friendship is heresy | Glowfic Constellation

What do you do with the trapped souls of the Queen of Infernal Cheliax and the Grand High Priestess of Asmodeus? You can’t, actually, keep them that way forever. Lastwall has spared no expense in keeping their soul gems as securely as possible, but given what Asmodeus proved willing to spend on defending Cheliax, it stands to reason that no security mortals can provide will keep his favored puppets imprisoned forever, or even for very long. Heaven could do better, of course, but they do not really want to try to match Hell intervention for intervention, not when Asmodeus is acting like this.

Besides the security question, of course, it is wronging someone greatly to keep their soul trapped forever, even when that person is Abrogail Thrune or Aspexia Rugatonn; hardly better than destroying it, even if Pharasma accounts it differently. It is better, by the values of almost all mortals, than sending them to Hell, but there are exceptions, and loyal Asmodeans are perhaps likelier than average to be exceptions.

They cannot, actually, send them to Hell, even if they would have preferred it over oblivion; if they do they will be resurrected immediately and continue to be used for Asmodeus’ purposes on Golarion. They could try to negotiate an arrangement where Asmodeus promises not to resurrect them, but that would be trusting Asmodeus, and unwise on principle.

This leaves, of course, the option of sending them to Nirvana and seeing what Nirvana can do. Iomedae doesn’t have a good estimate of how likely this is to work; in her judgement redemption, like love, is a concern overrepresented among the Good gods and emphasized out of all proportion to how much it actually improves the world. So Lastwall asks the church of Shelyn instead; Shelyn, who has for personal reasons made something of a study of the redemption of beings twisted by Evil, and whose marginal intervention is in Lastwall’s opinion far less efficiently used than Iomedae’s.

Shelyn, unaware of the risk of reducing Herself to a plot device for ridiculous glowfic premises, knows just what to do.

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"Well, it usually is."

Days pass, then weeks, and Abrogail's permanent background outrage at being trapped in the land of friendship and ponies gradually fades. Minds are funny that way; whether or not she can live here, she does, and she goes on doing it even though the Abrogail Thrune who was Queen of Cheliax would have sworn she would rather die. That said, there is one regard in which Equestria continues to infuriate her: it's all fake. There's endless petty social drama, but no one ever gets tortured over it. There are monsters in the woods, but they're basically harmless. Even the local adventurers don't appear to have ever seriously risked their lives for anything; it's a miracle Twilight got to fourth circle even given her résumé, which would sound fairly impressive in Golarion, if you didn't know anything about Equestria, but—

—well, Abrogail isn't sure what she's more baffled by: a timid yellow pony who can successfully Intimidate an adult red dragon, or a world in which the biggest threat that the adult red dragon posed to the nearby town was the smoke from its snoring.

It's this, moreso than any lack of royal status or god-enforced injunction against hurting people, that has her still planning to leave. Luckily, Twilight was stunningly easy to manipulate* into continuing her research into interplanar travel, and it looks like the project might just be possible.

(She hasn't mentioned to anyone that if Rarity ever makes it to Golarion with her diamond-locating spell, she could probably buy the planet. Even with just the diamonds Rarity gave her for "research purposes", Abrogail could probably buy Cheliax back from the paladins if she promised to have nothing more to do with Asmodeus.**)

In the meantime, she's started writing a romance novel. A proper, Chelish romance novel, mostly just an amalgamation of the plots of several of her old favorites, but surely a vast improvement on the drivel currently available in this place. The reception it gets will be informative about ponies as a species; on Golarion, Chelish fiction does have something of a cult following outside Cheliax, even in Good countries—unless the government bans it. She's not sure what Celestia will do.^†

(*) Actually, there's no way Twilight wasn't going to research it once she found out it was a thing, Abrogail or not.

(**) Even Abrogail is aware that returning to Golarion while denouncing Asmodeus is probably a bad idea for her.

Princess Celestia

as-the-dawn

(†) Whether or not Celestia decides to censor Abrogail's novels, she will certainly read them.

And so, one afternoon a few weeks after her arrival, Abrogail is suddenly accosted by a tiny yellow filly wearing a mane-bow larger than her entire head.

"You have to help me! Twilight said you could help me. Please will you help me?" she says rapidly, in a country accent that identifies her as probably one of the Apple clan.

What.

"Uh, how?"

"Diamond Tiara's cuteceañera is today and everypony in my class will be there but they all have their cutie marks but I still don't because I'm no good at—"

Acid— no she will not hurt the little ponies.

"Slow down, child. What the abyss is a 'cutie mark'?"

"Wait, you don't know—?" She glances at Abrogail's flank. "Hey, you don't have your cutie mark either!"

"Well, the last person to call me cute got t—" no she will not traumatize the little ponies either "—old off for it."

Apple Bloom just looks confused. "No, a cutie mark doesn't have anything to do with being cute," she says. "It sym—symbo—has to do with your special talent. Everypony—well, every grown-up pony—has one...how old are you?"

Her special talent is torturing people, which would be both difficult and potentially traumatizing to small ponies to depict in a tattoo on her butt.

"I'm twenty-one," she says. "But I've only been a pony for a few weeks—I have no idea if ponies mature like humans at all."

"I'm eleven," volunteers Apple Bloom. "What do you mean, you've only been a pony for a few weeks? What were you before? What's a human?"

Probably about a human maturation timeline, then. At the very least, not off by an order of magnitude, and given that it's that close it's probably exactly the same, for the same bizarre reason that all their cities are named with Taldane horse puns.

"I was a human," she says. Really she would have thought this obvious from context but children are very stupid. "A kind of person from very far away. When I came to Equestria I was transformed into a pony."

"Oh!" says Apple Bloom. "Well, only ponies have cutie marks, not griffins or zebras or anyone else. Maybe you have to discover your special talent as a pony, and you just haven't yet. You will eventually."

She doesn't actually care. "What did you want my help with?"

"Well...Twilight said you might have a spell that could give me a cutie mark, since hers didn't work...but maybe you could just come to the party with me instead? It won't be so bad if I'm not the only one there without her cutie mark. And you're a grown-up so no one will make fun of you."

She was planning to drop by the party anyway—she does genuinely enjoy petty social drama, however silly the Equestrian version is—but she has too much pride to be visibly coaxed into it by an adorable little filly.

"I do have a spell. What cutie mark do you want?"

"Well, almost everypony in my family has something apple-related..."

She Prestidigitates a literal apple blossom onto Apple Bloom's flank.