in correcting Celestia with his knowledge of that banned name.

Celestia's delicate brows creased carefully, "And how do you know that?"

"I know it because you tried to smother and hide it."

"For good reason. A pony can't fall for the empty allure of dark magic if they never have to endure the temptation to begin with. My ponies are not weak of will, but a desperate pony is often not rational." Celestia's words hardened, "Exactly like all the grieving mothers the witch Selenia tricked into becoming murderers, just like her."

She took a deep breath of the near-shimmering, heated air and settled herself back down, "Your dear 'mother' was that self-same witch. She sewed you together from a murdered foal. That is what she was. A foal killer."

Prey bit down on a mad giggle. He really tried, but the muffled sound still escaped his mouth on its second attempt. This was so utterly ridiculous. His mother's name wasn't Selenia, it was ~ ~ ~.

No, Prey knew her name wasn't Selenia. Simple. It wasn't Selenia, because he knew what her name was, and Selenia wasn't it.

He knew, he had the name embedded in his head, in his very soul. It was impossible for him to forget it.

Prey repeated the name in his head reverently.

'~ ~ ~'

There. In the sanctity of his own mind, where Celestia couldn't contaminate it by hearing, he'd repeated it.

"Her name was also Selenia, wasn't it?" Celestia goaded.

He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt it was a different name to Selenia, because it wasn't her name.

Because her name was a different name.

It was not the same name.

The name wasn't Selenia. It was ~ ~ ~.

It wasn't Selenia. It was anything but Selenia. Selenia wasn't the name.

Gossamer's mother had been an ewe, whereas there were no accurate records of what species the Great White Witch had been. His mother's wool had been a cream white, but that was it. So were a thousand individuals of every different species out there, why, even zebras were half white.

And besides which, none of that was relevant, because her name hadn't been Selenia! It had been, it had been... ?

Prey's giggling choked. He repeated that sentence over in his head. But no, his mother's name had never been Selenia. And anyway, his mother had been a pacifist, the furthest thing from a witch!

If she'd been a witch, which she hadn't! But if she had been, she wouldn't have folded in the face of the Resistance, wouldn't have stooped to live a life of hardship and toil in a tiny border town, wouldn't have put up with an unfaithful husband, absolutely wouldn't have suffered her two lambs to go hungry, and wouldn't have died to that fire!

'But everyone needs to breathe. All it takes is one or two breaths of smoke.' Prey ignored the completely irrelevant thought. It didn't matter if anyone could die by accident, because his mother hadn't been named Selenia.

Gossamer's mother, Gossamer's mother of course! He needed to keep correcting his racing mind. He was panicking because of Celestia.

"Tell me her name." Celestia whispered softly.

Prey didn't even realise he'd flinched and reflexively exclaimed the answer until Celestia said.

"See? They're one and the same."

"Are you deaf?" Prey hissed, "I didn't say Selenia, I said ~ ~ ~!"

"You just said it again." Celestia told him with quiet patience.

"My mother, Goss-my mother, her name wasn't, isn't Selenia! It's ~ ~ ~"

"Listen to your own words. Stop and really listen."

'It isn't me who's not listening!' His hooves hurt, his back hurt, his eyes hurt, his head hurt. He wanted his ribbon.

His mother's name wasn't Selenia. It wasn't, because it wasn't.

It wasn't Selenia, and it couldn't be, because it was, it was, it was...

Prey heard an unhappy sigh. He blinked. A reflection of sunlight dazzled him for an instant. He jolted and refocused on the sealed room.

"Because it's not Selenia, because it's-!"

Celestia was levitating a large mirror in front of Prey's prison.

It was so bizarre, so outlandish to what they'd been saying, that for a moment he didn't realise that-

"No!" Prey threw up his hooves, shutting his eyes.

"Yes."

Red hot nails were pounded into his hooves. Filthy, disgusting, horrible golden magic wrapped around his face, his legs, pulled his hooves away, forcibly held his head in place, and then peeled back his eyelids.

Prey desperately tried to thrash and kick. His body could barely twitch a single millimetre in the golden aura confining him. He tried to deliberately unfocus his eyes, looking anywhere but at the mirror.

In response Celestia just floated it closer, until it filled his whole view right up to the shield bubble.

"Don't fight it. See yourself!"

To look in a mirror was to see your physical self. To look into a liches’ mirror though, that was a curse. She couldn’t know he’d… this must have been frustration.

Before Dreverton, in another desperate bid to never die, Prey had looked into the liches’ mirror he'd found, or that had let itself be found by him. First though had come the Jaw of Hearts, covered with runes of internal repair and preservation but unable to fully prevent decay, then combined with the witch coven’s ritual of external youth, each helping counteract the shortcomings of the other. Almost. But then he'd gone and added the liches’ mirror on top. Because he hadn't been willing to rely on only one method. He'd wanted a failsafe, a backup.

He had refused to die while Fire Strike had yet lived. But he still shouldn't have looked into the liches’ mirror.

He'd thought he could manage it, thought he could stomach the cost. He'd prepared himself beforehoof.

In truth there was no way he could ever have been prepared.

In addition to slowing down your physical aging and decay, which mixed with his Jaw and ritual to almost halt the process completely, looking into the liches’ mirror trapped a reflection of your soul forever, at a single point in time. It wasn't possible to look into the mirror and remain whole. To trap that reflection the mirror shattered you, stole one of the shards, and left you forever unwhole afterwards. From then on and always, every mirror only showed you your true, broken, unwhole self.

They would only reflect the real you, with putrid flesh rotten by time, furless shrunken skin, and empty eye sockets. The real you touched by the ravages of time. And what awaited you after your first death, when you rose again to become unliving. At your first death, the liches’ mirror spat out the broken shard of your stolen soul, just the lone sliver, forever after trying to fill the vast emptiness where the rest of the soul wasn't.

Afterwards, its task done, the mirror had slipped away when Prey's back was turned. To wait until another victim sought it out.

The last mirror Prey had willingly looked into, barring the pool in his cavern, had been that same mirror, fifty-nine years ago. He had not accidentally looked into an actual mirror since. He'd suppressed and forgotten the two events, ripping the memories up into pieces, and hid the bits under the ash of his outer mindscape.

He'd known, he'd seen, and he'd made himself forget afterwards. Tried to make himself forget. But now every mirror only showed him the truth. His real self.

Prey didn't know the exact reason why he had to avoid every mirror, he'd removed the exact consequences of failing from his mind for his own safety, because to know, was to also know the why. But the ringing echo of pain in the emptiness where the memory had been still sounded to this day, warning him away.

Prey was his own worst enemy, done in by his own paranoia and cleverness. He should never have looked into that blasted mirror.

In the floating gold-rimmed mirror conjured from Celestia's magic, sat Prey himself.

A hornless runt lamb, huddled on the floor beneath a transparent shield dome. His cloven forehooves were being grasped gently but firmly by magic. His legs looked too thin, stick-like. The hated tracer bands still sat there, dull gold. He was dirty. His body trembled and shivered unevenly in fits and starts. His wool was bedraggled, and fur unbrushed. His face was a mess; red eyes puffy, scarred cheeks inflamed, and tear-streaks matted. No ribbon tied behind his left ear. There was a cut on his right shin, just below the elbow, and a nasty, scabbed graze a bit higher.

Even now, after the trial, the train ride, and a night in the cells, there was still a splinter from the destroyed train car snagged in the dirty wool over his shoulder.

That was his reflection. And it wasn't what Prey saw in the mirror.

But no rotting, warped, near-soulless husk which had forgotten the taste of happiness looked back at him either.

Muddy green. Blue. Together, two mismatched button eyes, sewn onto a head of ragged cloth. 'Prey's face without eyes.'

A stitched patchwork. Scraps of linen, sack-cloth, old cotton, whatever could be found at hoof. 'Prey's false flesh.'

Straw stuffing, poking through the stitched seams. 'Prey's insides.'

Two jaggedly stitched up cross-shaped patches on the doll's head, where a ram's horns should've been. 'Prey's sacrificed body parts for the ritual.'

And sewn onto the patchwork body, were the last remaining scraps of another sheep's wool. A wool which now showed as a sun-bleached bone white, not cream white anymore. 'Selenia's own gifted wool. Prey's mother.'

Mother.

"M...m...m-mother."

"Yes." Celestia said gravely, never once glancing down at the mirror she held.

She saw Prey exactly as he saw himself now, always had. She'd only ever seen a speaking doll when conversing. Tried to get it to cut its own threads, so she wouldn’t have to.

"S... S-S-Selenia."

"Now you see. Now you understand."

It was no longer hot. Neither was it cold. He'd been wrong to assume a doll could perceive temperature. And in realising it, the sensation was lost to him forever. The tiny room was spinning.

Prey screamed. The dry, rustling cracking of straw. He screamed and kept screaming.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!"

Looking in the first true mirror of his life, and then hiding the truth from himself. The dark night in Mayflower, so close to the edge, and hearing that sing-song memory of what came before. Discord's back-to-front joke about him being someone else's toy doll, which had actually been truth. And of course it would be that Selenia's pincushion would come to him, and should accept back the old sewing needle.

Because he was the doll of a murdered soul, made from straw, string, and stitch.

"-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!"

He'd almost drowned in a muddy stream. He needn't have drowned. What did cloth have need of breath for? Cloth that was flesh, flesh that was cloth. And a woven heart that beat between a Jaw.

There was a runt lamp superimposed over a runt lamb doll. Like an optical illusion. Once you'd seen both images you couldn't unsee either.

Once you knew the truth of reality, you couldn't revert to not knowing it.

"-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!" An unchanging wail of distress.

Unreal. It couldn't be. But it was. That was him. He'd lied, he'd been lied to. The mirror didn't lie. That thing, that doll, that was him. He was it. It was him.

To look in the mirror and see yourself, but not see you. The utter disconnect. To see the thing in the mirror and know; 'That is the summation of what makes up Prey', and not recognise any of it. To not see yourself looking back.

'I'm that. I'm a rag doll. I'm a thing. I don't have bones. I don't have eyes. I never did. I was her son, she made me, but she wasn't my mother. She made up Fleece too. Prey, Gossamer, I've never been real.'

"-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!" No need to inhale. A doll didn't have lungs. But still he, it, screamed its distress.

The cruel, jagged pieces all lined up, not into the known tale, but the true story all too terribly easy to see. An old ewe made young with black magic, but left forever unable to bear children of her own. An ewe about which untrue tales of terror spread beyond her control. One whose actual dark magic prowess far lagged behind the tales. Wasn't that how it happened? Hadn't they feared Prey as a demon in the Deeper Green, when but a single lucky arrow or spell would have slain him?

All the confrontations with Selenia, weren't the survivors who spread the tales witch hunters to begin with? Each time she survived by the skin of her teeth and fled, her story grew. First with just the Witch known as Selenia, then the White Witch Selenia, then the Great White Witch Selenia.

Didn't that picture sound so much more like the peaceful sheep Gossamer had known? A hunted ewe, one who after decades of lengthened life, was just so tired. Tired of it all. Who wanted to stop all the hiding, struggling, and killing. Years on years on years. Who just wanted to try for a normal life, and made a promise to change for good.

Maybe she'd even done what Prey had once before. Brutally cut away the parts of her mind that she hated, literally remaking herself into the new ewe she was so desperate to become. Her dedication and self-promise might even have worked, at first. But a decade is a long time. A long, long time. Slowly the long nights turned sour, and life is always eager to break you down.

Going out in search of love, finding a husband who at first loved her back, but oh-so-slowly slipped away and become unfaithful. Desperate, longing for children of her own. So she did what she'd done for other grieving mothers, and made her own children. Knowing it was wrong, knowing it was twisted, but that's what madness was.

Magic could not create food for her hungry children, not her magic. It could not grow plants, or heal. It could only hurt, break, or kill. The world didn't need another killer. The Resistance and Border Guard were doing such a good job by themselves. And then, a fire, seeing her children to safety, going back to try and help survivors, and then... all it takes is one or two accidental breaths of smoke to kill you. Just like that.

Death isn't fair, it doesn't care, it just takes.

A story that was so easy to imagine, because Prey scarcely needed to. He could see it, he could understand it, because wasn't that exactly what he had tried to do? Even when it would have been so much simpler to fall back on his older, easier methods? To try and change for Crimson? Tried, and failed.

He couldn't touch, he couldn't taste, he couldn't smell. 'I'm a thing! I'm a thing! I'm a thing!'

"-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!" The alicorn in the room was trying to ask him to be quiet.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,~
When something inside started to stir,
Down Humpty fell, down to his death,~
And from within, all the yolk and the mess,
That little something, took its first breath~

He'd misunderstood all along. Where had the taunting rhyme even come from? It was about him. He was the thing that had thought it was Prey. A little something ripped out of the shell of a murdered foal, and still breathing.

"-Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" He stopped screaming, but only because a golden aura had forced his mouth shut.

A rag doll didn't have a mouth, though. But a lamb did, and a lamb could scream even if a rag doll couldn't.

Celestia very carefully watched him over the top of the mirror. The slope of her swan neck seemed resigned, "Enough of that. I will release you again if you will stop screaming. Do you understand? Nod if you understand."

Prey didn't nod. He didn't move, he didn't anything. After a long, drawn-out minute, Celestia slowly slackened her telekinesis anyway.

Prey/the doll shifted his/its head up a fraction of an inch, and looked straight through Celestia with two mismatched button eyes, that were also still able to be seen as a pair of sky blue orbs. "You've done this to me."

Celestia had made this happen to him. He'd been Prey, been a real, living, breathing lamb. He'd been able to believe that. But she hadn't been able to let that go, she couldn't let him live in the safe ignorance. Her pride, her arrogance that she always knew best wouldn't permit her to let such a lie pass.

He'd been alive, and now because of her, he wasn't.

"It is the truth of honesty." Celestia contradicted, still not turning the mirror away.

"You did this to me."

"It is better to face the hard truth than to live a comfortable lie." An easy statement for the beloved, wealthy, powerful alicorn to say, to claim the moral high ground even as she destroyed another's life.

"You did this. You ruined it." The doll had no facial muscles with which to show the broken, despairing rage.

"I will not make an apology for doing what is right." She stated firmly.

No answer. Threadbare cotton and stitching was hard to read. It was a wonder the soul inside the doll was even still conscious now that it had become truly self-aware, because straw and cloth can't think, can't anything.

Celestia went on into the stifling silence; "Now you clearly see and understand. You aren't a pony, and though your creation was not your fault, neither should you exist. You're a dead soul who should have returned to Harmony's cycle many years ago, and instead, you've only further gone on to drag out your death many more years by giving in to dark magic. You've lived a half-life, a cursed life. Misfortune will beset you on every side in recompense for your stolen existence, Harmony will ensure that. It's pitiful. Do you now understand? What never should have been in the first place has only been perpetuated by your actions. I am not angry, I am sad."

The breathless air pressed in closer in the hot room, with nowhere to escape to. The superimposed dirty, exhausted, crying lamb was shivering so hard his teeth were chattering. The raggedy doll couldn't shiver or move.

Finally, only now, did Celestia put down the conjured mirror to the side of the tiny room. It began to dissolve into floating particles of twinkling gold.

"Now, are you finally ready to let go?"

The air was immovable. The rest of the world was gone.

Are you ready to die?

A stuffed doll in the shape of a sheep. A pincushion on its back. Staring button eyes, straw poking out of the seams. The thread stretched, opening wide to let the darkness of the mouth gape open from within, hungry and empty and endless.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!"

"Oh for goodness sake, please don't start this again."

"-AaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAA-!" The rasping wail just got louder.

Celestia's magical aura swiftly reapplied itself, clamping down over the lamb's mouth, because the lamb could scream but a doll couldn't.

"-AAAAAAAEAEAEEEEEEE-!" But the scream didn't cut off this time, instead just rising in pitch and anguish.

"Control yourself. You need to focus-"

"-EEEEEiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiIIIIIIIIIIII-!", It was grating on the teeth now, crawling into your ears, and desperate.

It was painful on the head and in the heart to hear. So Celestia seamlessly integrated a silencing layer into the shield already containing Prey.

The scream cut off. For a moment. But then it started up again in the distance, ".....IIIIIIAAAAAAA-!"

The air almost seemed to shiver. The scream was still carrying through, still clawing its despairing way into her subconscious. Abruptly it became clear why. Celestia was hearing it with her head, not her ears.

'-AAAAAAAIIIIIIIII!!!!!!!!!!!!' The wordless wail of pain kept rising to something beyond pain. It was meaning.

Celestia's horn flashed with sunlight. The invading mental sound was instantly cut off behind a cool, soothing barrier within her mind. But it still sounded in memory, and the face of the bit of Prey that was a lamb was rigid, tendons in his neck bulging out, as his head was arching further and further back. So far it could have snapped if it wasn't stuffed cloth but rather a real neck.

*Snap.* Not the condemned's neck missing only the noose. It was just the world suddenly shifting sideways.

Barely an inch, but suddenly everything was just that tiny bit not where it was supposed to be. Celestia sat up straight, her face smoothing out in caution.

The lamb's whole body had shifted from screaming to not screaming, as if there had never been any screaming at all, and now instead he was looking at her. The lamb, not the button-eyed doll, but the lamb. The doll was still there, visible just beneath the surface, but it was the lamb addressing her.

That should not have been possible. She'd thought the unintelligent doll had been slowly subsuming the lamb as the undeniable truth sunk in. But not so any longer.

With a spark and a shimmer over the shield's surface, sound was once again allowed out of the bubble. But only after Celestia had carefully scanned the whole room first with her magic. Just to be sure.

Watchful, the sun alicorn held onto the initiative, and waited for what Prey was going to say first.

Jerkily, his thoughts rigidly locked onto iron tracks from which they couldn't deviate to the right nor left, he spoke.

"My name, is Prey. I am Prey. I think. I am."

Celestia's head turned just a fraction, to look to where the last of the conjured mirror was in the process of disappearing. "How can you say that having seen the truth? You aren't a pony."

The rest of the question was unvoiced. How can you still think? Straw and cloth couldn't think. How are you capable of even speaking the words 'I' or 'me' without going insane from the clash and paradox of unreality and reality occupying the same space?

"My name, is Prey. I like, I like candy. I dislike bright lights. Don't touch me. I work in the Night Guard. The Captain's name is Nighthawk. He gave me a Half Moon medal. Princess Luna, she knows me. I rent an apartment in Canterlot. I have a friend, my best friend. His name is Crimson. He's waiting outside the gates for me. I am me."

"Princess Celestia, I beg. Please, I'm not broken, see? I'm still a person. I can think, I can talk, I can reason. I can't help how I was made. Can a child be guilty for the crimes of their parents? So please, let me go, let me continue, let me live."

Prey was Prey, and Prey was a mind leech. He was a weak, powerless, runt lamb. Or at least, that was what he was once again. His flesh was cloth, but at least for now the lamb overwhelmed the inanimate doll!

Prey knew this, because he'd made it the truth. He was a mind leech. If anyone else had been in his place, they would've come apart. Just broken and stopped, truly becoming nothing more than the doll. That was what'd been happening to Prey. But Prey was still a mind leech. What was mentally lethal gymnastics to another he could manage, balancing on a knife's edge.

That was why he'd screamed. He'd broken his mind into pieces, and hastily stuck the bits he wanted back together. It was horrible. It was a violation of the self. He'd done it anyways to avoid becoming only a doll with no more lamb left.

He was a rag doll, but he wasn't, because he was Prey, and Prey was a lamb. That was the logic he'd crucified his own mind to. It was self-mutilation on every level. But the fox will gnaw off its own leg to escape the snare. Twice before, he’d managed to fully cut away the offending memories, quarantine the knowledge before the fangs sunk in too deep. Not an option now. The Sun Wolf had forced him to confront it, and like a song stuck in the head, it was impossible to crush.

Only ignore. Only refuse to acknowledge existed. Only delay.

His mindscape was a shattered mess of nothing possible. It could never be repaired now, either. The grey ash was burning, the ground was broken, the roiling purple sky was bleeding, and his inner mind was screaming. But Prey had ripped parts of himself out so that he might keep thinking, keep existing.

He would do it over and over again, each time the truth that he wasn't real started to slip back in, he'd rip it out of the wound afresh. Because that was the price. Prey was too smart for his own good. He now knew the truth, deep down, and he couldn't get rid of it anymore, so every moment of thought had to be balanced on a knife edge lest he accidently 'slip'.

So for a chance to live, he'd done this to himself, so he could sit and talk, to retain the ability to beg Celestia.

He shouldn't have to beg an immortal to live. 'I HATE her.' A thing of cloth couldn't hate though. 'But I'm not cloth, not a doll. I am Prey. I can hate. I HATE her.'

"Please let me live. Maybe you only see me as a golem, but even then, you must at least acknowledge I'm sentient. I'm begging for my life. Please."

A shiver passed over the smooth mask that was Celestia's face. She took a quick breath, then caught herself and took another, much slower and more measured inhale.

"I am honestly astounded. I was not expecting this," The white alicorn admitted, "Three times before I've sadly encountered remnants of Selenia's work... but none of them were able to come back after seeing themselves. Only you have." She didn’t know about the liches’ mirror, then. Blind coincidence had guided her actions.

"That's proof, isn't it? That I'm a person, that I'm alive." Prey desperately broke in. 'I shouldn't have to argue that I'm a person. I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.'

Celestia looked down at him. "You're right. You are entitled to decide if you are a pony or not." She admitted.

"So I will judge you as a pony."

Celestia lifted her head higher, mane and aura radiant, "All that means is that we have come full circle. Nothing has changed. You are a pony who has refused to move on, and turned to a dark magic item instead of letting go. You let your own fear corrupt the pony you once might have been. It is long past time for you rejoin the cycle of Harmony."

Then of all things, she suddenly gave him a kindly smile, as if it didn't brand her a murderer and a liar, "Contrary to what you must think, I can promise I don't hate you. I spoke the truth before too, death isn't painful or scary, so you don't need to be afraid. And I do truly appreciate the service you've given to my sister, even if she should not have hired a foal. I will see to it that your friend is cared for and comforted."

"I hate you."

"I don't hate you." She assured Prey, "Are you ready? Or do you need a bit longer to make your peace?"

The lamb, the doll... he didn't move. He didn't breathe. He gave no answer.

One minute... five minutes... ten minutes...

Celestia patiently waited without interrupting. An eternity distilled into those too-short moments.

Alone in the world, a lamb and an alicorn waited inside a sealed stone room. Just a Wolf, and its Prey.

A violent shudder went through the lamb. It passed from the tips of his hooves, through his wool, and out the ends of his drooping ears.

"Where are we?" He asked for the second time. The question came out low and strangled.

"It doesn't matter. Suffice to say, somewhere well-warded and secure."

His unreal teeth clacked together, loud enough to make a listener wince in sympathetic pain, "Canterlot?"

Celestia hummed, "Maybe. Maybe not. Does the answer matter that much to you?"

"Where?"

"I'll take that as a yes. If it matters that much to you, then yes, you are still inside of Canterlot."

A sharp inhale, then quivering stillness from the lamb. Like a rabbit crouched frozen inside the brambles, the falcon's shadow circling the thicket. No way out, and nowhere to run.

Celestia did not know why that answer should matter so badly to the doll-who-was-a-lamb. She couldn't know why. But it was actually so very simple.

Crimson was still inside Canterlot too.

Once before Prey had said: 'I'm taking everyone with me.'

He'd been willing to do it, too. In reckless, unending spite, he'd been prepared to end it all before. On the mountainside. While crippled by Discord. He'd only ever been a breath away from giving in and surrendering himself to give them a way into the world.

Unreality. Hungry Things. Hunger. A hole torn into the world for them to squirm through.

'Why should the world get to go on if I can't?' Because if there was no hope, no cruel unkind hope of survival, why should he care what came afterwards if he wasn't there to suffer it?

That was what he'd thought at the time, while fighting the war inside the Deeper Green. Spite and hate. He'd lived it, breathed it, survived it. So that is how he'd thought.

And then along had come Crimson. And now Prey did not want Crimson to die.

That was how simple it was.

In that moment, the only two things Prey would not do for Crimson shrank down to one.

Prey had never cared what would happen to anyone afterwards if he wasn't alive to see it. But now he did.

Prey wanted Crimson to keep living beyond him.

Celestia didn't know it, but her answer of their location changed everything.

Celestia was an alicorn. She was immortal. She had doubtless thrown down terrible foes before. In her thousands of years, it was inevitable she would have encountered and fought such things. And since she was still here, she'd obviously won.

But at what cost? How many had died first, how many miles had been turned into dead tracks of grey, crumbling land in which nothing would grow again?

Celestia must have flown into battle, grimly prepared to fight those foes. But here, only a metre separated Prey from the sun alicorn, unprepared, laying on a cushion... at this range, this close, and caught off-guard... perhaps even the Sun Wolf would die. Just so long as Prey was willing to die first.

But if she died, and was consumed by the things which came out, and they were left to bloat and grow unimpeded, even for only an hour... then Canterlot would crumble and fall.

And Crimson was still inside of Canterlot.

'...Now there is only one thing I won't do for Crimson.'
"If you murder me, you'll regret it. Your sun may rise, your sun may set. But even you have to cross the river someday." Each trembling word dripped with poison. But he was no longer threatening that final, twisted form of suicide.

The perfect white alicorn did not know that. She had no concept of how close she had come.

Celestia briefly shut her eyes, "Oh little lamb, I'm not executing you, or anypony. I outlawed such barbaric acts centuries ago. I am only going to remove that dark magic device from inside of you. Nothing more, nothing less, I promise. What happens to you after won't be because of anything I've done, but because of nature catching up."

"A rose, is a rose, is still a rose. By any other name. It. Is still. A rose!"

A murderer would always be a murderer. It could never be taken back.

"I am no such thing. What I do is just, every saddening bit of it. Any consequences that come are only as a result of you meddling with dark magic. Everypony is responsible for their own actions." There was no give or leeway in Celestia's conviction.

"You'll regret it. I've made contingencies, backup plans."

"If that's true, then I'll prevent them," Celestia shrugged, "But please, stop it. You're desperate, I understand, but you don't need to spew false threats. Won't it feel better if you can leave with some dignity? Then you can be proud of that."

"Is there any last message you would like me to carry?" Celestia prompted again.

For a moment the image of the doll twisted and almost overtook the lamb. Prey shuddered violently and clamped his jaw shut.

"Come now, no words at all? I'm sure it would mean a lot to your friend. Crimson, you said his name was." She offered.

Prey only glared. He didn't say a word. He only glared. But the hate in his eyes transcended what any inefficient words could ever have expressed.

Celestia never looked away from it. "There are many who wished they'd had the chance to give some last words to their loved ones. Do you really not have anything to say?"

There were no words spoken. Just that glare.

Celestia waited.

Prey didn't speak to her. He only glared.

"Then do you have anything you want to say to me instead?" She asked softly, "I have sat beside more dying ponies in their last moments than you could ever imagine. I promise you, nothing you have to say will shock me."

The lamb's bloodless lips didn't even twitch. To be there in that moment, to see the hate in those sky blue eyes... perhaps it was so deafening Prey could no longer even hear Celestia's words.

Hate, like drinking poison and hoping the other person drops dead from it. Like swallowing live coals rather than spit them out. In that windowless stone room, between an alicorn and a runt lamb, those descriptors were almost tame for what lived behind Prey's eyes.

Look at the lamb. See a foal. Is the hate of the foal intimidating? No, it is not, because it's only a foal. Nobody fears a foal. Celestia certainly didn't.

"Are you ready?"

Prey never answered.

Celestia's long horn lit up brilliantly. Golden light suffused the whole room, dancing and mixing with the ever-flowing rainbow cascade of her mane. A soft grip settled around Prey. The lamb felt warmth, centred on his chest. The doll did not feel either cold or heat.

It took minutes- how many exactly, nobody counted. Just that it took more than a few. Celestia did not rush. She took her careful time. There was more than one spell. Each spell matrix was individually complex, even for the ancient alicorn. She would not make a mistake. She had already said it, she believed she was no executioner. What came afterwards, that was merely nature taking its course.

A white flare, and when it faded, Celestia was levitating a set of iron jaws. They appeared as some meld between a bear trap and a brace of false teeth. Iron teeth from some deep sea creature, at least. The glinting iron points did not drip red. In fact, they were remarkably clean.

The old torture device was ceaselessly biting the empty air, over and over, in time with the beating of a healthy heart. The iron rippled and flexed like fluid with each snap.

Celestia called forth her power, the aura enveloping the jaws and turning it almost solid gold.

From inside the opaque ball of magic, there was a brief molten red glow, bleeding through. When her magic relaxed, just glowing slag dripped out and splattered onto the stone floor.

Celestia let out her breath in a great exhale of tension. Only then, with the dark magic artefact safely destroyed, did she turn her glimmering magenta gaze back to the lamb she had just surgically removed the Jaw of Hearts from.

There was no one left but the unrepentant perpetrator, Celestia, to bear witness.

Inside Prey, warring dark magics suddenly found themselves unbalanced. The burning energies of the ritual of external youth found it could overtake the energies remaining geared for preservation and repair, mirror unable to fully compete, and overtake it did. It had a lot to catch up on. Silently, like sand drifting away in a current, tiny flakes of dust were peeling off of Prey.

It was like seeing a sapling sprouting, growing, peaking, and then aging and withering down all within a smattering of heartbeats.

Rotting straw spilled piece by piece out from between the doll's rapidly gaping stitching. A drawn-out sound of ripping thread, of string unravelling.

And then a square patch of flesh that was cloth, but still flesh, peeled off of Prey's leg and blew away into ash.

All across the lamb’s body ragged patches began to peel, to flap, and unevenly break off. Inside of his body, there was nothing. No blood fell, no innards splattered. He was naught but hollow stuffing and straw.

And still he glared, two slowly-loosening button eyes of hate.

Stitching rapidly unravelled before Celestia's very eyes. Wool and fur fell out strand by strand. And Prey made not a sound. He didn't even look at himself as he faded, as the doll disintegrated.

Straw, string, and stitch. He never looked away from Celestia as his left hind leg failed and fell away.

Nor his flesh and cloth sloughing off.

Nor when a button eye plinked onto the floor.

Celestia dared not blink or breathe, lest she miss the final moment. That was only right. She waited for the last thing he would say, ready to commit it to memory.

But Gossamer never did. He only glared.

There was a farm behind him. The fields lay fallow. A tired ewe, slowly breaking the hard and packed earth. A smaller brown shape laboured diligently alongside her.

The farm was so very far away, and rapidly fading further. The night would soon be upon him. He wondered if there was room for a third? But it was so far, too far, and the night was here.

The fading refrains of the last sound there would ever be, "...so wonderfully free. I love no one, and no one loves me~"

It was lonely. And dark. And cold. And hungry.

And then...

...And then...

......And then.

And then Celestia let her breath gently out, briefly bowing her head in a moment of respect for the dead. No matter who they'd been in life, everypony wants to be remembered.

There was a highly sensitive magical barrier covering every inch of the stone room, but nothing had pinged the barrier trying to get out. There were also a hoofull of overlapping and sympathetically linked scrying spells here. Scrying and divining spells were unreliable and imprecise at absolute best, but this close to the object of their focus, and with so many overlapping, they would at least react if something unexpected had occurred or something had gone wrong outside in the rest of Canterlot.

But nothing. No resonance. No alarm signalling any delayed dark magic reaction caused by the doll, the lamb, finally departing this mortal coil.

None at all.

His threat at the end, of dire consequences, had been a bluff. Or were non-magical in nature, and merely the mundane kind of threat.

Celestia rose gracefully off her satin floor cushion. It was sad, it really was, that it had to go this way-

And then there was the screaming pulse of blackness ripping into the world.

In the lightless depths of a sinkhole under the mountain, freezing water fell past smoothened stone so old it’d never seen the light of day.

Something Prey had never intended. A mistake. A punishment.

Down and down and down, down in the crushing dark, the worm of hate split open like a burst fruit and began to swell.

Burning power blasted defensively outwards from Celestia in a pressurized wave. It was instinct, a reaction. To defend yourself. The stone of the room cracked and glowed, and then the power rebounded and rushed back into Celestia. But the danger hadn't come from in here.

Celestia whirled, horn a blazing nova as she looked up, up towards something she couldn't see beyond the cracked and blackening stone, "Oh no!"

But that wasn't it, there was more than the worm at the bottom of the sinkhole. Prey had told the truth. In fear and paranoia, he'd made contingency plans in the dead of night when the fire was burning low.

Beneath a tree canopy and down amid light-dappled ferns, just outside of a tiny deer holt, a young fawn was playing and prancing around with his twin sister, their parents nearby, tending to and weaving the living walls of the holt.

A moment before the cries of panic, a shrieked alarm sounding within heartbeats, the fawn had seized up and spasmed wildly in the dirt, torn ferns flying.

The desperate holt didn't know, couldn't know that it wasn't a snake bite or poisonous mushroom, but a foreign soul trying to drive into the fawn, the invisible greater rune carved onto the back of the fawn's head acting as a beacon.

The terrified parents had no way of knowing. Hundreds of miles away, buried beneath a city they'd never see, a massive and complex array of runes was reaching out across all that distance to sink invisible claws into their fawn's skull.

They'd willingly given their food and shelter to strangers moons ago, under another forest’s canopy. Prey had repaid that trust with treachery in the dark of night, where there was no one to see.

Above the golden mountainside city of Canterlot, there was a brilliant flash of light. Celestia appeared high above the city in mid-air, enormous wings beating.

Spells flashed in rapid succession before her, cast faster than was equinely possible for all except for her as an alicorn.

Her head snapped around, wings re-orientating her to the right direction. She flinched violently, losing a hoof of height as another signal struck her, this time from beneath her.

'Danger, danger, danger!' It was screaming.

She looked down at Canterlot, at something coming from beneath Canterlot. Her floating mane stopped moving, "Oh no..."

In a spare room, inside an earth pony's house in Upper-Lower Canterlot, with a blanket thrown over it and a half-filled clothes basket stacked atop it, a heavy grey box began to vibrate.

Scenic wasn't in, he was out, having already hastily left to look for Prey, Gloom, and Crimson. A thestral flier had just come by from the Palace, specially searching for him.

The thestral didn't hear or see the disturbing jack-in-the-box given to Scenic by Prey and subsequently had been put from their mind, didn’t catch it vibrating and moving. There was a horrible wet clicking-grinding coming from inside.

The air ignited around Celestia as strengthening magic poured into her, rushing in through her feathers, her hooves, into her lungs. More than anyone but an alicorn could summon. She drew more, needed more, there was terrible, terrible danger. The ponies of Canterlot had to be protected!

Celestia reached out for her alicorn magic, her Harmony-given destiny, and transmuted power directly from her own element, the sun, such was her need.

A halo of light burst into blinding glory about the alicorn, the halo's edge shimmering with enormous tongues of invisible heat. She was too bright for any naked eye to look at. In a desperate race against time, Celestia cast whatever spells she thought might work as fast as they came to her perception-enhanced mind.

And something that had never come from Prey. A rag pincushion, in a dark cavern, sitting on a broken and scoured-smooth stump of stone. The stitching burst while cloth began to bulge outwards, as if teeth and claws were straining against it from the inside.

There were wards hundreds of years old, almost forgotten and never used, only tested, built into the very foundations of Canterlot.

She'd been lax, she should have maintained-! But by her alicorn magic, overflowing energy gushed into the unpowered wards. They sprang up, ten times stronger than they'd ever been activated before.

Wasted, ill-directed magic burned away in them, but an alicorn had more than enough to compensate, to outstrip the need for fine control with sheer quantity. In answer, the city's massive wards blazed up like a bonfire!

In the heart of the misty Isle of Dove, twisted wicker monstrosities of every shape stood like statues. Vicious, cruel shapes unmoving in the clinging mist.

There they would stand, until in who knew however many years’ time, some pony explorers figured out how to duplicate the extinct Clan Myrrdon's feat, and cross the cliffs.

Suddenly the largest shambler, as tall as a building, twitched. The blanketing of dewdrops shivered off its twisted hide in a wave, as grafted chitin scraped and muscle contracted.

Complacency. Of late, the entire rule of Princess Celestia of Equestria could be accused of complacency.

Nightmare Moon, and the complete ignorance of Luna’s coming return that had been allowed to exist. Followed by the string of empty platitudes offered to Griffonia. The closed borders and hostile standoff which followed without significant efforts to fix. And absolutely everything pertaining to Discord's return.

Complacent. The solar princess had been so very, very complacent.

And further complacent in not believing the threats of a tiny runt lamb.

Now she had to race the supernatural might of her alicorn spellcasting against time.

But even an immortal alicorn with all the time in the world, even they can't take back a single second once it is gone. The natural price for the sin of complacency.

Celestia wasn't fast enough in activating the huge city wards, or in casting her blocking spells. Too slow, too slow.

It wasn't by any feat of her own that Celestia stopped the escaping dark magic, black magic, blood magic, or voodoo magic from achieving their last, final goal. Because she didn't.

Their failure was simpler than that.

It had always been long odds to begin with. No plan can ever be perfect, and the contingency plans Prey had set up while alive had been incredibly far from that ideal.

Warlocks and witches of every kind had tried to cheat death for centuries, via methods both depraved and inventive. Delaying death was possible, Prey himself had managed that. But coming back after death, a soul missing a body? That was a different beast entirely.

You planned, prepared, and tried, but who had ever managed to defeat it? There was no possible way to be confident in the planned method of your own revival. And who would ever willingly test their backup plan? Who would kill themselves to see if their plan to avoid dying worked? Nobody.

Failure had been all but guaranteed before he'd even begun. Still, Prey had built his runic arrays, and tried.

He'd tried his absolute hardest, and sacrificed the most time, on the possibilities he'd theorized might stand an actual chance.

He'd been so scared of failure, and tried so hard.

But a soul can only take so much. It can't survive without its body. And it had already struggled so long inside a false body of cloth that had not been its own, so worn, stretched and shattered and stolen from and rebuilt and frayed...

Celestia was too slow. The only thing she had done right was oversee the complete degradation of the lamb's body, because a soul needed a body. Thus she had unknowingly made sure the liches’ mirror's one-time chance was wasted in the aether. But for the rest, she was too slow.

How lucky for the princess, then, that her complacency went unpunished.

How unfair.

Bucking and thrashing in his crying parents’ grips, his terrified twin standing frozen and staring on, the fawn abruptly shuddered and lay still.

In the spare room of Scenic Paint’s house, the noise of the complex mechanisms and runes, as well as clicking-grinding, that came from the jack-in-the-box cut off and went silent.

A pincushion finished growing and swelling, spilling off its stone pedestal, but that was it. It lay lifeless. Prey hadn't touched the pincushion in life, he hadn't dared. He hadn't known it had belonged to his mother. But whatever the pincushion had been attempting, it didn't move again.

On the Isle of Dove, the huge scarecrow, Prey's replacement for his mage-killer veropede, ceased twitching. Mist and silence returned to the isle's shrouded heart.

Unfair. The world was unfair.

Scenic, Lilly, Saffron, Carton, all yet to learn of the terrible events. Randy Pickaxe, whistling a cheerful tune as he sweated away in the city park. Lemon Pink, racing to get back to Canterlot on a train, disguised beneath an illusionary veil in another car with wounded from Haven Hay. Gloom... just gone. And Crimson, waiting outside a gate as the hours had ticked by, knowing something had gone wrong but unable to leave as he clung onto poisonous, addictive hope.

There is light. There is darkness. But before both, there was hunger.

The worm of hate had not been one of the attempts implemented by Prey to try and cheat death, not even close. It had been a mistake. A thing like it could not save life, it could only eat life. He'd thought, he'd hoped it was dead.

He'd thought wrong.

A giant pulsating body of grey, squirming flesh. Blind and eyeless. Slime. Stretching, stringy, feverishly multiplying tendrils. And mouths. Toothless, leech mouths everywhere. It was a throwback to a time before there were teeth. It was flesh, hunger, and mouths to feed the flesh's hunger.

It surged upwards, rushing through the dark water, racing for the sinkhole. Ravenously racing for the air, and the hunting grounds awaiting it.

Prey hadn't intended for the worm to exist. He hadn't intended for a lot of things.

For one, he'd never intended for the sinkhole to be part of his lair. For another, he'd never dipped so much as a hoof into the icy water to lay any runes beneath the water line.

The impenetrable protection of the crystal lair cut off at the sinkhole's surface. To the outside world, above the water, it was there the world ended. Nothing uninvited could go beyond. But beneath that, in the bottomless shaft of water, all of it was still tangible, and therefore, mutable.

How doubly fortunate for Celestia.

Celestia's magic was screaming at her. Blaring alarms flooded through the feedback channel from Canterlot's wards and to her. Danger, danger, danger!

But shouldn't raising the wards have been enough? Shouldn't the combined ingenuity of generations of the greatest unicorn mages birthed in Canterlot have been enough of a defence?

But something was still coming, rising up. Something terrible, something which drank in magic like a hole in the world! It was hurting Equestria by its very existence!

The beautiful spires and streets of Canterlot were laid out below her like a map. The strength of the magic only she could access granted her perfect eagle vision sharp enough to see the scuff marks on any single cobblestone, if she but knew where to focus. But she couldn't see anything. Where, where was it!?

Spells tumbled from her horn, triangulation spells, like an ethereal net cast wide. But the delicate spells were being corrupted and destroyed almost as fast as they formed.

The city wards were bowing inwards, showing it was pressing up from underneath Canterlot, but where beneath exactly?! Why hadn't she ever made certain those dank caves and tunnels were fully mapped?

Celestia cast the same location spell faster and faster, trying to get back a returning magical echo before they could all be absorbed, by relying on sheer volume. She had to pinpoint where the threat was coming from before it breached into the streets of Canterlot at all costs.

And then she finally had it. One of the spells managed to return back without getting corrupted. There! Beneath stone, something vile. Celestia prepared her magic to reach out and cast-

-Something reached hungrily back, drinking down her magic.

Instinctively, she severed the connection. The thing somehow tore the connection back open and kept drinking. Horrible, freezing cold. Not good, not evil. Just hunger.

The true magnitude of the rapidly escalating threat approaching her precious city broke upon Celestia. So she acted.

Power. Magic. Sunlight.

Every magic recording device in every mage tower, shielded or not, overloaded.

Magic suffused a bubble of rock and water inside of Mount Canter, with the black hole of anti-magic hunger in its centre. In a bare moment, the hole had already sucked away half of the caging magic, greedily reaching out to eat the rest as well.

It was only the sheer gushing volume of magic an alicorn could pour into overcharging a spell which let Celestia finish snapping the spell's matrix into place in time.

Only a few seconds later, and she would have been too slow, as the worm would've breached the sinkhole and vanished beyond her sight in the lair she couldn't reach.

How truly, wonderfully lucky indeed for the ignorant ponies of Canterlot.

Celestia and the bubble of stone and water surrounding the worm vanished from Equestria with a pop.

Prey had saved Canterlot from a shapeshifting threat it never even knew of. Canterlot would never know how he then balanced the score by threatening the whole city, even after his death.

Inside the Palace, nobles, ministers, and bureaucrats worried and complained over their scheduled meetings being cancelled. Where had Princess Celestia gone all these hours without giving any notice?

Yet everything was quiet. The sun was still shining brightly outside. Canterlot was quiet, there was no panic in the streets, and no mad Discord flying over the city. Trade and commerce ticked over. Life was going on. Most of the population was none the wiser that Celestia had even left. So whatever the occasion was, there was no need to overreact. Princess Celestia would no doubt be back in her own time.

No one was present to bear witness. None to stand and see. Far, far into the Badlands, there was merely a distant flash of light to signal Celestia and the worm's arrival.

No one saw it.

Not one person felt the far-distant vibrations, like thunder on the breathless air.

None witnessed from the edges of the wastes the light bright enough to permanently blind, reduced to mere twinkling flashes by distance. Lances of fire hot enough to melt stone and rend metal screamed down from the sky. A ceaseless hammering barrage. One continuous, never-ending, overlapping explosion. The Badlands groaned and buckled. Pulverised rock dust was thrown into a cloud miles high.

Equestria didn't know where Celestia went, but back in Canterlot they did count the long hours they were without their sun princess.

Monstrous squirming flesh charred under a ceaseless magical blast, pounding the creature flat. Celestia didn't let up. The magic never stopped. The worm bunched itself together, enduring, waiting out the damage. The blinding, burning wrath never weakened, Celestia only struggled to pour out ever more.

None even knew exactly when their beloved princess returned. They didn't see her, she just arrived in her private rooms. The maids who rushed to attend her were made to wait outside, and even then, were only addressed through closed doors. Celestia quietly asked for her sister to be awoken, and to attend her.

The worm no longer huddled. Now it pushed through. Celestia poured everything she had into the fire. There was no unbound oxygen left in the air, everything had been burned away hours back. Pure heat was all that was left now, striking the bloated, squirming worm. Except it was growing more and more immune by the second, adapting, eating greater and greater proportions of both the magic and the physical heat.

Four endless hours of struggle. Four hours of ceaseless combat against a hungering monster that continued to grow and feed and adapt.

Celestia screamed and clawed away. Boiling droplets of blood as thick as magma scattered from feathers. Her aura burned everything, stone, dirt, sky, and yet not the worm any longer. She teleported again, and again, and again. The worm followed her through using her own teleports, forcibly holding the path through spacetime open as it squirmed after her. The destructive spells and trap spells awaiting it on the other side were endured, recovered from, or just absorbed time and time again.

Four hours of not knowing if you were going to survive, let alone win. Four hours of using everything at your disposal to attempt to win, only to have them fail one after another.

Growing, gaining. The worm was gaining on her. Faster and faster each time. Pain. Blood. How long had it been? Blades of folded space cut it to pieces. Tendrils of bubbling flesh rejoined like tar. Unbelievable heat scoured it, yet did nothing as the hungry mouths devoured that too. Explosions and conjured acids and traps and shields and more simply withered, long ago ceasing to damage it. Celestia tried to teleport away and found the spell no longer functioned in the worm's presence. A shadow, the light and heat eaten. She looked up. The worm dived out of the sky, its uncountable toothless, sucking maws open.

One minute of life or death combat is the most exhausting thing in the world. Four hours of it... how many hundreds or even thousands of unicorns would have died in her place in that time?

Spells. Anything. Everything. Just to slow it down, anything that might hurt it, delay it, contain it. But hunger is stronger than pain. Desperation mounted to become a titan, roaring within her. Celestia tried the opposite. She reversed her mastery of talent, and took away all of her light, all of her heat. Cold had always been opposite side of the coin. In such absence of energy, everything began to freeze, even her. Especially her.

Celestia fought the worm for four hours. No one bore witness, even if they could have survived being present. No one was there. No one saw.

But still it happened. Celestia against the worm.

They fought. It fell. What more was there to tell?

The mortal died. The goddess lived.

A hundred thousand words, decades, strife, conquest, success and failure, the entirety of a single life. Could it not be boiled down to just those six words? It was so much simpler that way.

What more was there to tell?

Once there was a little lamb. Then he grew old, but not up. The end? No, just the ordinary beginning to a hideous life...

I have nothing to say. Not yet. We're almost there. Wait until we reach that end, then, we can talk. 😶

But I couldn't in good conscious do this and just leave, the next chapter will not be long in coming. It might be cold comfort, but there it is.

Editor: Panem et Circenses
Also, ShankMaster submitted this very cool Worm vs Celestia fight scene picture.