Appledashery

by Just Essay

Mare, Mare, on the Wall

Rainbow scuffed, scurried, and shuffled her way through the winding corridor, following the sound of a distressed voice. After meandering through a miniature labyrinth of rock and mirrors, she emerged into a long hall segmented by multiple stalactites and stalagmites. She stared through the vertical stony barbs, attempting to get a good view of the source of the frightening sound.

At last, she saw a quivering figure several yards ahead, obscured by multiple rods of rock, a female buffalo stood, leaning dramatically forward. Her body shivered and swayed, and yet her body remained anchored in place as if her hooves were encased in cement.

Rainbow blinked in curiosity. Flapping her wings, she carried herself upwards to get a better view. Ultimately, she discovered that the buffalo had every reason to be stuck in place. Her hooves were stone. What's more, her legs and shoulders were swiftly becoming the same thing. In a wave of glowing white energy, the cowering buffalo was quickly becoming solid-as-iron from her hooves up to her head.

Rainbow Dash's face grimaced. She strafed to the left in midair, catching sight of the buffalo's panic stricken face. She saw the eyes of the creature shrinking in fright, reflecting a glowing light source. Soon, all of the mirrors that clung to the walls and stalagmites around the buffalo shimmered as one.

Still trying to take this all in, Rainbow's eyes darted upwards, for she felt a huge dark shape looming. Her peripheral vision caught dark scales upon dark scales. Huge sinewy limbs flexed and clung to the cavern walls. A slender neck with an even slenderer snout leaned forward, peering maliciously into the buffalo's quivering soul. The reptilian creature's right eye was missing—replaced with a horrible, slashing scar. But something glowed brightly on the left side of its skull. Upon hearing Rainbow's flapping wings, it turned away from the buffalo and towards her. Rainbow's skull throbbed from a singular pulsating eye.

"What—?!" Rainbow grunted as she suddenly fell like a torn kite to the ground, flank-first. "Ooof!" She winced, stuck to the ground. Frightened, she jerked a look behind her.

The very tips of her tail hairs had hardened to craggy pale concrete.

She gnashed her teeth. Soon, the floor all around her shimmered with the pegasus' shadow at multiple angles. Her eyes jerked towards the mirrors; the lightw as coming closer.

The buffalo—her head barely capable of moving—let loose a long shriek.

The light jerked away as the creature aimed its massive snout at her again. Rainbow could see through the multiple angled mirrors that the buffalo finally became all-stone. The monster reached forward with large, jagged talons and picked the bison up off the floor, proceeding to clasp the petrified victim in his jaws like a mother cat might carry a kitten.

And then its many-many legs shuffled towards Rainbow.

Panting, Rainbow Dash flapped her wings and tried to take off. However, the clump of stone that consumed the very tip of her tail hairs was so incredibly dense that it held her to the ground. She grunted and squeaked and growled, but she simply couldn't make it budge through pure lift-off alone.

Slumping back down to her hooves, Rainbow Dash could feel the whole cave shaking from the oversized hellbender rushing towards her. Thinking fast, she curled around, lifted the clump of stone with her muzzle, and—with considerable strain—finally succeeded in rolling the thing onto her shoulders. Her tail stretched up to her backside in an extremely awkward manner.

The multiple legs were upon her. She could hear the creature hissing out the side of its mouth as it bit onto the frozen buffalo.

"Gnnngh!" With a soulful squeal, Rainbow lunged to the side, rolling with the weighted rock for several meters. She came to a stop, hiding just behind a thick stalagmite that separated her from the furious gaze of the Slithering. She heard—and felt—the creature coming to a stop. The air of the chamber echoed with its snarling, gunshot inhales and exhales. A low crocodilian hiss accompanied the breaths and shuffles at all times, growing increasingly in reverberation as the thing stalked ever so closer to where Rainbow hid.

Rainbow heard a loud rattling noise. Looking up, she saw one of several mirrors plastered to the stalagmite in front of her. Scooting the rock behind her rear end, she planted her front limbs against the floor and kicked her rear legs up.

"Grnnngh!"

It took two or three swift impacts, but she succeeded in knocking the one large mirror loose. It fell to the ground before her, shattering and littering the rocky floor with several large shards of glass.

The heavy limbs of the Slithering stopped, paused, and re-shifted, approaching Rainbow's hiding place faster.

Rainbow didn't waste any time. She bent over, fished through the shards, then grabbed a chunk of mirror large enough to fit in the crook of her hooves. She leaned back and jabbed and slashed at the tail hairs. Her sweat slid over her eyes. The chunks of glass around her rattled across the floor with each incoming stomp. At last, the surviving mirrors above her reflected a deathly pulsating light.

At last, Rainbow slashed the stone shard loose. She still had plenty of tail left, and she flicked it as she kicked off the floor with a single flap of her wings. Milliseconds later, claws raked through the cavern air, smashing the stalagmites to pebbles.

Rainbow grunted as she flew through the debris field, twirling so as to knock all of the sediment off. When she evened out, she saw a sea of rocks and mirrors, and all of them reflecting a bouncing, surging light that trailed at her dangling hooves.

Feeling the air heat up with a ravenous hiss, she banked to the left, threaded her way through several more chunks of rock, and dove down the tunnel from which she came. She kicked, jumped, and bounced off the walls in a pure spiral. All the while, a reptilian body sprinted in the reflection, dangling a stone buffalo in its jaws as it came closer and closer.

Finally, Rainbow burst out of the tunnel, gliding swiftly over the cavern full of abandoned vendors and markets. Within seconds, the mass of muscle and scales behind her smashed out of the tunnel. Rainbow didn't dare look back. Instead, she gazed at every errant mirror that she passed, watching as splinters and waves of debris flew into the air from the monster's pursuit.

Gritting her teeth, Rainbow Dash jerked hard to the right, avoided a claw-swipe, bent around, approached the monster's long-long-long girth, and spun upside down in time to glide under its serpentine belly.

Several massive knees went slack, and the creature's weight plunged to the ground. Rainbow shot out from underneath it just milliseconds before its body could crush her. Twirling, Rainbow made for the far tunnel where she expected Churning to be waiting. In mid-flight, however, she felt the air shifting. A faint win tickled her ears. She couldn't imagine the Slithering capable of flight. So, daringly, she glanced back.

An entire wooden shack was flying towards her, thrown like a dollhouse.

"Gaaaah!" Rainbow dove low, skimmed the cave floor, and slid her way into the tunnel. This all happened right as the shack slammed into the junction above her, raining down a splintery sea of wooden shards all across the pegasus' body. She rolled, tumbled, and collapsed—panting. Her eyes could see nothing. She was covered in darkness.

With menacing thuds, the monster marched on a dozen dull legs towards her. Closer and closer...

Comments

[Scohinyha Sanka]

Gets some rope guys cause we are hanging on a cliff.

[Tchernobog]

Basilisk! AAaaaah!

[Sheendough]

3881517 Cockatrice?

[Tchernobog]

3881951

Too big for that, cockatrice are about pony sized. Basilisks are bigger.

[Sheendough]

3882391 But it has legs... Hmmm...

[MellowMabari]

Crap, this thing has at least some semblance of a brain unlike most of the buffalo.

Good luck, Dash, that's all I gotta say.

Onward!

[RainbowJack2000]

I thought it was a snake. Then a lizard. Then a cockatrice.
Now....I don't even know what it is.

[zaponator]

[DrEggnog]

This shit is tense.

[Metal Aura]

While the tension is high it is important to remember that our narrator is a 2nd hand source at least and RD isn't the most accurate of story tellers.

[arancaytar]

And here I thought this was going to be a thousand chapters of nothing but feels and fuzzy. Nope - we've reached the scary part.

[AppleTank]

Fak