Golden Prose

by Field

17

“Holy buck, colt. You scared the living hell out of me!” I all but shouted at the cowering foal before me. “What the buck are you doing creeping up on me like that?”

Bookmark looked guilty for a moment, and then a look of determination crept over his little face.

“It was dark! I couldn’t tell if you had become one of those things until you made that big fire!” He nodded sagely. “I know they don’t like bright stuff, so they wouldn’t do something like that.”

Smart colt. But that meant that he had encountered the Taken down here; we wouldn’t be safe when the tapestry went out.

“And how do you know my name? Has your mom been back through here?”

Confident for the time being that I wasn’t going to lunge out at him again, Bookmark plopped down on his haunches and appraised me quizzically.

“You’re really confusing me, Mister Mossy. You introduced yourself to me when you picked me up at the condo to go see my mom.”

Buck, with everything that had happened I had almost forgotten about the manuscript. I still had no memory of it, but I definitely had brought him here during my lost days. Perhaps I had actually found my way to the castle by some kind of subconscious memory, not magical influence.

“Sorry buddy, but I wasn’t myself that day.” I rubbed my forehooves against my face, trying to keep my composure. “I really need to talk to your mom though. She should have been back here a little bit before me, where is she?”
Bookmark perked up at the mention of Golden Prose, but a realization seemed to come over him and he began to frown.

“My mom has been here for a long time. She hasn’t left or even said anything to me since she started writing again.” I thought I could see tears threatening to well in the corner of his eyes. “I know I’m not supposed to bug her when she’s writing, but she’s never been like this before.”

“How can she still be writing? I just saw her no more than two hours ago, she sh-… she didn’t seem like herself.” I thought the better of telling the colt that his mother had tried to liberate my brains from my skull. I needed him to listen to me, not think of me as an enemy of the family.

The colt nodded as if he’d expected me to say something like that.

“You probably saw the thing that looks like my mom.” He said sadly. “It comes back here sometimes and tries to talk to me like my mom would, but I’m not stupid. I know it’s not her…”

That’s what Princess Luna had meant when she said I’d found out Golden Prose wasn’t who she seemed! She thought I had figured that much out on my own, but I had been too stupid to make the connection. Now I was kicking myself for being such a moron.

“If that thing isn’t your mom, where is she? Can you take me to her?” I clapped my hooves together and tried my best to look reassuring. “Princess Luna herself sent me here to bring you both home!”

The colt seemed to take solace in my mention of the princess. It was something powerful and safe for him to grasp onto, more than I as a relative stranger could provide for him. He hopped to his hooves and began to tug at my foreleg to follow him.

“Come on! Maybe you can talk to her and make her stop!”

The light from the little unicorn’s horn was barely bright enough to illuminate the immediate area around us, but somehow he navigated us through the darkness without running into any obstructions. Looking over my shoulder I could only see a hint of the fire we had left behind. I couldn’t tell if it was because the fire was dying or if we really had traveled that far. It was beyond disorienting not being able to grasp the dimensions of the chamber.

If what Princess Luna said was true Bookmark’s spell would do nothing to deter the taken. Despite that I was still reluctant to break Vinyl’s lighter back out until we absolutely needed it. The fuel in it must have been nearly depleted after the near constant use on the trip here.

“Why didn’t Princess Luna send a bunch of guards with you if she really cares what happens to us?” Bookmark posed, having apparently given the question some thought while we had been walking.

“Why indeed.” I thought to myself with a momentary scowl.

“Both the princesses know that there is bad magic going on here; bad magic that can hurt even them.” Again I felt a twinge of guilty fear for uttering such a statement. It didn’t seem fair that I had the nerve to backtalk and even lash out at an alicorn directly, but behind her back I still felt like a shamed foal whenever I said something negative.

“I don’t know…” The colt was unconvinced.

“They sent me because I already know my way around! And because I have a special connection to the magic here.”

The understatement of the century goes to Mossy Hooves.

“Okay I guess…” It seemed like the colt’s faith in me was waning the more I spoke. “But if the thing that looks like my mom tells you to do something again you can’t listen this time, okay?”

“Don’t worry; you’ve set me straight on that. I promise I won’t listen to a word it says. Cross my heart and hope to fly.”

The promise seemed to satisfy him for the time being, though I did have to wonder what other things I may have done at Nightmare Moon’s request to make him say that in the first place. Fortunately for the both of us my fear of the answer was great enough that I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

While we walked I began to get the sensation that we were passing through a smaller area than we had been in before. There was an oppressive sense of confinement as if we were in a hallway, but still no walls were illuminated by the unicorn colt’s horn.

As quickly as the sensation had started, it suddenly passed. As near I could tell we were in another large chamber, or maybe even back in the first chamber for all I knew it. The dimensions of this place seemed to defy all reason.

“Well, here we are!” The colt announced as he skidded to a halt so quickly I nearly stumbled over him.

I looked around the darkness dubiously.

“Kiddo, I don’t see a Celestia-damned thing. Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

Bookmark looked over his little orange shoulder and gave me a superb ‘oh please’ look that I’m certain would have made his mother flush with pride. I shot an incredulous ‘well get on with it then’ look right back at him. He shrank back visibly and turned to trot several steps away from me.

“MOM! I’m back now!” He shouted futilely up into the darkness.

“I thought you said she wouldn’t answer y-“

My words were cut short by a bright flash that once again threatened to make me jump out of my own fur. It was so intense that for a moment I almost believed that Celestia herself had somehow decided to make an appearance. When I opened my eyes again the brightness had faded, but spots of light still shimmered in my vision as an aftereffect.

But they weren’t spots, were they?

I blinked repeatedly trying to focus my eyes on the lights that hovered through the darkness all around us like oversized fireflies. There was no mistaking it, they were words. Hoof-written words shimmering in the air. They reminded me of time-lapse photography I had seen of earth ponies drawing shapes in the darkness with sparklers.

“If you think that’s cool, check this out.” Bookmark added, noting my slack jawed expression with a smirk.

The little orange colt suddenly scurried off through the field of words. It took me a moment, but I quickly fell in step behind him once more. He seemed as though he was looking for something. Maybe he was looking for some word in particular.
He finally stopped and settled on a cluster of words floating just above his head. Scrunching his eyes shut in concentration he lit up his horn with magic and tapped one of the words.

Milkshake.

The word fizzled and dissolved much like a destroyed Taken pony. In its place appeared exactly what the word had proclaimed; a milkshake. Strangely it looked familiar. The glassware matched that from the diner back in Ponyville, the Hay Rack, if memory served me.

Bookmark caught the glass in his magic and levitated the straw to his lips for a sip. It seemed to meet his approval.
I was dumbfounded. Given everything I had seen in the past few days I shouldn’t have been, but I was anyway. This must have been how the colt had survived on his own down here with no supplies

“That’s a pretty neat trick.” I offered up, tapping my hoof against the glass to make sure he wasn’t fooling me with an illusion. “But where are all these words coming from?”

Without a word the little colt raised a hoof and pointed into the air above us.

High above us floated the pony of the hour; Golden Prose. At least I was fairly certain she was the real deal this time. She was curled in the fetal position, encompassed in the familiar golden glow of her own magic. Around her, much like the electrons of an atom, floated twenty something scrolls each with their own quill scribbling furiously.

Bookmark was right. Whether intentionally or not the mare was still weaving the tale empowering the Dark Presence. Every stroke of the quill could be the word that tipped the scale irreconcilably against me in this confrontation.

I shouted up to her several times to no avail. If she wouldn’t be roused from her trance by her own colt’s voice I doubted my own would elicit any stronger response.

“I know your mom knows a levitation spell, but did she ever teach it to you?” I asked hopefully. Maybe he had been so confused by everything going on that he’d forgotten such a simple solution.

The colt shook his head no, seemingly more interested in his milkshake for the time being.

I doubted I could throw anything high enough to reach her, not that she would likely be awakened by something so crude.

“What about using more of the words? Have you tried using anything you get from the words to wake her up?”

Gulping down the last of his milkshake, the colt winced for a moment from an apparent brain freeze.

“If I do it too many times in a row the thing that looks like my mom gets angry.” He gently set the milkshake glass down on the stone floor. “It doesn’t seem to mind if I use it sometimes for food and stuff, but maybe now that you’re here I can try using more words!”

I wasn’t too keen on the idea of doing something that might attract the Dark Presence back down into the bowels of the castle, but frankly I didn’t see any other way. We would just have to be very careful to make our selections count.

“Sometimes the words don’t give you what you think they will.” Bookmark explained as we wandered through the clouds of words. “It’s been happening more and more today than it has before.”

I had a feeling that meant Golden Prose’s power over her own writing was fading. The Dark Presence was warping her words more and more. Who knew how long it would be before something as benign as ‘milkshake’ would create something dangerous. I wished Vinyl Scratch or even Iron Bars were here to be a sounding board for this crazy plan.

“So besides junk food what kinds of words have you tried out?” I asked finally, hoping to avoid repeating the colt’s mistakes.

Sheepishly the little unicorn paused and looked down at his hooves.

“Well I tried my mom’s name a couple times but that just brought the faker thing back…” He frowned. “Mom warned me about trying it before she started writing again, but I got scared and didn’t know what else to do.”

“Understandably so!” I offered up as reassuringly as I could manage. “I think you’re doing a good job so far considering everything that happened. Do you remember anything else your mom said before she started writing again?”

“Oh! She did tell me to give you something!” Bookmark perked up. “I don’t know what it’ll do, but she told me to save one of the words until you got here. Come on!”

The little colt took off again through the cloud of words, leaving me to play catch up. I couldn’t help but wish for a moment that I had his kind of energy in this situation. Without the fight or flight adrenaline that had been pumping through my veins almost non-stop all night I was beginning to feel exhausted.

We finally came upon an area of words that seemed more sparsely populated than the main cloud directly under Golden Prose. I guessed that they must have been written much earlier and flowed outward like water dripping from an overflowing bucket.

Memories.

Bookmark paused in front of the word as if waiting for my permission to activate it, but I wasn’t sure I was ready. I’d expected something more specific, like the name of a tool or an object. Memories was such a vague word, an abstract concept. I had no idea what it might conjure up.

This was probably one of those times I needed to trust my gut. If Princess Luna believed in me, then maybe I should give it a try.

“Go ahead.”

In a flash of golden light the little unicorn touched his horn to the word as he had done before. I squeezed my eyes shut
expecting my mind to be assaulted by some kind of invasive vision, but nothing came. When I opened them all I saw was a small, crumpled cardboard box.

Tentatively I stepped up to the box as Bookmark backed off. It seemed innocuous enough, so I tapped a hoof against it. It sounded empty.

“Aren’t you gonna open it, Mister Mossy?”

I shot the colt a look.

“Don’t rush me.”

I steeled myself, took a deep breath, and tapped open one of the flaps on the top of the box. Illuminated by the faint glow of the other words around it I could just see that the box was just as empty as it sounded.

“Well that was a bust. Waste of a word.”

I facehoofed and turned my back in frustration. Behind me I could hear the colt checking out the box for himself. The box was still useful in that it could be burned for a momentary burst of light, so I didn’t want the colt to tear it up.

“Hey, what’s this?”

I whirled back around to find the colt holding something in his magical grip. It looked like an old Polaroid photograph.

“Hey Mister Mossy, it’s you!”

He levitated the photograph over to me and I snatched it out of the air. The instant my eyes focused on the image in the darkness I felt my heart wrench. It was a photograph of Atten Burro and I. The old donkey was beaming proudly with his hoof on my shoulder while I posed with a bright blue macaw perched on my outstretched foreleg. It was one of the snapshots somepony had taken during the filming of one of the first episodes of Equestrian Wilderness I had been a part of.

“This… all these pictures burned up in the fire…”

The colt intuitively picked up on the sentimental importance of the picture. The foalish curiosity dropped from his face and he smiled a smile that seemed too sage for his age.

“That’s probably why my mom wanted you to have it. I know what it’s like to lose somebody you care about.”

A quiet ‘thank you’ was all I could manage as I carefully folded the picture and tucked it into my vest pocket opposite Vinyl’s lighter. The little colt had given me back a little reminder of the happier times in my life. It meant more to me than I could even express to him as I patted him on the back and fought back a tear forming in my eye.

“Come on, Bookmark. I don’t know what word to pick to wake your mother up, but I do have an idea.”

As we trotted back toward the center of the word cloud I had an idea of the kind of word I was looking for. I knew I was never going to figure out how to wake Golden Prose on my own, I needed help. I needed a mechanism to contact the outside world for advice.

Radio.

I found the word I wanted on the opposite side of the word cloud from the memory box. I could use the radio to contact Vinyl Scratch and Iron Bars back at the radio station. Maybe the DJ would have a better idea of what to do here, being a unicorn and more magically inclined than I could ever hope to be.

“I’ve got a friend who might be able to help us out.” I explained to Bookmark. “I want you to use your spell on that word there so I can talk to her, okay?”

The colt nodded happily and set to work concentrating on the glowing word in front of him. It seemed to be a mirror image of the previous two times; at least until the ground started to rumble. That didn’t seem like a good sign at all.

The word flashed in a magical explosion much larger than before. In a panic I snatched the colt up in my teeth and took off in a mad dash away from it. Whatever was happening I was certain I didn’t want to stick around and be in the middle of it.

Out of the golden light a solid form began to materialize. It started from the ground and tore upwards through the darkness, forming a metal superstructure. I knew what it was almost immediately and the gravity of my mistake sent a cold chill down my spine.

It wasn’t a radio, it was a radio tower.

I hadn’t been able to see the ceiling of the chamber were in until the tower punched through it like a hoof through drywall. Defying logic the tower broke all the way through to the night sky above, sending a cascade of stone and debris down where we had been standing only seconds earlier.

Bookmark had warned me of this but I had no idea something this drastic would happen. There was no way a magical burst of that size and destructive power would go unnoticed. It was only a matter of time before it showed up.

And then it did.

“Bookie, I thought I raised you better than to make such a mess in someone else’s home!”

Comments

[-Brutus]

Going to read it now :), *dives in*

[-Brutus]

Tense time for Bookmark.