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// Chapter the Fifth: Pitfall 
// Story: Mountain of Misfortune 
// by Kiernan 
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Art held tightly to the ladder. He must have gone at least half a kilometre up, and there was still no place to step off the ladder and just stand. Two rungs had broken, almost causing him to fall. That would make descending even more difficult. In addition, his hooves were shaking. If the rungs were breaking, it was safe to say that the bolts holding the ladder to the wall could just as easily be ready to strip away. If this ladder gave way, he would never survive the fall.

He took another shuddering breath and continued up the ladder. He didn’t know what could be up here, aside from a possible exit, but the light wasn’t at the end of the tunnel, it was in his mouth, and he couldn’t see anything else around him. 

And then he spotted the end of the ladder. Half a metre above that, a small cliff. He could probably rest there, as there was sure to be more tunnel for him to follow. If not more tunnel, at least something. Nopony would make a ladder going all the way up here, devoting the time and resources to secure it to the wall, if there wasn’t something up here worth going to. And even if they had, then at least he could rest for a bit before trying to go back down.

It took a fair bit of effort, but Art did manage to climb up onto the ledge. He slipped once, and was sure in that moment that he was dead, but he managed to climb up and secure himself. There was indeed more tunnel to follow, but for now, he was content to just be sitting on stable ground. Or at least, what he assumed was stable ground. 

“I should have brought something to eat,” he panted, more from stress than exhaustion. “I would kill for some trail mix right now…”

A popping sound further in the tunnel drew his attention. 

“Is somepony there?!” he shouted. “I need help!”

Silence. Then another pop, followed by some kind of burbling. 

Based on prior experience, Art had to wonder if what he was hearing was, in fact, his joints popping and his stomach rumbling. It wouldn’t be the first time today that he saw himself  as reality folded over on top of itself. After all, he’d chased himself through the rotund chambers less than an hour prior.

Then again, that was silly. It had been silly then, and it was silly now. More likely, it was something moving in there. As his mind raced through the likely solutions, as well as some unlikely, he concluded that the pops were drops of water, and the burbling was some kind of moving water. A river? Maybe he could follow it out.

With a glimmer of hope, he stood up and followed the noises. Maybe the pond would have some grasses or something that he could eat, or maybe the water was drinkable. Maybe the exit was down a waterfall, and he could make his way back down while breathing in the cool, refreshing spray. All manner of things could be true.

Alas, none of the answers he came up with were accurate. While there was moisture flooding the air here, it was not a pool, but a tiny trickle running down the wall from a tiny polyp in the rock face; the beginning of a stalactite. The water trickled down to the bottom of the cavern, where some kind of mould, or perhaps some kind of anaerobic moss was growing. The popping was coming from the bed covering the cave floor.

On closer inspection, the burbling seemed to be the growths slurping up the water and then pumping it through its mass to propagate outward. The popping was little globules at the end of tiny stems spewing spores into the air. By the time Art found this out, several caps had popped up and hit him in the face, and it even left behind a sticky residue.

Immediately, he scuttled away, almost afraid to breathe as he knew the dangers of fungal infections in the lungs. He gasped, however, when his flank hit a wall. He was at a dead end.

In a way, this was good news. The wall wasn’t the cliff he’d just climbed, as slipping off of that would have been disastrous. Blocked off was way better than falling for who could say how long, culminating in instant death.

He grabbed his mane and put it in front of his mouth and nose. It wasn’t a great filter to keep out spores, but it was better than nothing.

“Okay, I can’t go back,” he reasoned. “I can’t go back, and going forward presents some problems. I don’t know how hazardous those mushrooms are, but I can safely assume that they’re not good to breathe in. That’s just almost universally true. Maybe I can burn them?”

He conjured a small flame with his horn and pushed it gingerly toward the fungus. He had to concentrate, as spewing fire was not exactly a common spell, and quite complicated. Most ponies who could would much rather just light a match, or a candle, with a simpler spark. 

As the flame drew near, a loud screech rang out as a cloud of spores came in contact with the flame and caused a flare. Art almost let the fire go out at that, but managed to keep it aglow. A few more loud flares rang out, spouting torrential jets of flame until the fire touched one of the distended caps. 

Immediately, the cap exploded in flames, sending flammable spores everywhere, which set off other caps, which set off even more, until the sheer force from the concussive blasts managed to put out the flame. 

Art was already on the ground, holding his ears to keep them from being damaged by the sound of massive explosions echoing all around him. It was almost as if five dozen artillery firework shells had gone off mere centimetres from his face. 

He picked himself off and brushed his face. He had a few burns, and was lightly shaken, and now his head was throbbing, but that only served to tell him that he was still alive. The dead didn’t feel pain, after all. 

He let out a small whine. It didn’t do him any good, but it made him feel better. Past the ringing in his ears, he couldn’t hear it, and the popping of the mushrooms was muffled, distorted by his tinnitus. He considered shouting out, screaming for help. After all, he’d just made an exceptional amount of noise. If anypony had heard that, they’d be listening now. But if they called back, he’d be unable to hear them, and unable to tell them where he was.

After two minutes, however, he could hear again. If anypony had heard, they’d be headed his way. Part of him hoped that he’d just ruined somepony’s crop of edible fungus, because they would be very interested in removing him from the caves as fast as possible.

“Hey, I broke your garden!” he shouted. His voice was very hoarse. “All of your precious mushrooms, destroyed! Come grab me and throw me out!”

All he heard was the popping of mushrooms. No voices called back to him. 

He pushed his lantern over the top of the patch of mushrooms. He held the lantern high, not wanting to accidentally ignite any more spores. The entire bed was destroyed, but some parts of it were more destroyed than others. In fact, there was a clearing now where his flame had touched down. The explosion had left a sizable divot in the floor of the cavern.

He took a deep breath. He could probably jump to the clear spot if he took a few steps to do so. From there, he could inspect further down the line. Now that he knew how the spores reacted to fire, he could possibly even clear the cave out in sections, as long as he crouched down, closed his eyes, and covered his ears. 

He set the lantern down in the clearing, making it obvious where he needed to land. He could jump that, for sure. All he needed was a running start.

With his tail touching the dead end of the cave wall, he rushed forward, leaping into the air. For a doughy customer service representative with a penchant for drawing pictures in his downtime, he managed to clear the gap rather cleanly, his hooves touching down right in the centre of the clearing.

Unfortunately, this caused an unforeseen turn of events. His hooves did not stop with contacting the stone, as between those two surfaces, the water beading down from the stalactite mixed with the slime oozing from the mushrooms made the surface very slick. He immediately slipped, sliding forward into the bed of mushrooms in front of him. 

Looking at them from nearby and being struck with a few pressurised caps was one thing. Sliding through a bed of them, with thousands of tiny pops slamming into his underside was a whole different can of worms. As soon as he stopped sliding and slipping and found even the tiniest amount of purchase with his hooves, he rushed back to the clearing, just so he could stand up.

Panting and shivering, he looked down at his chest. Aside from being covered in slime, his skin looked like it had been burnt, or eaten away. It felt like his skin had been torn away, as if the cave floor combined with the water had wet-sanded away his chest. He was bleeding, too.

As he tried to breathe, to both calm himself and clear his head, he noted a crackling sound coming from his throat. There was no avoiding the obvious; that ploughing face first into the bed of mushrooms had caused him to breathe in an uncountable number of spores, and they were now stuck to the inside of his throat. There was no doubt that he was in trouble now. Any denial he might have had in the form of “I should probably see a doctor when the weekend is over” had been heightened to “I need to cancel my weekend plans and see a doctor right away.”

Walking the mushroom-laden path was a bad idea. It had been from the beginning. Trying to burn them away had seemed a good idea, but they were explosively flammable. Trying to go over them was also a sound thought, but terrible when put into practice, due to how surprisingly slimy they were. 

In the end, it seemed that he had no choice but to walk across them. Leaping would cause him to slip again, and sliding was bad, and he did not have the energy to blow them all up. He didn’t even know how far they went. There could be miles of this stuff, and he was only a single unicorn. 

He picked up the lantern and held it in front of him, stepping as softly and precisely as he could to have as few caps touch his hooves as possible. Every step caused his hooves to hurt, as if his flesh was being torn apart. His hooves were battered by the caps that popped off, but that was the least of his concerns. Far more than that, the spores stuck to his fetlocks, and it wasn’t long before he could feel it burning. Worse still, he could feel the same burning sensation inside of his lungs and throat, and all over his chest. 

He began to feel tired, and soon after, nauseated. If he wasn’t so focused on continuing, he’d have stopped and fallen asleep. Unfortunately, he couldn’t. He knew now that reaching the end of these mushrooms and finding an exit to the cave was a life-and-death situation. To quit now meant death. Continuing on from here was the only way.

Eventually, his bloodied hooves stepped on something that was not solid ground, but a hole that the blanket of mushrooms had grown over the top of. His mind had gone fuzzy long before, and his hooves were screaming out in agony, so he didn’t feel it at first. He was falling before he realised it, and landing in the pit below, he found that there was no way back up. Unfortunately, the only way to go was up, and the walls were covered in slime, as were his hooves.

He was trapped down here. He was trapped down here and he knew it. There was no way he’d be able to climb out. 

“HELP!!” he shouted, his voice destroyed. “HELP ME!! SOMEPONY, PLEASE!!”

And as usual, there was no response.

It was hard for Art to breathe. He didn’t know why, but he could feel a horrid scratchiness inside his throat. He couldn’t quite place it, it was just a coarse raspiness. His voice just gave out. 

He slumped down against the slime-covered wall, into the pool of gunk on the floor. He had to hold the lantern aloft, lest it go out entirely. He was exhausted, but he had to hold it up. The light was all he had left. 

“What a harrowing thought that is,” he thought to himself. “This lantern is the last inch of my life. I always thought it would be when I was old, lying in a hospital bed over a disease I haven’t even heard of yet. I wanted kids. I wanted a wife, or at least a marefriend. And now… nothing.”

He started coughing, and after a few hard wheezes, a chunk of fungus came up. The mushrooms were already growing inside of his lungs and throat. That was the harbinger of his death.

He slowly lowered the lantern toward the slime, and as he hovered above the surface, he rasped, “If all I have left is this light, and I am to die, then let this be my final decision. These spores shall never harm another pony again.”

As the flame came in contact with the spore-coated slime, there were a few loud pops, but the liquid put it out. He was now alone with nothing. He could feel his skin being eaten away, and in that hole, that was all he had to look forward to.