When she came to she was in a dimly lit room, lying on a table of some description. She felt a nasty bump on her head throb painfully to the rhythm of her heartbeat, but when she tried to touch it with one of her hooves, she realized her front legs were tied above her head with rope, while her hind legs were bound on the other side.
The ropes were basically keeping her stretched out as much as possible, and it was more than a little uncomfortable. It also felt as if the table had a large hole in it, right underneath the middle of her back, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why.
Her first thought was that she had probably hit her head harder than she’d thought, and that this was all hallucination, or some sort of dream. But if it was, it was a mighty convincing one at that...
She tried looking around the room, but as their was only one single, weak lamp right above her, she couldn’t see much.
Suddenly she imagined seeing something move in the shadows, a shape that broke the monotony of immobile shadows with a deeper kind of darkness. “I...is somepony t..there?” the filly said shakily. Apple Bloom and Scootaloo had told her more than a few scary stories during their camping trips, and an unnerving amount of them started off just like this...
She sighed in relief as Cheerilee stepped into the little circle of light. “Oh, teach! I hit my head and I don’t know where we are, so could you please?” she begged, nodding her head towards the ropes.
Her white skin grew even paler than usual when she realized Cheerilee was carrying a hammer in her mouth. She didn’t know why that freaked her out all of a sudden, but there was something in Cheerilee’s eyes... “Euh, miss?” she squeaked weakly. Cheer’s only response was to lift up one of her hooves, revealing her to be wearing another one of those special workpony shoes, not unlike the one she’d used to hold the chisel. This one had a far smaller hole though, and the circle wasn’t completely closed off. It was designed to hold nails, while still being able to slip the shoe off the nail(through the opening) once the job was almost done.
“What are you-”, Sweetie Belle began, but she cut herself off with a scream as Cheerilee let her actions speak for her, hammering a nail diagonally into the filly’s right hoof and through her heel until it got stuck in the wooden table below her.
She felt a trickle of warm blood coat the nail and bit her lip as she struggled to keep calm, for she knew simply attempting to pull her hoof away now would cause even more damage, and more importantly, pain. Not that the ropes currently offered her much freedom of movement, but she didn’t want to take any risks.
With tears in her eyes she tried pleading with Cheerilee again, completely bewildered by this recent chain of events, her mind racing to figure out what was going on, how she could wake up from this nightmare...
“Ple... please... stop... What have I-?” the filly whimpered. Cheerilee just smiled sweetly as best she could with a hammer between her teeth as she prepared another nail, this time putting it in place against the filly’s other hind hoof. The mare looked Sweetie Belle in the eyes intently for a moment, making sure she knew exactly what was coming for her.
Sweetie Belle whimpered and swallowed back a new birst of tears, before crying out: “No! Help! SIS! RARITY! ANYPONY!”
But nopony replied, let alone came to her rescue, as Cheerilee hammered down for the second time driving the nail through the filly’s left hoof and into the table with just a few well aimed blows.
Sweetie Belle squeaked in pain as she tried her best to keep still, the necessity of remaining still weighing down upon her as heavily as the pain itself. She kinda understood the concept behind “walking it off” a lot better now, as she’d have given anything to be able to do just that.
She sobbed as Cheerilee ducked down to retrieve another nail, walking around to the other side of the table.
“No... please... no...” the white coated filly sobbed, letting out a desperate cry as Cheerilee started nailing one of her front legs down, before quickly doing the same with the other one as well.
Sweetie Belle could feel pain radiating through each one of her legs, but for her tormentor it still wasn’t enough. Unaffected by the filly’s crying and pleading, she continued on and drove a second nail through each of the filly’s legs, this time straight through the ankle just above the hooves themselves.
Little pools of blood started to form around her hooves, flowing off the edge of the table and dripping down to the ground lazily. In the heat of the moment Cheerilee dropped the hammer and tentatively held her tongue underneath one of the little streams, savouring the taste of Sweetie Belle’s warm blood as it dripped into her mouth. It tasted even better than Scootaloo’s had, perhaps because it hadn’t had as much time to cool down yet.
The filly was still crying softly as Cheerilee rummaged about, retrieving one of several matches she had stored in the room. She struck it against the nearby wall and bowed her head down to light a fire underneath a metal cylinder that reached up from just above the floor to the table itself, connected to the table in the spot where Sweetie Belle had felt a hole in the wood earlier. The little bits of wood and tinder the mare had prepared for this occasion caught on fire quickly and continued burning nicely, smoke circling up to hang just underneath the ceiling.
Cheerilee looked up at it, but wasn’t too worried. The room was badly ventilated, but it was a small fire and she wouldn’t need it that much longer in any case.
A minute or two passed, Cheerilee just mesmerised by the small flames as she waited, thinking of the fun she’d had with Snails earlier.
The white filly slowly stopped crying, sniffling pathetically as she looked at Cheerilee with teary eyes, confused by the mare’s actions, but hopeful that this pause meant she was reconsidering keeping her there against her will.
“Please... miss... If you l...let me go I’ll... I won’t...t-tell... anypony, I pro..promise!” she managed to say with a trembling lip, but again Cheerilee neglected to respond. Suddenly Sweetie Belle became aware of a panicked squeaking noise coming from somewhere in the room. The sound increased in intensity steadily, until it sounded like a great many rats were fearing for their life somewhere, even though that didn’t seem to make any sense...
She had some trouble locating the source of the noise, until she suddenly realised it came from right underneath the table, from the thing Cheerilee was staring at but which she could not see.
As her teacher stepped closer to the table she mentally recoiled, but the mare simply leaned in and reached underneath the table itself, grabbing hold of a metal plate at the top of the cylinder with her teeth and pulling it out, removing the last barrier between the cylinder and the hole underneath Sweetie in doing so.
The squeaking quickly escalated to unprecedented levels, but still Sweetie Belle couldn’t make head nor tail of it. What did rats have to do with a metal pl-
Suddenly the filly gasped and her eyes grew wide with fear as she felt dozens of little claws scratch at her back, as the entrapped rats surged up from the overheated cylinder to find a way to escape the flames.
Even in their frenzied state they recognised the difference in hardness between their metal prison and the filly’s tender flesh, and they were fully prepared to put some effort into creating a way out if it meant living to squeak another day.
Many mouths and claws worked together as they started to gnaw and tear at the filly’s back, her terrified screams of pain not managing to extract any mercy from the swarm of vermin.
She tried arching up her back to lift it out of their reach, which would also have set them free, but with her body stretched to its limit and held firmly in place by the rope and nails she couldn’t even lift it a tenth of an inch.
The rats quickly ripped away patches of her coat and skin, relentlessly going on to gnaw at her flesh. The filly screamed as she thrashed her head about from side to side, unable to do anything else as the rats started to devour her alive, piece by piece.
Like a well-oiled digging implement they ripped and tugged at her muscles and ligaments, tearing out sinews and arteries both as they pushed onwards. Several of them came face to face with her spine, but decided to simply gnaw around it when it proved to be a nut too hard to crack. After all, they were aiming to break free and didn’t have a bone to pick with any of the elements that made up Sweetie’s body in particular.
The filly herself shrieked like a banshee, foam appearing on her mouth as her muscles convulsed and her body thrashed about as much as it could, which is to say not much at all. Regardless of that she still moved enough for the nails to pull at the wounds they had inflicted on her, causing the holes to become larger and bleed even more profusely.
But this, although painful, was only the least of her troubles as the rats’ combined efforts finally broke through layers of skin and muscle and they erupted into her abdominal cavity, clawing up past her intestines or, in some cases, simply gnawing through.
The unpleasant and torturous feeling soon turned Sweetie green with nausea as her stomach buckled and she vomited, partially managing to spray it next to her on the table, but some of it getting onto herself as she could only barely lift her head to aim it away.
The ensuing screams were music to Cheer’s ears, and when copious amounts of blood started streaming out of the bottom of the metal cylinder, falling down into the fire with a hiss, her legs got all wobbly with excitement.
As the rats continued to bite and claw their way through Sweetie Belle, her screaming slowly shifted to a wet gurgling noise. With every passing second more of her internal organs got ripped to shreds as the disoriented rats tried to find a way out. A few of them stayed right on target as they started advancing on the upper part of the filly’s abdomen, opposite to the point where they had entered.
Some of the other rats were clueless though as they kept going around in circles or started off in completely wrong ways, digging horizontal tunnels of gore through Sweetie Belle.
As one of the rats tore through her diaphragm the filly’s breathing became shallow and troubled, and Cheerilee started taking up bets with herself as to what would kill the filly first: loss of blood or the inevitable destruction of some vital organ or the other.
It wasn’t long after that that the filly’s stomach started to bulge out, before suddenly a blood-soaked rat tore away the last patch of skin with his sharp claws, and poked his head out of her stomach.
To Cheerilee, the small, furry critter was the most adorable thing she’d seen in quite some time, especially the way it looked around the room with curious eyes. It clawed its way fully out of Sweetie Belle’s warm entrails and made its way down her quivering body and off the table, soon followed by a dozen of his brethren as they all fled their meaty container and scurried off into the darkness.
The pale filly’s body convulsed so wildly with shock that not even the ropes were enough to hold her down anymore. She thrashed and shook against her bindings as a stream of blood flowed out of her mouth and down her chin, nails ripping through her flesh or simply getting pulled out of the table altogether.
After a few violent seconds, during which most of the rats escaped, all of the nails had ripped either through her flesh or her hoof, or both, but the filly was already too far gone to notice or care. Her body convulsed one last time as she let out a horrifying choking sound and then the filly, finally, passed away.
In the ensuing silence the only thing that could still be heard was the dripping of blood and Cheerilee’s heavy panting, sinece the blood flowing out of the cylinder had long since extinguished the crackling flames the mare had lit earlier.
A few moments passed during which Cheerilee tried to control the trembling of her body, until suddenly a soft squeaking noise could be heard. The reason for Sweetie’s choking sounds towards the end became at once apparent as her mouth opened, one of the rats forcing his way out of her throat and climbing past her teeth to freedom. Cheerilee burst at once into hysterical laughter, still in the throes of hilarity when she took the stairs back up to get to the fillies and colt’s dressing area.
All the way up there only one question was on her mind: Why had no comedian ever thought of this before? Death was simply hysterical!