Part 30
Silent Ponyille: Reunion
Don't cry.
Part 30
------
Lance Strongshy opened his front door and saw the very thing he was begrudgingly expecting: a house that had been victim to a horrible fire prior to being abandoned to the elements for a good fifty or so years. Tendrils of mold and fungus had spread everywhere, and whatever hadn't been subject to fire damage was now subject to water damage. Even before he had set hoof through the doorway he could already hear the creaks and groans of a structure bearing a load it was fast proving unable to handle, leaving him to doubt whether it could handle the weight of an additional full grown pegasus stallion. The pressing issues of his trapped wife and the leer of a another certain mare behind him coaxed him toward testing his luck though. He extended one hoof, eased a bit of weight onto it, and then added another, slowly repeating the process until his last rear hoof hesitantly stepped onto the unreliable looking flooring. His breath caught for half a moment as he both heard and felt a cracking of wood below him, but whatever damage the amber stallion's weight had just caused was too minor to send him plummeting downward through the floor.
A pair of wings at that moment would've been somewhat useful.
Only the half broken door to Fluttershy's room remained now, without any remaining alternatives. He could not leave Posey trapped in the kitchen below. He could not even leave his house anymore for all the hoarded useless junk blocking the way. His only choice was to open that door and go inside. That was it, that was all there was. At every level he knew it and felt it. Yet even after moving to stand in front of the door he found himself remaining there doing nothing for the longest time.
...
...
...
There was no self scolding, mental or audible. His hoof rose, turned the knob, pushed inward, and that was it.
The door swung open and allowed him to peer inward at the darkened entryway and the bit of wall beyond it where the kitchen door should have been. Lance started moving through but paused as he heard a quiet yet noticeably distorted exclamation and hooves moving away from him...along the living room ceiling. He glanced downward and saw a barely noticeable trail of small blood spatters that lead inward. It seemed as though he had found where his grinning stalker had gone.
The living room was a mess, but it was a more relatable mess than either of the other two versions of his house. His couch and chairs were there, the shelves were back, pictures that he remembered fondly adorned the walls, and the place overall looked like somepony actually lived there. The fact that it also looked like somepony had brutally burglarized the place didn't exactly help things, but it was still closer to home than an empty burned out husk or an empty rotted shell.
The couch had been overturned, the chairs were out of place, every object had been carelessly thrown from the shelves, and he realized that several of the more valuable items that had been on said shelves were missing entirely. Not only that, but after the intruder had finished searching the place for valuables, they had then proceeded to liberally apply a bat or sledge hammer to what remained. They had broken in, turned his safe shelter upside down, stolen everything of value for their own needs, and laid waste to everything left behind.
In the same spot as both living rooms prior, there was a bust sitting atop a pedestal. This one was made of solid looking stone and a good bit smaller than the first two. The pedestal had a round base, somewhat larger than the first two had been. Along the outside edge of the base, written with blue paint, was an incomplete ring of symbols that gave off a very slight fluorescent glow. Having spent years of his life working alongside his unicorn friend and colleague, Lance instantly recognized it as a magic circle, though its particular effects eluded him. The soft glow indicated that there was energy still lingering within it, and he knew that if the right symbols were drawn to complete the circle, a spell would be cast on whatever was in the center. Unfortunately, that was where his experience in the subject ended, leaving him clueless as to which symbols would set off the magical reaction or even what the spell would do. He was at least able to eyeball the size of the incomplete circle's gap and make a rough guess that there were three missing symbols.
There was a single, quiet drip to his right. It was not necessarily alarming, but still a curiosity. The other sections of the 'house' had been absolutely ruined and a dripping noise would not have warranted any attention, but this version had been ransacked and bludgeoned, not left to rot. He glanced to the side and saw a small spatter of blood on the floor, leading him to aim the beam of his light upward.
He flinched slightly, having expected the stalker to have vacated the living room entirely. But she was still there with him, lying on the ceiling, head tucked into the corner and covered by her hooves in a futile bid to hide from something. In all likelihood she was hiding from the sovereign instead of the amber surgeon, but watching the creature that had helped him before anypony else in that place quiver in helpless terror was somehow...unsettling to him all the same. Rather than ponder it any further he decided to move on to the dining room, expecting another gramophone and record to be awaiting him.
What he had not expected was the sight of a little yellow pegasus filly slamming painfully into the wall of the strangely well lit dining room before falling to the floor with a strained whimper and remaining there reflexively curled into a fetal position.
"Would you let a monster listen to Mommy's favorite songs, Fluttershy?" came Lance's ice cold voice from further within the room, out of sight. "Would you let one defile the precious belongings of somepony you loved so much?"
He remembered this.
"Would you let them take any joy from them at all? Taint them like everything else they touch, like some kind of infectious leech? Would you?" he continued asking whilst slowly approaching, his face as chilled and unreadable as his voice.
She just kept crying there on the floor, helplessly waiting for the pain to come.
"Answer me!" he suddenly shouted, the practical explosion of noise rattling the little filly even more effectively than the strike of a hoof. She yelped and started quivering, tucking herself up even more tightly.
"N-no," she barely managed to squeak out in her fright.
"Then why do you expect me to do it?" he yelled in a fury before the dining room lights abruptly cut out, plunging the room back into darkness just as Fluttershy cried out from a blow to her ribs. "Don't touch anything that belonged to Mommy! Ever! Monsters like you don't deserve it!"
Fluttershy kept weeping pitifully in the darkness for a while before her sobs started to grow quiet and distorted to accompany the swiftly moving red embers of a memory burning away. Lance stepped into the room once they had gone silent, eyes drawn to the wall on his right by the last flickering of a crimson 303 boiling off in the exact spot Fluttershy struck when he had thrown her against the wall after catching her with Posey's old records. He blinked away the slight blurring of his vision and bitterly muttered an affirmation that she'd deserved it before turning toward the rest of the room.
His table had been overturned, with the legs that might have made for decent bludgeoning weapons conveniently torn off and missing. There were bits of broken glass everywhere left behind from the now barren dining room cabinet that had doubtlessly lost all of its valuables to a smash and grab. It would have been ludicrous to spare even a bit of worry about the missing dinner ware, so he instead spent a few moments looking around the floor, trying to find a shard of glass that was long enough to possibly stab something. He had no luck there either. Somepony had either picked them out already, or the glass had just spitefully shattered in just such a way as to leave not a single usable piece. Such sentient malevolent glass existing would not surprise him anymore.
He sighed and gave the backdoor an obligatory try, finding it open but leading into a fog filled void again. After closing it he turned expecting to find another record, yet while the gramophone itself was still in its usual place it had no record to play. Thinking perhaps it had been knocked off during the burglary, he did another brief search of the floor but was unable to find a record, or even the broken fragments of one. There was at least something of a consolation discovery on the wall above the gramophone though.
Carved into the wall was a variety of symbols that would look at home in a magic circle like the one in the living room. They were arranged in a somewhat rough nine by nine grid and Lance could only assume that he needed to figure out which three symbols he needed...and the order in which they were to be written...and some way to write them down that would be magically reactive since he doubted his red pen would manage it. While he was at it he would look for the missing record, feeling by now that they definitely held some significance he just wasn't seeing yet and that the third one would be vital. Having completed his rather strange 'to do' list he started heading for the hallway.
Every door was either barricaded shut by nailed on bits of broken furniture or mysteriously absent altogether save for the door to the laundry room at the far end. But it no longer resembled a laundry room in any sense. He couldn't see a washer or dryer, and as his light illuminated more of the room upon his approach he could see they had been replaced by an old, dented, blackened furnace on the far wall. There had always been a water heater and furnace in that room for certain but they had looked nothing like the centuries old relic that now stood unlit before him. The entire room around the furnace was made of old, crack riddled concrete that had been blackened to a varying extent throughout. The room smelled strongly of smoke despite the lack of a fire in the furnace, probably owing to the lack of any visible window or stovepipe to let smoke out.
Peeking out from beneath the layers of black soot on the ceiling, walls, and floor, he could see words that been written down in chalk a long time ago. It was a single phrase repeated over and over again, written in two distinct hoofwritings, one refined and practiced, and the other not so much. Rarely was the phrase ever totally visible, either fading into or out of visibility beneath the blackness, but it was so short that piecing together the entire phrase was no problem what so ever.
STOP CRYING
The floor was littered with bits of paper that been mostly burned, but on the uncharred bits he could see the remnants of crayon and markers. They were the leftover pieces of children's drawings that had been burned.
He remembered this too.
What most caught his interest was a crumpled piece of paper on the floor that had somehow entirely avoided being the least bit burnt. Such a miraculous bit of stationary warranted attention. He picked it up and uncrumpled it to see that it wasn't another drawing, but rather a story that had been written by his very young daughter for a school assignment.
My Best Day Ever
by Fluttershy
On my best day ever I woke up and me and daddy had strawberry pancakes
Then daddy said he had a surprise for my birthday and took mee flying where we could see all the mountains
Then daddy said to cover my eyes and landed and said to open them again and we were at lakeside park
We rode on a bunch of rides and have fun and I got to have cotton candy
When it was time to go home we stopped to see mommy
I was tired when we got home and daddy read me a story and tucked me in
That was my best day ever
Nothing of the sort had ever happened, nor had Lance ever seen this story. As best he could figure, Fluttershy had made the whole thing up for the sake of completing the assignment while keeping her home life a secret, assuming the paper in his hands was not something that had been fabricated wholesale by that world's odd properties. That would have meant she had hidden it from him though, for a very, very long time, and at the risk of having gotten punished had he found it. If it was in fact really something she had written, it would have to be something that was very, very precious for the little filly to have taken such a chance in keeping it. But why go to such lengths over a completely fake story? He did not understand, but he didn't need to. It might be necessary for his progress and that was more than enough reason to stow it away in his saddlebag.
The sound of somepony softly knocking on the outside of the front door drew his attention away from the blackened room. Lance knew the door was unlocked and that anything that wanted to get to him could either break the door down or ignore it before simply appearing inside the room with him instead of resort to a polite knock. So it was less fear and more curiosity that drew the amber stallion out of the laundry room. When his light revealed his young daughter lying on the floor quietly trembling against the wall opposite the stairwell, the questions in his mind were put to rest. When the knocking sounded a second time he heard the familiar sound of his own hoof steps approaching the door and pulling it open.
"Yes?" he asked of the visitors.
"Um, hi Mr. Strongshy. We were wondering if Fluttershy could come out and play for a while?" asked the voice of a little filly.
"She hasn't done anything with anypony after school for a long time!" said the worried voice of another. Lance recognized them as Fluttershy's old friends...before her mother had died.
"Oh, well, I'm sorry, but Fluttershy doesn't want to come out," Lance answered them using a gentle voice that Fluttershy hadn't heard in months.
"Aww, why not?"
"Is she still sad?"
"No girls. She's angry."
"She is?" one of the little fillies pressed.
"Yes. In fact, you're the one's she's angry with," he clarified.
"Wha...what?"
"Why?!"
"Because, she realized that the time she spent playing with you was time she could've spent with her mother before she died. She's never going to get that time back now, and she blames you and the rest of her friends for taking it from her."
...
One of the fillies began to cry.
"That's not fair!" the other one yelled. "We never made her play with us! It's not our fault!"
"I know, I know girls. But, I can't really convince her otherwise. She told me she hates you and never wants to see you again."
The crying filly let out a pained wail upon hearing that her best friend hated her.
"Don't cry Sweetie Snow, you're not a bad pony, Fluttershy's just a big jerk and we should hate her right back!" the angry filly assured the crying one. "Bye Mr. Strongshy," she said curtly in parting before the two former friends took their leave.
When the door closed, Fluttershy's body shook with aggrieved sobs even more wrenching than those of the friend she'd just lost. She covered her face with her front hooves and gave a few weak kicks of anguish with her back legs before her cries were cut short and she recoiled from the force of a blow. Silently she shrank against the wall clutching at her face protectively.
"You should be happy Fluttershy. If they're no longer around you, you can't hurt them like you did to your mother. Don't you care about them? Don't you want them to not be hurt?"
She trembled in pain a few moments before nodding in surrender, still hiding her face.
"Good then. You understand."
The little filly shivering in pained terror on the floor then slowly burned away, revealing the familiar number dissipating on the wall behind her. When all was still he was left alone in the dark, trying to remember the other filly's name. Fluttershy had gathered a decent social circle at school prior to her mother falling ill, but those two fillies were the ones who came over with any regularity. That afternoon he'd just witnessed for the second time was all it had taken. After that, word had spread of her betrayal and she had become a pariah at school among the other foals, just as isolated there as she had been at home. He still could not remember the name of the other filly but it did not really matter. There was no use in it, nor time for it as he continued upstairs.
After making his way up and past the broken wooden railings, the carpet made a soft squelching noise beneath his hoof as he crested the stairs. He glanced down at his hoof and sniffed the floor, finding nothing that would lead him to believe it was anything else but water. Something must have been leaking in the bathroom, for a good while too if it had managed to seep into the carpet next to the stairwell. As he looked down the row of doors he realized he probably wouldn't be finding out exactly what was broken. The doors to the upstairs closet and his library had both disappeared altogether. The door to his office looked relatively fine, having avoided any damage or alteration. The upstairs bathroom door on the other hoof had changed significantly. It was still the same general size and shape but now made of dented, scratched and partially rusted iron, with hinges made a bit useless by welds along each side that fused door to frame. Nopony was getting into that bathroom to fix anything anytime soon. Or ever.
It was where he had nearly drowned his daughter.
Lance felt a brief twinge in his front hooves, still remembering exactly how it had felt to hold her head beneath the water as her small body struggled a little less with each passing second. He also felt a brief bit of nausea in his gut and a horrible taste in his mouth that he ignored in favor of checking his office door. It was locked. Not as good as unlocked, but it was better than broken. His next few steps were as hurried as he could manage in order to minimize the time he spent in view of the archway visible from the balcony, though he could do nothing to mask the sound of his hoof steps squishing into the wet carpet.
Fluttershy's room door was completely undisturbed. It looked normal in every way, without even a scratch left behind in defiance of the wanton destruction that was on display through the rest of the house. But the master bedroom at the end of the oddly long hallway was another matter. It was a door much like the one sealing off the bathroom, only the rust did not look exactly like rust and it lacked anything in the way of dents or scratches. The carpet also steadily turned from its usual color to a deeper and deeper shade of brownish red as it approached the sealed off room. Something other than water had leaked out of it a long time ago, and the water from the bathroom could do nothing to wash it out. There was nothing making him want to approach that door and absolutely everything making him want to stay away from it. For this second go round he managed to spend an appreciably shorter amount of time hesitating before he pulled open his daughter's bedroom door.
...
His daughter's horribly, horribly deceptive bedroom door didn't match the size of the passage behind it at all. It was square instead of rectangular, and small enough that he would have a bit of difficulty moving through it while crouched. It was also far too long to have possibly fit inside the room as he remembered it, but then again he was standing in an extension of his house that was the size of his entire house and yet invisible from the outside. This passage being the thing he questioned seemed a bit ridiculous in comparison. It wasn't as long as the narrow passage in the hospital had been though, and there was the bit of assurance that it was too small for a roller gurney to fit. But for all he knew they would just continue ignoring everything that made sense about physics and come after him anyway. Less comforting was that he couldn't see the end of the room on the other side, although his light was able to catch sight of something either small or very, very distant. He really hoped it was just small. Presented as always with a dearth of other options, the amber stallion winced with a bit of pain as he crouched a bit lower and started making his way through the passage.
Progress was steady and only painful enough to rate as mildly uncomfortable. He stopped and glanced back a couple times, just in case, and was fortunate enough to make it to the other side without incident. It was then that it became apparent the passage didn't lead into a room exactly. For one, the flooring ended at the threshold and was replaced with dirt, prompting Lance to cautiously poke his head out and look upward thinking it had lead him outside. It had not. The texture of the wall looked like any household wall but as the beam of his flashlight drew ever higher it just kept going, and going, and going, until at least he caught sight of a ceiling a ludicrous distance above. He followed it seeking the other side of the room, and by the time he caught sight of the opposite wall the circle of his flashlight's beam was ridiculously small for how vast a distance lay between them. It expanded in size a bit as it illuminated the sole object in the very center of the desolate expanse, and now Lance knew for certain it was not small.
"Seems like all the interesting stuff was hiding upstairs for this one," Lance glumly remarked beneath his breath as he disobeyed every single one of his nerves and started trotting toward the object. At that distance all he could tell was that it was a white rectangle of some sort. He was able to pick out more details as he wandered farther from the door, his sense of unease increasing with each step as though something was growing progressively more off.
There was a sound of crunching dirt to his left, too far to be an immediate danger but too close to ignore. Lance flinched and directed his light in the sound's direction, looking for the source frantically but finding nothing there. It was truly a massive room though, and the amount of space he could light so comparatively tiny. He was completely unable to shake the feeling that there actually was something out there in the darkness he simply had not spotted. There was another sound to his right and head. Again, his search did not turn up anything or give him any relief from the quickly mounting dread. When he heard the third sound he did not bother checking. Whatever they were, they were going to come at him or leave him alone and he had little say in the matter.
"Just keep walking," he muttered to himself, eyes forward.
He soon was able to make out that the object was a section of wall with a barred over window, partially buried in and held upright by the dirt. It was not just any wall though, he eventually recognized it as being from Fluttershy's room, and something else was attached to it. Now finally standing before the bit of wall, he examined the line of nine drawings that had been nailed against the wall above the window. A few were in crayon, some were in markers, a couple had been drawn by pencil, and one was even a mix of all three, but he instinctively marked them as being the work of his daughter. He was featured in most of them, his primitive stick figure depiction always smiling and playing the part of the good father. But one in particular caught his eye and set the gears in his head turning.
Fluttershy had drawn a picture of herself standing in front of a gravestone that said 'MOMMY', whilst he was standing off to the side wearing that same smile that was a bit unnerving in that particular context. It was something from the story he'd found in the laundry turned furnace room. Trying to ignore the sounds around him that had continued coming at an unpredictable rate at seemingly random distances, he retrieved the story from his bag and compared it to the nine pictures. Just as he'd thought, six of the pictures corresponded to the events of the story, but they weren't arranged in order. Perhaps he was being tasked with rearranging them? But then if that was his task what was he supposed to do with the three that were not in the story, and even if the pictures and the story were connected, what did they have to do with the grid of symbols in the dining room?!
...
His eyes widened briefly and took another look at the pictures above before seeming to settle on trying something out.
"You're zero," he stated to the leftmost picture. "Or one? ...no, buck it, it'll work the same either way, zero. You're eight," he continued before assigning the highest number to the rightmost picture. He then turned his attention back on the story in his hooves.
On my best day ever I woke up and me and daddy had strawberry pancakes
Lance looked up and found the corresponding picture third from the left.
"Two."
Then daddy said he had a surprise for my birthday and took mee flying where we could see all the mountains
Leftmost picture.
"Zero."
Then daddy said to cover my eyes and landed and said to open them again and we were at lakeside park
Center picture.
"Four."
We rode on a bunch of rides and have fun and I got to have cotton candy
Far right picture.
"Eight."
When it was time to go home we stopped to see mommy
Third from the right.
"Six."
I was tired when we got home and daddy read me a story and tucked me in
One left from center.
"Three." He started quietly repeating the sequence to himself to sear it into his memory as he turned and started heading back to the passage out of there, doing his best to ignore the sounds around him. But when he heard another crunching of dirt that did not sound any farther than a mere four yards to his left it was impossible to resist the urge to look, once more finding nothing. It was less of an issue now though, as he was only a few steps from the passage and ducked inside moments later. He stopped about halfway through to let out a somewhat shaky sigh and let his nerves wind down a bit, looking back over his shoulder to confirm nothing was following him. Allowing himself to feel a bit of relief now, he turned back to continue into the house.
She had been looking in at him.
By the time his flashlight caught sight of the retracting metal muzzle and his heart had leapt into his throat the sovereign was already gone, curiosity seemingly sated. The only other thing he saw was a brief glimpse of her tail as she strode away toward the stairwell. For a few moments he was paralyzed into inaction by fear, but then thought of something that made him start for the end of the passage even faster than he had been before.
She would only hurt him. She would kill Posey.
Lance emerged and looked around frantically, but the apparently recovered alicorn was nowhere to be seen or even heard. His best bet now was to move fast, worrying about getting caught be damned. He started for the stairwell but found himself stopping at his office, hearing familiar voices inside. They were not loud enough to make out clearly, so he took another quick look around before pressing his ear to the locked door.
"...and this is?" Lance heard himself ask at length from within.
"Um I...I drew it at school...da-...f-father," a young Fluttershy replied uneasily.
"I could tell that much already," he said with disdain. "I'm asking what the picture is about. You're so bad at this that I can't tell just by looking."
...
"It's...I...thought maybe if-"
"Why did you make this?" he cut her off abruptly.
She sniffed, starting to cry already. He could hear it in her voice as she answered him. "T-teacher wanted us to...draw something at school every day...so I drew that so you could-"
"Crumple it up."
...
"I said crumple it up Fluttershy."
The little filly sobbed softly and soon there was a sound of crinkling paper being bunched up into a ball.
"Throw it in the basket."
There was a brief pause before little hoof steps strode over to the corner of the room prior to the nearly inaudible sound of a childhood drawing being dropped into the waste paper bin. She let out another little whimper.
"We'll just keep doing this until the basket is full. Then we'll burn them. Now stop crying and get out of my office."
Fluttershy audibly hiccuped, forcing herself to stop crying. Her sad hoof steps then dutifully headed toward the door, and caused the listening stallion to take a step backward in surprise when the door actually opened. Lance lingered for a moment as though expecting his daughter to actually emerge, but no such thing happened, and there was no light emanating from the decidedly vacant office. He nudged the door open and peered inside.
Everything was gone save for a desk and cot pushed up against the back wall, but it was less like the place had been robbed and more like the room had simply been re-purposed as such. Desk and cot were both littered with empty wine and pill bottles, with a central area of the desk kept clear for messily stacked papers, and a single small picture frame with the glass pane broken and the photo missing. Between the two sparse bits of furniture was a wastepaper basket that looked empty at first glance. Even so, the conversation that he had recalled compelled him to peer into it to see...a piece of chalk?
Lance reached in and grabbed it, wondering of what use it could be when he remembered seeing Mannie using chalk for spell circles. Those had been completely written in chalk though, not partially in paint. He did not know if mixing the writing medium for three symbols would work or not, but at worst he'd just have to rub some chalk off the base of the pedestal and try something else. He stowed away the chalk in one of the small compartments on the front strap of his saddlebags and continued downstairs and into the dining room, still not hearing or seeing any sign of the sovereign whom he knew to be somewhere nearby. The faster he could get Posey and get out of their house the better in any case.
"They're all positive numbers, so you're zero," he said as he stood before the grid of symbols, hoof briefly pointing at the symbol in the bottom left corner. He retrieved a spare bit of paper and the pen from his bag. "Two...zero," he muttered, using the first two numbers as coordinates before copying the symbol onto his scratch paper. "Four...eight," Lance repeated, jotting down a second symbol before moving onto the third. "Six...three. Hope you work; I'm out of ideas otherwise." After confiding in nopony he trotted out to the living room and quickly but carefully used the piece of chalk to draw in the three missing symbols, doing his best to keep them around the same relative size as the rest of the spell circle. Then he stood back and waited.
...
Lance was starting to feel discouraged when the slight glow of the painted on spell circle started to slowly spread into the chalk symbols before starting to intensify steadily. It was working. As the light grew brighter it darkened, turning from blue to purple, and then at its brightest a somewhat menacing red color. With a final brilliant red flash that forced him to shield his eyes, the circle released its energy, and when Lance lowered his hoof the pedestal and bust had both been transmuted from solid stone into a granite so brittle that a small piece fell off of its own accord as he looked on. In his eagerness to get at the tablet inside he tried pushing on the fairly compromised bust but found that it had enough resilience left to resist collapsing. It was not a big deal though, he simply brought a hoof back and struck it with enough force to break the smaller bust open and send bits of rock scattering about.
He also provoked the grinning stalker above to let out a distorted shriek of pain and then scurry away in fright to another hiding place. Lance had almost forgotten she was there by that point and the reaction startled him to say the least. Once she had retreated from sight he looked down at his hoof and just stared for a few moments, looking as though something had just unexpectedly cut him deep. But soon after he was able to manage a scowl and mutter an obscenity at whatever insane architect was responsible for that place before sifting through the debris atop the crumbling pedestal to find the third triangular tablet for the safe. This one depicted a pony hanging by their forelegs from shackles and chains, bearing the words 'The Prisoner' beneath. On the opposite side was a letter K.
Right then, it was time to lea-
"You stand charged with the kidnapping and brutal murder of Officer Cicero. How do you plead?" came a loud voice from back in the dining room. Was that the gramophone playing? Lance retreated back there a third time to see that a third record had indeed materialized and started playing itself whilst he had been occupied with the bust.
"Guilty as charged your honor," answered an older stallion without a hint of shame. Lance recognized him from the first record, and
"You are certain?" a middle aged sounding mare pressed as though she was trying to give him a chance. Lance could only assume that voice was the judge of the proceedings.
"Your honor, I may be an old stallion but my memory is still sharp as a tack and I most certainly remember kidnapping an arrogant colt named Cicero before chaining him up in my basement and breaking things until he stopped breathing, because none of you would do it, and somepony had to. I am aware I am waiving my right to counsel, I am aware that I am waiving my right to a trial by jury, and I fully comprehend the nature of these charges and the sentence carried therein."
...
"Very well sir. This court accepts the plea of guilty and will currently move to sentencing," she said, apparently satisfied that the old stallion knew exactly what he was doing. "You have served a full and storied career in law enforcement, defending the peace and saving a great many other ponies. But due to the heinous nature of your crime I cannot in good conscience spare you the full wrath of Equestrian law, and I therefore sentence you to live out the remainder of your life within the walls of Foalsom. Court adj-"
He was laughing.
"-pardon me but would you mind sharing with this courtroom what you think is so humorous about any of this?" the judge inquired indignantly.
"Life, huh? The quality of a life is a hard thing to measure, almost impossible. There's just so many variables upon variables upon variables, and hay, even if everypony you ever asked could name every single one of them, they'd each give you a different answer about which ones are the most important. But the duration of a life is a simple number you can toss out whenever it makes you look good, so it makes perfect sense that you politically minded bucking idiots see preserving the length of a life as this all encompassing good for which the quality of any number of lives can be sacrificed as needed. Then you call it justice and ponies can't stop singing your praises while you leave good ponies like my grandson to rot just so you can make ponies like me or that psychotic mare live longer. That right there isn't funny. It's bucking hilarious. I hadn't planned on lingering in my golden years so long that I would become a burden on my daughter and son in law. There's no dignity in that for me. Now here you are sentencing me to be a burden on every single tax payer in Equestria? You can take your sentence and shove it where Celestia's sun don't shine, your honor."
"Interesting," the judge grunted indignantly. "I'd hold you in contempt of court but clearly there would be no point in that with you. When you plead guilty you submitted to the will off this court and you will live your last years behind bars. Now would you have any words to say to the court in parting prior to your being processed and transferred?"
...
"Yeah, actually. I got my start in Foalsom Prison and one of the things you could rely on was rookies coming in feeling like they had something to prove. So they gave the prisoners a bunch of grief to look tough, and that periodically got them in trouble. I remember one that was such a moron I lost count of how many times I had to drag his stupid flank out of a brawl with the prisoners. It got so bad that one particularly industrious inmate made it a point to shiv him so deep it sent him to the hospital for a month. The guy wised up after pulling through that, and I made sure that by the time he was back on duty, the inmate that almost took him from the world had lost just as much blood as he had, maybe a little more. Not many hassled him after that."
"Would you perhaps indulge this court by informing us as to how this story is relevant to the current case?"
He chuckled again. "Well your honor, a little bird told me that he went on from that job to eventually become a bailiff."
Lance heard a pair of unlocked cuffs being flung away before chaos broke loose in that courtroom. From the sound of it the old officer was a bit more spry than his age had let on and none of the other security officers present had been able to pin him down before he got out of the courtroom. The shouting of commands to stop grew quickly more distant as he galloped for it.
"Bailiff, you just enabled a convicted murderer to flee from this courtroom!" the judge snarled.
"I did your honor. My foals grew up with a father because of that stallion. I owe him my life for having my back and setting me straight; the least I could do was give him the choice about what to do with his own," the bailiff answered, just as certain in his actions as had been the officer turned killer.
"Where do you think he'll even go? We're on the third floor and security will have the stairwells and fire escapes closed down by now!" she pointed out furiously.
"I think he'll avoid hurting anypony else and go visit his grandson, your honor."
The bailiff's theory was confirmed seconds later when Lance heard the distant sound of glass breaking, and then screaming from the street below from the unfortunate ponies that had witnessed the old stallion jump to his gruesome demise before the sound cut off in favor of the scratching of blank vinyl. But unlike the first two records, music started to play after five seconds of silence. He recognized the tune immediately. It was one of the oldies tunes that he and Posey had enjoyed listening to together on nights when they were both relaxing at home. While it was a pleasant memory indeed he had other places to be at that particular junction and was about to step out when his own voice interfered with the music.
"Fluttershy?"
A filly that was a little older but still a ways off from adolescence gasped in fright and cut the music off with a clumsy record scratch as she fumbled to stop the gramophone. What followed was a very tense silence spent watching his terrified daughter fidget nervously before he spoke again.
"You were listening to your mother's records again. So...tell me what happened last time I caught you doing this."
His daughter was silent another few moments before mumbling a reply.
"I can't hear you," he said at relatively normal volume but with a tone harsh enough to make it clear she would only get this one last chance.
"You...you threw me into a wall...and then you hit me," she recounted with a shaky voice.
"Right, good, you remember. But that means we have a problem right now, because you apparently remember, and yet it didn't do any good did it?"
Fluttershy managed a squeak that vaguely sounded like "N-no?"
"So what do you want me to do now Fluttershy?" he asked pointedly.
He distinctly remembered the color draining from her face as she backed away a few steps, beginning to look a bit ill.
"No input then? Fine, I think I have an idea. Stay here," he commanded before the sound of his hoof steps marked his departure from the room. Judging from the trembling, near sobbing noises he heard afterward, his daughter was doing as told, resisting her every urge to run and hide knowing that it would only make things worse. When his footsteps neared again he heard her give another shudder of fear before exerting what self control she could in order to silence herself. "Face the window," he ordered upon entering the room again.
"Why did you get a bel-" She cried out in pain as her father's hoof struck her across the face, and then silently obeyed his command. But her silence did not last long. Lance remembered well the moment when the belt descended around her neck. "Father?" He put a hoof against the back of her neck and pulled the impromptu noose tight. "D-daddy!" she choked out before Lance pulled it tighter still with a soft creaking of the material and then fastened the buckle. He heard the jostling of the table as his daughter backed away from him into it, and then another clattering of plates and silverware as she tripped and leaned against the cabinet, one of her hooves trying desperately to unbuckle the belt holding her airway completely shut.
She collapsed to the floor, shaking with rising panic as her face steadily started turning red. On quivering legs she managed to stumble back towards her father, getting a small yellow hoof to touch his leg and look up pleadingly, tears streaming from her wide, terrified eyes as she kept trying in futility to draw a breath. He kicked her away from him and continued watching impassively as she laid there on the floor on her side, writhing and ineffectually trying to undo the belt buckle on the back of her neck as her reddened face started taking on a blue shade and her movements became increasingly lethargic.
Lance waited yet longer still. It was not until her movements had been reduced to spastic twitches and her eyes began rolling back into their sockets as the last vestiges of consciousness started slipping away that he strode closer and reached down to undo the belt. She sucked in a massive breath of air as soon as the belt stopped strangling her and started coughing and crying, only to be held against the floor by an amber hoof on the side of her her head.
"Remember what that felt like Fluttershy. Remember it next time you feel like not listening to your father," he warned her severely before a strike to her chest caused her to roll over with a agonized grunt, still too winded to even yelp with pain. "Have this mess cleaned up by dinner time," he demanded as he retreated from the room, leaving Fluttershy curled up in pain weeping there on the dining room floor.
The recording kept going on like that for another half minute, making the amber surgeon of the present progressively more angry at continuing to have all of this shoved back into his face as though he had not had good reason to do the things he did or that there was anything he could do to change things that had already happened. But then the smoldering aggravation was snuffed out cold by sheer curiosity as he heard a completely unfamiliar voice on the record.
"Look behind you."
Who was that? Had somepony been in his house? His daughter just kept crying unresponsively, and he knew she would have reacted to a complete stranger. To whom could that voice have even been talking?
"I said, look behind you."
That was the precise moment that Lance realized he had in truth let the worst thing he could have let happen, happen.
He had become so accustomed to the sound of his watch constantly buzzing away that he had not noticed its warning steadily climbing to a crescendo as something drew to within hoof's reach of him.
No sooner had he whirled around then a black tendril was coiled around his neck and lifting him off the floor. Her metallic blood soaked leer bored into his eyes as she watched him flail against her strength as uselessly as ever, her full vigor having returned in force. He briefly pondered how the hay she had gotten so quiet, but the thought was replaced by a more urgent one as the grip on his neck tightened considerably, so tight that he stopped struggling so hard out of fear of breaking his own neck. Her grip tightened a second time and he fell completely still, feeling his neck pop painfully and making him fear that she would crack it apart entirely with the next squeeze. He could do nothing but look at her with wildly fearful eyes and wait whilst the malicious alicorn stood there, her breath coming heavier but in a way somewhat different than usual. She was not doing anything like savoring the anticipation. She was growing progressively more agitated, applying greater and greater effort to not do something.
Just as his dwindling oxygen was once again becoming a concern she loosened her grip, and then delayed his catching his breath by spitefully tossing him into the wall and knocking the wind out of him as he bounced off painfully and fell to the floor. He looked up from his spot lying on the floor just in time to watch her vent her frustrations on the dining room cabinet by wrapping her tendril around it and squeezing until the bit of furniture collapsed, breaking apart and splintering beneath the pressure before she effortlessly tossed it across the room and stormed out angrily.
He blinked a few times, rubbed the soreness out of his neck, and then stood up again as soon as he was reasonably sure she had sufficiently taken her leave. He took one step and then stumbled with a groan, the impact with the wall and floor having rattled him enough to make his various injuries flare up again. Lance retrieved the unfrozen health drink and drank down about another third of it to take the edge off the pain before he snuck out to the front door and opened it.
It wasn't the hallway of the center house behind the door, but Fluttershy's normal sized room, barren of a bed or toys or anything else that would bring comfort to a child. Lying in that room was his young daughter, who much to Lance's deep horror looked unnaturally thin and dehydrated like she had been locked away there without food or water for days on end. She stirred and with great effort managed to lift her sunken face upward to look at him, and then, unable to contort her dried mouth into a smile, she expended an even greater effort to struggle to her hooves. The little dying filly stood there breathing rapidly in an effort to make her deprived body work, trying to call for her father but only managing a squeak that cut his heart in half.
"No...no I didn't do this! I didn't do this!" Lance denied adamantly while backing away slowly with tears in his eyes.
Fluttershy saw him trying to leave and attempted to clumsily walk toward him on her shaky, uncoordinated, withered legs, making another dehydrated squeak as her eyes begged for rescue. But mid stride her leg gave out and sent her falling to the floor.
Lance had no say in the matter. Even though it sent pain shooting through his back legs again, his body crouched and leaped forward of its own accord to catch his daughter. He would have made it too, had the room and Fluttershy not both vanished leaving him to plunge through the battered, burned, moldy remains of the upstairs flooring down to ground level with an impact that made him writhe on the ground in pain, head spinning as smaller bits of debris fell to join the larger pieces surrounding him. It looked like he was back in the central house after all. Fluttershy had not actually been there at any point. It had been another of his nightmares surfacing again.
To drive the point home after he'd gotten back to his hooves cursing beneath his breath the entire time there was a black inked note on the wall next to him.
"Didn't you though?"
Lacking enough energy to offer any reply he simply glared at the note briefly and started limping past the first floor hall closet toward the living room. The safe had fortunately escaped all the wear and tear which was currently causing the rest of the house to practically fall apart and still looked exactly as it had when they had first come in. Lance found a bit of flooring that felt stable and took a seat to extract the three triangular tablets from his bag. There was obviously a certain order he was supposed to follow when inserting the tablets into the indentations on the front of the safe, but there were only six possible combinations with that set up. It would be a simple matter to try them all until something work, a process Lance began by inserting all three in a random order.
He then jumped out of his skin for the millionth time as a corpse dropped to the floor nearby with an unnerving crack of bone, kicking up a cloud of dust that he instantly focused his light upon. Once everything had settled he saw that it was a barbed nurse lying there motionless, her neck bent at quite the fatal angle from the fall. Where had she come from? Was she the same barbed nurse he'd been dodging upstairs in the burned out house? If that was true how had she gotten there?
No, wait, none of that was important. The important thing was that she had dropped the instant he had made a random guess. She was not currently regenerating, which either meant that he was under the gun to figure it out properly before she started, or that she would start if he guessed wrong again. Lance pulled the tablets from the sockets to start over, this time examining them and the safe a bit more thoroughly. The words "Schedule Departures" were still scratched into the rust on the front of the safe, presenting an obvious starting point. He examined the more intricate sides of the tablets but nothing connected in his head about them. The letters on the other sides were another matter though.
"C, L, K...Cicero, Laughlin, Kip...so that's what the records were about," he realized at last. "Schedule departures...the order they died in maybe?"
He picked up the C tablet and was about to press it into the first socket, but then paused and placed it into the second. Lance had heard Cicero die first, but he'd died second in the chronological order of the story. Kip had died first, and so the K tablet went into the first socket instead. Then finally Laughlin had flung himself out of the third story window, so the L tablet went in last. "Huh...potassium chloride."
One second after putting in the last tablet, a loud clanging noise inside of the safe shook some of the rust off and sent the three tablets falling out of their indentations before the door creaked open. Lance let out a sigh of relief and pulled the safe open to find a key inside labeled #3. His eyes widened as he realized the significance of this find and grabbed it. This was the last key to unlock door 303. They could escape the house now...maybe even escape the entire town for that matter. But first he needed to find a way to free Posey, because he was absolutely not going to leave without her...and yet,what choice did he have but to open the door? He had the key from Posey's bedroom, but a key did not do much good against a wall where there should have been an archway.
This was it. He had to open it. 303 was his only way forward. He had no clue in the least what opening it would do, but he had no other choice save to take the gamble and hope it let his wife out.
For the final time he stood before the chain covered door after having carefully navigated around the supposedly dead nurse, pausing momentarily to read the note that had been left for him.
"It's not even worth talking to you anymore is it?"
Nope.
Lance plucked the note off the door and tossed it aside. The #3 lock came off next, and after wiping from his hooves the ashes left behind by the key, he pulled the last bits of chain off. It was clear now. It was just a regular door waiting to be opened. Before another siren could trigger he swallowed his anticipation and turned the nob.
It clicked without moving.
...
It continued clicking as he repeatedly tried to turn it, his movements each time growing more forceful as the anger within him built until he abandoned the doorknob and resorted to striking the door with his hooves as hard as he could. The door itself had been locked too.
"ARE YOU SERIOUS?! AFTER ALL THIS IT'S STILL NOT ENOUGH?! WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM US?!" he bellowed with rage as he continued trying to knock down the door that had so long held the promise of freedom for he and his wife.
"Lance?!" came Posey's comparatively angelic voice from behind him. He let up his assault on the door and turned to see that the archway leading into their kitchen had returned, though it was now blocked by a panel of iron bars bolted into the wall, and the two side openings that had lead into the living room and hallway had been replaced with plain walls just as the kitchen entrance had been. If Lance cared about now being trapped, he did not show any sign of it as he cantered over to his wife, still panting a bit from his furious outburst.
"Are you okay? I turned away for half a second and the kitchen was gone," he explained, looking her over for any injuries as he attempted to reach through the bars. They were only just too close together for his hoof to fit through, but Posey was the slightly smaller of the two and was able to manage it, touching the side of his muzzle as though to make sure he was actually there.
"I walked into the kitchen for half a second and everything else was gone!" she countered, her eyes looking like she'd been crying with worry whilst unable to do anything but wait inside the trap of a kitchen. "If they're going to keep separating us like this they could at least give me something to do!" Posey added while looking her husband up and down for any additional injuries. He was so beaten up she feared that even if he did have anything new she wouldn't be able to discern it from everything else.
Lance found himself smiling despite everything. Of course she would say something like that. He looked around at his newly sealed off little prison briefly. "Maybe that's what this is honey; I can't see any way out of here from my end. I even took the last lock off that door." He motioned back with his head to indicate the door he had just been trying to utterly destroy.
"You what?!" she exclaimed aghast before looking around in acute concern, still remembering well what had happened in the depths of the hospital.
"There was no other way Posey. I haven't heard any sirens yet though. Maybe this time is different because...I don't know," he confessed, the two reunited spouses equally clueless as ever about the entire world. "Can you leave the kitchen now?"
"Um..." She turned and trotted around to let the circle of light from her lantern reach every corner of the darkness shrouded kitchen, but there still didn't seem to be any obvious way out. Then on a hunch she opened the pantry and peered inside. A way out still wasn't forthcoming so she stepped inside and Lance heard her start carelessly nudging things off the shelves, understandably unable to care if she made a mess of the place slowly torturing them. She then stepped out into view again. "There's a hole I can probably squeeze through into the laundry room at the back of the pantry."
"Alright," he said before realizing such a find was a double edged sword. "Wait, be really, really careful out there! That alicorn thing recovered and she's probably still in the house!" he warned her.
Posey's wide eyed face would've visibly grown pale at this news were it not for her cream colored coat. "What...wouldn't we hear her moving around if she were?"
"I don't think we can rely on that anymore Posey. Turns out she can be really, really quiet without those restraints," he elaborated grimly.
Posey swallowed fearfully, looking at the hole in the pantry, then to her husband. She closed her eyes and then took a deep breath before letting it out and silently heading back into the pantry, about as unwilling to leave her spouse trapped as Lance had been. He was left to wait and listen intently, wincing a little every time he was able to hear anything she did, because if he could hear it so could the sovereign. From the sound of it she'd made it out of the laundry room and into the hallway without anything worth screaming over. He tracked the sound of her hoof steps and soon found himself looking at one of his daughter's drawings that had not been there pinned to the wall with a rusty nail moments prior. It featured crude stick figures of he and his wife labeled 'mommy and daddy' standing on a cloud together with a rainbow in the background and looked like somepony had uncrumpled it after retrieving it from the waste paper basket. The sight made his feeling of seething anger return, and he couldn't help but tear it off the wall before even thinking about it.
"What use is this really? Huh? Why all these memories?" he turned and asked of the stubbornly locked Door 303. "Is that all you are? Things I already know? What's the point of this then? What's it supposed to do?" the amber stallion asked the door mockingly as though it were an intern who had just put a pony's life in jeopardy with a particularly ridiculous error. His mood was not helped when he turned to his right and saw three more drawings nailed to the wall. All three were of he and Posey again, one where they were in the yard gardening together, another on their balcony having lunch, and another at the local theater watching a play. One of them looked to have been at least partially burnt. His fury spiked again and he tore them from the wall, but was confronted by another seven when he turned back to the bars, and another ten when he looked back to his left, every single one of them now looking partially burnt.
"Stop it!" he demanded ineffectually, tearing off the drawings obscuring his sight line into the kitchen but not bothering with the others. Before he could drop the last one on the floor he glanced at it and suddenly found himself too curious to let it go. This one too was of he and his wife. He looked from one drawing to the next as they kept coming into existence around him always just outside of his view. They were all of himself and Posey. Fluttershy was entirely absent in her own drawings, and there were so many of them! He glanced back to see that by that point they were almost entirely covering every surface, serving as carpeting, wallpaper, and paint for the ceiling and door all at once.
His anger was steadily waning now. He was trapped and surrounded by something that could not be scared off by a loud outburst or physical blow, so continuing to try either just felt pointless. Something else was coming back now, something held back by the rage that had always been easier for the pegasus surgeon to handle, something cold, dark, relentless...and familiar. Lance let the drawing drift down to the floor with the others, his vision blurring again as he resigned himself to wait for his wife in silence. But when he lifted his gaze upward again she was already standing there, looking at him with concern, having returned just in time to see a tear start trailing down his cheek.
"Lance? What happened?" she asked, looking both at him and the room around him that had been altered so drastically in such a short time. "What are these blank pieces of paper doing everywhere?!"
He wiped the water from his eyes and afterward found his gaze pulled away from her again. Two more drawings had appeared implausibly nailed to the iron bars, one on each side of Posey so as to not block his view of her, and they answered a few questions that Lance really had not wanted answered now that he knew.
The one on the left was of he and Posey on a wedding day. He could not call it their wedding day because this one looked far more extravagant like something out of a children's story. Once again they were both labeled, but there was a note off to the side in typically childish hoofwriting that said 'i dont egzist so there happy and have mor bits'. The one on the right was of he and Posey walking out of a hospital, and had a similar note that said 'mommy lived becus daddy had more tim to help without me'.
A foal had drawn all of the pictures. A foal, who at her age should have felt like she was at the center of all reality because foals did not know any better, had drawn picture after picture of some alternate timeline where she had never been born and her parents were alive and happy for it. No doubt she had kept drawing them and trying to give them to him because to her young mind it had been a feasible plan that perhaps these pictures would make him happy.
He'd made her crumple them up and help him burn them. Every. Single. One.
Lance practically collapsed to a sitting position, his head only remaining up because he let it lean against the bars in front of him, silently shuddering as tears he couldn't stop trailed down his muzzle.
"Lance?!" Posey repeated with more urgency, putting her hoof through the bars to touch his shoulder.
Maybe...maybe his daughter had done this to cause him pain, knowing that he would react like this eventually.
"Lance what's wrong?!"
You know children can't think that far ahead.
"Lance!" she shook him as he continued being unresponsive.
Only the adult of the house could ever think like that.
He finally looked up at her, eyes now red from his own tears.
And there's only one type of adult that ever would think like that, Lance.
...
"You were right Posey. In the hospital, you were right about me. I've been lying to you about Fluttershy."
"What? I...Lance this isn't a good time, we need to find a way out remember?" she replied, taking a seat and reaching through the bars to hold his other shoulder. "I haven't found anything yet but-"
"She was bullied at school but nopony laid a hoof on her. Those injuries you saw in the photos, every single one of them and so many more, they were from me. I hurt our daughter Posey. I hurt her over, and over, and over," he interrupted, looking at her like a broken, possessed stallion unable to stop, his voice rising steadily. "She didn't blame me for your death and move away. I spent her entire childhood after you died torturing her in any way I could think of until she ran for her life!"
...
Posey took her hooves off his shoulders and backed away from the bars a few steps. Her eyes were wide, her mouth left partially open. Shock, disbelief, horror, pity, it was impossible for him to tell exactly what was on her face at having heard that.
...
"Wh...why? Why would you do such a thing?" she asked while trembling, audibly having to make an effort to keep her voice steady.
"Because you didn't die peacefully in your sleep either Posey. Our daughter killed you."
"What?!"
"When I told her to go up to our room to see what you wanted for lunch she went up to our room and stabbed you to death!" he elaborated, having long ago abandoned any effort to speak calmly, quivering with a confusing, contradicting mess of emotions he could not adequately describe. "I came in to see what was taking her so long and you were on the floor stabbed so many times with Fluttershy standing there covered in blood with a knife in her hooves! What was I supposed to do Posey? How else was I supposed to treat her after that?! That thing couldn't possibly have been our daughter anymore!"
...
...
...
"If that's true then I guess she deserved it didn't she?"
Lance froze, his tumultuous mind blanking out and his body going completely still as he stared dead ahead with eyes opened as wide as possible.
...
Had that been her voice? Had that been Posey's voice saying that? He scoured his immediate memory and yes, the lips of the mare before him had been moving in the right pattern at the exact time to have said that. It had not been some auditory hallucination on his part. His wife had just said that. The words had not been sarcastic at all. She had just said that and genuinely meant it.
"Am I wrong?" Posey asked with a slight tilt of her head sounding more confused than anything.
It was now Lance's turn to take a step back from the bars in shock. Was his wife even capable of saying something like that about their daughter? Was he even looking at his wife? Had the mare on the other side of the bars ever been his wife?
No, no this...this had to be another hallucination. The deaf colt was trying to get to him again. But if that were the case why was he not remembering this nightmare like the other few times they had been torn out of his subconscious to be weaponized against him?
"Lance?" she pressed while moving closer to the bars again.
The kitchen wall opposite the bars erupted in a loud explosion of debris that caught the both of them completely off guard, flooding the room with light from outside. Lance saw Posey turn around as something moved inside the obscuring cloud of dust, and before either of them had even recovered from the first shock there was another flash of movement with sufficient impact to knock Lance clean off his hooves amidst an ear grating chorus of bending metal. He was left on the floor in a daze, for a few seconds unable to do anything but lift his head up and try to see what had just happened.
Posey was pinned against the bars, having been knocked into them hard enough to bend them inward and mangle a wing that had been trapped between the iron and her body. She was impaled on a blood drenched metallic spike that stuck out of her back, a torrent of blood spurting out of the wound on both sides, dripping copiously to the floor below with each beat of her pierced heart. The hanging limbs of her already lifeless body twitched sporadically, but the postmortem spasms were then rendered indistinguishable from the much more noticeable movement of her body being lifted upward.
The sovereign gave a couple flaps of her wings to try and dissipate the dust somewhat as Posey's blood poured down her visor and muzzle. A tendril formed from her mane and wrapped around the dead mare's foreleg before tearing her off her horn, the blade cutting its way out through her shoulder before she was carelessly tossed aside.
Lance was not sure what he was screaming as he scrambled back to his hooves and flung himself uselessly at the bars, but he felt like he was screaming it instead of breathing. The iron barrier was unsympathetic to his all consuming need to get to his wife even after the faith shattering conversation moments prior, and refused to bend. He was about to make a second attempt when the sadistic alicorn made an attempt of her own that proved much more effective, deforming the bars further, partially dislodging the bolts that held the entire panel to the wall, and spattering Lance with some of the still warm blood that covered her. In a moment of twisted logic amidst his madness he backed away, knowing he was never going to accomplish what she had practically done already. A last strike from her forelegs tore the bolts from the wall and sent the panel of bars clattering to the ground, prompting the desperate stallion to try and scramble past her.
Her tendril wrapped around his braced back leg and lightly tossed him back towards Door 303. Instead of hitting the door he inexplicably flew past where it should have been and landed in the middle of an elevator that had not previously been there. The moment of confusion only kept him from struggling back to his hooves for a precious moment during which the sovereign was sauntering toward him. The elevator car shifted worryingly with the movement, but he ignored it in favor of making another attempt to get past the alicorn, predictably ending in her tossing him back again. This time the dangerous swaying and sound of straining cable above was impossible to ignore, and it seemed the larger monster mare was intent on stepping in with him. He would never make it to Posey in time if he fell to his death in that elevator!
"Stop! You're too heavy! If we're both on here the cables will-"
Lance was cut off by the swift application of the apparently insulted alicorn's metal clad hoof, sending him sprawling against the corner as she stepped inside, indifferent to the elevator car's lurching downward as another bit of cable snapped above.
"L-let me go..I can still save her!" he pleaded desperately as he tried to get up, only to be pulled to the ground by the tendril that had wrapped around his leg again and begun dragging him toward the sovereign. "Please! For buck's sake please!" he cried out as she descended upon him, pinning his back legs and waist beneath her chest. The trapped stallion beneath her flinched as steam vented from the sides of her muzzle, her metal jaw dropping open with a dull clang as she wrapped her tendril around his forelegs and head. "There's still time," he begged again with quite a bit less conviction in his words as his struggling grew less energetic. She forced his head into just the right position and then brought her metal muzzle down, pressing his skull into her jaw at an angle that let his ear slip into her helm through the currently unoccupied jaw slot. "I can save her...I know I can save her," he protested forlornly as his attempts at escape had degraded into little more than the occasional twitch of his back legs. Through the ear inside of her helmet, he heard a drawn in breath and then...
Liar.
Sirens.
The sound was unmistakable and nearer than ever before. His light started to flicker and dim, but what caught his attention most was the feel of what he could only assume was teeth taking hold of his ear and biting down, harder, and harder, and harder! Lance gave another brief effort to struggle free, but was reduced to crying out in pain as the elevator cables stretched their last and snapped, sending them into free fall. He screamed out his wife's name as tears of anguish seeped from his eyes unrestrained and the mare on top of him shuddered in delight, but the ensnared stallion's voice was drowned out by the rushing of wind as the two of them continued falling into the pitch black darkness...
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FINALLY !!! GOD IVE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR MORE !!! THANK YOU, THIS MADE MY FREAKING DAY !!! PLS GIMME MORE AND HAVE THE ASSHOLE GET WHAT HE DESERVES !!!
I love it when I'm proved wrong.
Wow I wasn't expecting Posey to have that reaction, guess it really isn't her.
If I recall correctly Lance still has that 'FOR A GOOD TIME' key, maybe that will undo the final lock on door 303.
My money is on that door containing a memory that is not his, showing him the full circumstances on how his wife really died, and right after it the climactic confrontation with the deaf colt and/or sovereign and/or stalker will happen.
One last thing:
I think that should be dropped.
6598777
Yeah the school budget was running low so they just had the kids draw on water that year.
Seriously though thanks for finding that I'll go fix it right away!
HOLY CRUD IT'S ANOTHER CHAPTER I was beginning to get a bit worried. While I remember the previous events fairly clearly, I kinda want to read it again because it's just that awesome, and truly worthy of being the plot of an actual Silent Hill game. I especially love that there's no less than three unique creations of the town (not counting Posey) with their own agendas,
You know, I kinda wish there was a "write a review" option so I could go into much more detail as to my analysis of this. I mean, I could anyway, right here, if you so desired. But still. In the meantime, I've actually been wanting to re-read it since HOLY CRUD THAT'S A LOT OF WORDS.
6599166
Go into detail as much as you like, plenty before you have done it, and seeing what people THINK is happening is part of the fun for me.
this is how happy you have made me.
Story still alive, must maintain the faith. Praise the sun!
I'm so happy that this story is still alive
. Please don't give up in this story is my favorite Silent Ponyville.
6599611
Holy shit sir that was amazing, I now have the biggest smile on my face! Thank you for making that and sharing it, I'm always stoked to see a reader of mine so happy. 
AAAUUUGH!!! No way!!!
Man, it's been so long! Thanks for keeping this story going! What's your current plan for this story? Do you have a timeline of when it could potentially be finished? We're getting so close to endgame, it's not even funny. I'm here until the bitter end, no matter how long it takes!
The climax of this chapter was one that I've been waiting on for a long time. Now that I have played more Silent Hill games, I'm noticing more references to the series here, specifically the second game. I definitely see similarities between Posey and a certain character in SH2. I can only continue to speculate until the final chapter is done.
Great chapter. Long overdue. As usual, want more. Keep it up!
6601921
I hate ask this especially after that comment brought a bit of lubricant to my optic but can you say that on the video it would make my week
I think Lance is a bit out of character in this chapter. His reaction to Fluttershy's speech at the end of Silent Ponyville 2 made it sound like he had repented and wasn't angry with her anymore, but in this chapter and this story in general, he seems to have backslid into hating her again.
Also, why is he acting like he doesn't know that Posey manipulated Fluttershy into killing her? Why did he leave that part out when he was telling Posey about her own death? If Lance is lying about this, then he could've even more easily just not said anything. I can't tell if you're purposely doing this for reasons that are not yet revealed or if it's an oversight.
Here are some errors:
1. some were i markers
2. For a few moment he was paralyzed
3. the room had simply be re-purposed as such
4. Hope you work, I'm out of ideas otherwise.
If you have 2 independent clauses, you're supposed to put a semicolon or a comma followed by a conjunction in between it.
5. You stand charged with the kidnap
6. I most certain remember
7. This court accepts the plea of guilty, and will currently move to sentencing
There shouldn't be a comma there. If the first clause is independent, and the 2nd clause is dependent, there shouldn't be a comma.
8. You have served a full, and storied career
There shouldn't be a comma there.
9. I owe him my life for having my back and setting me straight, the least I could do was give him the choice about what to do with his own
That comma should be a semicolon.
10. he had other places to be at that particular junction, and was about to step out when his own voice interfered with the music.
There shouldn't be a comma there because the 2nd clause is dependent on the 1st clause.
11. But mid stride her leg gave out, and sent her falling to the floor.
There shouldn't be a comma there because the 2nd clause is dependent on the 1stclause.
12. The safe had fortunately escaped all the wear and tear which was currently causing the rest of the house to practically fall apart, and still looked exactly as it had when they had first come in
There shouldn't be a comma there because the 2nd clause is dependent on the 1st clause.
13. a process Lance began by placing all inserting all three in a random order
14. Maybe that's what this is honey, I can't see any way out of here from my end.
That comma should be a semicolon.
15. I haven't heard any sirens yet though, maybe this time is different because...I don't know
That comma should be a semicolon.
16. with out anything
You don't seem entirely clear on the rules regarding commas. There are a bunch of sentences in this chapter and story where you should've put in commas but didn't. There were so many that I didn't feel like stopping every paragraph to document them all.
6609070
Honestly? I guess I have no idea about the specifics of comma use aside from listing in a sentence. I generally throw them in when I feel like there would be a pause in the verbal recitation of a sentence as that was what I was taught they represented. I'd also like to add that when I'm writing dialogue I'm a bit less stringent with grammar since I aim for something that sounds natural for someone to say, which isn't always strictly correct. At over 222k words I'm probably not going to find the time to go back and correct all these little issues that litter the entire story though so at this point I'm probably just going to have to declare this story a grammatical failure and move on with things. I'll go back and fix these particular errors you pointed out though, thank you.
6605238
Done and done!
6609334 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma#Separation_of_clauses
6608905 I could be wrong but I didn't think he ever found out about Poesy's manipulation. But it's been a while since I read the original so I could just be wrong.
6615510 There's a line in Silent Ponyville 2 where Lance says "You need to understand the misery you've caused with your love".
I forgot to say this, but this is the most emotional chapter yet.
6617504 Ahhhhhhhh I see, thank you.
Well then. I'm kind of at a loss for words right now so this probably won't send the intended massage buuuuuut, if I have to wait two years for the ending, I'm probably gonna stab someone.
7243354 well, I literally just finished silent ponyville 3 and I'm sorry to say that that doesn't happen. As for my feeling bad for him, I was more so trying to say that everyone involved in that..."incident" was equally to blame and while yes, he was a douche bag, no should have to go through the s**t he is.
...or maybe I'm just too forgiving for my oun good.
Ok, I'm 100% invested and waiting to see what more comes of this. Hopefully it'll be soon, but the truth came out. He's revealed, mostly anyway, just exactly what happened between him and Fluttershy. But now something is striking me as extremely odd about Posey. She's been an off character for 90% of the story so far to me, but now to use your own symbolism the entity within my mind responsible for raising red flags has ripped the flag off the pole and is now smothering me with them.
Nice read so far and it's definitely going on my watch and favorites list. Can't wait until the next installment.
7436409
Thanks! Glad you're enjoying the story and I preemptively apologize for the clusterbuck that was the Manehatten General section! XD
7437071 Silent Hill is always one giant clusterbuck. It's just nice to see it happening to someone that quite frankly deserves what he's getting. A legacy of lies, a familiar disguise. But the lies are coming unraveled and the disguise is slipping. How much more to go until all is laid bare and our "protagonist" concludes his journey? I eagerly await. Though one of the things I wished to see has not and most likely will not happen, at least the story has not let me down so far.
This is definitely deserving of its canon status amongst this most excellent series, and you my good sir are an excellent author. Wonder if you'd ever consider taking a crack at this idea brewing in my mind... but that's neither here nor there. Keep up the excellent work and I look forward to anything you may write in the future.
7437289
You can send me a private message about your idea if you'd like. I promise nothing but I will hear you out!
Soon (tm)
~ Chapter: 13
The Sovereign: A callback to the Celestia mural we saw in Silent Ponyville 2, where it was implied to be part of the Cloudsdale hospital(or a common part of Equestrian hospitals), the notes constantly referenced a fear of her judgement. Then add in the fact that Lance was never punished and the fact that Fluttershy is friends with the somepony who has the ear of the Princess(Yes, Lance knows of this and he also knows he abused an international hero so there's that). What you get is a subconscious fear that at anytime that little filly you abused could call down the wrath of "God" on you.
From the desk of M.Hatter
7882059 Best explanation ever! I wondered why our beloved author chose to make an Alicorn Monster but your explanation made it click in my head! Sadly in order for this to happen then Lance should not be at Fluttershy's wedding ... Or there at all ...
Anyways now I can imagine Celestia herself (or better still Luna) giving this muthabucker an Almighty Butt-Whooping while waiting for a new update.
Thanks and laters ^_^
Who's ready for a wall of text? TL;DR at the bottom.
Hey, Chapter 17! I finally made an account here, a thousand years too late! And I just got done rereading this leviathan! And reading all the comments you got on both sites for the last coupleish chapters! And I think I'm one of maybe two or three people left on the entire planet that has any sympathy for Lance at all! Everyone else including you seems to enjoy his pain!
Alright, I've used up my exclamation mark allotment for the day. Also my throat was getting sore from typing such a Papyrus-like comment! I'm not sure how typing can make your throat sore but that's what happened!
I'm about to cover a lot of stuff, kind of at random. I apologize if any of this is a repeat of some of my comments from way back when on DeviantArt.
I feel sorry for the entire Strongshy family, even Lance. Fluttershy's sin, though the consequences were horrible, came from fear and desire to please a parent and a child's lack of understanding. Posey's sin, though also a terrible thing, came from pain and misery and exhaustion. She selfishly wanted to finally stop hurting. And then there's Lance.
I believe that most of the time, people are mostly to completely responsible for their own moral choices, because the person still makes the decision, even though their emotions influence what the WANT to do. But even when someone's being evil, it's still possible to sympathize with why they're doing it. As far as Lance knows, Fluttershy was always, or at some point turned into, a monster, and killed Posey for no reason besides being monstrous. Hating Fluttershy is probably most of what kept him going back then, keeping Posey's loss from breaking his will to live. What he did was horrible, but he was emotionally broken, and hate became the easy choice, and the strongest shield to pain.
He could have chosen to forgive Fluttershy, whether he was the one who raised her from then out or not, and tried to emotionally heal, but that would have been painful and hard. He saw her as a monster from the moment she killed Posey, and he never allowed himself to consider otherwise, or that what he was doing to her was evil, or stop to ask why she did it. He still bears most of the blame. He had years of time where he could have stopped and admitted being wrong, but that would have meant letting the guilt for his cruelty come out of the hole he buried it in and crush him, and it would have meant letting go of his old hatred, which would tell him that saying she wasn't a monster would be letting the monster win. So I still sympathize with him, even with the wretched things he did. I hope everyone can accept my reasoning.
The best things about this story are the flashbacks, with Lance and Posey and their relationship, the deliciously detailed and clever writing, and the nature of Lance's Nightmare Ponyville. All the symbolism manifested into objects and places and creatures is just so friggin' good. Just in this chapter, the doors to the bathroom and master bedroom were particularly freaky-awesome, and the enormous empty room had a hard-to-describe otherness to it.
Poor Kip and Laughlin. If Cicero had let the sharpshooter sharpshoot, or at least heard what she had to tell about Kip and tried to get the deranged mare to sympathize with the kid and not want to hurt him, maybe all three of those ponies would still be alive.
I'm gonna place my bets. I'm betting the Grinning Stalker is a manifestation of Fluttershy, the Deaf Colt is from Lance, the Sovereign is also from Fluttershy, and some form of Posey is Lance's final confrontation. We'll see how I do.
Also, did I correctly read that the Sovereign forms her tendril from her hair when she needs it? If so, that's pretty cool.
I'm going to stop writing this thing now. Any errors or inconsistencies in it I attribute to me not wanting to edit this any more. Have a good one.
TL;DR: I finally made an account. I finished rereading this leviathan of a story. I feel sorry for the Strongshys, including Lance, even though what he did was horrible. All the flashbacks are great and Lance and Posey from back then are great, and Lance being the origin of the stare is cool. The writing and reality-warping imagery in this story are also cool. So is the story of Kip and Laughlin, but it's sad. I think the Grinning Stalker is Fluttershy, the Deaf Colt is Lance, the Sovereign is ALSO Fluttershy, and Posey is going to be the final boss. This TL;DR wasn't that short.
I swear to celestia if there is no redemption for him I will personally write a story about me kicking his ass to tartarus and back
Can we please get the next chapter soon? I want to know what happens next.
Can I just point out how well written this whole fic has been so far? Your narrative skills are quite on point with what I'd expect from standard literary works. You do a great job at balancing being descriptive with keeping the timing of the story flowing smoothly. I also love that Silent Hill's trademark symbolism is executed with just the right amount of subtlety to it.
I realize it's been quite a while since this last part was posted. While I can perfectly understand if you are just taking time off to come back fresh to it, or even if you just entirely decided to abandon it for whatever reason, this is one of those very few pieces of fanfiction I've gotten completely hooked to. I'll remain hopeful we'll see a return to this story, because it's deserving of closure given how good it is.
8050705
A glowing comment like this deserves a preview of what's to soon come. I've told my readers that I will finish this story no matter how long it takes me and I intend to fulfill that promise. Thank you for reading!
8051288
Oh wow, I wasn't expecting a reply at all, much less a preview into what's coming! I'm now much more excited for when the next part is posted, but of course, no rush on that. I'll patiently wait for when you feel it's ready to see the light. Keep up the amazing work!
Can I just say how absolutely delighted I am to see all of this work you have put into your story? Seriously, you are an amazing writer and even though I really should be asleep I HAVE to keep reading.