Note of Silence

by Quicksear

Runaway

“I remained still, frozen, like a rabbit under the glare of a wolf, unaware of all else but the climbing music, but then it changed. The bass leveled out, and the treble rose higher and higher. Suddenly the bass dropped, blowing away my self-control, even under the screeching accompaniment of a pack of violins.”

*****

I would like to think that Hoofington is what Ponyville was like six years ago, before the fame drew the celebrities and monsters and crowds. The peaceful town was nestled between two hills; the main road passing up between rows of terraced cottages thatched golden and washed white. I couldn’t quite shake the feeling that I did not belong somewhere so peaceful, or that my very presence was the reason I saw not a pony in the streets.

Ponies are, by nature, social creatures; they seek out the companionship, validation, and affection of others. Ponies can die of loneliness as easy as of starvation, so walking into what should have been a happy town like this and meeting not a soul in the streets was… wrong. Of course, I’d forgotten what had happened those months ago in this very town.

Bon Bon.

My old friend from Ponyville had been returning home after her sweetshop’s grand unveiling in Canterlot, brimming with joy and glowing with victory. She’d sent a note express to Ponyville, exclaiming that she would be back early to celebrate with her friends, and of course, especially Lyra. The mint unicorn had gone into a flat spin preparing for her marefriend’s return, planning a huge ‘welcome home’ bash. I wasn’t really aware of it at the time. I was in my basement, a Soul Tap on my table and another tearing into my body, ignoring the fact that Octavia had just left me. I don’t remember much of that time, only waking up that afternoon with a horrible sense of foreboding and major blood-loss.

I heard a buzzing noise in the air. I flicked my ears to shake it.

I tried to warn Octavia too late. Bon Bon never made it home. She’d be found by Lyra two days later in Hoofington, one of the stops between Canterlot and Ponyville, beaten and bloodied and robbed. The pair sent one letter home, and were not heard of again until it was too late. Both of them are alive, though, in Ponyville. The shock of it to this small town must have been enough to cow the ponies living here, especially when they heard what had actually happened.

I frowned. That buzzing wasn’t going away. It was getting louder, too annoying, and yet...compelling.

I tried to stay inconspicuous among the houses, but one pony walking through the dust is hard to miss. I heard windows and doors opening. Then I heard them swing quietly shut, and for once, I was happy that I was so intrinsically forgettable.

That damn buzzing noise was plain loud now. I turned this way and that, trying to figure out where it was coming from. Eventually, I found it.

Hoofington Clinic.

It was no different to the one in Ponyville. Same muted colours, same blocky layout. I swear I could almost recognise one of the windows. What did surprise me, though, was the blue pegasus at the door, sitting patiently. Almost like he was waiting for me.

I nodded to him, my ears swiveled low against the noise. He nodded back with a sad smile. He seemed unaffected.

“Hey, stranger. Thought you weren’t coming.”

“I’m not exactly built for long distance,” I muttered. Behind Chasing Haze, in the lobby, I could see busy nurses bustling from desk to room, pushing white carts, carrying white equipment, counting bleached-white bottles of white pills. The only variation were the drab grey curtains.

“My sister’s inside,” Chasing said.

I flinched at his detached, resigned tone. “Your sister’s a nurse?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he turned and pushed open the door and gestured me to follow him into the pale building. Amid the white-clad nurses and colourless furniture, I looked right at home. We walked to the end of the hall, up a flight of stairs to the second level. I shook my head violently, trying to dislodge the humming now all around me. I nearly fell down the steps then. Chasing turned and looked at me carefully.

“You alright?”

“I’m...fine. Can’t you hear that?”

He looked me over one more time, then shook his head and kept walking. Something was… off. Chasing Haze kept walking, nodding familiarly to the odd passing nurse, answering their nervous questions as they shot glances my way. It was clear from the way they treated each other that Chasing Haze had been here before, often. To see his sister. So why did he lie?

“She’s right in here.” He said softly, nosing open a featureless door. Inside was dark, heavy. The buzzing intensified. Chasing Haze watched me intently now, waiting. I swallowed. I should have just left. I should have left this strange pegasus to his vigil, but...something kept me there. The door, that darkness; the buzzing was forming something there, a timbre, a voice, plaintive, seeking, lost.

I walked in.

It was lighter inside than it seemed. The thin curtains were drawn over the little window, throwing swirling motes of lost light across the room, to fall idly by the single bedside, and the still dark form lying there.

The buzzing dissolved into the clicks of a Geiger Counter as I saw her.

Her coat was ashen grey, stripped away in places, leaving bare, blackened skin, leathery, dry. Her wings tucked around her, featherless. Her body was pitted with angry red scars, barely healed. Her legs had not healed at all. Deep raw holes burrowed into her limbs, weeping clear liquid across her long-ruined sheets. One foreleg shifted, and I saw specks of light right through on gaping wound in her hoof. I nearly gagged. Her breathing, deathly shallow, dry, wheezing. From the corner of her mouth, something green seeped into the thin fur of her cheek. I felt ill.

I took a step closer.

Then another.

Then I was standing right over her thin, trembling body, moving only barely to indicate her being alive. Her wounds grinned at me, taunting me with the twisted story they told amidst the aching clicks and whispers.

It’s beautiful, isn’t it?

On her flank, I noticed she had no cutie mark. I felt like screaming.

Chasing Haze stood next to me, looking down sadly at his sister’s body. “Her name is Paladin Haze.” He chuckled thinly, “Yeah, pretentious name, isn’t it? My father always said it suited her though. Best flier in the family. She joined the Equestrian guards’ Long Patrol right after the Canterlot invasion. Three weeks later, we found her like this, nearly dead in the woods.”

What was wrong with this colt? I could see her wounds left untended, open. She must be in so much pain...

She can’t feel a thing. Her Song is gone, just like yours will be.

The clicking blended into a squeal in my brain.

“How can you leave her like this?!” I demanded sharply, stepping back as if I’d been stung.

“What more can we do?!” His tone fell into bitterness, impotence. “Here she is, in hospital, the ONLY hospital that has cared for Taken before. We...we did the best we could for her. We don’t know when she was attacked or why those crazy zombies did it. All we can tell is that she isn’t getting better, and then yesterday...that.” He pointed to the ruined mare’s flank, bare and blank. “Now, I know she isn’t coming back.”

We aren’t zombies.

...not yet.

I pointed at the gaping wounds along her legs, seeping fluids across the sheets, “How can you say that when…” Then I saw his expression. A little lost, one eyebrow raised, questioning. I realized too late. “You can’t see…”

His eyes hardened. He knew. He turned and slowly walked out of the dark room, back into the glaring hallway. He left me with her, but as I now knew, he didn’t really believe she was there at all. So far as I could tell, she may not have been.

I followed him out. The buzzing reached crescendo, calling to me, begging. But I couldn’t look anymore.

I didn’t know where he was going, but it was the same way I was headed. Down. Out. Away. We pressed past the exit together, turned down the street together. It was then I realized he really was following me.

“Would you mind coming with me, Miss Scratch?” he asked, toneless.

Or leading me. I sucked in a breath. My automatic reaction was to push him away, get his presence as far from me as possible. That name no longer counted. I could feel him somehow looming over me, intimidating me, even though he walked well out of reach. My horn trilled as I tried to summon force no longer there. Chasing Haze, watching me, snorted, something clarified in his mind.

“Come on.”

I followed.

Hoofington ended abruptly, pushed up against the border of the Whitetail woods. I absently noted we were walking towards Ponyville from the opposite side. The trees looked on apathetically as I passed, still following the black-and-white tail before me. Why, I couldn’t tell you. Something beyond my comprehension was driving my steps in the silence around me.

Then I realized. Chasing Haze was Songless.

Eventually he slowed down. We were well amongst the trees, hidden from all sides. Chasing glanced at me askance, a thoughtful look in his eye. “You’ve finally caught on, haven’t you? You can’t Take me.”

“I wouldn’t. I couldn’t!” I stepped away from him, denying with every step.

“Is that what you told Octavia when you led her down to her doom?”

I didn’t reply.

“You have to understand why I’m doing this,” he continued sadly. “I know I’ve lost my sister. She was hurt beyond measure, even if she seems fine now. I have to protect others from her fate.”

“You couldn’t see her wounds…” I muttered, “So what? You gonna kill me in the woods? Eliminate the risk? I’d like to see you try.”

He stopped dead, eyes wide. “...If you could even think that of me...no, I’m here to help.”

“There is no help for us,” I growled, stepping back. “You have no idea what you’re talking about! You have never seen what the Taps can do, the feeling of their magic eating away at yours! You couldn’t even see what your own sister is going through!”

No whole pony can. You’re broken. Broken and gifted.

A curse is all I have, Angel, and a curse on you!

“Help you?” the pegasus sneered. “No, I mean help Equestria, by ridding it of you! You can get hidden away in whatever hole they’re hiding you, just so long as you can’t do to anypony else what your kind did to my sister! To me…”

“Oh? How you gonna stop me? Unicorn, remember?” I set my hooves foursquare. I was bluffing. I had no magic left in me, but at the very least, my horn was pretty pokey. “Back off.”

“Hah!” he laughed at my posturing. “You think I don’t know your magic’s gone? It was the first thing I noticed, you pushing that branch aside. Then the scar on your neck.” I raised my hoof instantly. “You see? It’s obvious if one knows what to look for, you’re one of the Taken. And the single most famous Taken pony in Equestria.” He stopped, levelling a look at me. “There’s a bounty on your head, you know.”

“Octavia’s reward to anypony who…” I looked down at the dirt. I couldn’t fight, I couldn’t reason. There was no reasoning with him. He wasn’t wrong either, I realized. But he was Songless. Hopeless. He’d seen what could happen to him at any time, and had lost what he sought to protect anyway.

“You have no Song.”

He flinched back hearing my words, and in the moment of hesitation, I did the only thing I could. I turned and ran.

The trees didn’t want me. They wanted wholesome things under their leaves. As I ran, an impulse was screaming at me to run for the Everfree. The place where the wild things lived, where being broken meant being right. My hooves beat the loam.

Everfree!

I never even made it close. Wings beat the air behind me as I ground to a halt, but I could only see the blue eyes glaring, unblinking, from the shadows, tracking me.

Clicks and hisses filled the air and my mind.

First came the lean jaw, curved, wicked fangs bared as the sound of loss escaped between them. Then the jagged twisted horn, warped by strange magic. The glowing eyes, the leathery, shiny skin, almost plates of chitin. Ears played back either side of a fin-like mane. Legs full of holes.

Before me stood a Changeling.

Chasing Haze met the earth behind me, wings spread to block my escape. He nodded to the Changeling before me.

“As you asked, sir, here she is.”

I gaped. He would hunt down Taken ponies for a Changeling? A predator? No! I screamed myself hoarse, “What- How can you do this?!”

Suddenly, the hissing, clicking stopped. I vaguely heard the sound of trumpets. “Good work citizen. Princess Luna thanks your service,” the Changeling replied. I whipped back, stunned to silence. That voice was not that of the mindless monster. It was that of a Canterlot guard.

Chasing and I were looking at two different pictures.

I was doomed.

And then, in a split second, everything changed. Again. The air was filled with drums, my mind beaten into submission by the sheer force of will. A high, shrilling C note‏ strummed through the air, reverberating yet grating. As I buried my head in my forelegs, screaming, I saw the Changeling do the same. A shimmer coursed over it’s carapace, and Chasing Haze, unaffected til now, stared in abject horror.

A grey blur lanced from the trees. Lights flashed, concealing the figure, and it’s speed made it untraceable. I saw the blur materialize again in front in me in the form of a slim waif of a mare, a unicorn all in grey from hooves to ears, buried horn-deep in the Changeling’s chest.

The drums and guitars ceased.

In the silence, I heard a thump behind me. I spun, snarling, ready to bolt, only to see Chasing Haze passed out on the leaf-litter. Through the trees I saw two more forms, the evening sun lighting the trees behind them, obscuring their figures. And a deep voice chuckled mirthlessly.

“Looks like we’ve found another Spotter…”

The heat, the exertion, the music caught up to me, and the ground rose to meet me in a rush of darkness.

Author's Note:

Had to pump out words at 2AM to complete this. Didn't mind one bit. Celebrated with a stiff drink and a weekend away. I'm currently sitting on a balcony overlooking green fields and a full pond. Horses playing in the grass.

Yeah, it's a beautiful summer here in the southern hemisphere :P

Anyway, I'll be picking this right back up on Monday, should have a chapter out by Wednesday. Til then,

Regards
Quicksear

Comments

[Brakyo]

*Peering at Chasing*
*Insert Spoony One "Betrayal!" scream*

Enjoy your summer, I'm enjoying the fucked up late autumn weather here.

[Yoshi1990]

Interesting story. It's got my attention but not much else. I'll continue reading it. Maybe I'll even give it a like in the future.