//------------------------------// // 3 // Story: Golden Prose // by Field //------------------------------// We were largely silent for most of the walk back to town. I imagined Golden Prose was thinking about her colt and replaying the scene back at my house over and over in her mind. I was lost in my own thoughts about the fact that everything I owned was now a pile of ashes. Aside from that we were almost afraid to talk for fear we would miss the sound of another dark pony creeping out of the shadows towards us. If there were any more of them out there they might not be so polite as to announce themselves the way Hardtack had. I didn’t know who we should tell our story to, if anyone when we got to town. It seemed like something best kept under wraps, but we had killed a pony. It was self defense no question about it, but in a small town like Ponyville something like that wouldn’t go undiscovered. Neither of us had been the last ones to speak to Hardtack Jack that day so at least we wouldn’t immediately be under any suspicious. That did bring up another thought though. “Ey, hat awou aie ouse?” I tried to speak around the flashlight. Golden Prose rolled her eyes and levitated the light away from me. “I said- what about my house? It’ll still be smoldering by morning and that’ll be visible from town. The fire department pegasi will be all over that place and then they’ll be looking for me.” Golden Prose chewed on the thought for a moment before speaking. “I really don’t think you have to worry. The fire was an accident… sort of. The body of that thing dissolved after I shot it, so if anyone asks just tell them the truth. A lantern fell over and started the fire.” She seemed remarkably detached about the fact that she had blown away an unearthly creature not all that long ago. She was right. Purely by accident she had put the revolver away without emptying the spent casings onto the ground, so there really were no remaining hints of the weirdness that had occurred there. That was simultaneously frightening and relieving. No one else would know what happened, but there was nothing to prove to myself that we’d really seen what we saw. “I can’t believe my house is gone… oh Celestia I can’t think about this right now.” I groaned to myself as we walked. “Forget that, what we really need to talk about is that page I found outside. Even if you don’t remember writing it you did admit that those quill strokes were yours.” Golden Prose reluctantly nodded. “You wrote that some kind of shadow attacked Hardtack, and then a shadowy Hardtack comes after us. I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you really were in the Everfree when it showed up and that you weren’t at the diner causing it somehow. But that leaves the obvious question: how did you know what was going to happen?” “I don’t know!” Golden Prose shot back, shaking her head to calm herself for a moment. “Look, I know you’re upset and trying to focus on something else, but I don’t know any more than you do right now. I want to know where those pages came from, but above all else right now I just want to hold my colt and make sure he’s safe.” I knew it wasn’t her intention, but she’d done a lovely job of making me feel like I was being selfish by worrying about anything besides little Bookmark. The foal was probably dead asleep in bed or having the unsupervised time of his little life, raiding the cookie jar and reading comics; whatever the cool colts were doing these days. The condo Golden Prose led me to was, as I expected, in the newer section of Ponyville. Adjacent to the market, it was one of six two-story units in a complex called The Elements of Luxury. It was undoubtedly a play on the fact that the bearers of the six Elements of Harmony supposedly lived in the town. I prayed that the units were normal and not themed after the individual elements. The unicorn mare’s pace quickened as we approached the fourth unit in the cluster. She scampered up to and through the front door of the little white bungalow without a word to me. After she had invited herself into my house I had no issue waltzing into hers without an official a-okay. As she trotted up the stairs to the bedrooms I went on a hunt for the kitchen to help myself to a drink. I had been dry even before the walk back to town; now I was downright dehydrated. “Booookmark!” I could hear Golden Prose upstairs calling to her colt as she went down the hallway. “Bookmark, sweetie, mommy’s home. You don’t have to hide anymore.” Trot trot trot, more hoofsteps on the hardwood. “Bookmark! Bookmark!” Then came the sound of a raging tornado of hooves and scraping wood. I bolted out of the kitchen and up the stairs in search of the source of the disturbance. The hallway light and every bedroom light adjacent to it were on, and at the end of the hall I could see the mare frantically barreling around the room that must have been Bookmark’s. Golden Prose had pulled the covers off the bed, yanked everything out of the closet, and just made a disaster of the room in general. “He’s not here!” Golden Prose sobbed frantically, dragging the room’s four post bed even more askew with her magic. “I can’t find him, he’s gone!” “Alright alright, don’t panic. I’ll check the other rooms up here; you go check the downstairs rooms.” I ordered quickly, fearing that if I left her upstairs in her current state she would bring the second story down on top of me while I searched. We tore the house apart. Well, to be more precise Golden Prose tore the first floor of the house apart. I left the upstairs in a state of organized chaos but didn’t find one thing out of place that could clue me into where the colt had gone. His toys and personal effects were still all in his room, albeit now buried under the mess his mother had made. I’d felt a little dirty snooping around Golden Prose’s room, but her things weren’t even unpacked yet. I hadn’t heard anything from the mare downstairs aside from a few shuddering sobs here and there, so I assumed she’d had no better luck. If I was going to be of anymore use I needed to have a drink and a rest before I passed out. From the top of the stairs I couldn’t see where Golden Prose had gotten to. I peered over the banister as I trotted down, half expecting to see her curled up in a pile against the wall. As I looked back up I noticed that the unicorn had poked her head out from behind the kitchen doorway. It almost looked like she’d been waiting for me. Then her horn started to glow. The initial magical blast knocked me into the wall and sent me reeling. I stumbled and fell over the banister, crashing to the floor below with a resounding thud. Before I could get back onto my hooves her magic hit me again. Invisible hands latched onto my shoulders and dragged me across the floor, up the wall, then pinned me there. “What in Luna’s name i-“ Before I could complete my sentence another invisible hand slammed into my throat, crushing my windpipe. I flailed wildly with my hind legs, trying to break free from her magical grip as Golden Prose approached me with murder in her eyes. “I know what you did!” She hissed, stopping several feet short of me. “Where is he? Where is my colt!?” The grip on my throat lessened just enough for me to speak and I gasped for a breath. “Have you lost your mind? What are you talking about?” That was all I managed to get out before the hand clamped back down. “Don’t play stupid, Moss. I found this while I was tearing the downstairs apart.” Without losing any of her magical potency on my throat she levitated a scrap of scroll out of her saddlebag and floated it up for me to read. “Are you really sure my mom wanted me to come with you? She always told me the Everfree Forest was a bad place and I should never go there.” Bookmark puzzled as he trotted beside Mossy Hooves, trying hard to keep up with the larger pony. The market was packed with other ponies, making a maze of legs for him to steer around. “Your mom is VERY busy working on a special new book right now and she needs your help to finish it!” Mossy replied cheerfully. “She asked me to come get you so she wouldn’t have to stop writing. You understand, right?” The little colt nodded and smiled. He knew how his mother got when she was in the groove of writing. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I’d never even spoken to the colt, let alone taken him anywhere. Yet this was unmistakably another page of Golden Prose’s manuscript. Identical to the one that had predicted the arrival of the shadow-taken Hardtack. “You don’t honestly think I took Bookmark, do you?” I managed to choke out as the unicorn placed the scroll back into her saddlebag. “And if I did do you really think I would be stupid enough to leave a note telling you about it? Something else is going on here!” I could see in her eyes that she wanted to believe me, but she was grief-stricken beyond reason. Her saddlebag opened once more and I was suddenly afraid that I was about to get a face full of flare gun. Instead she floated out my flashlight, turned it on, and shined it centimeters away from my face. We were already in a well lit room, but I guessed that after seeing that flashlight take on the shadow monster it had taken on some supernatural power in her eyes. Satisfied that I hadn’t dissolved into ashes she finally dropped me to the floor. I lay there for a minute, considering my options and catching my breath. Part of me just wanted to get up and run. Run to the train station and catch the next train back to Baltimare. There was nothing left for me here, and what’s more there was something fundamentally wrong here that I didn’t need to be a part of. The other part of me knew that I couldn’t just leave Golden Prose here to face whatever this was alone. If there was some grain of truth in that page she had showed me then I was already too tangled in this to jump ship anyway. “I’m sorry, Mossy.” Golden Prose eventually spoke up, standing over me as I pretended to admire the grain of the wood floor. “I just saw your name on that page and my mind went red… I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions when I can’t even explain where the writing came from. And besides all that the scene on the page looks like it was set in the daytime. Bookmark was with me all day; it was dark when I put him to bed.” I hadn’t noticed that when I read it, but she was right. She offered me a hoof as I tried to stand up but I politely brushed her away. I was already beginning to sense a reoccurring theme there and I didn’t like it. “It’s alright… I can’t claim to know what it’s like to have a missing foal, but I can imagine. I would probably be losing my mind right now too.” A poor choice of words on my part. I winced and waited for the glare or sharp comeback, but one never came. Instead the mare shrugged off her saddlebags and threw herself down on the living room sofa. I hated to leave her like that but I really didn’t know what else to say to her. Defeated, I dropped my saddlebags next to hers and headed into the kitchen to get that drink I kept missing out on. By the time I came back out I half expected Golden Prose to be asleep. To the contrary she was lying on the couch on her stomach reading a book. It looked familiar to me, and when she noticed me watching her she looked a bit guilty. I trotted across the room and took a seat on the floor next to her. The book was one my Shining Dawn novels, but not the one I’d had in my saddlebag. She had what I’d thought to be the last book in the set, Kept from Sleep. “Where did you get that?” I asked, knowing full well it was a little too much of a coincidence for her to have her own copy. Golden Prose bit her bottom lip and laid the book down flat. “I kind of took it from your house. I almost tripped over it when the fire started. “ I raised an eyebrow and gave her a look. “What else of mine did you pocket while you were there?” “Just the flare gun and the book, I swear. I thought we’d need the flare gun, and I just had this weird feeling that I shouldn’t leave the book behind.” She replied quietly. With all the weird things that had happened thus far a gut feeling seemed like as good a reason as any. Besides, it wasn’t even my book really. “So have you ever heard of that author, Shining Dawn?” The mare shook her head and levitated the book, turning it from side to side looking for an author portrait on the inside covers. “I know every pony in the modern publishing scene these days, but this book is absolutely ancient. There’s no publishing house information or any kind of date on it. Classical literature isn’t really my thing.” “Fair enough. What’s it about?” She shot me a bit of a look and laid the book back down on the couch in front of her. “No offense, Mossy, but you were in the kitchen for five minutes. I barely had a chance to get the book out of my bag. I just needed something to occupy my mind for a while.” I chuckled sheepishly. That had been a silly question; I must have been getting more tired than I realized. Or Golden Prose’s magical assault had knocked me too senseless to function properly for a while. I really wanted to lie down, but I had no idea how to broach the subject of the hotel room she’d promised me. To be honest I wasn’t even sure if the offer still stood after everything that had happened. When it came down to it I could afford to get one on my own, I was just nervous about making any transactions in my own name until the matter of my burnt home was dealt with. My slowly nodding head gave away my exhaustion more than I intended and Golden Prose eventually looked away from the book long enough to notice. She pursed her lips for a moment then closed the book. “Until we figure out what’s going on I don’t think it would be wise for us to go out at night.” She said finally. “We need to rest and go back to the Everfree at noon, when the sun is highest in the sky.” She floated the book onto the coffee table and slid off of the couch. “You can have the couch tonight.” Without another word she headed up the stairs toward her bedroom. It struck me as a little curt, but she was giving me a place to sleep so I couldn’t complain. I flopped onto the couch with an exhausted sigh, burrowing my head into the throw pillows to give my eyes a rest from the light. The couch smelled like Golden Prose, and whether I wanted to admit it or not I enjoyed that fact and found a bit of comfort in it. A loud FWUMP shook me out of that line of thought and I turned my head to see the source. The real Golden Prose had levitated the mattress from her bedroom over the banister and dropped it into the living room. With a pillow in her teeth she trotted down the stairs and plopped down onto the fallen mattress. “What?” She asked as she noticed my confused expression. “We only have the one flashlight and flare gun. If something happens we’d best be in the same room to deal with it.” She was right. Not to mention that in the page I’d found Hardtack Jack was alone when the darkness had struck. He’d been in a well lit kitchen but somehow the darkness had been powerful enough to put out those lights and engulf him. There was no reason to assume it couldn’t do so again. If all it needed was a moment of mental weakness, alone the two of us would probably be easy prey. “Alright…” I mumbled, rubbing my face sleepily on the couch. I was ready to sleep, but apparently she wasn’t. “Of all places why were you moving to a backwoods town like this?” She asked from the mattress, sprawled out on her back. “I could ask you almost the same thing. This is hardly a vacation destination. Why not visit someplace nice like Canterlot or Trottingham?” “Now now, I asked you first.” I rolled my eyes. So that’s the way she was going to be. She had to have known about the Hayseed Swamp incident, everyone did. “I’m from Baltimare, I just couldn’t take the city life anymore. I was trying to move out here for a little peace and quiet so I could work on some personal projects.” She took in the half truths I had spat out and seemed to digest them for several minutes. I could tell she knew there was more to it, but also that now wasn’t the time to pry. “You’ve never read any of my books, have you Mossy.” She said at last, definitely more of a statement than a question. I turned my head on the couch to face her again. “I’ll be pretty frank, before that waitress at the diner started raving about you the other day I’d never heard of you in my life. No offense.” Golden Prose nodded and touched her tongue to her front teeth thoughtfully. “I want you to do me a favor then.” “What’s that?” “Don’t ever read them.” I don’t know why it mattered, or why I agreed, but it seemed to give her a sense of comfort and that was good enough for now.