“Was someone hurt? Are you? This is a lot of blood…”
“It’s from the body of shop keep Hard Tack. I think I mentioned him in my letters. A nice fellow. The first friend I made in Mournthread.” She hears the unicorns voice say through the door.
Mulberry stops in her tracks. Her fiance is speaking in past tense, but it’s all so hard to believe. She is sure there is some perfectly logical explanation to this. There must be. There has to be.
“Changelings!” she exclaims. “It’s changelings isn’t it? That’s why you thought it wasn’t actually me earlier, right?”
Yes, it all makes perfect sense! Mulberry realizes that when he says it’s the shopkeeper’s body, Antione actually means it’s a changeling with the appearance of this Hard Tack fellow.
She hears some murmuring from the other room, and then the stallion says, “If only it were that easy.”
Mulberry continues to the door frame and stops right outside of it. She takes a few deep, calming breathes and then pushes the door open.
She let’s out a scream, but soon stifles it with her mouth. Half in shock, half in an effort not to throw up.
Antione has pushed his bed into the middle of the room. Atop it is a pony who looks very normal from the neck down. It’s a stallion, middle-aged, and wearing pajamas. The mare can just barely see his cutie mark. It’s a trio of what appear to be crackers. Above the neck the pony is nearly unrecognizable. Mulberry has trouble looking at it for more than a brief moment, but it looks like the poor stallion’s head was caved in with a heavy blow to his face. It crushed his snout in as well as most of his front skull.
>Mulberry’s eyes have begun to open!
She let’s herself fall on the door frame to keep from fainting, and then hears a click of metal on metal.
She snaps her head up to see Antione sitting at a desk beside the bed, holding a gun.