Cooling Embers

by Incandesca

Prologue - Burning Rage

This was it.

She'd done it.

Three years it took her. Three years to reach this point. Three years and fifteen more of scraping, grovelling, biting and clawing her way to the top.

Sure, she'd broken a few bones along the way. Spilled a little blood. Ruined a couple lives - maybe permanently!

She didn't care. She couldn't find it within herself to pay it the single, smallest piece of her mind. That was just how the world worked. Gore and glory went hand in hand, and she was ready to make some headlines.

Because she was here now - it was here now. It was hers. And it had all been worth it.

In the dark of night, knuckles pale, she clenched the crown in her fists.

No.

No no no no. Not just any crown.

Her Crown. The Crown that stuck-up cunt Celestia owed her from the start. The right she'd always deserved, that every worthless scum in her miserable life had tried to take away.

None of them ever believed in her, not really. They lied, and cheated, and hid the truth. She gave them warmth, and all they'd ever returned was scorching fire or bitter ice. She'd learned to adapt, ugly fight after ugly, hideous, brutal fight. She'd taken it upon herself, wove it into her bones. Breathed deceit with more ease than she breathed air.

'And look at me now.' She grinned a gruesome, bloody grin. Her reflection grinned back. 'Do you smell that, Equestria? The fire's coming from inside the house.'

They'd all see her soon. She would make them. They would bow and prostrate themselves before the Killer Queen of Canterlot - in this world, and the next.

Flame raged in cold eyes as she admired her prize, its beauty. The golden gleam, the intricate engravings, the six-sided star jewel that capped it all off, like candles on the birthday cake she'd never gotten.

She would've killed all her birthdays in the world if it meant this moment. Now, she didn't even need to. Cakes, Crowns, and Kingdoms, all for her. What a treat.

Shining Sun above, this was just too good.

She laughed, stroking its cool metallic surface like a beloved bird. "At last... More power than I could ever. Imagine."

And with more power than she could ever imagine? No one could hurt her ever again.

Hands trembling, heart pumping, she raised the Crown up high. The moon's surface glinted in its reflection. Blood rushed through her veins like a flood of precious ruby, until at last it touched her head. Her heart thundered with the drumbeat of a shitty, miserable lifetime.

It fit perfectly. Just how she always dreamed.

If sentiments were worth a single damn, she might have cried. But she shed her last true tears a long, long time ago.

Then, it began. She felt it. The power. It licked up her arms, her legs, a blazing dark inferno of black and blue and white that matched the glare of her gaze.

With each passing second, it crawled up her skin, setting her nerves alight. Tendrils of magic nipped at her flesh, every little bite a bursting thrill of conquest. 'Yes, yes, yes,' she cheered. 'Give it to me! Make it mine, all mine!'

And it did. Her feet left the ground, and she didn't even notice until the world became small beneath her. The people became ants, wretched and pitiful as they always had been. Her only regret, that she needed help to get there.

As if those two idiot boys were any help at all. Whatever. She'd give them the reward they deserved, in due time.

'Ow!'

She cursed, attention flicked to her hand. She could hardly see it anymore, wreathed in writhing, coursing mana. It fucking hurt. Why the fuck did it fucking hurt?

Suddenly, screaming heat pierced through the skin, lancing her flesh. The roaring blaze drew nearer, climbing up to cover her face. Every tendril burrowed inside deep, deep down beyond the bone, beyond the marrow. In the span of null, the power she'd craved for all her life turned to swords, stuck through every one of her atoms, down to the last.

'Stop, stop, stop it!' She screamed - or she tried to. Her jaw made no motion, and her throat made no sound. What was this? What was going on?

This wasn't happening. She had victory literally within her grasp. She had the definition of it scrawled atop her skull. It was supposed to be HERS Sun fucking damnit!

It was Twilight.

That bitch. She'd done this, hadn't she? She'd planned for this all along! That piece of throne-usurping trash, she'd taken everything from her! Celestia, her Crown, her queendom, her birthright!

Time slowed to a crawl, as her soul shrank in on itself. Signals fired, fired, fired in her brain, but no response came. Her body refused to move, to listen, to so much as twitch in the right direction. She wasn't even allowed the mercy of death, as every second of agony became a grotesquely stretched millennium.

Fists clenched, banging against invisible walls. No reaction.

Her eyes, wide and hollow, stared forward. Locked in place, pupils trembling. Her lungs burned, her heart burned, her blood burned. It all burned.

The stars in the sky blinded her eyes, laughing, laughing, laughing. The jeering, distorted faces of all those she'd- No! No, fuck you. She hadn't wronged anyone. They did it first. Not her. Them!

Ink blotted out the sky. It bled down in liquid rivulets, eating whatever it touched. It wanted her. It needed her. It hungered for her, a yawning empty chasm that swallowed the horizon and pried her chest apart.

The world became nothing. She became nothing. She would die here and she would never know when because it would twist time until it lost all its meaning, and the concept, the name, the idea of Sunset Shimmer would be lost forever and no one would remember and no one would care and no one would love her and-

Tears.

Wetness. Weakness. Pity. Misery.

They beaded in her vision, stinging her skin with dagger-like salt. The heat of them seared worse than the magic. They seared with awful, choking, sputtering shame.

She wouldn't let them. She couldn't let them. No one could see. They'd see inside her, see the hideous scars and poison words etched on her tongue.

'Why?' she asked. Herself? Her parents? Her Matron? Her Princess? The world?

They ran down her cheeks, each trail a bright, smoking path. Droplets carved grooves in the meat, staining her everything with its ashen stench.

She spoke, in a voice she no longer owned. She heard it in her mind and ears, like her own voice played back in lovingly crafted detail.

She was small.

She was weak.

She was nothing.

In her last dying gasp she managed to ask one final question. It was a question she'd never said aloud. A question she thought she'd buried in the bowels of her gut, then heaped over top a mountain's worth of charred, smoldering debris.

'What did I do to deserve this?'

---

Hatred.

Reality came slowly. Brick by brick, it built itself around her. Blinking bleary, stinging eyes, she opened them to the world

Or what was left of it. She recognized her surroundings at once. It was that void, that insidious shadow the vile, treacherous Crown spat in her face.

She should have been used to this by now. Why had she expected anything less?

Pushing herself off hands and knees, she expected to feel... something. Anything. She hadn't died, clearly, but maybe this was worse.

No. Not worse. If she could find a way out, she would. Equestria's storied pages spun tales of ancients, trapped beneath the earth, in the Moon, under the Frozen North. Prophecies foretold that, one day, they'd awaken.

If this was her fate, she'd be no different. She'd wait in eternal Tartarus if she had to, until she finally broke out and got her revenge.

Grunting, she pushed up from the black. She felt nothing she touched. Because it didn't exist. Hard to get input when there was no output.

She balled her fists. She heard her knuckles crack, and unclenched. After a delay, shooting pain spiked through her fingerbones, pulsing up to her wrists, traveling beyond her elbows.

She held one hand up to look.

It wasn't there. Somehow, the nonexistent ground below her feet fell.

She twisted around, darting her neck and body in quick, panicked jerks. Shouting at the top of her lungs, fangs scraped the flesh of her throat. She didn't hear herself. In fact, with a dawning dread she realized she didn't hear anything.

Terror was a monster. It squeezed her pumping heart in its claws, and took a meaty chunk. There was no horizon in sight, no reference point for scale. Faster than light it zoomed out and away from her, pouring her brain to the brim with relentless, cosmic apathy.

She clutched at her head, raked her scalp, and screamed.

Hatred.

She hated them.

Every last fucking one. From her first fillyhood friend to her last idle plaything. They were to blame for all this. They put her on this path. They chose her destiny before she could hope to choose it for herself. They deserved this, not her.

She'd been stripped of agency, rip by bloody rip, until her raw muscle oozed. And so she rebuilt herself, plastering on layers of silver and gold. Then, with a casing of iron, she picked her target, chased her dreams, and clutched them in her bare hands.

She'd been on the cusp of perfection. That Crown, the last metal piece she would ever need to fill herself forever. The key to unlock her hard-earned happy ending.

Dropped off at a porch. That was the true start of her life. She'd come this far, not just grazed but gripped victory, savored the spiced, smoky flavor on her tongue.

It would have tasted so sweet going down.

Hatred.

She laughed, and didn't care she couldn't hear. Her chest rocked in the motion until her belly ached.

Hatred? Was that all she felt?

Please.

She felt a whole lot more than that. Hunger, for one. The kind of starving knife she felt slice her guts on long, dreary summer nights those first few months. To think a few cans could possibly satisfy her needs - ha!

What a joke.

She felt that hunger now, again. It coiled inside, bony fingertips creeping along the rungs of her ribs like a ladder. There it would pry her jawbones apart, until she broke down, popped her rations open, and ate them all 'til she wanted to puke.

She'd hungered for so many things, then and now, beyond basic sustenance. Power, for one. Vengeance also - that one more gradual, developed with time and care. Freedom to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted, to whomever she wanted.

Of the three, power had been king. If she got power, freedom and vengeance necessarily followed.

Something slammed into her head. Or her head slammed into something. Hard to think with her skull ringing from the crash of a sledgehammer.

She blacked out, again.

---

She blinked, and vision returned. Sounds, smells, sight. Holy, holy sensation.

Somehow, this was worse.

She was in a body. Her body, she deduced. But it didn't look like her, and she wasn't the one to inhabit it.

But she was?

She watched herself from first and third person. She moved her arm, flexed her claw. Felt herself move her arm and flex her claw. But she never remembered telling herself to do that, or wanting to, or thinking about it. Or having claws to begin with.

A deep, dark, crackling laugh burbled in her core. It started in her diaphragm, working its way through her voicebox, vocal chords, and larynx until it spewed out of her mouth. Because that's exactly what it felt like.

Her mouth grinned with sharp, pointy fangs, the kind that could tear steel. The wicked rakes of her fingertips were the same, each a shiv in its own right. Both dug into her flesh, gums and fingers respectively. It was torture.

The strangeness returned. That fucked up simultaneous third and first person view. How was that even possible? How could she see herself from within and without at the same time?

She was detached. Dissociated. Like her own eyes were a TV screen, her point of view on the left, outside perspective on the right.

She fucking hated it.

She had power.

She fucking loved it.

She had none.

The color of her skin reminded her of a drawing. She wracked her brain for the details, and drudgingly they came. It had been of a centaur, some foe of ponykind imprisoned in Tartarus Celestia knew how far back. Her eyes reminded her of the same monster, pools of endless coal, but with blazing aqua instead of yellow at their center.

Her hair, more than it did before, conjured the image of a flame. Honestly, she thought she looked kinda hot. Real fire would have been so much better, though. Imagine if she could catch things on fire with her hair alone, wouldn't that be a laugh.

She was still floating she realized. Then, belatedly, no. She wasn't floating.

She was flying. Demonic, bat-like wings beat against the air, reminding her of a pony she didn't care to remember, but memory forced her to on occasion.

She'd always wanted to fly, have wings. Now she had them, and she didn't know how to feel.

It didn't matter. Her past didn't matter. Her present did, because what she chose to do now shaped her future, and for once the whispers in her blood told her that future was finally hers to chart.

The witless crowd beneath her stared in shock, shifting around in frightened masses. The sensation she drank from their fear was sublime. Pleasurable little shivers danced along her vertebrae, making her want to arch her back.

Her body didn't let her.

Without thinking, she - or whatever controlled her body - shot magic at the two boys. In a flash, they transformed into creatures just like her. The smiles on their faces told her they enjoyed it as much as she did. A part of her couldn't help but wonder if they also hated it, too.

If they did, it hardly mattered. They closed in on the girls while the others scattered towards the school doors, their shrieks and screams making her shudder.

Her mouth opened. It moved and spoke. "I've had to jump through so many hoops tonight, just to get my hands on this Crown, and it really should've been mine all along."

Her voice didn't sound right. It had an affectation, something about it just... wrong. Beyond the layers, the otherworldly effect. It was too smooth, too pompous to really be hers.

She didn't want to hear it again. She didn't want to feel it use her throat.

She continued anyways.

"But let's let bygones be bygones."

Her serpent's eyes licked across her huddled peers. The words that left her mouth were ones she'd wanted to say for ages, but she didn't have the choice in saying them.

"I am your Princess now!" Her body gasped inwards. "And you will be loyal... to me!"

Her wings flew her towards the school. As the crowd behind the glass screamed, her arms shot out and ripped the doors open. Her eyes stared them down, and a foreign will pressed from her mind to theirs.

And just like that. They were hers.

She hadn't planned on this. Any of it. But she'd have to work with whatever her body offered. Her hand flicked at the girls who'd been the thorn in her ass ever since that bitch arrived.

"Round them up and bring them to the portal." Her body dove for Twilight, stopping mid-way. "I was bluffing when I said I was going to destroy the portal. I don't want to rule this pathetic little highschool. I want Equestria."

"And with my own little teenage army." She gestured to her thralls. "I'm going to get it!"

"No. You're not."

Excuse her?

Excuse fucking her? What the fuck did the bitch just say?

The absolute Mooncursed nerve of this insect. She'd never let Twilight win. She'd die before that happened. How could one mare take everything away from you and still want more?

When she won, she'd put the usurper in a pit in Tartarus, until her own mother forgot she existed.

"Oh please. What exactly do you think you're going to do to stop me? I have magic-" Her arms spread, showing her handiwork. "And you have nothing."

"She has us!"

The rainbow-haired one stepped up with the others. The bitch's dog growled impotently.

She couldn't help but laugh. Did they seriously think they could do something? Even she'd never been that arrogant. She'd always made plans within plans, backups of backups. She'd sketched out how to commit murder and get away with it once or twice.

They knew nothing about her. About her past and what she'd done to get here. If they knew, they'd be fucking terrified.

Her hands crackled. "Step aside. Twilight has tried to interfere with my plans one too many times already. She needs to die."

Death, or a pit at the pitch dark black bottom of Tartarus. Either worked, really.

The crackle grew. Embers coalesced around her fingertips, using the air as fuel for flames. Fire surged from her hands, spewing out in a deafening blast she aimed at the group. She cackled, and couldn't wait to see their bodies on the ground, black and steaming.

The smoke dispersed.

They... they were still there. Holding hands. In a pink fucking bubble. Fucking pink. Really?

She'd puke if she had the time.

"What?" her lips said, and her eyes watched the girls glimmer.

Their feet left the ground. Light ran up their arms and legs just like with her, but not with dark magic. They gained equine features, and Twilight...

No. She had wings, and a horn.

She had magic.

Twilight rambled on about the Elements, the Crown, some stupid bullshit about 'friendship'. It didn't make any sense. How the fuck could 'friendship' do this? Friendship wasn't power, power was power! She was power] The red of her skin and the slaves behind her proved it!

She had to do something. Now. Now, she had to do it now! Why wouldn't her body respond? Why did the Crown hurt?

It forced her to watch as victory crumbled around her, for the second time that night. A prismatic beam burst from the bitch and her suckups, rising and streaking towards her in a long, bending arc.

Not towards her. Towards the Crown.

She screamed inside her coffin. She pulled and yanked on her arms. The Crown wouldn't let go, flooding her nerves with pain, shock, and horror.

The rainbow crashed.

It all went white.

---

She coughed.

Blood spattered the ground. It coated her tongue, iron and copper failure. Bile. Bitter. Disgusting.

Nobody noticed. Or they did, and she couldn't. Her head hurt, her bones ached, her eyes stung. Smoke and rubble choked her from all sides.

She looked at her own hand. Her body obeyed, like it was supposed to. Her perspective stood firm, and whatever she asked her body to do it did.

Cool, calm relief flowed through her.

Then, the shame.

She lost.

She failed.

Despite everything. All that she'd been through, all that she'd done. And she failed. She wouldn't get a chance at this again. Or maybe she could, given enough space.

She could crawl up out of this smoldering pit, turn tail, and run for the hills. She'd bring nothing but the clothes on her back and what she owned in her apartment. Start from scratch. Build back up. She'd done it before. She could do it again.

A thought hit her. Pounded her like a bullet to the brain.

Did she want to?

Did she really want to go through it all again? The lies, the hate, the nights spent curled up because her guts were eating her from the inside out? Join crime again, ruin more lives, kill more relationships?

She couldn't stop herself from crying. Memories of the past three years and longer gnawed at her mind, dredging hideous, wriggling things from the depths she never wanted to remember.

But she saw them now. She saw herself now - what she actually was. Because she hadn't become a who, she became a what.

It crumbled in magnified slow-time. The infrastructure of her inner walls, the castle she built around herself crumbled. The paint flecked away. The torches guttered out. Bricks fell loose, and exposed the pulsing, throbbing mass of snakes coiled behind.

They writhed and bit at the flesh. The meat of their neighbor, or missed and bit themselves. Venom seeped into their blood, from their own fangs, as the ones around them did the same.

A veil she'd never known existed lifted from her eyes. Time and time again, trauma after trauma, she thought she'd 'seen' clearly, assessed the world and people for what it was and who they were.

She'd fooled herself every step of the way. In the process, she let herself turn into a monster. In her case, literally.

Lead weights tugged on her chest, squashing her guts. Something hurt deeper than the skin and meat and bone. Deeper penetrating and revealing what she was inside, without the pretense and justifications. The self-victimization.

Liar.

Cheater.

Killer.

Monster.

A sort of blankness smothered her. Once, after breaking her arm on her motorcycle, Flash took her to the hospital. Before fixing the joint and setting the cast, they gave her meds for the pain. It numbed her everything, and that's how she felt now.

Only this time, it wasn't her arm she'd broken. But her life. And she'd been the one to break it, nobody else.

Flash. Canterlot High's old Queen Bee. Celestia. Her three older friends. An older mare. A young filly.

Dimly, she crawled out of the crater, then ducked below before they saw. They were laughing, cheering, smiling. They had kind faces and friendly eyes.

Good people. Nothing like her.

She hated them. She hated them so much. She wanted to scream and rage, and strangle them until the light went out forever.

She was so, so close.

Twilight spotted her. Walked, loomed over. There was anger in her violet eyes, but no hatred.

"You will never rule in Equestria. Any power you may have had in this world is gone. Tonight? You've shown everyone who you really are."

Each word punctured. Sunset threw in more of her own. Described to herself in a vague, blank, disconnected way who she really was. Little. Small. Pathetic. Weak. Cowardly. Shiftless. Backstabbing. Narcissist. More and enough to fill a dictionary.

"You've shown them what's really in your heart."

A lifetime squeezed the sob from her throat. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know there was another way."

Lies came easy.

The truth came so, so hard.

Comments

[TheGJ90]

"Lies came easy.

The truth came so, so hard."

At that moment, there was nothing Sunset could say but the truth. Or at least, some part of it.