With a great sneeze, I was more than a little shocked to suddenly notice how blue everything was. In fact, I really should have noticed sooner. But all I could remember before this was the unpleasant way the sun did nothing to dry all the sweat that clung to me as I drifted behind that hydra in the swamp. The dampness was only worse now, and all I could see was blue. It was pale, and glowed like a clear, sickly sky. Up, down, left, right, everywhere, it was impossible to judge just how far it all went, or if it even if it covered anything. It looked so uniform, and smelt strangely of lemon.
Only the hydra, standing a few dozen yards away, necks fully extended up, gave the room any impression of height, and even that was only due to the number of thin, pale, red-glowing strands that had extended from the blue and onto the heads of the massive beast.
And then there was the fear.
My own, as ever, whispered silently to me from the sand that had now claimed the entirety of my legs from the knees down, clenching tight and beginning to creep higher thankfully, for once, because it put a few precious centimeters between me and the blue covering the floor. The fears of each of the hydra’s heads still called to me as clearly as Ms. Sparkle’s beside me, but all of that wasn’t even a close third compared to the fear that sang throughout the entirety of the room.
The very air was filled with life, and one fear. I was literally breathing them … it, in. Coating my lungs with each breath.
This. Was. Bad.
All of it, the whole room, was The Bog King.
With the flat out superhuman feats of your average pony on top of the magic they wielded, it just didn’t seem fair there were intelligent slime molds on top of it all. Worse, what little I actually knew about molds was related to how hard it was to get rid of a fungal infection, let alone an intelligent, magical one.
The hydra’s eyes, all of them, now glowed the same red as the filaments, and the central head craned down to look at me.
“You were allowed a single retainer to accompany you,” it said deliberately, its great voice thrumming up along its long throat, “and yet you have brought a princess of the equine tribe with you.”
Oh God.
Flashes of ants and spiders slowly climbing atop trees as snow-white fungi grew out of their joints sent an icy knife through the hand already clenching my heart. It was displeased, and the only comfort to that was the pressure of the sand which now grasped both of my legs entirely like some demented living fighter pilot pressure-suit. My eyes flicked to Princess Sparkle, only to find she was unconscious, her body depressing into the ‘carpet’.
Worse, it was right. I’d broken the rules of etiquette it had sent, but what could I have done? Come here and leave the ponies who were supposed to watch me without permission? I was already here in the heart of their kingdom, after having spread terror throughout their cities, and now was surrounded, in many cases literally less than a stone’s throw, by their greatest weapon.
“Well?” It asked, letting the condemnation hang in the air.
As much as I wanted to cough, to stick my fingers down my throat and claw away all the things I knew were sticking to my lungs, I kept my hands at my side and quietly said, “Wha-”
“Speak. Up.”
“What do you want?” I asked, nearly shouting, the words leaping from my throat.
“What I want,” they said, the left head snorting, “is for creatures to keep their word. And, as of yet, you have been doing a poor job of it.”
“I’m sor-”
“You had best say something of greater worth than ‘I’m sorry’ or this whole thing will end here and now.”
“How can I make it up to you?” I asked far more calmly that I felt.
The middle head cocked to the side before it and the others extended back to the roof. “A moment,” it stated simply, and the red strands retreated from the hyrda and back into the ceiling, turning it a solid blue once more.
The hyrda shook its heads, its eyes regaining focus, but otherwise remained where it stood, leaving me to stand like a lump with the useless knowledge of how much this sapient soggy carpet feared the sun drying it out.
I could still leave, I could probably even get Ms. Sparkle before the hydra could inhale enough to roar at me for daring to move. But would it make any difference to the spores in my lungs? Knocking us unconscious was already on the table, and really, it didn’t need much else. And at least death by starvation probably wouldn’t hurt at all at that point … if I was even capable of dying from lack of food that is.
Before thoughts of what really constituted my life now and how badly I wished I could get all of it and this nonsense to end in a nicely packaged twenty-two-minute period could consume me, however, the red tendrils came back down into the hydra’s heads. The red glow returned to its eyes, and then craned its chins down to stare at me.
“It has been decided, that in reparations for the insult of ignoring the specifications of the invitation, you shall be put to labor for one day, helping to rid us of the pests that attack our crops.”
Blinking, I tried to … say something, but the floor rushed up and …
I hate magic.