It wasn't even worth mentioning; out of the corner of his eye, he caught just the slightest glimpse of a chicken head on a small dragon body, waddling away. It wasn't even worth mentioning, and it was the closest he came to death.
Normal things, like sunsets, like soft flickering of dreams, like the simple contentment of a short walk outside, like the taste of ice cream, like the reliably tolerable manners of a stranger, exchanged by force, without request, for new, for abnormal, for unknown, left uncanny reminders in place.
A story about a horse that suddenly appeared one day and the accidents he fell into.
Paper-thin, obscuring mists permeated the rustling greens by the side of the gravel road. From that forest edge and down the path, a pony bolted. Pebbles shifted and rolled and hopped and remained, untouched and undisturbed, giving their full and undivided impassivity to his frantic irrelevance.
Lumpy blobs of green leaf swaths like hard candy rejects laid on depth-perception defying trunks, covered in large, white bark edges. He passed by, leaving transparent, swirly pulses of brown dust behind. The ground to either side was colored green. His big eyes kept focused forward, in the direction he was heading. A circular, two-story building made of metal sheets and glass windows sat to one side of the trail. Some distance later, he passed a round door in a giant rock. Mostly, there was just a wall of plants on each side of the trail guiding him along, which he pushed himself down at speed so that he could get to the place it led, in spite of not actually knowing where that was, because that was where he was going.
Dredged, the flickers of noticed thought recorded a jerky passage from desolate, dense foliage to busy, empty houses on powerful missteps designed by his adrenaline-addled mind. Insufficient breath squeezing through a tense neck passage and blood pounding every cell, he found himself here, in the midday sun, on a foreign trail, in some thatch-hut hamlet, perched precariously on two legs too many. Despite his mad dash, he hadn’t the foggiest in regards to maintaining an ass off the ground and a mouth not filled with gravel. Though he was doing it before, he didn’t know how to do it, now that he was thinking about it. Obviously, he took a spill.
The cluttering memories of rock raking flesh and body straining onward and vague yet urgent calls fell away under the rebuffing concept that everything that was happening was bullshit. His coming here was bullshit. His walking on four legs was bullshit. His face was bullshit. The time of day was bullshit. The similar clouds and the monotone sky were bullshit and everything else was under reasonable suspicion of falsehood.
His eyes flicked from object to object. His gaze was intended as an investigation. Each piercing glance found that hidden behind each thing perceived was the confirmation that, yep, that s indeed a bush, or a tree, or a house’s rocky wall. The town he had reached the edge of was just a town to him. He had no concept of the place he had been rushing for and he had no memory of where he had been rushing from. His paranoia grew as he found, again and again, nothing. He recognized the trend and stopped. He accepted that looking at his surroundings wasn’t telling him what was happening. Nothing he could see would explain everything in a useful manner. Nothing would explain the splayed horse legs in the air above him. There were only two options. He could wait for everything to be the way he wanted, or at least a way he understood, or a way he thought he could understand, like Gandhi protesting reality, or he could accept that this furred mass of bone and meat was now him, because he already knew that it was.
He came to his hooves… poorly. Even poorer was his first attempt at a step. Even poorer was his idea of where he was going. Even poorer was how he felt when he realized, back on his side in a cloud of dust, why, exactly, he didn’t know of anyplace useful to go.
Nearby, he spotted a box. He knew what it was. He got to his hooves but stayed low to the ground. His choice proved wise as his imbalance kept bringing him down. His tummy served as a fifth leg as he moved to the orange painted dumpster. He propped himself up against the side and pushed open the lid. He tossed the lid up so that it rested against the wall. He rolled himself over the threshold and dropped in. Two eyes peeked over the rim. A single hoof reached up and hooked the lid. Slowly, it lowered, sealing in eyes and out light. For a time, he had a moment, and he slept.
He stood, bruised under the fur and smelly everywhere, back out on the gravel again. He raised his hung head and stared into the sun. There was a breeze. There was the ever-present need for air. There were sharp, hard edges digging at his keratin. His spine ached slightly and the only emotion that overshadowed his bored uselessness and his scared uncertainty was the reassurance of his ignorance. The future was as open as the past was closed. The only questions were where to go and what he hoped to find there.
He wouldn’t find what he wanted. If he couldn’t find that, food, water, and shelter would be nice. Of course, any good shelter would be owned, but water was easy and food… food might be easy now, too. Living might not be too much work. His body worked, so he should be able to do things. He should be able to grow and learn. There should be people; at least, there were buildings. He couldn’t know who they would be or what he would do. It didn’t matter yet. The only question was where to go.
The village was silent. Scattered scant butterflies flopped in the sky. The leaves in the trees rustled and the sun beat down on the dusty gravel. It was quite courteous of the world to leave him alone for a moment. That breeze was also relaxing. Soon, it would be gone and the sweat trails would resume dripping. The forest would be pleasant, not that he would know anything at all about it. Really, there was no reason to think that it would be better than the village. The village had some sort of life worth living, or there would be no one living there. If they weren‘t friendly, he could run to the road or the forest. The forest had shade while the road was hot. The forest would be better. That was a silly thought, though. The sun wouldn’t always be up. The road would lead to another town. Civilization was far safer. Roads and buildings both lead to everything he knew he wanted. There was no reason to… to… the forest sounded good. There was no question.
He lowered his gaze toward the border. He slowly, carefully trotted under cover.
Something not unlike but not quite crickets made the ambient serenade under the canopy. The forest floor had a strange lack of overflowing and un-navigable greenery. Grassy tufts and clumps of mushrooms could be spotted in the dim, blue-ish light. The ground rose up into dangerous peaks and swallowing troughs. There had even been one slight overhang with roots sticking out of it. The light didn’t carry very far.
A cobweb, or perhaps a spider web, was torn down and wrapped his face. It itched and tugged and got in his eyes, and he made faces and blinked and rubbed his forehooves over his head. When it was gone, he glanced around and hopped to the nearest bit of grass and devoured it. It tasted like salted paper with oregano and the forest's mushrooms tasted like glue. The bushes tasted worse. It wasn’t that he liked those flavors and it wasn’t that he hadn’t eaten, he was just still hungry. He had been eating since he entered the forest. The hunger drove him on.
He didn’t look in the trees. He ran a circle around the base of one and ripped a sheet of moss off. He chewed and swallowed and immediately directed his attention to the foliage growing out of a nearby rocky outcropping. He shuffled his forehooves across the wall and stood on his hind hooves, focusing only on the wall before him. He shuffled over a short distance until he had to stretch out over a bush to get any more. He lowered himself to scavenge the tufts in front of the bush. He searched around its edge, stuffing his face under it to get at what he found. A dense pocket of grass sat, tucked into a crevice between a steep dirt hill and the rock outcropping. He followed it. A rock shifted loose under-hoof and he fell to his stomach for a moment before getting back up, consuming all and carving a barren trail to the top. The rock tumbled, unnoticed.
He could see slightly more from up here. Similar shaded trunks and grasses and dirt and greens faded off in each direction. The chirping sound was louder. Everything in sight was still. His stomach ached and he was off again, head first down the nearest semi-clear trail .
Another mouthful of tall, hard, and green plant followed a swallow of shroom and was followed by short, kind of pokey plant matter. He found stalks of tall, bulbous plant along a trench and then reached up to chew on hanging vine. He tugged it down and started grinding it between his flat horse-teeth.
A painful “scree” zipped through, above, between someplace unseen and a nearby tree on buzzing wings. All that he glimpsed was a sharp, black limb coated with sparse, long brown whiskers disappearing overhead. It was silent. The creature did not show itself again.
It hadn’t occurred to him just how lost he really was. Now, though… now he’d seen a bug. He would have to sleep soon. In every direction, all he could see was a carpet of brown leaves and dead twigs and randomly placed trees and bushes and tufts of assorted food. The blue light coming through the trees lit the scene well enough that he could see the forest immediately around him, before it faded off into the dark.That thing could have been anywhere. Anything could have been anywhere. There was nothing he could do about it. His fear and his hunger fought. Hunger won.
He, like an individual in total control, chose one of the indistinct paths at random and resumed the process of slowly beating back his hunger like a panda. He heard nothing but under-hoof crunching, the creaking and rustling of the trees, and his own heartbeat, breathing, and chewing.
He pushed his head through a space between two more highly complex and individual, but still indistinguishable, specimens of plant life and into a gentle downhill clearing covered in grasses and calm blue light and light blue flowers. It was a buffet of mediocre free food. It would have been typical, if disappointing, if he had failed to appreciate the flavor of a full meal. Fortunately, this wasn’t any better than the rest of the grasses. Then, he ate the flower. After a day of spiced sod, that first blue head was an explosion of blunt flavor. He stopped and closed his eyes. He ran his raw tongue across it, unraveling the bulb and sticking petals to most of his mouth. He mashed the pedals already on his teeth, and they felt strange, like they were being numbed by chemical sour and sweet. The petals were slowly dissolving in his saliva, and they each soon released strange, electric taste surges where there had been subtle peanut & tea.
The next flower was devoured. So were the rest. The grasses were untouched and all of it was under-appreciated. He felt tired now. He managed a shamble over to a bush in a dip in the earth and crawled inside of it to hide and rest.
There was sound, and he awoke to it. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from and his ears began spastic twitching. He knew that his hearing was directional but he wasn’t used to it yet. He didn’t stand up, since he had slept standing like some kind of horse. Anything else would be ridiculous. He also realized the flaw of hiding in a bush: moving makes noise.
The sound was crunching and scraping faintly. A clack sounded close and somewhat loud. He could see nothing through the bush. He just held still and waited.
The sounds were everywhere. His ears had become agitated and he needed to sneeze. Spaces of blue light had begun to open in the bush through which he only glimpsed leaves falling. A low, quiet growl sounded in the distance. His heart maintained a full, fast, hard rhythm. He held as still as he could and tried not to make noise. White pulsed at the edges of his vision with each pump of his heart. Nothing came. Nothing struck. The leaves continued to fall.
He could clearly see the brown on what had been green leaves. The nearby grass was now black and the farther off grass was brown. The leaves shook with a pulsing tremor in the ground. There was nothing alive moving in the clearing. He sneezed.
At the maximum speed he could force out of his untrained body, the pony darted through bramble and plane and incline alike, teetering dangerously and unable to intentionally turn. The pulsing was quicker and getting stronger and the sounds stayed the same. He ran by large hole filled ground and orange and purple rocks and a wide, burnt clearing and so much green. He burst out at a riverbank with a clear set of stepping stones and dug into the ground, pushing forward against the earth with each step until he slowed to a stop. He panted, open mouthed, and stared down the rocks for a just a few moments. He looked back through the trees and saw yellow eyes. They were searching. Two bulbous, purple shoulders hung above. a third bulb, he assumed the neck, hung between and lower. A blue head could almost be made out. It’s snout was to the ground, with some sort of light purple string extending up from each side of it’s nose. The sound from before, from when he had been hiding in the bush, had been rubbing, and it clicked once. The creature stopped and tensed, listening for him.
He turned and reached a hoof out to place it on the first wet stone. He didn’t expect to successfully keep his balance, but his hoof just slid right off and into the water the moment his put weight on it. He let it drag him in.
He saw a rock coming, or he was coming at the rock. Regardless, he put his legs out to claim the impact. The water just swept him over the smooth surface.
The water had been fast. The banks had risen to become cliff faces on each side. His attempts at swimming may have been good, or not, but they definitely weren’t effective. The water was slowing and another larger rock was showing. On this one, parts were even dry. It was almost right in his path.
He was successful in mounting the stone.
He was cold and getting colder and dripping on his boulder. To either side was a cliff face without grips and down was the water he came from. In the sky, the stars shone, but, from here, he couldn’t find the moon. A broken rope bridge hung a bit down one side. The cliff faces were dirt near the top and grey rock elsewhere, with orange and purple and pink shiny bits scattered across one side. Upstream was just higher water. Downstream was lower. The old slime on the rock returned as it got wet, and he would either shepherd himself in soon or fall in instead.
He lowered himself into the water.
It was a short ride. His head didn’t go under, and he took no new bruises or cuts. The water slowed. The walls moved on by him, and soon gave way to widened waters. Downstream, in the night, he could see something orange. He floated closer and saw that it was a flat stone and it was huge and it was embedded in one cliff face and a bit flat and it blocked the natural flow of the river. The water was slow, almost calm. The opposite cliffside veered off, leaving a flooded riverbank. He paddled and kicked and slowly drifted toward shallower water. Grass could be seen swaying in the water, except where his efforts suspended a cloudy trail of mud. He moved a bit quicker once his hooves contacted the ground, through they mostly just pushed through. The water was down to the bottom of his barrel before he could hold his head up.
A tree with no leaves, studded with chunks of shiny orange, purple, and pink, sat before him. Some of it’s branches seemed shriveled, but others were disproportionately huge and gnarled, one of them reaching from the top to the the ground and off into the dark. a number of gnarled roots shot off from the body of the main trunk, providing a nice, dry platform. He pulled himself up onto the roots and for a moment, he just observed it. There was a small wet thudding from behind him.
He turned his head. He turned his ears. Soon he was turning everything, and, soon, the sound was coming from everywhere, and he still hadn’t found its source. He stopped. The sound continued and quickly began sounding more like it had when he awoke.
He turned only his head. The sound was still behind him. He moved only his ears. The sound stayed behind them. He pointed his ears back. The sound was in front of him. He held still and saw nothing move but the water lazily flowing around the giant orange stone and the grass waving under the water. He looked down.
In the water, he saw. A long, black, jagged stick extended from his scalp behind each of his ears, on the end of which were writhing masses of pointed, black, curved, and hairy limbs and lunging fangs and single eyes, each locked onto his own through the reflection.
He reared and looked up and saw nothing and felt nothing and was very, very, unwilling to let the issue drop just because the thing didn’t have mass and couldn’t be seen, apparently. He swung his head and heard the horrid confirmation of many small limbs smacking together as he slipped off into the water. He stood up quickly and found that the water was up to his knees here. He swung his head down, and the water splashed and parted. He left it under, and no bubbles came up, but some empty space still swung cuts of water open at him.
He raised a hoof to apply bone-breaking pressure to something on his head, through water, into soft mud, standing on mud, on only three legs, with his head awkwardly lowered, but he couldn’t bring himself to give his leg to that dangerous thing. Still, it started pulling in the other foreleg, sending them back into the water. He scrambled for the safe footing of the roots and began swinging again, smashing the things against the trunk.
The limb tips gouged the trunk. Individual joints popped and snapped and clanked together, some pieces falling off. The water parted around the pieces, leaving shaped bubbles that slowly collapsed as they faded from existence. Blood spurted from the air and painted the tree and colored the water. It hurt. He swung again. He swung again, and he stopped, panting and wide-eyed. He hung his head over the water and looked at the reflection of the two. One eye was busted. Most limbs were gone. Still, one lazily swung through the air, a mouth snapped at his ear, and one lidless eye stared back. He turned, lowered his head, and smashed the top of his head into the tree.
The jagged, knobby poles holding the things away snapped. Claws and teeth descended on him. Scrapes and crunches sounded from his head and a weight landed on his back. Pain laced through his ear. A cut opened along one of his shoulders and a hole opened on the other. A set of little fangs sunk into his forehead. As he pushed onward, the impossibly sharpened poles on his head sank into the tree, crushing whatever part of the thing was still between his head and the tree. The surviving part of the thing rolled off his back. He could see it land on the roots in the water’s reflection. He pushed a forehoof through it and ground it against the root. It stopped.
The tree creaked. The colored stones in the roots were glowing. He was tugging on his head, and slowly withdrawing the jagged poles from the trunk. He couldn’t see above him, but some green and purple tinting was pulsing across his blood in the water. Something hit his back. It felt like heavy air and kind of like static electricity. Weights appeared on his side and his shoulders and forehead. They felt hot. His head pulled loose. The heat and the feelings and the tinting lights went away.
The only color light was the dim blue from the sky. The pain in his head-sticks was gone. He looked himself over and found dark stones clinging to his body everywhere he had been injured. The root he was standing on was blackened, but it had been fine before, and the trunk was rapidly darkening around the two holes he had made. The dark, grey stones ached. He rubbed his hoof across the rocks, but they didn’t dislodge. He could feel their rough surface rubbing under his skin, though it did not hurt. A clump of stone rested on his forehead.
And, so, he sat in the water and rubbed hooves across his body until the wood under him gave way and then swam-crawled out, searching for dry land.
Heads between a lizard and fish roared into the sky, a sharp toothed black mass stalked a muted fear, and he walked past the same tree for the 47th time. He could see them in the sunlight, in the cracks between the trees. He could even spot, quite clearly, where space wrapped around. This, he would tell you, if you could ask, was what made him think he had lost it: there was a spot with two suns, just a little apart. He would slowly walk past the mass of heads and necks and teeth at a distance again. Soon, he would walk through that spot, and there would be two masses of heads, one in front of him and one behind him. The sky would be wrong until he took just one more step and left that sight behind again.
The mass of black sat, silent, in a tree, and, then, it was in another. Its green forked tongue flicked out, tasting the air. All was still for a moment before a green light shimmered in the tree. A cicada flew down from the branches and into the open. It flew confused, slow circles and then dropped to the ground. It was just out, in the open, sitting there. Green flame licked over the cicada, obscuring it. When the flame faded, a big spider with a skull on it was left behind. It skittered back into cover, under a bush. The darkness in the bush shimmered green, and a green, forked tongue flicked out from under it. A frustrated buzz sounded.
The hydra was standing somewhere. It didn’t know where it was. It couldn’t feel its feet. It couldn’t hear its roar. It could see only bright, patterned, cloudy shines in every direction set in rows and columns, burning its eyes. It swung and flailed and kicked but hit nothing. When tiring, it slowed. Once rested, it tried harder. It had been trapped like this for 8 hours.
On every pass, there was a tulip. Every pass, he checked behind a log and found it. It was good the first time. It was good the second time. If he could eat another without vomiting, it would probably be good. Currently, his stock of food was larger than it needed to be. It was in his mouth, clenched by the stalks.
There was no need to walk; it wouldn’t do any good. He just stood “behind” a tree and relaxed. The flowers dropped in front of him. The stones in his side still ached. It was midday and he could see and hear a terrifying creature with many heads. He was a horse, gravity pulled down, and it was bed time. Soon, he was asleep.
Snapping, cracking, crushing percussion yanked him from slumber and shook the ground. He was awake and rested and panicky, and there was only one tulip on the ground. It was raining. Two trees collided, one falling from the sky, scattering dirt and broken wood across him and the clearing he was in. That roar he had slept with filled the air, and tremors pulsed in the earth. He picked up breakfast, picked a direction, and fled. Also, he finally noticed that it was raining.
He picked wrong. A tree lifted and left a clear vision of a toothy blue-scaled cyclone of vegetative death. Its stubby legs carted its fat, armless body closer to valid targets for its aimless rage, mostly trees. Its long necks swung wildly and lifted tons of future sod and its heads crushed trunks. The heads invaded through the gaps it had made, snapping at the air, lunging. Its eyes swept over him. They didn’t pause. They didn’t react to him at all. He just backed away and ran. He was not pursued.
The stars were out and rain was falling. Again, the large, black shelled, fanged creature's blue eyes fell on the same exposed root system. If it kept walking, it would find this overturned wreckage again. The muted fear it had been stalking was frantic now, but fading.
He was thinking. Well, he was trying to. He didn’t have much to work with. He wanted safety; he had no defences. He wanted to remove these aching rocks; his hooves did nothing to them. Simply put, he didn’t know anything. So, he tried to think and pay attention to his surroundings. It would have gone so well if a drop of water didn’t fall from the sky and into his invisible, broken-open head protrusions every few seconds, supplying him with an indescribable, but unpleasant, feeling. He wasn’t much practiced at ignoring getting hit by something in the inside of a non-existent space in his head over and over.
Nearby, a small rocky cliff face extended across his very limited field of vision. Conveniently, his hooves had brought him right up to a crevice in the wall which ran down from what he thought was the top of the cliff to its foot. The crevice entrance was just wide enough for him. Stone chunks and dirt piles formed the crevice path floor and the cliff split formed curved walls, hiding most of the path up. The path promised unseen edges and difficult angles, a meandering and steadily uphill passage. A small stream drained out from it, making a puddle below.
At the entrance, he had stopped. Change didn’t feel safe, regardless of the confusing, unnatural fields he had walked through. There was nothing to be gained, from what he could tell. The forest behind and the forest above, to him, weren’t much different. Why climb when he already had a perfectly good forest to wander, lost in. He would feel exposed in that trial. More time contemplating this was more time trying to stand still while rain pelted him in the nothing. He tried, again, to think about what he should do next and became frustrated. He shuddered and shook his head in some vain attempt to throw off the water.
His legs began moving. He pointed his face to the sky and let the rain hit him, but at least he wasn’t staring at rocks and doing nothing while being driven crazy. He squeezed past the first narrow bit of the crevice. He was glad to be doing something different.
He found deep holes in the folds of rock to either side. He lifted his front up and onto a rock and pulled his lower half up behind. On the next dirt slope, his hooves slipped a little, and he scrambled to keep his footing, hooves grinding and head lowering so that he could see. The dripping stopped his thoughts again, and he put his head back up. He charged up the next bit of pathway ramp. His heart rate rose from the exertion and it was altogether unpleasant. He turned left, without looking, head still in the air. As he stumbled down into the dark hole in the wall, it just felt right.
He lowered his head and looked into the dark. He could make out dim stone floors getting dimmer deeper in. The cave brightened slightly, like the moon had escaped cloud cover outside. The sounds of rain faded slightly. He looked over his shoulder.
Two blue orbs over a set of screeching, white teeth lunged from the cave entry. Weight knocked him off his hooves and into the wall, removing the air in his lungs. Parts of his body became warm and soggy as green masses flew from the black thing's mouth and stuck him to the wall.
He gasped, and green goo filled his neck with bitter numbness and slime. It felt like when you are about to bring a loogie up into your mouth, but he didn’t feel the need. Instead, he tossed and flailed and generally panicked. He did nothing useful. He did not feel like he was suffocating.
The green goo formed into a bulb around him. Thing’s mouth closed and a green fire lit above it’s two blue orbs. The fire revealed a clearer image of this random cave and its walls and the black, sharp, body with webbed wings and four legs. A jagged black spike sat at the flame’s center, holes covered its body and wings, and it was panting. It pointed the spike at him and he started feeling tired.
The dark, grey skin-rock in his forehead warmed, then it heated, then it burned. Black began to spread from his head and into the green sac. The blackened goo itched. He closed his eyes and cowered in pain and fear. He went still, ceased his struggling, as the fear and pain faded in spite of how his flesh still burned.
The creature felt proud, victorious! It had a pony ready for consumption. First, it would drain its emotions. Then, it would take the pony home, where it would have its emotions restored in order to be tended to by dream weavers. Last, all the pony's love and joy would be filtered out and added to the food store. It began the basic draining spell. It tasted bad, but that was to be expected during capture, when things were usually terrified. The creature also didn’t feel fuller. It’s head hurt a little. It watched the pony flail less and then stop. The pony just looked at nothing.
The creature’s headache got worse. A black discoloration was spreading in the goo sack. Something was wrong, but the big bug couldn’t concentrate to figure out what. Its eyes were heavy. It stumbled. It did not survive three more minutes.
He waited. At some point, the green stuff dropped him. At some point, the black remains of the goo dried, flaked off and stopped burning. At some point, he found himself looking at a dead body with the vague thought that walking into the dark caves was a good idea. He walked into the dark.
He turned from one all-encompassing void of dark nothing and moved left, into another all encompassing black. His hooves clip-clopped against the hard rock. He didn’t mind the temperature or the humidity and he didn’t bother to remember it. He did, however, start walking more quietly. It seemed like a good idea. He bumped into walls in the dark, unable to see anything but never quite making a wrong step. His hoof ground against inclines he didn’t expect to be sliding down. He felt himself brush against stalagmites and stalactites. He found sharp edges where he had been prepared for sure footing and his leg twisted, giving out under him. Usually this lead to short drops, like missing a staircase step. Usually. He had to crawl back out of at least one gravely pit. Somehow, none were filled with spikes. While walking, he found himself dropping into water and he just swam through the cold liquid, to the other side. Sometimes, he just stopped and held totally still and let his lungs burn for a time before continuing on, unopposed.
He found an angular gem, glowing orange in the cave wall. As he passed, it grew brighter. He did not hesitate or look at it. He didn’t use its light to pick a path forward. He just wandered into a small hole in the wall, a foot off the floor, to the left, and kept moving. He was getting better at moving quietly.
He heard clicking and hissing. He stopped. Blue orbs darted across the ceiling in pairs. The creatures collided and jumped and moved past loudly and playfully. They did not concern him. He continued on.
There was a glimpse of shining, purple rock down a path to his right. He moved past that path and took a right into the darkness. He drug his side along the curve of the hallway wall. There was a faint, green glow in the hallway ahead of him. The green grew brighter as he continued on, until the narrow hall he was in came to an abrupt opening.
Green orbs, as large as he was, were stuck to the walls and floors and ceilings. They glowed, bright enough to make out the surfaces they were stuck to. Rock both jutting and curved filled the room, forming a cluttered space of rounded surfaces and pockets and small, etched pathways. Black creatures wandered amongst them, along walls or floors in the dark. Inside some of the sacs, colorful horses floated. Black creatures sat perfectly still next to some of the green sacs with the horses in them while their black, jagged horns glowed with green fire, further lighting their surroundings.
He walked between the sacs. He paid no mind to the floating, sleeping forms of the colored horses. He merely placed his hooves quietly, forming and following a trail across the chamber floor and into a hole in its wall. Inside, a small staircase brought him up to one of the ledges overlooking the sac chamber. He followed the ledge edge. It was cut from the rock and dirt of the wall and it followed the wall’s curve. He followed around its bend. The ledge was interrupted by a large rounded rock face, extending up to the ceiling of the chamber. He crawled up it. He continued until he reached the corner between the rock face and the ceiling, and then he continued through a square cut into the ceiling and into the black space beyond.
There were no blue eyes. There were no green flames. There was an occasional buzz and the shuffle of some wall clinging bug-legs. There was the filling and emptying of 242 lungs from every direction. He did not slow. His face brushed a warm, hard shell. He stepped on a leg. He walked over the top of one of them. He kept looking forward, single-mindedly focused on a goal he could not see, his goal. He extended a hoof and found a solid wooden surface.
Normally, sleep in the sleeping chamber was as uninterrupted as eating in the eating chamber. It was the way “normal” was supposed to be. Wake up, eat, fight boredom in some mildly productive manner, and sleep. The love storage was well stocked: the 7,000,007,040 sided – most creatures would say “circular,” but changelings knew better – love combs were mostly full. They could sense threats before they arrived. It had been peaceful for months.
A bright light shined through the door, then it slammed shut.
Freshly awoken, with stinging cave dwelling eyes, the changelings looked for the creature responsible for this unpleasant interruption to their rest. Green tongues rapidly flicked. Some horns lit, burning their eyes more. Wings buzzed. They found no fear. They found no rage. They found no cold bloodlust or joy or confusion. Visually, nothing was in the chamber with them that wasn’t a changeling. No changeling would admit to opening the door. The queen snapped. “Shut up! Nothing is in here, so nothing came in here!” Most of them looked back to the door.
Outside, inside, in the light shining through broken windows and missing bits of roof, he moved down brick halls, by doors and chairs and over carpets and up stairs. Molded, sun bleached banners hung on the walls. Bits of stained glass littered the ground. Very few stained glass windows remained in their windowsills. Torches, still burning, hung on the wall. He passed it all by until he came to an unlit torch supported by a metal pole sticking out of a vertical slot. He thought he should feel like squinting. He knew he should be suspicious. Instead, he hooked his hoof over it and pulled down. The floor under him and the wall next to him turned, removing him from the hall and sealing him away.
The changelings flooded out from their door, shouting “Someone found us! Someone found us!” for the benefit of their slower members. Changelings flew out open windows. Changelings opened every door. Changelings stood and scanned the castle. Changelings sprinted down the halls. The queen approached the doorway and glared out at the world. She then closed the door and went back to sleep.
Terror reigned over the little forest creatures outside in the form of giant fangs injecting paralyzing substances. Bug wings in the halls churned air until dust filled it to saturation. Nervous changelings produced extra, dripping green goo. The orange, pink, and purple gems were glowing – some faintly, some brighter – as confused changelings swarmed over them.
Slowly, the gems were growing. Floors were cracking open. Walls collapsed in piles. Furniture was nudged out of place or crushed. Where the gems grew, their edges dug trenches and bricks moved aside.
“I don’t care. Stop telling me!”, the sleeping queen dreamt that she shouted. “Do you see a pony? Are the gems helping you find a pony? Then, don’t tell me about it! In fact, don’t tell me when you catch it. Just stick it with the others.” The queen shut them out from her mind.
So, the gems took up slightly more space and the changelings remained scattered and impotently agitated.
He, hidden behind the wall, had found a pink gem. He was in a small, square, brick pit.The pink gem was sticking through one of the walls, forming a walkable slope and slowly reducing the wall it was in to rubble. He began to walk up it. When he stood on it, it shined brightly and grew rapidly. The top tip of it extended and dug into the ceiling above. Bricks fell and a thin, skinny shard of purple gem expanded from where the pink gem had pierced the wall. He dismounted the crystal and left it and the rubble pile behind. As he moved away, it stopped shining, then stopped glowing. The pink gem and the purple both slowed their growing. He just continued down the hall.
Armor suits lined the walls. He paid them no mind. He turned and passed through a doorway between two of them. He entered a large chamber with a large pipe organ. He approached the organ before sitting down and running his hoof across it, hitting every key.
Somewhere, a trap master and a metalsmith rolled in their graves. Somewhere in the castle, gears screeched and squealed and cried as they tried to answer the trap organ’s call. Everywhere, hidden arrows fired and trap doors opened and walls shifted and hallways rearranged themselves. Some rooms didn’t have exits anymore. Some rooms were filled with fire. Impaled, burnt, screaming, and maimed, changelings fled for their little home as the dilapidated castle ground it’s intruders for the last time. In the organ room, a passage opened. He turned and went through it.
He was standing over a cliff. There was another cliff face across from it, so it was really more of a trench. Below his hooves, gems were growing out of the wall, forming platforms. The ground was churning slightly. Some dirt and rock fell down the trench. Water ran along the bottom of the trench. He dropped over the edge.
When he landed on the first gem, he heard his flesh deform around his bones, dispersing the energy of the fall and breaking a few hundred tiny blood vessels. He stood up and moved himself over the next edge. When he landed on the second gem, he heard his flesh deform again, breaking a few hundred more tiny blood vessels and straining his bones. Eventually, with a wet thud, he landed on a gem where he found a cave mouth completely coated in a pointy swirl of orange, pink, and purple gems. He pulled himself down the cave’s slope as quickly as he could.
The path closed slowly behind him. Deeper in the cave, the dirt and rock began to show from behind the gems. There were fewer gems. The path opened up into a chamber and only one line of gems remained along the ground. The last gem in the line was purple, and it extended, narrow, out into the chamber. On the end of the large, narrow, purple gem, was a small, curved, red-orange spike. The spike extended towards the other main feature of the chamber.
Across the chamber, there was a bright, blue tree made out of sharp, angular crystal. At its center, was a six-pointed, pink-purple gem. In the branches, there was a red lighting bolt, an orange apple, a pink butterfly, a purple diamond, and a blue balloon.
That was all he saw of it, because he was focused on something else. His body continued forward as he looked at something he couldn’t quite place. He knew what he was looking at, he just wasn’t sure where it was. He didn’t think of her as being elsewhere, but he didn’t see her in the room. He was still looking right at the tree and he could see it too.
Her eyes didn’t move. He chest didn’t move. She was a purple horse. There were two large wings hanging by her sides and was a horn on her head. Her mane was dry and crinkled and floating. Behind her was just bright. Her fur was matted but maintained the sheen of a healthy coat.
He had moved toward the tree while he gawked, unaware. The dark, grey rocks in his skin were sparking and heating. The large, narrow, purple crystal contained a growing green light and the little orange-red spike on its end was glowing and shaking. The tree continued to light the room like daylight. The green light flared in the narrow, purple gem and the gem shattered into a thousand little shards. The curved, red-orange spike popped off and flew through the air. It swerved and stopped tumbling mid-air and then swung down and landed base-first, half on his fur, half on the grey skin-rock in the middle of his forehead.
Everything needed to burn. He could see the branches of the crystal tree smashing under his hooves. He could hear strangers crying. He was thinking of that purple mare strapped to a hollow cylinder of metal while someone fed an oil fire inside of it. He was thinking of looking out over all the known world and knowing it was his and for him, no one else. He liked it. His body was reaching out to touch the tree of harmony.
Beams of light shot from the branches of the tree and into his body. For a moment, he felt calm and happy. The skin-stones in his body began burning and vibrating and he didn’t care anymore. Attacking the tree didn’t seem like a good idea anymore. Panic washed over him and then was replaced with calm again. A snapping noise was heard as a fracture formed along the curved, red-orange forehead spike. A bright red light built and then there was a brighter red flash and the cave was gone.
He was standing in the forest. The rocks were glowing and vibrating and discharging sparks into his surroundings. Angry thoughts of blood and fire and, somewhere in the back of his head, feelings of confusion and just a bit of fear bumbled about in his head. The spike on his head was still glowing. As the seconds passed and images of burnt villages and killed warriors and abused furniture and people filled his mind, he became slowly more concerned about it. As the image of a group of youths forced into a blizzard entered his mind, he jammed the spike into the nearest tree trunk. He pried and yanked. The part of the horn that was over the rocks separated like there was never a connection. The part that was on his fur felt like peeling off a fingernail. His head jerked free and he fell on his haunches.
The skin-rocks cooled and he began to wonder where he was. Looking right behind him, he saw a deep trench. The dilapidated castle’s remains rested across a mostly empty field on the other side of the trench. The castle was hard to look at, with the sun setting behind it, and it’s shadow stretched across the field. He felt uneasy, knowing what was hiding in there.
He wiped a hoof over his face and found no blood. He was dirty and sleepy and a little tired. His everything hurt, but his legs and sides hurt the most. Somehow, there were no burn marks around the rocks in his skin. They were still grey, but each one had a different and changing pastel shimmer to it
He started to feel like getting away from there. He started to want to get as far away from that horn as possible. He slowly stood up, blinking and backing up, before turning, and then running out into the forest.
It was bright and clear and open, for once. There was knee-high grass swaying in the breeze all across the massive clearing. He had cut a path of trampled grass and had nearly reached the other treeline. The ground pulsed with tremors.
He turned and saw it. First, he saw the bulbous purple shoulders. In the sunlight, he could clearly make out the hand-like foreclaws on rippled, thick, bumpy arms during each bound. He was already backing away. Its bulbous purple neck had white lines moving from its base to its blue head. Its eyes were still yellow and it snout was a light tan and still filled with teeth and covered in tight clumps of muscle. A long, thin, pink, sinewy whisker extended from either side of its black nose and up. The torso was purple, wide, and solid. Behind it, a long tail swished around, end pointing generally forward. It was roaring a low, loud, long, rumbly roar.
He ran into the treeline. The cover felt thin, now. It was the same as it ever was. He continued straight into the forest as quickly as possible, but before he was far enough in to even get lost, he could hear the thing crushing bushes. He turned and ran in another direction. The pulsing tremor got closer. It got further away for a second before stopping. He found a short, steep drop and ran along its edge before turning around. The pulsing started again. He jumped down. He ran along the side of the wall. The light touched everywhere. A loud thud shook the ground. There was no bush any better to hide in than the rest. He ran.
He could hear the paws slamming into the ground. He could see the leaves shake. When a hole in the wall appeared from around the next unassuming bush, he dove in with no hesitation. The path was bendy and he hid behind the second corner, pressing himself against the stone wall. He slowed his breath. The tremors had stopped nearby. As quietly as he could, he moved along the dim cave.
His eyes adjusted and he entered into a surprisingly bright chamber with a ledge just ahead of him. To his right was a downward rock ramp against the chamber wall. He approached the ledge and looked down. He found a pool. It took up the center of the chamber. The ramp curved around half of its border, ending in a stone floor that wrapped the rest of the way around the pool. On the lower floor, on the far side of the pool, there was another tunnel entrance. It could have lead out. It could have lead deeper into the cave. He could not see under the bright, blue water surface. There was no reflection of the cave itself. Yet, his bloody, dirty, torn-eared and bag-eyed body was looking back at him.
He looked back the way he came. Two yellow eyes looked out from the dark. This behemoth thing was shifting and lowering its body. It was pouncing. He did the only thing he could do. Heart pounding and grey rocks still shimmering, he bucked. His hooves caught the neck of the behemoth, slowing it by nothing at all. His forehooves scratched along the cliff edge and then over it.
He and the behemoth dropped through the air and into the pool. Under the surface, they slowed. Their images distorted and their colors bled. The behemoth swung as its arm dissolved. It struck his abs, causing him to empty his lungs. The shimmering on the rocks spread into the water and the rocks themselves melted and dislodged from his body. The water around the rocks boiled and the rocks slowly shrank. The behemoth was now a cloud of murky color. His fur was fading from purple to pale purple to light grey as the colors spread into the water in dense lines and then diffused. His legs wobbled and his nose stretched out and bent. His vision blurred.
The pool blackened. The surface bubbled and steamed, releasing black mist into the air of the cave. Pastel pulses of slight shimmer claimed small sections of the cloud, and those sections faded away. Soon, there was no water in the strange pool, and, soon after, there was no black cloud in the air.
It was a bright, sunshiny day. Lovingly crafted items were being crushed and consumed, as is the place of such things, sitting on a basic, small town cafe menu. Birds chirp in the sky (or, more accurately, from within little alcoves in the houses that nobody ever intended a bird to live in). Kids played in the middle of the street. Adults chatted disinterestedly and animatedly and watched. Houses with the same personality displayed their charm down each side of each street.
Someone left their house, smile on face and eyes shining like stars. She looked at trimmed lawns and competing children and into the ball of fire in the sky and at pretty butterflies and in people's windows and at the clouds in the sky. She trotted off the streets and along the shrubbery line, down the grassy patch between the cafe and someone's house. She looked at everything as she passed down the alley: a garden gnome, two walls, and the grass. She paused her walk as she came out from between the two buildings. Quietly, quickly, she said, “T’day's a good day.”
He stepped on a garden gnome and stumbled forward into a neat row of bushes. It took a moment, nestled in that relatively quiet, cool, and dark space in the bushes that ran along and defined the edge of the cafe property and gazing glazed-ly out at calm, smiling, socializing creatures eating together, for him to stop hyperventilating. There was no tremor. There was no roar. There was no pain. There were umbrellas in the sun and low, wrought iron chairs. There were drinks and cups and flowers on bread. There were ponies sitting.
The first table he looked at had 7 people: a white one with horn and purple mane, a pink one with a darker pink mane, an orange one with the yellow mane and a cowboy hat, a blue one with a prismatic mane and wings, a tiny purple dragon, a yellow one with a pink mane and wings, and a purple one with a horn, wings, and a mostly dark purple mane. He stared at her for a moment. He sighed and pulled himself back out of the hedge. His legs were shaking.
A child was next to him. The child looked at him and gasped. A look of terror overtook the little one. As a child ran away, he decided to avoid being seen. His legs weren’t shaking anymore.
He backed into the space between the cafe and the house. He put the gnome back on its feet and then looked forward. A green pony was standing a few feet away, at the end of the alley, and looking away from him. She turned to start walking and noticed him out of the corner of her eyes. She turned to face him and her smile dropped. Her mouth opened and her eyes slowly moved from his muzzle to his ears.
He ran past her and into the nearest relatively dark alley. He did not stop.
She turned to watch him go. She looked at the alley he had disappeared down for a few moments. Her eyes narrowed and her lips curved down. She growled, “It IS a good day.”
“Okay, there has to be a way to get him to say ‘I outrank you.’”
“Yeah that should be easy; he's a second in command.”
“What if he is on a fleet vessel and there is an enemy ship and he's like, ‘Full speed ahead. Ram them.’, and some guy is like, 'Sir, that doesn't sound like a good idea-’ 'I outrank you!’”
“No way. He should just tele-choke him. That's what he would do to anyone who questioned him, actually…”
“What if it was the new guy?”
“He kills him.”
“Like, the new guy doesn't know how things work.”
“He’s fucking Sladick Zaeder. He doesn't care.”
The door creaked open and then closed and Feather Whistle just kept talking. “So, the new guy is like, 'Sir, that doesn’t sound like a good idea’ - ‘I out rank you!’” Feather giggled and wiggled.
“...Okay then.”
The sofas sat on the floor, the quills sat in their jars, the open sign sat in the window, and the employees sat behind the counter. The bathroom door slowly swung itself closed. At least three ponies were lounging on the same cushions as hundreds before them.
“I outrank you!”, he repeated, much to his continued amusement.
“You do a really bad Zaeder impression.”
A nearby customer let out a low “Oooo, right in the heart.”
He was in the bathroom. It was small, with one toilet, a sink, a roll of toilet paper sitting on the toilet back, and bar soap. In the mirror, his pale, grey horse-face viewed him with dull gray eyes. Darker gray patches rested under the eyes. His ears were cut and pierced through. Drying and scabbing over, streaks of blood clung to the surface of the two broken, black head-sticks from the invisible creature.
He turned the faucet on and tried to turn his hoof over to cup the water. His shoulder was not built for that. Water fell through his hooves and down his legs and cycloned down the sink. He kept bending himself farther to the side. His head was upside down as he stood on three legs and stretched his other leg up, upside down. He got his hoof into the basin and wedged his hoof under the faucet.
The water ran out of the back of his hoof and down his leg, running over his body. He slipped on his wet hoofs and was left dangling by his arm in the sink as the faucet head dug into the soft part in the center of his hoof, spraying water everywhere. He squeezed his eyes shut and gasped through clenched teeth as the round faucet dug into him. He struggled and yanked and his leg popped free. He dropped on his back. “Pain. Yup, that's pain. Aah,” he breathed.
When he was done flailing and smearing red on the linoleum floor, he stood back up and shoved his whole head under the running water. There were no paper towels, he realized only now.
He spent well over a half an hour sticking squares of toilet paper to his hooves and rubbing himself. There was no trash can. He was very tense when he finally flushed and very pleased when the mound of toilet paper successfully went down the drain. He was still covered in faint red patches, but the sticks were wiped clean. It was good, even if he was damp and his nose was smeared.
He nodded reassuringly to himself and then turned to the door. He pushed down the handle and pulled it open. As he walked through the doorway, his fur became dry and the pale blood stains disappeared.
“You don't win! They are too old, and they have seen basically everything before. A grandmother will always win at negotiation and little social family confrontations. When your mother-in-law comes over you put away the sulfur hexafluoride and stop doing fun things. I don't care if you’re Sladick Zaeder; if you go out there with a gas induced deep voice, you will have to deal with her politely implying things about how you are childish and irresponsible and not good enough for her daughter.”
“Well, just ask. ‘Are you calling me childish?’”
“That's the thing. She would just make you look bad for having accused her.”
“Pull out a mana-beam and go, ‘You insult my honor. Duel.’”
“Now you get to look aggressive and rude and you just threatened your wife’s mom.”
“Then just pull out a toy, plastic sword instead.”
“Now you look childish again and she gets to go talk about how you were sarcastic at her.”
He approached the counter.
Feather smiled but scrunched his face while laughing.
“See? You don't win. You just eat your dinner and wait until she leaves.”
“Hey, uh-”
“Ah, yes. Hello. Welcome to quills and sofas. Are ya here for quills or sofas?”
“Um... no…”
Feather opened a drawer and started rifling around. The other employee smiled. “Alright then, we just got a bit of the good stuff in. What's your number?” Feather pulled out a binder in his mouth and opened it, dropping it on the counter.
“...Number for what?”
The two stared at him for a moment. Feather swept the binder back into the drawer and closed it before staring at him again. They were both sweating bullets. The other one opened his mouth. “So, how can I help you sir?”
He asked them if they knew of any place that sold soap.
The front desk lady looked out of the glass doors. Her knees rested on the counter and her forehooves were steepled, a triangle forming between her forelegs and the counter. She wiggled slightly from side to side. On the counter, there were loofahs to the right and moth balls and scrunchies to the right. The countertop was glass, with a menu visible inside it. She looked left, down the hall. The steam room was steamy. The massage room door was closed, but it could be assumed that ponies were in there. The same could be said for basically every other door in the spa. She may have already observed every decoration and read every bit of text in the lobby and then every other nook and cranny of the building, but it was still better than nothing.
The one place she wasn't looking was at the light grey pony sitting in one of the lobby chairs. She was a professional in a professional establishment and she wouldn't oogle her customers and make them uncomfortable. Similarly, she would not bat a loofah back and forth across the glass, and she would definitely never shoot moth balls into the plant pots using scrunchies.
Whenever the bell over the door jingled, she came right out. On these occasions, counted times a day, she expected to either make an appointment or check someone in. Instead, this grey guy was just sitting in the lobby waiting and forcing her to keep it manned. He just sat there, mumbling to himself occasionally and avoiding eye contact with her. She stared at out the glass doors at the empty streets and empty, still yards.
They waited.
They heard a door open down the hallway. They both turned their heads. A mare came out of the hall with bags over her back. The mare approach to the counter and scooped a hoof-full of small gold coins out of her bag and onto the counter. Still sitting here, he followed the mare with his eyes and opened and closed his mouth and raised one hoof, but didn't say anything. The lady chatted with the mare for a moment and marked the transaction as complete in the appointment book and arranged another appointment. The mare thanked her and walked past him and out of the front door while he mumbled to himself. The door closed and the doorbell let out a little ring.
The waiting resumed. She was looking at him until his eyes flicked up at her. They were looking at the wall and glass door, respectively, after that. As yet more moments of her life were used at that desk, making her small business dreams come true one agonizing millisecond after another agonizing millisecond followed by another agonizing millisecond, she wondered if there was anything she could really do about it. When he had first arrived and sat down, she had asked him if she could help with anything. “No. Uh, no... Thank you,” he had responded, so she resisted the urge to ask again.
They heard the door open. Both of them turned their heads. He got up and walked to the hallway corner. A mare walked out and noticed him standing there. “Hey, uh…” He sat and pointed a hoof at a nearby stand. “That, um… over there… buy me that soap, please.”
The mare had her mouth in her bag and pulled out some coins. She looked at him and let out a muffled “No.” before spitting them onto the counter. She said, “Next Sunday at 5,” and trotted out of the building.
The lady recorded the payment and appointments. He sat back down in the lobby chair. The lady put away her binder and glanced between the soap and the grey inconvenience. She wiggled her butt slightly on the high stool. Just giving him the bar was sounding like a great idea. She turned and dangled her legs. A hallway door opened and she sat right back on her chair. He moved and sat next to the hallway’s corner, right next to the display stand with the soap. A mare walked out.
“Yo.” The mare looked at him. He fidgeted slightly. “Could you buy me this soap?” He pointed a hoof to a white bar of soap wrapped in plastic. “Please.”
The mare looked at the stand. “No way, that's expensive. You're getting the cheap stuff.” She walked up to the display stand and bit into a white bar of soap wrapped in plastic sitting right next to the white bar of soap wrapped in plastic he had pointed at. She put it on the counter with a single coin on top of it and a pile of coins next to it.
The lady took the coins and pushed the bar away before pulling out a binder in writing in another friday appointment. He took the bar and said something approaching thank you, the soap in his mouth garbling his words.
He left, the mare left, and the lady sighed and hopped off her stool. She opened the drawer and pulled out a lighter and a roll of tobacco-equivalent product. She walked out of the back door and at least 30 feet away from the spa, like someone who cares about the smell in their relaxation and health based business.
He just froze up when he heard it. It was coming from the right. At a glance he found a horse with wings. She was red and still and pleased. And that's how they sat, without trying to hum or to speak or make sounds.
Was fault with him, or was fault with her? He had tried not to be loud.
He heard and remembered an old song in his brain, but produced melody in a soup. It was one thing to hum some notes out of place while there wasn’t anyone who knew his face or name. Not so, while under the stranger’s gaze, not then. Shut down, his display was kept in, quirk hidden.
Standing outside, in the midday rays, her smirk suffered a slow death. After some time, with a sharper gaze, she was leaving with a shaking head. As he watched her go, with her head hanging low, he was glad that nothing was said.
And, then, he went about his walking with his soft song again. The sound grew, as the crowd did the same. He ignored it, till the tipping point came, then he said “hi”, and incoherency reigned.
“Hi! I’m - My - What? Wait - Hi! Why? Who is tha- same song?”
“Hey, guy, soooo, what is the next line?”
He surveyed the group. “I don't know the words to this.” Some cringed at this news and some grumbled and groaned. They slowly turned and left, mumbling to each other.
“...Guess they just like music.”
Some measured bit short of a running pace, he shuffled off after the same landmark hill he had been going for. At his asking, a stranger had pointed him off towards it, and he moved for the edge of town. The homes thinned as the altitude rose. From the top, he could spot his goal, and he moved down to the lake. A horse was tanning while some others were splashing and playing. As he stood, with his hooves in the sand, he felt nervous dread.
He wouldn't be bathing alone and he didn't know how to swim. He only knew how to float by breathing in and holding it.
He dropped his plastic wrapped soap and approach the shore. He slowly dipped his forehoof in and then slowly dipped his other forehoof in before slowly dragging his hooves forward while breathing in little, hissy bursts from the cold. The water climbed. Soon, his stomach was just above the water, being licked with chills by the waves. He bent his legs, plunging himself the rest of the way in, and held his breath.
His hooves lifted off from their footing and he felt like he was falling. His legs begin kicking, dragging him deeper as his back hooves drug along the mud. His head surfaced and he tried holding it up as his backside slowly sank. His mouth went under for a moment, and he stood up on two hooves for one last breath to float with.
His forehooves stopped kicking. He didn't feel like he was falling. His hind legs were supporting him. He stood for a moment, chin deep in the water. His eyes glanced down before looking forward again. “Okay, then.”
He turned and pushed off the ground he slowly drifted to the shore. His neck rose out of the water. His barrel rose into the air. His legs left the lake. His back hooves, or lower hooves, rested on the sand.
His forehooves hung at his sides. It slowly set in that he could have been walking on two legs the whole time. He made a constipated face.
He found his soap in the sand and bent all the way down to just barely grasp it with his teeth. Standing back up, he wedged the package between his forehooves and tore open one end of the plastic. The bar popped out of the package from the pressure of the hooves. He crouched down on his haunches and pressed his sand covered soap between his forehooves, dropping the wrapper. A breeze lifted the wrapper off. He sprang up and wobbled off after the rolling plastic with his forehooves firmly clamped together and moving from side to side in time with his steps. He stepped on the wrapper and kicked some sand onto it. “Show off,” the sunbather commented.
He was still soaked. No one seemed to be watching as he looked around.
He jammed the end of the soap sticking out from the backs of his hooves onto his stomach and began grinding it into his fur. He continued until there was a caked on layer. No one was watching; he checked. He rubbed the soap in as far up each side as he could manage, rocking his shoulders on his spine. He rubbed back and forth up his neck. He held the soap high and rubbed his head against it. He couldn’t get to his back or most of his legs like this.
He pressed his hooves together harder, jamming the soap into the curve of a hoof. Like this, he held the soap against his body and rubbed circles. He did the same with his other hoof.
After putting the soap down, he pressed his bare hooves into every part of his body, rubbing in and spreading the soap until his whole body was a bit sudsy. He walked into the water and then tried to jump. He got most of the way out of the water before curling into the “cannonball” position and sinking back down. He stood in the shallows and rubbed and the soap spread around him in a slightly discolored circle. It just kept coming off him as he rubbed. Eventually, most of it seemed to be gone. He stopped rubbing and looked around for a moment. He sighed and then leaned forward and floated, resisting the urge to kick. After a while, he was comfortable, and the feeling of falling down a river, into a canyon, went away. He paddled to the shore.
He had been tired since he woke up. He was hungry. He was cold and ignorant, but, for the first time since gaining his body, he was clean. He smelled like a wet horse, but he was clean. He even had a possession. It occurred to him that he didn't have a place to keep his possessions, since he didn’t know anyone, and he would have to faintly taste soap to keep his soap with him.
He bit the soap and retrieved the plastic with his hooves. He carefully slid the soap inside. He decided to stash the soap. The lake was the only place with water that he knew he could use. So he decided that he should leave it nearby.
A large tree was nearby. He trotted up to it and popped up onto two legs. He stretched and stood on one leg on his tippy-hooves and balanced the soap-pack on one forehoof. He reached just a little bit past a large branch which formed a convenient crevice. He wedged the soap in with the hole on the bottom so that any water would run out as it collected.
He had only eaten from one place and he had only slept in one place. He knew he was always welcome there. He headed for the forest.
He weaved between trees and green leaves. Somehow, being back in this familiar setting left him less tense. The sun still shone through the canopy. The bushes and hills still blocked his view, at least when he was trotting. If he stood up, he could actually peek over the tops of most of them.
He found a tulip and a daisy and a small yellow and purple thing which he thought was probably a flower and which tasted like white Airheads. He wasn’t really hungry, but he didn’t want to stop, and he wasn’t quite full.
He looked over a bush and just about shat himself when a bunny bolted out of cover and away. He didn’t see food, so he calmed down and walked to the next nearby bush.
He still knew how to get out. Town was generally in the direction off to his left. He peeked over a bush and found a clearing full of lilacs. He dropped and, on four legs, moved around the bush, to the clearing.
The sky became pink and orange and purple and darkened and was black with white specks and transparent swirls of space colors.
Slowly, he stepped into the clearing. He looked up and behind and around and none of the plants or inanimate matter answered his accusing glare. Backing out of the clearing didn’t bring the sun back, either. Eventually, his heart calmed down. The dark was dark and the lilacs continued to exist a few feet away.
Lilacs taste like salted popcorn. He only had a few. He still wasn’t full. He still wasn’t hungry; he just thought to save some of them for breakfast. It wasn’t like he could just carry them all around in his mouth forever.
He trotted out of the clearing and hid between a few bushes sitting in a circle. He stood, facing town, and closed his eyes and breathed. The breeze caused lazy scraping and clanking of sticks in the trees. The air cooled. His thoughts slowly began to drift away from the topics he was thinking about. He began to let go of his sense of worry and safety. He forgot about figuring out the world. He forgot about where he hid his soap and he forgot about his breathing.
Air continued to move through his nose. Eventually, the air was cool. The leaves rustled softly and continuously. His heart beat slowly and more slowly and even more slowly. He could hear it beating. He ignored it, but it didn’t ever quite fade. For that matter, neither did the sound of the leaves. He waited for the sounds to go away. He realized that he had already waited for a rather long time. His heartbeat sped up just a bit. He tried to shift his hooves, just to get a bit more comfortable so that sleep might finally take him. He didn’t feel them press into the ground.
He opened his eyes to find darkness on every side: not a single star up in the sky. He looked to find mists of drifting blackness pierced in thinning, star lit, faint-light patches. The wonky sky could not compete to hold his interest when made to compete with the feeling of nothing coming from below his knees, and, so, he was watching down as, slowly, from the darkness, his legs emerged, resting on the ground. The dim mists turned brighter by the moment but gathered most densely at his hooves, then went away.
Everything was dead. The leaves were blackened and curled on the ground and he could see right through the bushes all around him. The moon was bright through the canopy and even the trees were dead and curling up.
He trotted to the lilac clearing. The blackening lessened as he went, but half the grasses and flowers were still crispy brown. He tasted a crispy lilac. It tasted like burnt popcorn and a burnt popcorn smell traveled from the back of his neck and to his nose and remained, even after he spat it out.
He was still in the forest. He was still as tired as when he first started trying to sleep. It was still night. The world still wasn’t answering his accusing facial expressions.
His reactions weren’t helping anything. Answers could wait, anyway; the only things he really wanted were food and rest. He also left his prized possession wedged in some wood near a lake. He was broke and friendless and skill-less and generally ignorant and he didn’t have any place to even keep anything.
He looked at the good, colorful lilacs. He needed a bag.
It was a simple plan, exactly the size that people without experience could execute on.
He left. He went back to his dead, moonlit patch of dirt and then questioned that decision. He moved away from that set of bushes and to the next set of semi-secluding, easy to walk though spider storage units and felt safer.
He faced town and closed his eyes and waited for sleep. It did not come. He could always feel the air pushing softly. He could always hear his breathing, and he could always hear the forest. The moments ground into his mind, one by one, and when he opened his eyes, he found only pitch black, again. The sunny sky pierced through the dark within a few seconds, and it soon faded and pooled under him. When he looked down at it, it was gone.
Everything was dead. Breakfast was delicious. He was still as tired as he was when he started trying to sleep.
He wandered through empty morning streets for about ten minutes. Smiling faces flooded from every door and he wandered through mostly full streets after that. He saw many things and understood few of them. Fewer still really interested him. He noted that, when pony architecture wasn’t completely standard, it was extremely non-standard.
“The fair is here”, read the poster. It had a picture of a clown with a ferris wheel behind him. The poster was stapled to a thick, wooden pole. The pole had black wires running to its top from the top of another such pole. In the distance, the series of connected poles continued on, though none of them seemed to be connected to any houses. The wires on the top of the pole with the poster, however, led into the roof of a metallic trailer home. This was the first time he had seen any of these things here.
This held his attention, but it didn’t really answer any of his questions. He trotted off.
The two easiest places to find were the town hall, which was in the center of a seven road plaza and roundabout and was taller than most other buildings, and the market.
It was outdoors. Single ponies sat in small wooden stalls. One sold only cherries. One sold only apples. One sold only screws. Over each stall, there was a sign with a picture of the product sold. He had already been here once this morning. There had been nothing.
Everything was worth one, two, or three coins. It couldn’t be said which value each thing had, because every sale was accompanied by a two or fifteen minute bartering match. One pony would say words and then slide some number of coins toward themselves and then the other pony would say words and slide a number of coins toward themselves. Eventually, the exchange would either happen or not happen.
He approached a baseball stand. “Hey.” The mare at the stand looked toward him. “What does it cost to set up a stand here?”
“Oh, well, my cousin already owned a hammer and a saw and the screws cost a bit each”, he made a face like he had broken a cracker in half and it had squirted juice at him and blinked rapidly, “and the sheet of wood-”
“How much were the screws?”
“Oh, my aunt is a really good bargainer, so she managed to get it down to a bit a piece.”
“How much?”
“A single bit. Or, well, there were, like, thirty screws, so it was thirty bits.”
“...” he figured it out. “So, how much to set up a stand?”
“Right! The wood was two bits and the paint and paper were each three bits, so, about thirty something.”
“Okay… but how much to set up a stand?”
“...Thirty something?”
“Besides that?”
She looked away for a moment or two. “... Nothing?”
“What does it cost to be able to take your already created stand out and put it here?”
“Time? Effort?”
He decided that no permit was necessary.
“Alright. Hypothetically, if I showed up here with a bunch of baseballs, would you want to buy them?”
“I already have baseballs. I’m selling them! Would you like one?”
“But, if you bought -”
“Three bits!”
“-bought them for one bit and sold them for tw-three bits, you would be making money.”
“You’re a weird barterer.”
“But, would you?”
“Well, I do like baseballs… and bits.”
“Alright... It’s been a… something, talking to you.” He trotted away.
She watched him go. She looked at her counter and then under her stand and then at her baseball barrel. She muttered to herself, wondering how she had managed to lose a sale.
“So, what you are telling me… is… that this sword,” he gestured at a somewhat large sword with a somewhat flattened handle and a perfectly straight, forward hand-guard and a curved up rear hand-guard and a blade that curved back slightly and ended in a point and returned back to the handle with two concave curves,” is worth one thousand, two hundred bits, and this sword”, he gestured at a somewhat large sword with a somewhat flattened handle and a perfectly straight, forward hand-guard and a curved up rear hand-guard and a blade that curved back slightly and ended in a point and returned back to the handle with two concave curves, ”is worth sixty five?”
The big-muscled, singed-feathered blacksmith stallion let out a quick “Yep.”
“Okay,” he pointed at a shelf full of water-proof, red, air-proof saddle-bags, “which of those is least valuable?”
The smith pointed at the second one back on the top shelf, “Twelve bits.”
“Alright,” he placed the cheap sword and the cheap bag in the very back of their respective stands, “is there anything I can do to bring that price down, anything you want?”
“Iron. Gems, too. I always need material.”
He didn’t have any of that.
“I don’t have any of that… Anything else?”
The stallion merely looked at him for a moment. The stallion slowly took a breath in through his nose and hung up his expensive sword before letting the breath back out. “Can you give me flight and still let me practice my talents at the forge? Can you bring my dead friends back? Can you stop boredom from claiming every good thing that ever lasted? Can you turn back the clock? Can you give me forever and make me not buck it up? Can you even keep my bills paid and my stomach full?” The smith went back into his forge room. “Bring me bits, then,” the smith called out before beginning to hammer out a slinky.
This left him standing in the middle of the shop, alone. The co-owner was still doing the mime-schtick nearby. He was very hard to talk to and would toss pie occasionally. Counter arguments did nothing.
He left “Adventures with Jokes.”
He had amassed a great wealth that morning. It came in in the form of knowledge about the town and, regrettably, not in the form of money. He knew anything in his possession was worth about one bit. He knew expensive items were in shops and that shops didn’t purchase. He knew some ponies were friendly. He knew that wagons and bags were expensive. He knew that mud ponies grew plants.
He knew this because he had asked the smith. “How would you recommend I get the bits?” he had asked.
“Legally.” The smith had replied. The smith had looked him over. “Why not magic somepony else’s plants into growing, like every other blank-flank mud-pony?”
“Magic?” he had looked at his hooves. “I might try that, thanks.”
With that conversation in mind, he trotted until he found a shop called “The Flowers’ Shop.” It seemed appropriate, and he went in. There was a mare shelving a potted pincushion flower.
“Hello.” He said, and she squeaked and quickly turned around. “Uh, yes, I was wondering if you could help me. Someone informed me that ‘mud ponies’ could ‘magic plants into growing’. I have no idea what they were talking about. Could you help me figure out how to do that?”
The mare’s mouth was moving up and down. She looked like a firecracker had gone off at her hooves a few seconds ago.”Don’t,” she mustered a small, sad voice, “don’t say that again. I mean, yes, but don’t do that.”
He resolved not to call someone’s profession magic and nodded. “Thank you.”
“Just…” she turned toward a nearby doorway and her eyes darted to his face before returning forward, “just stay there.” She quickly came back with a yellow flower with an unopened bulb. “One second.” She extended a hoof to the pot and the bulb grew very slightly. “There, it should open with basically any input from you. So, just… just touch it and think a happy thought.”
He touched the pot and thought of his little brother. Nothing happened.
“Are you thinking a happy thought?”
“Yes.”
“Try another one?” He thought of music and owning those bags. “Try smiling?” He smiled. “Touch the actual plant?” He touched the stem. Nothing happened.
She was shaking her head. “I… you should go to the library… or the doctor… I can’t help you.”
“Well, thank you for trying, then. Wait, doctor? Is something wrong with me?”
“Ummm… this shouldn’t have been… I just think… most ponies don’t need to be told… just go to the doctor. Just… just…”
“… Ok… thanks. Where are those places? Also, where are the fairgrounds?”
She told him and watched him go. She looked over at the almost done yellow ranunculus. She reached over and lightly bopped the pot. It bloomed explosively. She wasn’t even thinking a happy thought.
He did not go to the library. He would not be going to the doctor. Instead, he was standing on a big patch of dirt. There was occasional garbage. There was a broken cart and a forgotten game of horseshoes. There was, most certainly, not a fair.
If he wasn’t going to make quick money, he needed to make slow money. That meant he needed a job which required no knowledge or skill and which provided housing and had a high turnover rate. The fair sounded perfect. It would just be super convenient if it was still nearby.
Instead, he had the junk they left behind.
The cart was a smashed, wooden container on two wooden wheels. It was good enough. He loaded up the wooden walls of some forgotten attraction and carted it away.
He spat a mouthful of screws onto the counter and pushed one screw forward. “One bit.”
The mare who sold screws looked between him and the screw a few times. “Two bits?”
He waited, looking at her for a few moments. “Are you gonna get them out?”
She looked down. “Oh! Yeah, one moment.“ She scrambled to put two bits on the counter.
“Sold!” He pushed one screw all the way over and scooped the bits off the counter and into this mouth.
She looked at the screw. “That won’t work again”
He pushed his other three screws over. “Four.”
“For which one?”
“All of them”
“Each?! No!”
“No, four bits for three screws, total.”
“I…” She put four bits on the counter and watched them and the grey pony disappear.
“… Selling more than one, huh?”
The baseball mare was packing up her stand. She put her bits in her bag. She put her balls in her barrel. She balanced both on her back. She heard bits being spit onto wood. After a day of trading, that sound held her attention. The lost(?) sale had returned. “Hello, need some help?” He was still a weird barterer.
“Yes. Well, no. I mean, I do this every day, but if you are going to make it your problem instead, don’t let me get in your way.”
He stood on two legs and held out his forelegs. “Give it here.”
The customer is always right. She put down her belongings and sat on her haunches, lifting the barrel over her head so that he could get his forelegs under it. She put her stand and saddle bags back on her back. “Come on.”
She trotted off and he walked after.
The silence would have been awkward if he wasn’t a bit behind her with balls in his face. Her house wasn’t far and the trip didn’t take long. They put her things in a shed next to her house as she spewed nearly irrelevant, though somewhat charming, anecdotes about her family.
“Could I borrow that screwdriver you mentioned, if you don’t mind?” She silently reached into the shed and bit a screwdriver before placing it at his hooves. “And the saw?” She did the same with a hacksaw. “… Thanks.”
“Alright, just put them back when you're done.” She yawned and went inside.
He spent hours removing and re-using screws and carefully replacing shattered and missing pieces of wood with no measuring tools or writing instruments. The core was good: the axle was strong and the wheels had metal edges. The handles were sturdy and undamaged. When it was over, the moon was out, he was hungry, and he had a total piece of shit in his possession. It was his, and it would work. He put the tools back and closed the shed.
He planned to join the fair, but he had to leave to find it. This was a big, and, as far as he could tell, extremely horrifying world, and he would not enter it without something sharp.
He needed money or materials or something to sell. Town is a place of landowners, craftsmen, and citizens. Everything here was owned. Free things, things he could own, were in the wilds. He would have to go in one more time, unarmed and alone.
The lilacs were still good. They were nestled in the cart beside him. The dried and darkened flowers hadn’t gotten any better and the blackening and browning had not spread in his absence.
His cart handles came with a metal, belt-like ring attached between them. He latched the harness around himself and stood up. As it turned out, forests aren’t well built for wheeled devices. So, he pulled a cart over bushes on two legs while searching for orange, pink, and purple gems.
Something kind of like crickets sounded. Moonlight dimly lit the underside of the canopy. Small, unseen creatures held perfectly still, and he made ridiculous amounts of noise.
He glanced around rapidly. The bushes scratched and crunched. The wheels squeaked and vibrated as they turned. His two-hoof stance pounded the ground. If he trotted instead, the handles would be pulled from lower and the cart would not pull over the top of the bushes as easily.
He saw dim grasses and weeds. He could just see to navigate between wide-enough tree-gaps.
From the darkness, some sharp shape swung for his face. He let out a strangled scream and swatted at it. It flew away and up. He saw a bat against the sky.
He tried to calm himself. The night sky darkened while he looked up at it, and his heartbeat could just do whatever it wanted after that.
He ran and heard distant chuckling. Something bolted across the open space he was headed for. There was no other direction he could run, so he ran through there anyway. Nothing struck at him that time. As he passed by the next bush, something swiped at his legs and he jumped over it. He started scraping his hooves against the metal belt latch. It didn’t come off.
His cart caught on and ripped plant life, slowing him, tiring him, and making him very easy to find. He heard things moving. He saw bright, different-colored points of light behind him, but the forest around them was not visible. He couldn’t possibly get away. He scraped his hooves along the ground, stopping. His cart swung around him and drug him along for a few inches. He glared into the lights, ready to rain horse-hoof hammer-blows or die.
Something slid across the ground. One of the lights flared and then flew for his head. He dropped to all fours and popped back up as it passed. He saw teeth in a circle on a ball of flesh sliding forward on the ground, propelled by long, thick tentacles trailing off into the forest.
It lunged.
He swung.
His hoof went through it.
The stars and the moon lit the forest around him. There were no small points of light in the forest. There were no teeth. He looked around and found the castle behind him, in the distance. A few feet behind him, he could see a deep trench over the top of his cart. To his side, there was a hole in a tree where the red-orange horn once was.
The tree’s bark was darkened. The branches were now skinny and long and empty of leaves. The tree was curved and jagged but never straight. The trunk was twisted around the hole,and the tree was covered in gems.
“Wha…” He let out panicked breaths and listened hard and felt the urge to keep running, but his goal was right next to him. There was no place better to be, and he would have to come back to harvest the gems anyway, if he left. He touched a gem and waited for it to grow and pop out. Nothing happened.
It may seem difficult to remove gems from a tree-trunk. It seems that way because it is. No amount of kicking did anything. Branches, however, bend. He just pulled down branches and some gems fell.
Having a cart full of gems, he couldn't go back into the bushes. He took the widest opening between the bushes he could and left the broken bridge, the deep trench, and the castle behind. He found a long set of wide spaces between bushes, forming a convenient pathway. He began to suspect that it was a road. He was correct.
The smith moved purposefully through empty morning streets. He reached his store and found the grey blank-flank sitting on a pile of gems inside a small cart.
“I said legally.”
He sat and smirked. “I think this was legal.”
One of the smiths eyebrows rose. “Think? Where’d you get them?”
“Found ‘em in the forest.”
The smith blinked. “You went in the Everfree?”
“Uh, I guess? Is that the forest?”
“How long were you in there?”
“Only half a night. It kind of feels like it rolled over for me this time.”
The smith breathed in and breathed out and decided that it didn’t matter if the blank-flank was full of it. “Put it in the building.”
The smith stuck a key in the door with his wing and opened the store. The bucket was filled with water, the forge was made hot, and the tools were set out. The smith left the forge-room.
“Also, there’s breakfast.” The pile of gems was on the floor. He was pointing at three lilacs and a few bits on the counter.
“I know where your junk’s at.” The smith tossed him his bag and picked up the sword and a large chunk of gem in his wings. “Gimme a second.” The smith went back to his forge.
The bag had bounced off of him and fallen to the ground. He scooped it up and dropped it on his back. He couldn’t find a strapping mechanism. A single hammerblow sounded. “Hey, how long does whatever…” The blacksmith was standing next to him with a hammer and a sword with an orange gem in the hilt. “Why did you… thanks?”
“Ta’ make it work better.”
“… Work… better?”
“Yep.”
“… Can you do it to the bag?”
The blacksmith grumbled and put the sword on the ground. The smith picked another large gem off the floor and the bag off his back and went back to the forge. After a single hammer-blow, the smith came back out and tossed the bag over the counter, back onto his back. Each gem stud was a smooth, inch wide half-sphere with a gold ring around the base.
“Uh, what do I owe you?”
The smith looked at him. “Boy, you don’t seem to understand what you gave me. Take your bits and go.” The smith ignored him and put the gems in a chest.
He spat the coins into his bag and clenched his sword-handle in his teeth. With his belongings, he left.
He opened the library door. The door was in a tree, and he wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but the inside looked like a well-lit, hollowed tree. To the Right, there was counter pressed against the wall and a doorway into a kitchen. To the left of that, there were stairs going up and down. To the left of that, there were rows of bookshelves. On the left wall, there was a window.
There was a small explosion and a flash of purple light. Muscles clenched in his jaw and down his back and his legs twitched three times in rapid succession before launching him through the air with a curved back back and flexed open lips around a clenched jaw, to land facing the counter.
There was a purple horse with two wings and a horn at the counter in a white lab coat. Her mane was mostly dark purple with a pink stripe. Her eyes were wide open and purple and twitching. There were bags under those eyes. Her head hung a bit above any other pastel horse he had seen. A small bit of hair on the side of her face was on fire and she was staring at him and smiling a big, toothy smile.
She did nothing.
He quickly glanced at the door. “Hello?”
“Hi!”
“… Can I help yo-”
“You can help welcome I Golden… welcome…” She looked confused and then burst out laughing. “Hehe,” she snorted, “ha ha - welcome - ha - welcome to the Golden Oaks Library. How can I help you?” She smiled a calm smile at him and her eyes were half lidded.
“You’re on fire.”
Her eyes drifted to the side of her face that was now on fire. “I am.” She looked back to him. “I should probably do something… Naw, I don’t have to care anymore. Weeeeeell, Celestia said alicorn-y stuff might scare ponies… don’t tell anyone, ok?” He just looked at her. Her head slowly drooped and then dropped halfway to the counter before lifting back into its semi-attentive position. “Welcome to the Golden Oaks Library; how can I help you?”
“… Give me the most modern history book you have. Like, a book about stuff from a year ago.”
“Kay,” She did nothing.
“Could you find one for me?”
“Oh!” Her eyes shot wide and her horn glowed. A book impacted the counter, coming from the general direction of the shelves. “The Elements Rise,” she proudly declared the title. Her smile dropped. “It’s the book! This book,” she jabbed a hoof at the book. “It’s not even that aaaaccuraaate.” she whined.
“Miss, are you okay?”
“Huh, what?” Her eyes opened fully and she sat up straight before relaxing again. “Juuust haven’t slept in a few days. Shhh,” she closed her eyes and extended a hoof to the left of his face. “I’m gonna make it better… What did you need?”
“I wanna check out this book.”
Her eyes opened wide and she put that toothy smile back on. “Library card!”
“I don’t have one of those.”
“Oh.” she wiggled and put the calm face back on. She pointed a hoof to her chest. “I got thissss.” She slowly swept that hoof out.
Her horn glowed and a quill, a binder, and an ink jar floated out. The binder opened and the quill dipped. “Name,” the quill started writing “Age, eye color, fur color, mane color, height, weight, date issued.” In a purple flash, a small plastic rectangle with a bar code appeared. A red laser shot out from her horn and over the card and book with loud beeps. The book and card floated into his bags, which unzipped and rezipped themselves, and everything else put itself away. She sat there.
He squinted into the heat of her bright face. “Ma’am?”
“Thank you for visiting Golden Oaks!” He heard a small explosion and was blinded by purple light. She was gone.
He stared for a moment, before turning and opening the door.
He stopped. He closed the door and trotted to the kitchen. He returned on two legs with a glass of water between his hooves. He opened and closed the door again, loudly. There was a small explosion and a purple flash.
“Welcome to Go-”
Her face became covered in water. The door slammed.
The fair had gone down the road to Horsetown. That road was on the side of town generally to his left. The sword rested in the cart. The cart squeaked and the wheels wobbled. The metal strap was wrapped around his barrel. He was headed for the lake.
He had just left the market. There hadn’t been any stands there today. He had asked a pony where they were and the pony had told him. “There’s only a market on saturdays.”
His only money source wasn’t available. He needed to get a new one.
He asked the pony where the fair was headed. He would be on his way to Horsetown already, but he had one more thing to pick up.
So, he walked through the village. He heard their chatter. He saw them playing and laughing. He smelled food. He saw businesses, like a club or a bakery. He felt the ground shake a little, kind of like a pulse. It was a bright day, like most of the others. He felt like jogging. He was still in town, so he settled for trotting just a bit faster. Some town crier was yelling. He didn’t listen. He just trotted on.
He reached the base of the first grassy hill. He looked back at the town. The streets were swiftly emptying. Ponies were running into houses. Blinds and doors were closing. It was still mid-day.
He left them alone with whatever they were doing and continued up a grassy hill. Once at the top, he could see the lake a few hills over and he walked until he reached the top of the hill overlooking the lake. He took a deep breath and stood up and unlatched the metal belt. It dropped and he noticed, only now, that the one strap connecting his saddlebags over his back was stuck to him like velcro.
He walked a few feet down the hill and stopped. He stood on the side of a grassy hill. He fell onto his back and looked up at the clouds.
They weren’t puffy, abstract blobs. He didn’t see stars and dragons or bunnies and flowers, but, somehow, they were nice to look at, anyway.
The clouds drifted slowly across the sky. He just watched.
Slowly, the world dimmed. He realized that that was unusual and looked around rapidly. In every direction, there were thin patches of drifting smoke-like dark. The smoke was rapidly getting thinner. It surrounded him and drew towards him. The grass around him was browned and darkened in wavy lines. The thin smoke thinned more. He could suddenly feel the ground again. The smoke disappeared.
He stood back up. Whatever had happened, it was time to go.
He returned to the top of the hill and re-latched his wagon. He returned to his soap, at the base of the hill, and took a bath.
He walked around the edge of town, looking for the road to Horsetown.
Soon, he stood on a gravel road, next to an orange dumpster. There was a forest, a town, and a road. It was hot. He had a cart, six bits, six stalks of lavender, a bag, a sword, and something resembling a plan.
He stepped forward.
Something in town was roaring a low, loud, long, rumbly roar. He looked toward it.
Over the houses, a column of purple fire rose from the middle of town and into the sky, fading as it approached a huge, six-pointed purple gem. Everything was blanketed in a flickering purple tint. The clouds closest to town were coated in purple flame. The column of flame fell and the star faded into nothing. The clouds remained, purple torches in the sky.
He was holding a small, plastic rectangle between his hooves as he walked. “Name: Name. Age: Age. Eye color: eyes. Fur color: color. Mane color: Main. Height: height. Weight: weight. Date issued: yes.” So readeth the library card.
“Okay, then.”
He dropped the card into his saddle bags. He stuffed both his hooves into his left saddlebag, though they were kind of like pockets while he was standing up like this. He pinched his hooves together, pinning the book before pulling it out. He began reading “The Elements Rise.” while pulling his wagon on two legs.
“Reading” was an acrobatic feat consisting of balancing the book on his right leg while pressing his left hoof into the page to hold it down. To turn the page, he cradled the book and stuck his tongue to a page corner, licking the page turned.
He was hoping to learn about the world's political situation. He was expecting a slow and detailed explanation of recent events. He got an unusually wordy picture book.
The images contained abstracted version of “ponies”. Things were simplified and symbolized.
The first page contained an image of different colored horses in a circle, pointing to the center, where a sun and a crescent moon sat next to each other. “The beginning of our tale was long ago, long before what we know. In the distant past, somehow, some way, we were given the charge to turn night into day. The council of horned ones brought light to the sky and sat in their castle on their mountain, high.”
The next page contained an image of lighting striking a line of shields and swords on the ground. This page described the great, hulking beasts and military threats that the “winged ones” held back.
The next page contained an image of the silhouettes of mud ponies standing on rows of tilled soil. Various produce was depicted above and below. It described the taming of the native land and creatures by “grounded ones.”
The book was thin, for a history book. Before long, he would be able to finish and then he would know something about the world, he hoped. He read on.
He learned that the country of Equestria began with a suicidal migration of every tribe away from the other tribes, which they were dependant on. This migration led each tribe to the same stretch of resource-rich land. As it turned out, the leader ponies of each tribe (he had already forgotten their names) all had the same idea: stop social-political tensions by leaving everyone else to die and taking high value land for themselves. Succeeding in a plan like this would probably have resulted in either a loss of the day-night cycle and most of pony knowledge or a rapid unicorn expansion on a relatively undefended and valuable piece of land and then horrible famine. Whatever the tribes were leaving behind, it must have somehow been worse. Alternatively, the ponies in charge were literally insane. Alternatively alternatively, Chancellor Puddinghead, a hornless, wingless(according to the picture) leader pony with a silly name, was insane, and the other leaders just had to “jump ship” because she did. There were many accounts of erratic behavior on her part. Some ponies believed this is evidence of insanity. Some ponies believed she could see the future.
Shortly after the three tribes had settled themselves and reinstated their cycle of dependence, a hate-eating group of wolf spirits set in and spread a winter which the “pegasi” could not remove. Apparently, that was something pegasi should have been able to do. According to the picture, pegasi had wings, but they had no horn for some reason.
There are two sets of conditions which, when met, can calm a starving people. Feed them, or whip up a nationalistic fervor. To work together and survive the winter, they would need a massive population culling and a common enemy. The frost spirits, called windigoes, provided both.
He was looking at a picture of a flaming heart when the day switched over to night. He couldn’t read in the lessened light, so he closed his book and dropped it in his bag. He dropped onto four legs and stopped. He ate the last of his food.
Ever so slowly, the free space between the tree trunks was widening as he walked. Soon, he would escape the forest, the Everfree. It was what it was, and what it was was bad, but it was also food. It was familiar. It was, kind of, home.
It was mostly food right now.
He wasn’t that hungry. He pulled his cart behind some bushes. He hid a little deeper in.
He tried, for hours, to sleep. When he eventually, impatiently, opened his eyes, he found a drifting dark in the air that pooled under him as it faded. He momentarily became strangely aware of the feeling of the night breeze on his fur and the ground under his hooves. As he stared at all the dead plants, he gave up on sleep.
He latched up his cart and trotted into the night, down the road.
A red-eyed rat came, screaming, out of the night and sunk it’s teeth into his neck. It scurried back under bush-cover.
No amount of stomping or cursing helped the wound. He was distracted, at least.
The cart squeaked along the road. He trotted through the night. He walked and read through the day. The day was about half over, and he was reading from about the middle of the book.
The page with the flaming heart read: “On the eve of Hearth’s Warming, the windigoes fled as the great flame of friendship burned them all dead. For more on Hearth’s Warming or the fiendfyre spell, read ‘Friendly Flames’ and appendix 3L” Text under the picture read “Artist depiction of fiendfyre spell.”
Apparently, the spell was friendship-fueled and it killed windigos and ended the permanent winter. The assistants of the three tribe’s leaders had been the ponies to perform the spell and it was a friendship between them that had served as the fuel. The people had been forced to learn to tolerate living in far closer quarters to survive. Many towns contained multiple tribes, after that point.
Puddinghead died. For a few years, assassinations became common enough to go mostly uninvestigated and villages would occasionally burn themselves or other villages down.
A floating cloud fortress was built. The book referred to it as “Old Cloudsdale.” It was untouchable to all but pegasi and exceptionally talented unicorns. Under the command of some pegasus general, they controlled the rainflow.
Old Cloudsdale was nothing compared to the legendary cloud city fleet of the old world, but it was all the population could support. It could provide a large lighting charge, but it mostly served as a unifying center for the pegasi. From there, they directed pegasi around Equestria to freeze or provide rain and clear skies to villages, stopping resistance. They also maintained a snowy tundra around the equestrian border, deterring enemy scouts and invasions.
The unicorns threatened to end the world if not respected, but nobody at any negotiating table believed them. Since Equestria was being isolated by the pegasi, they could stop news of the threat from spreading to the populace.
The pegasus general died when-
The cart dropped and he fell down. The book landed on the ground in front of him. The pages began turning to the end. They kept turning. The book remained open to approximately the middle as the pages turned faster. The book slammed shut.
He looked back at the cart. The wheels were in pieces. He unlatched the metal cart-belt and sat next to a wheel. He poked it with a hoof. The axle snapped and the wheel fell to the ground and broke into more pieces . He pressed his hoof down lightly and watched as wood and metal alike crumbled into grains.
The cart would not be moving on.
He bit the handle of his sword. He held the book between his hooves. He would not be able to continue reading. He put away his book.
He was still in the Everfree and he was still hungry. He pushed the box of his cart to the side of the road. It sat there, displaying it’s mismatched and mildly misshapen side panels. It was just a wooden box, now. He walked into the forest.
Most of his time was walking and finding. He found a red flower and some tulips and a bunch of those weird, yellow-purple things that tasted like white Airheads. He was full, but he was still stocking up.
He walked into a clearing of grass and the best flowers. The blue flowers. The first flowers he had eaten. He ate one. The slightly numbing sweet and sour peanut and tea gave way to those electric taste surges. He resisted eating more. Instead, he picked them and packed them into his saddlebags.
He felt a tremor in the ground and stopped for a moment. He picked faster and then put his sword back in his mouth and ran on four legs. He was practiced at trotting like that, now. He was quieter, more agile. He could move swiftly between the trees and bushes. He could also hold a sword in his mouth.
The sword bounced off a trunk with a resounding ‘thunk’ as he passed.
He heard a low, loud, rumbling roar. He ran harder as a pulsing tremor in the ground grew. The road was close, he knew it was, but there wasn’t any real safety there. The pulsing took on a faster, confused beat.
He would have to fight it. He would have to take his sword and kill something which could best anything short of a slug-loaded shotgun.
He would put it off for as long as he could.
A bush was crushed behind him. He dodged behind a tree and the large creature behind him followed. The creature was slightly worse at taking corners then he was, it seemed, based on how far back its steps sounded. He darted to a second tree and gained just a bit more ground there. As he glanced back, he saw the behemoth attacking the third tree. The tree lasted 4 seconds, but he gained what ground he could in that time, and he made it across the road before the behemoth was right behind him again.
He ran around another trunk. The behemoth was in front of him, as it had not followed him around, this time. He swung the sword and the behemoth swung a clawed arm. The savage blow sent the sword flying.
He scrambled after it with all the force he could muster. As soon as his mouth was on the handle, he turned and sliced the air. The behemoth pulled back and stopped just beyond the end of the swing. The pulsing in the ground continued. It roared at him. Huge, blue, fish-lizard heads ripped into the behemoth. He turned and ran as fast and as far as four hooves could go.
He was sitting in a tall chair next to a tall, small, round table and hanging over a cold glass with a straw. The sword was next to him, on the chair. He was inside, next to the tent wall. The glass contained strawberry milkshake.
The fair was still in Horsetown. He had hoped that would be a good thing. He had learned some things today.
The stallion in charge of hiring and firing was Chuckle Shuffle. He had been directed to Chuckle by the other ponies operating stands or rides or performing. He had approached Chuckle Shuffle and asked to join.
“What’s your cutie mark for?”
“My what?”
Shuffle looked at him for a moment. “Your cutie mark.”
“What’s a cutie mark?” he had asked.
Shuffle didn’t move or say anything for a good 5 seconds. Shuffle looked to the sky. “I don’t have time for this.” Shuffle walked around him and looked at his butt. “Blank flank. Okay. I don’t need any more blank flanks. Have a nice day.” Shuffle ignored him after that.
After that, he had asked strangers about cutie marks.
As it turns out, a cutie mark is a naturally occurring, abstract representation of the purpose of a pony's life. It indicates that a pony has extreme talent in something and would be happy if they focused their life around it.
As a result, every job was either given to an expert in the related field, or a blank flank. No employer wanted a blank flank. There were ponies with generalized marks for cleaning and organization. If you weren’t skilled, you were probably filler employment with someone who hoped you would develop a mark and stay with them forever.
The pony he asked only told him what a cutie mark was.
“So, it’s kind of like a degree?”
The mare looked confused, and said, “Those things that say you’ve been to a school?”
So, he came to this tent and spent a bit. He sucked on the straw, hard, until he tasted the shake.
As a horse, strawberry milkshake tasted exactly like a strawberry milkshake.
His face became hot and, slightly, his eyes stung.
“Now, there he is! It is the one who will devour the brightest star! His march is not halted by ends! He is an infection from behind the fabric from which all things rise! Even now, he has brought un-death to the most powerful warrior! His buck has brought him to lake-oblivion! We choke on his disengagement! He is doomed to disregard! I can hear it, the dark stone shaft’s erosion from within its wooden coat! The will ticking time on drags us to our completion! It speaks as thus!”
He looked up, towards the yelling. A hoof was pointed directly at him. The pony pointing was small and out of breath and sitting a few meters away. No one was looking but most weren’t talking. The small pony giggled. The pony's eyes darted around and their laughter rose. A light flashed near the pony's flanks.
“A-and that guy,” he pointed at a stallion at the bar, “That guy-”
A tan furred pegasus covered in silvery and yellow-ish metal got up, which left him standing on his stool. “We-e-e-ell! Did somebody just get their cutie mark?” The stallion hopped down and approached the doomsayer. His irises were red.
The colt nodded enthusiastically. “Y-yeah! Yeaah! And, you’re gonna-”
The stallion shoved a hoof into the colt’s mouth. “I don’t believe I asked you to ruin my life. I would suggest you go find people who actually want your predictions, but you got your cutie mark for public slander, so… I’m telling you to.”
The stallion was, apparently, intimidating enough for the colt to leave. The stallion sighed as the idle chatter returned. The stallion looked around and spotted him, still sitting next to his milkshake. The stallion looked concerned and glanced at the other patrones. The stallion reared up and pressed a hoof into the side of his own glass and, when he pulled his hoof away, the glass remained stuck to the hoof. The stallion approached on three legs, holding his cup up by its side with the bottom of his forehoof. He watched in aw. The stallion hopped up and sat across the table from him.
“So then,” the stallion pulled a spoon full of yellow ice from the cup and ate it, “You up for a bit of the rough and/or tumble?”
He hadn’t quite recovered emotionally, from any of it: the strangeness of the world, his one sip of a taste like home, a horse grabbing with no fingers. If you could see the skin on his face, you would see a wide patch of slight reddening. “What… what was that?”
“Well, see, first, some stallion is kind enough to replace your teeth with a hoof. After that, they shoves’ a hole down your neck. Lastly, it exits through your backside. And, that is, roughly, the rough and tumble.”
“Not that.”
“Lemon slushie.”
“No. No, um, how did you get it over here?”
“… I walked?”
“Could you be more specific?”
“I picked it up in my hoof and carried it here with my other hooves- WFLPT” The stallion sharply shook his head while squeezing his eyes shut before looking right back at him. “Why are you still here?”
“Milkshake.”
“Wha-excu…”
He looked down at his hooves and then down at his sword, in his chair. He reached down and pressed his hoof into the handle. He raised the sword, dangling it in his grasp. Those who were sitting near him held still and it got just the slightest bit quieter. He dropped it and it stuck into the dirt. Everyone went back to their own business.
The stallion looked down at the sword and then back up at him. “Well! It seems you do think you're some sort of bad-flank. How many fights in a beverage shop have you been to?”
“Excuse me, am I being threatened? Is that what is happening now?”
“No?”
“Then, why would I be in a bar fight?”
“Okay, I know most fortune tellers are bogus, and the real prophecies can’t be stopped, but… listen to me. It doesn’t stop folks from trying. The ponies here just heard that kid say that bad things will happen because you are alive. Some of them might want to be a hero, might attack you or anyone around you, like me.”
He took note of some of the glances he was getting. They didn’t seem particularly pleasant, but he couldn’t really be sure what those looks meant. He thought he had an idea, though. “I…” he looked down, at his cup, “I’m not leaving this.” He pulled the lid off with a hoof, “But, I will drink fast,” and started drinking his shake.
The tan stallion watched, then smiled. The stallion removed his spoon and chugged his slushy.
The empty slushy cup was slammed down first. The stallion refused to cringe.
He finished his milkshake in two or three goes. He put down his cup and hopped off his chair. He was standing on two legs, and he pulled his blade from the earth. “Why are you still in here, then?”
The stallion’s smile widened. “I don’t think you understand.”
The tan stallion with the red eyes hopped down and spread his wings. They were almost all metal. Silver strips ran where his feathers should be. Yellow metal replaced the upper edges. A mess of small, metal spines and white strands of mane hair ran along his spine. Plates of rounded metal covered the upper part of his barrel and neck. One forehoof was clearly prosthetic. His cutie mark was a steaming, copper gear. “I’m Hot Air, and,” he reached into this saddle bag and rooted around for a moment, pulled out nothing, unfolded nothing to the right and nothing to the left, and then put on imaginary sunglasses while two shaded pieces of clear plastic descended from his metallic head piece and covered his eyes, “I am some sort of bad flank.”
Horsetown’s roadways divided the town into a perfect block grid. The middle of the streets were paved with asphalt. The edges were cement sidewalks. The ponies trotted on the sidewalks and used the carriages on the asphalt, as should be obvious. All forms of traffic always moved down the same side of the street. Buildings matched the owners and owners matched the neighborhood, with the skyscrapers clumped in one place and the warehouses in another and small, family houses in another. The weather was always sunny with a few drifting clouds, since no stable ecosystem needed to be maintained.
In supermarkets, on sidewalks, in cubicles, in yards, there were smiling ponies everywhere. They all looked fulfilled. They all looked like everything was going their way. They all looked the way their momma told them to look.
There were two things which a cutie mark indicated: talent and enjoyment. Cutie marks did not indicate what the talent was; the marks were often too abstract to tell what they were for. Only the pony with the mark could really know in full. Talent wasn’t guaranteed before the cutie mark, with some marks requiring years of practice before the mark’s appearance and some marks seeming to grant huge skill increases. Only enjoyment was a somewhat reliable indicator of a talent.
So, employers looked for happy workers, and workers looked happy, under any conditions. Thankfully, managers tended to be good at their jobs and happy. Business owners weren’t totally free of this, since happiness indicated quality in their products.
Even happy ponies with the correct job could be fired if another employee who they were in competition with obtained evidence of depression. So, unless they trusted those around them, had no competition, or something bad and related to their job happened, they tried to look happy. As a result, smiles became the cultural normal.
Hot Air was smiling. Hot was trotting through the residential district, to the edge of town, where parking was free. His new acquaintance was walking next to him, sword resting on his shoulder.
“So, what I am hearing… is… that you went into the wilderness because you felt like it, and you obtained a sharp object because having it makes you feel better?”
“Uh, basically.” His facial expression remained a calm, unforced blank.
Hot Air smiled wider.
“And, why did you leave the wilderness?”
“Well, I mean, the whole society thing is kind of nice, you know? If you’ve got money, you’ve got steady food. It’s kind of simple. That’s about it, right now.”
“Well, what are you doing in Horsetown, then?”
“I was going to join the fair. I thought it would be better than setting up a stand at the last town, but they said they didn’t need a blank-flank.”
“That sucks. What’s your plan now?”
He was silent for a moment. “I’m a three bit hobo with no talent or friends. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I’ll probably try to get an internship or apprenticeship in something, or else I’ll go forage again.”
“A hobo? How many towns have you been to?”
“Two.”
“You don’t saaay.” Hot chuckles lightly. “He he he, that would make you some sort of wild stallion, then. Wouldn’t it? I’ve been in the wilderness, too. There are all sorts of things out there, aren’t there? Not too many strangers, copious rocks, tons of plants, some animals, and a few dangers, all waiting. Ponies get a bit concerned with some of those dangers. Fairly often, they want ‘em gone, go figure. Sometimes they get a-mighty-figure-of-bits concerned. Mostly, they just get scared of a big beastie of sorts or a whole region that’s actin’ up. Though, sometimes, an old, lost item will get a price too, ‘cause someone will want it bad enough.
“I remember, one time, a lake was just filled with giant piranhas. It was the easiest money I ever made: one lightning bolt, and done. I don’t mean it’s easy, ‘cause sometimes the kill’s too much for me on my own. I’m no royal guard platoon, I’m just one lonely dude stabbing things fifteen times my size.
“You got any family?”
It took him a moment, but he caught up with the sudden topic change. “Yes! Yeah. Yes- well, I did.” He looked straight forward. “I don’t think I’m gonna be seeing them again.”
“Sorry to bring that up, then. My mom and dad are dead too. They burned their house down. They forgot to get out first, too. So, they died and, every once in awhile, I miss ‘em, since that’s how being dead works.”
“It… yep, it definitely is. That’s pretty much… pretty much is. It’s like, every once in awhile, I want to do something which I know will be satisfying, and I don’t see a way to do it, and I’m not sure what it is, and disappointment fills me.”
Hot let out two slow, low, approximations of laughs, “Heh heh, fills.”
He blew air out of his nose in something that could have become a laugh. The barest twitch of a smile poked at the corner of his mouth. He tried not to smile. So, of course, he finally smiled.
“There we go. That’s part of the way, you might just know what funny is, yet.”
“Is funny on your shoulders?”
“I’ll have you know that there isn’t a funny bone in my body, or anything else.”
“Is funny on my shoulders?”
“Let me check.” Hot walked behind him and stood on two legs, scrutinizing his shoulders. As hot moved his scrutiny along, observing the neck and then the back of the head and then the side of the head, his two-legged steps were shaky, wobbly, uncertain. When Hot got to his face, he dropped back to four hooves and burst out into a mildly convincing fake laugh.
He merely continued walking as he responded. “Well, if it’s so funny, then I found it. I identified funny. I have reached the victory condition. I know what funny is; fuck the rules.”
Hot made a choking sound and then made a far more convincing, real laugh. “Do WHAT to the rules? Ha ha ah, why would you? Ha ha ha, hooooow?” Hot got himself mostly under control. “Oh, that will do. That will do just fine.” Hot sat down and spread his wings, “Well, I have something I have to go do now, something out in the wilds that will get me a few bits, ya’ know? It sure would be easier if I had some help. Don’t blink.” Hot jumped into the air. A muffled, rapid popping sounded. Hot glided through the air and pulled back, flying directly up for a short distance before falling and sliding through the air on his back in a slow, rocking motion. He landed softly on two opposite hooves, with his front hoof on a higher surface than his back hoof, and his other two hooves raised and stretched out. His wings were still flared. He was posing and looking into the sky with a smile.
He was standing on something. It was big, it was covered in gears and colored bulbs and white paint and copper. It was essentially a four wheeled, half train, half RV thing. Hot reached into his saddlebag and pressed something. Sparks flew in glass tubes. Steam rose from stacks. A door popped into the cabin and slid out of the way, leaving a dark entryway.
He observed the doorway. “Sooo… I don’t really have anything else to do. I’m fairly sure you’re talking about employment…” He looked up at Hot, who was still ignoring him. “I’m… yeah.” He got in the vehicle.
Dawn cracked, and, as such, the sun was high in the sky. The steam-mobile was parked on a gravel road separating a swamp from the desert that surrounded Horsetown. Hot was asleep on the couch. He was sitting on the bed. The bed was comfortable, and he was just as slightly tired as ever, but he didn't try to sleep. He didn’t want to take the bed, but hot insisted, out of politeness, at least until they bought another mattress, at least as long as he was still a guest.
He had turned on a light and read all night.
Commander whatever-his-name-was had died when a single unicorn struck the city. The evacuation of old cloudsdale was as easy as falling through the ground. A single pony wasn’t considered cause for evacuation. Half the support clouds of Old Cloudsdale were filled with poison or explosion magic and the military base was burnt with the commander inside. The unicorn was caught and slain, but managed a high body count and basically destroyed the architecture. Over a few months, the magic-charged clouds were replaced and dispersed. The Old Cloudsdale civilian population adopted the phrase “Cloudsdale rises above” as a banner of pride in their survival. With a large portion of the pegasus soldiers and all of those few in line to take command of this lightly organised military dead, survive was a good word for it.
There was no consensus among any of the other groups about this event. Some ponies were outraged at the attack. Some other ponies raised flags with the reported colors of the unicorn. Since only a few pegasi actually saw him, the colors varied. Numerous fights broke out about flags. Some of those flags weren’t even intended to have anything to do with the unicorn, but ponies mistook them for support anyway.
Seven summers after arrival in Equestria, the ponies were struck.
The first enemy to come through that snowy border in full force was The Rolling Stone. The Rolling Stone was either a creature or a magical object created in the old world, so no pony fully understands it. It was a small white rock and it was believed to steal souls. Every time it killed something, it would create a blue silhouette of that thing. The silhouette of the last thing it killed would normally surround the stone, offering protection. The other spirits would move freely, but seemed to have no will of their own. Unless all the spirits under it’s command were slain, it seemed untouchable. It slaughtered two villages before news spread.
Against the pleading, commanding, and demanding of every pony who thought they were in charge at the moment, nearly every village near the destroyed villages evacuated to the most defendable nearby place: Stalliongrad fortress. Stalliongrad had been one of the better attempts at making an Equestrian capital city. It had already been under siege three times by Equestrians. Before “The Attack of the Stone,” it was under siege again.
Thousands of wingless peasants camped outside of the stone brick wall of Stalliongrad fortress. About three thousand could have reasonably been fit inside. Around a thousand sat behind it’s closed fortress gates. Always, there were ponies pulling on bricks or trying to climb. Stalliongrad’s walls were self repairing, due to magic arrays and a great crystal core which sat in the center of the fortress. Ponies were easily removed from the walls using long sticks, and none had anticipated a need for siege tools.
After two days, The Rolling Stone arrived.
Before sun-up, a group of ponies spotted a blue glow coming down from the northern mountains. They spread the word and most ponies were packed up and shuffling nervously near the gates, or already running, by sunrise. Blue silhouettes emerged from the northern treeline. The remaining peasants started running away, along the fortress wall, and it looked like they would surely be caught. Then, the blue silhouettes walked through the walls of Stalliongrad Fortress.
Some peasants rejoiced as specters began snapping necks, inside. As those inside the fortress died, Spirits began pouring out from a point in front of the treeline. A lone unicorn stallion had remained at the gates. He wielded magic that modern ponies would call forbidden. Miasma floated out from his eyes. A life eating gem rose from the ground at his command. Magical beams fired from the gem, leaving small grey stones behind. These “null stones” impede magic, and any parts of a ghosts that got too close to the stones would disappear. The pink gem was essentially a medium for casting, and the unicorn used it to cast an anti-gravity spell on themselves before jumping through the air. Once he was above The Rolling Stone, he commanded the gem to cover his own hooves in grey “null stone,” and fell to the ground, shattering The Rolling Stone.
The silhouettes had already come through the other side of the fortress. The quick destruction of The Rolling Stone saved most of the retreating peasants. The life-eating gem fed on the spirits as they faded, and would have used the energy to grow, multiply, and cover the region for a time. The gets would have compelled the unicorn who made them to collect more souls, sending him on a murdering spree, but the sudden influx of death was great enough to instead cause the unicorn to faint and the pink gem to shatter. He woke up as a magicless martyr, though he would eventually forcefully remove the grey stones, getting his magic back. This event began the dark age.
This age consisted of a very long list that he could not be bothered to remember of groups who pretended to stand for a very wide set of values, and insane wizards, all trying to gain and maintain power. After “The Attack of the Stone,” there was a sudden spike in unicorn fillies and colts who had an interest in using magic for exceptional heroics. As a result, there was a sudden increase in death related cutie marks and reckless combat magicians who used easy to learn and effective spells without understanding the costs. When you have a skull and crossbones cutie mark and magic, bad things tend to happen.
A month after “The Attack of the Stone,” giant spiders were on the march. The pegasi were still trying to reinstitute another chain of command, and couldn’t mount a valid defense. The pegasi were in as much disarray as the rest of the country. However, they had created a system of border lookouts and it provided early warning of the impending invasion.
To slow them down, the pegasi placed a snow blanket in the way of the spiders. As should have been predicted, they had snow shoes. Another village fell and Stalliongrad became the new northern border. Stalliongrad had a fortress. Under the leadership of the unicorn from “The Attack of the Stone,” they had set up a relatively organized government. They were economically ahead of the rest of Equestria. They had also set up a better evacuation system and militia. They were ready, and they defeated the spider forces.
There were many more such attacks over the next ten years.
Stalliongrad, which was quickly becoming the center of Equestria that it was built to be, became a center of untrained wizards with cutie marks in death as well as hopeful heroes from the other two tribes. The property and ecological damage that this resulted in was staggering and uncountable, but the surviving fighters were forces to be reckoned with. For a time, it was nearly the case that the highest law in Equestria was the judgment of wondering, opinionated youths with disproportionate fighting ability. As a result, the land’s natural beasts, monsters, and geography were quickly forced to manageable threat levels. Thanks to this strange combination of prosperity, protection, and danger, by the year “00010”, Equestria was filled with young ponies.
That year, in the month of “forpendu”, the town of Saddylon’s population disappeared along with half of the unicorn council. These disappearances were unexplained at the time, but it is now believed that a large hive of changelings was responsible. To do this, they would have to have been transforming to look like ponies and replacing them for years. This may explain the early Equestrian difficulty with creating working social structure.
With the loss of half of their members, the unicorn council had to begin importing magically charged gems and began to let in less skilled members so that they could maintain the day/night cycle. They wished to host a school to train young unicorns. Magic was a powerful force connected to emotions. The unicorn council believed that magic should not be used without understanding and care, lest the magic user should lose themselves to voices in their heads. While Equestrian villages were willing to pay tribute for a day/night cycle, education was seen as a luxury.
By this time, many of the self taught unicorns had come into prominence to such a degree that two of them had influence on par with the tribe themed organizations. Effectively, emotionally unstable ponies were gaining political and magical power. A few lesser “dark lords” took interest in the crumbling unicorn council, seeking to control it and gain their own power. If one of them could control the knowledge in the unicorn council library and control the sun and moon, they could get away with far more.
No one is sure when the crystal empire was founded. All that we know is that, in the middle of a permanent, snowy tundra, there was a large city made entirely out of magic gems. A young unicorn on the council who studied, but didn’t use, dark magic reported the existence of the empire to the unicorn council and a trade route was created so that gems could be supplied.
The book detailed the rise and fall and clash of many political leaders. He didn’t really care for their individual stories. The sun had been out for a good half hour and Hot was still asleep.
He put up his book and left the bedroom. He approached Hot’s sleeping form, curled up on the couch with a pillow on his head and his nose pressed up against his back hoof. His mouth was open and he was softly breathing.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, there’s a sun out there. You can see things for stuff doing.” He poked the pillow. “Hey.”
“Ooooh, please no. For the love of Luna, whyyyy?” Hot groaned. “I will burn everything, everywhere, for all of time.” Hot curled tighter and pressed his forehooves into the top of his pillow.
He backed away quietly.
Hot pushed himself into the corner of his couch with a back hoof. “Uuuaahhe,” Hot flipped over, leaving his pillow under him. After a moment, he opened an eye “Luna, dammit.” Hot got up and trotted into the kitchen section of the cabin. He opened a refrigerated box and started digging around in it. “Oh, tell me he didn’t.” He kept digging. “Got a bucking early bird, what the moon was I thinking? Yes!” He pulled out an orange and held it up, letting the fridge-box lid slam back down. He bit into the side of the orange, eating it and the peel. Juice dripped. He remained sitting, hunched over the orange and facing away. When it was gone, he breathed in and out.
He trotted to the wall with an extended hoof and pressed it into the wall, which moved out of his way. “C’mon, let’s go.”
He picked up his sword and followed.
Trusted sources showing new behaviors are not trustworthy.
A bird flew lazy circles in the sky, next to what he assumed was still a distant ball of white, nuclear fire, like it should be. Through the air, there was a clear parting between empty, blue skies and dense swirly cloud masses. Under the clear sky, there were rolling sand dunes, with slightly green tinted sand. Under the cloudy sky, there was swampland, with puddles and pools pockmarking the land and more dense plant life growing deeper in. The gravel road ran directly between the desert and the swamp, and the parting in the sky ran directly above the gravel road, like the road either was built on the borders, or defined them.
It was so hot.
“And, more specifically, all I gotta do for this job is make about thirty land-bound birds dead. that’s what I’m here for, and you can follow me out, if you still want to help. They could be anywhere out here. Which way would you go?
He looked between the desert and the swamp. “Well… do they need much water? I don’t really know enough to have a preference.”
“Well, I do!” Hot spread his wings and flew into the shady, cloudy sky over the swamp. As he lifted into the air, that muffled popping sound returned. Hot pulled out two metal sticks and dangled them, flying lazy arcs and swoops as the sticks clanged together.
He ran off into the swamp, trailing along behind Hot and trying to follow higher ground trails and avoid the pools. Constantly, his hooves sank into the mold and mud. As he went, sudden downpours of water and waves of hot and humid would wash over him. Hot just kept flying his swoops and arcs through the cloud cover, and whooping. He was quickly getting tired. While he had been on the move constantly, he hadn't been on two legs for nearly often enough for this kind of abuse. He could see hot flying in the distance, across a pool from him. He chose to move left, along the raised dirt path along the edge of the puddle. A mass of tentacles and blades rose out of a deep puddle. He backed up and took a longer, more complicated path.
He chased after Hot and into denser tree cover. The canopy was almost dense enough to stop him from tracking Hot. As he gazed up, trying to see through the trees, he heard a rattling from the branches of a tree to his right. He moved through a puddle to his left.
He felt things brushing against his legs. He looked down. Something was moving through the water with him. He caught a glimpse of a ball of fins and pink fluff looking up at him with two big, blue eyes. He was torn between fear and adorableness. Small teeth sank into his leg. The thing smiled up.
His eyes widened and his mouth clenched around a strangled scream of pain competing with confusion. He began jumping from hoof to hoof. He raised his sword and began stabbing and slashing through the water. No fluffy bodies floated to the surface, though cut branches fell and gashes opened in trunks.
He heard the wet squelch of a foot sinking into mud, and looked toward it. Plates of natural rock armor formed the shape of a giant alligator, or maybe a crocodile. He held still and did nothing as the creature came closer to crushing him. The little bites continued.
Hot dropped through the canopy and landed on the large creature. There was a flash of blue-white and pain filled the grey pony. Pink bodies floated to the surface and the rock creature flailed. A blade came out of the bottom of Hot’s fake hoof and he inserted it into the giant’s spine. Hot exhaled.
“Sorry about givin’ ya’ a bit of the zappy, there. What’s that you were swinging at?” Many cute, little, pink faces were frozen in looks of pain and betrayal, floating upside down. Mixed in with them, small blue fish with full sets of flat, white teeth and tiny, red fish-eyes were also dead. “Oh, Luna, you don’t know what you are doing with that thing, do ya? Nevermind that, though, I found them. Come on, quietly.” Hot pressed a hoof into a metal plate on his chest and the popping sound stopped. Hot trotted for the treeline. He followed.
The ponies were quiet and they stopped three puddles away from the open air of a clearing. Through the weeds, they could see the birds milling about on their long legs in a shallow, wide pool. They had brown feathers on a big, round torso. Their wings were long and skinny and the tips had sharpened bone protrusions. The head was covered in a metal ball. The ball had a hole for a long beak, two slots for sight, and a hole for with a long, bendy neck sticking out of the bottom. Their legs were bladed and their knees bent backward. When they stepped, sharp, metallic blades could be seen, attached to the back of their legs.
They were walking slowly and jamming their heads into the water to eat wandering creatures. They seemed to be doing their part for the ecosystem. Everything seemed to be alright. For some reason, somewhere, some ponies disagreed.
Hot began to reach his hooves out into the air before sweeping them into his chest. A white discoloration formed in front of Hot and thickened into a white, fluffy ball. Half submerged, half sitting in humid, swamp shade, Hot built a cloud.
After two minutes, Hot had compressed three clouds into dense balls. One was dark grey, one was clear, but wavy, and one was dull grey, like a stone. “Ok,” Hot whispered, “we are gonna’ toss these at ‘em. Cover your eyes and ears and stay out of the water until all of these hit.” Hot pointed a hoof to a dirt patch with a tree growing out of it, a bit closer to the clearing, Just run for that patch of dirt. Ready?”
He nodded and Hot immediately and rushed for the birds. He followed. The birds stopped and brought their heads up, looking around for the source of the noise. Hot hurled the cloudballs as the beaks turned to point at them. Hot dove into a patch of dirt at the base of a tree. The grey pony stood on the patch of dirt for a fraction of a second before copying Hot. The grey ball hit the water and a blinding flash of light followed. The wavy ball hit the water and a deafening boom followed. The black ball hit the water and electrified it.
Hot moved first. While the birds were squawking and bumping into each other and running directionally, Hot took to the air. Hot’s hoofblade came out, and he glided by, claiming one dumb animal head after another.
He uncovered his eyes and shot to two hooves. He glanced around and found his sword lying on the ground. He noticed that the gem was no longer orange; it was a dull grey with a slight orange tint. He picked it up and charged into the shallow pool with his sword raised, crying a mighty awful battle cry.
He swung at the neck of the first bird to stumble in his direction. The sword bent around the soft flesh, settling at a thirty degree bend. He fell onto his backside in the water.
Hot dropped another set of helmets in his pile. He had twelve, so far. The birds weren’t bumbling about anymore. They were moving quickly and regrouping in the distance.
He sat up, covered in leeches. He held his bent sword in front of him and just looked at it, opened mouthed. He was yanked from the water and into the sky by Hot, but managed not to drop his sword. “How many did you- Oh… your sword seems to be out of commision, there. You got your horseapples together real good, don’t you? Just nevermind, I got this.”
Hot followed the birds across the swamp, toward the desert. That popping sound was back, and it seemed to be coming from Hot’s chest. As they crossed the gravel road, Hot dropped him, and then Hot flew into the swamp cloudline. The birds had collected on a sand dune. They were calling, in a shrill, reverberating call, and their heads were swiveling about, on the lookout. A chunk of natural cloud descended from the sky, pushed by Hot, and slammed into the birds. They disappeared under it, for a moment, and then began struggling to the cloud’s surface, as though suck in the cloud, like it was semi-solid to them. As each head emerged, they lost it.
He looked down at his bent sword. He grasped the tip and tried to bend the sword straight. It bent, but it didn’t straighten. Instead, the tip snapped. The resulting piece of metal was a sword, still, if it ever had been. It just kind of went up from the hilt, like any normal sword, before bending forward, and then bending backward a little bit farther along, leaving it pointing basically straight up again. The tip had snapped cleanly, leaving the front edge of the sword taller than the back edge.
Hot landed with a huge clattering of helmets and beaks. “You can replace the gem later, just load these up. Come on, we got places to drive.”
They hauled the heads, and then the bodies (meat had value, too), into the steam-mobile and left them in the bathroom. The rest of the day was spent driving, chatting, and turning in heads. Also, they played cards a bit.
“So, as the guest,” Hot put a pile of coins on the table and pushed a portion of it to the side, “you get the bed again. That is, of course, unless you were some kind of employee, now.” Hot folded his hooves and waited.
That night, he would sleep on the couch. That arrangement was perfectly fine with him.
By 00100, Equestria was at war with the griffins, minotaurs, zebras, spiders, mer-ponies, dragons, donkeys, and frogs. Equestria was also at a sort of civil war. Nearly all power was in the hooves of those unicorns who would take it by force. The city of old cloudsdale still stood because it had co-operated with the unicorn council to create clouds which were somewhat resistant to magic tampering and which the cloudwalking spell would not work on. The council itself stood because no lord was willing to stand for another possessing it. The Crystal Empire was still trading gems to the council mostly because their leaders had been replaced.
In 00010, adults had remembered the grudges of the past while their children had remained mostly ignorant. At that time, the Hearth’s Warming message of unity seemed to be slowly defeating the “three tribes” mentality. Now, everyone knew that unicorns were dicks and overpowered. In 00010, fillies and colts looked up to heros. In 00100, some villages would crush unicorns at birth.
While no unicorn school of safe casting had ever been created, individual lords would take apprentices. Due to this practice, fewer died in the early days of training. Sometimes, lords would have births monitored, in case the result was a unicorn. Their power seemed secure.
In 00102, a warrior with no horn or wings appeared. Her name was Crinkle Snout, and her weapon of choice was a kitchen knife. Wherever she went, she left villages with no leaders. Wizards and apprentices were left in pools of their blood. Word of her exploits spread, and lords made the best defences they could for themselves. She was reported to simply walk through illusions and patrols. No trap or magic array ever caught her. Her strikes slipped past attempted blocks. Arrows and spells simply missed, even if some rube goldberg coincidence had to conveniently put something in the way at the last moment, and she would always finish in a single strike. They expected a fight with a berserker or a potion-guzzler or an enchanted item wielder. Instead, a moment would come where they yawned in their dining room, or where they sneezed when walking around a corner, or where they looked left first instead of right, and she would be there. “If Crinkle Snout came in the dead of the night, or mid-afternoon, or in the open sunlight, and carried her call in her mind for your head, it was hers, then, or so ponies had said.” There seemed to be no way to even argue with a fate like that, and no way to win that argument if you could.
The power vacuum this caused was catastrophic. Heavy breeding had been encouraged often, with almost no education.They were used to the structure of an uncontested totalitarian dictator. They mostly spent their freedom eating everything and breaking everything else, and were quickly captured by competing lords.
That unicorn who had originally pointed out the existence of the Crystal Empire was the oldest member of the unicorn council. He smashed his own horn before replacing it with a modified dark, soul-eating crystal. His plan had been to use the horn to cast magic without repercussions. It worked, but caused worse, permanent violent cravings.
The oldest living unicorn began claiming the lands and ponies of lords who fell to Crinkle Snout. None could directly oppose him. His body could melt into black mist and had reverted in age, and he could cast dangerous spells without creating mediums. Early in his reign, he took over the Crystal Empire.
Over time, he reportedly became less coherent and sane. In spite of this, Crinkle Snout refused to hunt him down. “That isn’t how this goes,” she said.
Under his rule, enemy nation’s forces and settlements were removed from Equestria. Old Cloudsdale was compressed and attached to the side of a mountain. This ended the Old Cloudsdale resistance. A stone platform was build around the cloud, then a palace was built on the platform, then the library of the unicorns was moved into the palace. He named the platform “Canterlot.”
One day, Crinkle Snout gained the attention of the Stalliongrad locals by taking the current figurehead’s life. There was an illustration of her standing on a large rock, with the sun behind her. Once everypony had gathered, she stated, “There is nothing else to be done.”
With a snap, confetti and balloons burst from a single point, and a high pitch buzz-whine filled the air. When the mess cleared, a serpent had appeared. It’s body was covered in either eagle feathers or brown fur. It had a red fish - or dragon- tail, and a head halfway between a dragon and a horse. It had one bat wing and one bird wing, one wavy horn and one branching antler, one lion paw and one eagle claw, and one bull leg and one lizard leg. He was floating on far-to-small wings in a tuxedo. “I disagree!” he declared. “But, if you insist.” He snapped his claw and she stopped existing. Before that large crowd, Discord began his reign.
The dark king did not directly confront Discord. Against a pony, or a mountain, or a lake, Discord was essentially unopposed. Where he went, he left creepy, mutated wildlife, edible objects, porcelain food, soapy roads, and all manner of things that might be marginally funny if they didn’t have any consequences which one cared about. He left ponies broken, mentally, weather it was done by causing betrayals or frustrations or by just altering their minds with magic. The book stated that records from that time were rare and often inaccurate, but the Crystal Empire was mostly untouched. Discord seemed to be a mostly harmless, all-powerful menace.
By 00150, the dark king’s influence was pushed back until it only contained the Crystal Empire. It was then that two ponies named Celestia and Luna, who were referred to as beloved rulers, appeared. Celestia was white and Luna was blue and they had both wings and horns. They emerged with six magic gems. The gems were called “The elements of harmony.” They acted like the gems made them invincible and confronted Discord. At the time, the idea was ridiculous. Then, the gems turned Discord to stone.
They were not initially seen as heroes, but as the latest “most powerful creatures in Equestria.” It was lucky that that was all they needed to be.
Shortly, Equestria was in its first full scale, organized, civil war. Only two groups were fighting.
The dark king quickly regained much of his influence and about half of his land. War continued until 00173, when the “alicorn princess” Luna was infected with an unknown mental curse, known as “the nightmare.” It fed on and amplified her self-hatred and loneliness.
In those days, Celestia led most battles and participated personally. She brought fire down on her enemies. She was everything that the ponies of Equestria expected out of a leader, and she was respected. Her sister, Luna, tended to be artistic and quiet and kept to herself unless she had business to attend too. At the time, speaking loudly and acting without question were culturally considered signs of strength and honesty. Though she was still considered a princess, her reputation suffered. Ponies talked and gossiped about her, went to Celestia to try and have her decisions overturned, and occasionally challenged her to duels. The duelists always lost, but speaking lessons and victories didn’t repair her reputation.
Luna began researching the kind of magic that everyone she had ever seen respected, other than her sister, had used, and began treating ponies like they were beneath her. Unlike every other pony who had practiced dark magic, she had a grimoire to read, filled with spells specifically selected for being extremely risky, and also had no teacher. Luna snapped.
Luna and Celestia had been single-hornedly controlling the moon and sun, respectively. Luna held the moon up and would not lower it, forcing Celestia into action. As the world’s temperature slowly dropped, Celestia used the Elements Of Harmony on Luna, and the elements banished Luna to the moon.
The elements sealed themselves away after this event and Celestia became reclusive for a year. The dark king remained in the Crystal Empire until late 00174, when Celestia took a flight directly to the empire.
The Crystal Empire had an object known as the Crystal Heart. It was a blue gem that was known to cause spell effects that affected enormous areas. As Celestia approached, the dark king did something to the Crystal Heart, and the Crystal Empire disappeared completely. Where there had been crystal ground, there was only snowy tundra, with no evidence that ponies or houses had ever been there. Celestia claimed that the Crystal Heart had remained, floating, before shattering.
Only Celestia was left to rule Equestria.
At that moment, he was so done with history for awhile.
The sun was up and he was standing, looking out of the tinted windows of the Steammobile, hoofing the glass and leaving little marks. Behind him, the furniture had a thin sprinkling of fur. He didn’t know if he had permission to open any of the cupboards. There weren’t any games or any other books. He began to suspect that Hot was some kind of workaholic.
Shadows traveled slowly across a grassy, hilly field, under lazy clouds. A light breeze swayed the long grass in waves. A small flock of little black birds pecked at the ground in the distance.
He then realized that he wanted to go outside.
He looked at the part of the wall where he knew the doorway was and walked over to it. He just kind of reached out and pressed and it just kind of moved out of the way and dumped him in the grass.
He rolled to his four hooves and was excited for a moment. The sun was shiny and the grass was green and the air wasn’t too hot. He was wondering what he should do when he remembered that he was an adult and required more than an empty field and his imagination to be entertained.
He grabbed his sword and climbed on top of the Steammobile. He sat and watched. Shadows traveled. Grass swayed. Birds ate. He observed from behind a wall of indifference, but he was an adult, dammit.
Time went by. He enjoyed the breeze. He listened to the birds. He let go a little. He enjoyed some shade and closed his eyes.
“Oh, what in tartarus?” He heard Hot.
It was dark, until sunlight broke through and the black faded. He was suddenly aware of the feeling of his skin. Hot was sitting on dead grass, looking up at him. Hot lifted his forelegs above his head. “What? How’s about you say some thing-words for stuff-explaining, hmm? Also, get off my cart!”
“What, uh, what did you see happening, exactly?”
“Well, I opened my bedroom door to find blackness hanging out in my living room, then I followed it as it retreated out of my door, which you left open, and then it all condensed and left you slowly scuffing my paint. Also,” Hot gestured in a circle, “stuffs dead!”
“I think this just kind of happens sometimes…”
“Sometimes you just appear out of a black cloud on the roof and stuff is dead.”
“I was on the ground the other times…”
Hot blinked a number of times while his eyes glanced around. “Well, were you doing anything before hoof, because...”
“Befo- I used to think it happened when I tried to sleep, but I was just watching clouds one time. All I was doing this time was enjoying the day.”
“Oh, ok, do ya’ think it might happen whenever you relax? Also, that’s kinda strange, since you were using my bed yesterday; how tired are you right now? You should actually try to do it intentionally. That all sure is all kinds of interesting. Also, get off of my roof!”
“Right! Sorry!.” He tossed his sword down.
Hot gestured frantically and angrily. “No!”
The sword stuck in the ground. Its gem was bright orange again.
“..Alright, nevermind, then.”
He finished getting down. “So, uh, it’s kind of nice here.”
Hot looked around. “The buck are you talking about? There’s nothing out here. How did you restore your gem? What kind is it?”
“Oh, I don’t know, it’s just nice weather and nothing here is trying to kill me. Also, I have no understanding of solid objects having ‘charges’ and set durability.”
Hot didn’t respond for a moment. “Amount of energy put into creation? The way the amount of work a thing can do is determined?”
“What about chemistry? What about the particles holding it together?”
“Particles?”
“...I think I might be off a little on this one. I'm just gonna accept that. It was something I heard of about alchemy, once; I don't know what I'm talking about. But, anyway, yeah, this is nice. I mean, that swamp was no Everfree, but this is peaceful.”
“Pfthpthp, Everfree-shmeverfree,” Hot waved a hoof. “Locals always think that their wilderness is such a big deal, that others aren't so bad, that others are 'peaceful.' The grass is always greener, my friend."
“Ok.” He swept his gaze across the grassy hills. “Why are we here?”
“We are here to teach you how not to die. Yesterday, you were useless against slirds. Slirds!”
“Oh! Swordsmanship?”
“I ha- what? What even…” Hot shook his head somewhat hard. “I don’t think I carry one of those around. Let me check.” Hot stretched out his wings and swiveled his head about, checking. “Sure enough not, so It seems that I probably have no idea how to use that thing. I'm gonna teach you what I already know: how to survive when an environment is horseapples.”
He learned Hot Air’s lessons in those hilly, grassy fields. He also learned exactly how peaceful it wasn’t. He also learned how to play outside, sort of.
The bright light of the clear blue sky filtered dimly through the tall, tall canopy of the thick, thick trees to show big, eroded stone steps descending into the ground. On two hooves, he walked over a soggy carpet of enormous leaves and long grasses and approached the top of the steps, one hoof in a saddlebag hanging on his flanks and the other holding his sword handle as it rested on his shoulder. He pulled and tossed, from the bag, into the ruined passage, a hoof-full of small, round objects. He ran down the old, grey, stone brick passage, after them.
They hit the bottom with loud cracks and small flashes of light. All but one ball was gone. The last one was lit, revealing hallway fading off into the dark to the right and left. Roots had grown through the walls. Moss grew on the stones. A layer of water covered the floor. Down the halls, some things moved.
They couldn’t be identified, but he could still see them bumbling about as their senses slowly recovered. They clung to the walls and the ceiling and moved around in the water. He couldn’t be sure that they were even the same species, but that didn’t matter; he wouldn't take any extra chances. He could see where they were as he held his blade in both forehooves, taking full steps and full-body, turning swings. The metal parted everything moving as he passed, and the orange gems glowed with each kill.
This is what he had the most practice at: quick take-downs of stunned threats. It was better to live than impress a wild animal, Hot had said.
Hot was someplace outside, in the thick, dense, boggy swamp. Hot was looking for anything helpful he could do or find before he went inside and was forced to give up the use of his wings. A grounded flying fighter is a significantly weaker fighter.
He stepped out of the darkened hallway and into a large room. Everything was still covered in patches of moss. Light came in through the missing bricks in the ceiling. Stone pillars supported the remains. A set of three steps divided the room in half, with the water and light only coating the lower floor. A butterfly fluttered in the light.
He continued into the room and the reflections on the water bent with the ripples. He noticed nothing in the water. He raised a dripping hoof out of the water and onto the steps, clopping softly. He lifted away from the reflection and water with his sword raised. Nothing jumped at him. Nothing skittered across the ceiling. Nothing emerged from the floor. He moved past the pillars. On the right wall, there was a rectangular stone frame with designs of bulbs connected in strange shapes he didn’t understand. Through the frame, there was only stone brick wall. On the left wall, there was another stone frame leading into bricks, but this one was covered in pairs of wavy lines which touched at their tops and overlapped other pairs. In front of him was a stone frame leading into open darkness and a stone floor, like a regular doorway. He looked around its frame for symbols, but found none as he walked toward it. He saw a black shape.
A lion paw reached out from the dark and stopped before his face. He was unable to stop and bumped it. His sword fell from his grasp and he fell from his hooves. “Whoa, slow down there, big guy.” A creature with light, yellow-brown fur on a large cat body with a round, blue bird head with a white chin looked down at him, while it sat in the doorway on four paws. It’s colors seemed somehow less vibrant, but the grains of it’s fur were detailed. Its eyes were half lidded and it was smiling a lazy, toothy smile through its beak. “Alllriight.”
He sat up and watched for a moment. “Heh, can’t just let ya’ pass. I got a riddle for ya’. He tried to stand up, but wobbled and fell back down. “What’s got four legs, one arm, and is bigger than a breadbox?”
He sat back up. “Uh… an ill-stocked weapon stand?”
“No, the answer is - fuck - you. Now, what is good in the evening, better in the morning, the greatest in the future, better as time goes on, and also just the best, always?” It smiled and kneaded the stone with its claws. It wiggled slightly, but did not move its back legs.
He sputtered a little and blinked rapidly. “D- uh,w-w-um… fuck you?”
The creature - or person, really- stood up and stretched out, revealing a perfectly smooth dip in the stone underneath it. “There you go. I’d like to think we all learned something here, today.” It walked past him, off toward the water.
He tried to stand up again and it worked, but he noticed something different. His hooves were clinging, slightly, to the floor. They always had, he realized. When tried to raise a hoof to took a step, the clinging on that hoof went away. He felt the same force on his forehoof as he picked his sword back up.
He looked back and saw no sign of whatever-that-thing-had-been.
He took a step into the hall, through the doorway, and, as he did, he was watching closely, and he saw something. With, each step, as he leaned forward with each leg, the angle of the bottom of his hoof changed.
He stood, mid stride, looking at his changed hoof. He then shifted his gaze to his forehooves. He continued walking down the hall, wiggling his sword in one hoof.
As he walked down the dim brick hall, it quickly faded to black. He would bump the walls as he went, but he found no turns or holes or stairs, only a straight path. As his eyes adjusted, he saw brick outlines in light ahead. When he reached the end of the passage, he pressed a hoof into a brick, sliding it slowly and roughly out. It fell with a ceramic shattering and light shined in from behind it.
He did not ram through the wall and bring endless 70 pound bricks down on his head. Instead, he felt the tension in each brick as they moved and picked them out like jenga. He made a gap just large enough to fit himself. He crawled through and around the edge of a messy pile of ceramic shards and bricks. He was in a small space between a wall and the side of some sort of ramp. Bright light poured in through a singular, large hole in the center of the ceiling, lighting a very large, cubic room with a very large pile of dirt and rock and brick in the center of it. Small stalactites and stalagmites were scattered. The walls that weren’t blocked from his sight were whiter and smoother than the others had been, so far. More wall-frames with different designs sat along the walls. As he looked along the wall, the designs never repeated until the dirt pile blocked his sight. He could see a few between the pile and the rap. He couldn’t see up the ramp, yet. Lunging over the side of the ramp, face first, came Air. This was startling.
“Oh good, ya’ help me find you! Did you come across anything good n’ helpful?”
He glanced down. “Oh, I, uh, I broke a vase… Yeah… Nothing helpful, though!”
“At least you’re enthusiastic about it. Come on.” With that, Hot flapped his wings and pulled him up, through the hole in the ceiling.
They came out of a small mound of dry ground. Below them, there was a hole and no evidence of the chamber other than that. Around them, there was green water and brown water and huge trees blocking sunlight. Islands and broken pieces of ancient buildings were sprinkled about. Plant clusters covered both, making them hard to find.
The tiny engine inside of Hot was the loudest sound, by far. Once, Hot told him how it worked. A heater and a sprinkler discharged into a boiler which turned a generator which charged his array of gems and operated his prosthetic wings. The steam normally disappeared into a disposal gem. It was useful, but Hot hadn’t chosen it. This was just what happened to ponies who lived like them.
Hot dropped him over the water. His legs, than his barrel, then his head stripped away, leaving a black smoke tumbling through the air. The smoke impacted the water and spread across the surface, before coming together, his eyes floating on the cloud’s edge. He drifted, searching for solid walls.
He had started practicing in that grassy field. It felt like a long time ago, but it probably wasn’t. He didn’t need to try to sleep or let go of everything or even relax to make it happen. He just needed to sort of forget about himself. He needed to reach a kind of detached zen where he wasn’t fully aware of himself. He had to forget about his body.
Vines and moss curled and darkened a few shades as he passed, and, before long, he found bricks. The bricks formed a corner of two walls and a flat top. He remained for a moment, clearing the way, and then backed away, letting Hot land on it. A small nozzle popped out of Hot’s prosthetic hoof. Hot steam shot out of the nozzle, melting the substance holding the bricks to each other. Soon, the flat top sagged and fell through, leaving a hole into the ruins sitting on a platform in the open swamp air. Hot dove in. The smoke floated over the hole, sinking through it. It poured down onto the floor and he walked out of it. He reached into his saddlebag and pulled out a pop-stone “light model” and lit it on the end of his hoof. It revealed a small room with many doorways leading to many dark hallways. The smoke was flowing into his back and disappearing.
Hot sighed. “Here I was, hoping I would be stuck on the ground, at least a little while.”
“Almost like being a mud pony, huh?” He was smiling a cheeky smile at his friend, the friend with metal wings.
Hot’s “joking” smile slowly became an expressionless gape. “Wh… how… can you say that?”
“Well, you’re stuck on the ground and you don’t have a magic horn or anything special. You just kind of have to trot around with me, down here, in the mud, get it?”
“I…” Hot looked away and then started moving for one of the doorways. “Sorry.”
He followed Hot into the passage. He began to suspect he had made a mistake, and he resolved not to mention Hot’s wings again. Hot filled the hall ahead with a wall of steam, flapping to push it onward. An armor panel on Hot’s neck opened, revealing the lit head of a flashlight.
They passed countless boiled vines and small lizards. The halls bent and ran into eachother and rose and fell. Occasionally, something would come out of the steam still twitching, or from a wall, or through the floor, or fall out of a hole in the ceiling. Such things wouldn’t live long.
One hall had many small chambers to either side. Each chamber was filled with steam and light and each chamber contained dirt on a stone floor. They searched every room in the hall and found a brick wall at its end. They went back the way they came. The next hall they came to was the same. They began skipping hallways like those.
Steam flooded through a doorway and into a large chamber. Damaged patches in the roof lit the room. There were many entrances and exits around the room and there was a walkway along one wall. There was a balcony with a doorway on another wall. The steam was coming out of an entrance below and to the side of the balcony. A dull, yellow pony covered in cuts and bruises flared her wings and faced the steam. Two points of light emerged, glaring at her and hissing, she imagined, and she struck as the hissing stopped.
A white, hard cap with a round top and a slightly curved down rim flew into Hot’s face. A flying back hoof smashed into Hot’s neck, right next to the flashlight. His popstone was still shining on the steam, turning it into a wall of white. The mare’s hoof came out of the cooling, condensing vapor and smashed into his hoof, breaking the light stone.
He could see now. Hot was on the ground, choking. A pegasus mare wearing a green, ripped up scrap of cloth that could have once been a shirt over her shoulders, a dark grey mane, angry, magenta eyes and grinding teeth fell fell to her hooves in front of him. He didn’t know what was happening, but he knew he felt threatened. His sword came down.
She blinked and then her eyes left his hoof and traveled up his leg. Her tense mouth sagged and her grinding teeth opened. Her eyes traveled up him and past his head. With a look of terror, she realized there was already a retaliating sword dropping over her. She tossed herself to the side and slid across the floor, biting her hat as she went. His sword clanged off of the stone and she took to the air.
She circled above, observing the strange ponies through the almost cleared steam. He looked up and decided he was going with her. His bottom legs flowed off into a small black cloud under him, lifting him slowly up, sword held down by his side. The smoke trail traveled up him, submerging his sword and barrel and head. She saw him slowly gliding for her and spreading, as a gas, across the room’s air, and she left, fast, through the ceiling. Hot flew around the black cloud and out, after her. He continued to rise.
Hot flew into the shaded bog and found himself surrounded by a light fog. Cat-tails swayed and the fog swirled. She was not visible. He came out of one ceiling hole just as Hot flew back inside through another. Hot landed inside, on the balcony, and waited. Eventually, he caught up and solidified, standing on the railing. “What wa-” he started falling backwards.
Hot grabbed him and pulled him back, and he landed on all four hooves, sword sliding across the floor.
“Maybe stick to solid ground, dumb a-” Hot stopped talking.
“Yes, there is a slight chance that that was dumb…”
“Yeah, just… be careful.”
“Ok. So, what was wrong with that bitch?”
Hot held back a laugh, poorly, and his muzzle began to violently twist into and out of the positions necessary for what is known as a “smile”. “Some of the things you say.”
“I take it that you don’t know, then?”
“No better idea than you. At least she’s gone.”
“What? You, uhh, you don’t like it rough, there?”
They took their stuff and walked into the balcony doorway.
“Not so very much, no.”
Using Hot’s flashlight, they found a small room. On one side, there was a stone desk with drawers. On the other side, there was another doorway. A stone chair sat in the middle of the room, facing the balcony door. They found nothing in the desk. They exited through the doorway and into a hall.
“I’m just saying, in that case, what’s the point of night vision?”
He left the room first, and he found that there was light coming from around a corner at one end of the hallway, and black everywhere else. He started for the light, and Hot followed, Around the corner, the hall exited out into the walkway. They moved across the walkway and through the doorway on the other side.
“I’m sure I don’t know just exactly what the bucking minotaur poop you are on about, but-”
There, they found a small, empty room with a set of stairs leading downward and two other doorways. They took one of the doorways and found a room with knee-high stone benches sitting around a short stone cylinder with two roughly rectangular marble slabs, each with a single, jagged edge, leaned up on either side of the cylinder. The door out of this room led to a downward ramp, which they took. It led into another hallway.
“Why would someone do that? What process put that idea in their head in the first place? They had to have some sort of idea, even if they were wrong.”
“The point’s that it happened; A little lack of understanding doesn’t change that.”
The first door they came to in the hallway led to a large, rectangular room with a huge stone bowl sitting in its middle. Chunks of highly corroded metal sat, scattered about the floor. One of the walls contained a large door with a large stone latch. The far end of the room was collapsed.
“Shirrkhkhaaah oh! Ok, sure. Haha. Why not?”
“And he was really fat too!”
His laughter quieted and then halted. His smile became flat. His flat mouth became a frown.
“...Just help me with this.”
They yanked on the latch repeatedly, causing it to grind on the wall as it moved out of the way.They then shoved on the door until it opened a bit.
An sour, acidic smell flooded over them. They retreated, gagging, through the nearest doorway. Hot’s light struck a wall a fair distance away. Once they got far enough away from the smell, Hot turned around, sweeping his light across a very large, very empty room. A small portion of the smell stuck to them, like it sank into their coats. “Oh god, we have to go back in there.”
“What if it’s in there? I mean, they made that door real nice for somethin’... Not now, though.”
“No, now, I didn’t see any other exits to this room when you turned around.”
“What?”
“Just check the rest of the walls.”
Hot began moving the light along the walls, checking them.
A small, white cat with a poofy tail was sitting nearby. He noticed. “Oh, cool. Itsa’ kitty.”
Hot found another exit and sighed in relief. “Ok, what was that you said?”
The cat wiggled a bit from side to side. “Hey little-AH” The cat flew at his face. He swatted his heavy horse hoof into the cat’s face, slapping it into the ground. Hot jumped and quickly turned his light on it and released a burst of steam over it, backing away. They left through one of the doorways before the steam cleared. “My doneness level is so excessive right now.”
“Was that a cat?”
“We go find this thing, now. Now we go find it.”
“Why were you scared of a cat?”
They entered another room. It was the room with the balcony and the walkway again.
“We skipped a path up there, let’s check that.”
“What’s it gonna’ do? Bite you?”
He dissolved his hooves and floated up to the balcony. Hot flew after. They moved through the room with the throne and into the dark hallway.
“-though that’s fine, If that’s the case. I’m just sayin’, cats are adorable.”
“All I did was yell in surprise. It jumped at me. I don’t have a ‘cat phobia’.”
They passed by two or three doorways, waving a light around each. The first one was empty. The second one was collapsed a few feet in. The third one seemed empty, at first, but there were corroded metal loops bolted to the wall and sitting on the ground and the room contained a set of stairs which led down into a room with a heavy stone door and a window frame with metal bars that had almost rusted to nothing. Through the doorway, they saw the destroyed remains of what could have once been cells.
“What is it called? The name is something like where you put clothes. Drawers? Hangers? Hagiophobia? No, that’s not right. That’s not even close to the phobia.”
“Claustrophobia?”
“OO! Yes.”
They went back up the stairs and into the hall. There was one more door. A dirty, rectangular marble slab sat on four stone cylinders in the corner of the room. It was knee high.
“-leave these milky marble looking eggs in your skin that you really can’t force out without cutting yourself. You have to smear sap or something over it after it hatches so it will crawl out to get some air.”
“I’m thinking I’d have to agree with that. What is this? It’s kind of short for a table.”
There was a marble wardrobe in another corner. It’s doors were on the ground, one of them broken in half. “Well, this is the only place we have seen this much marble. Maybe this is where they guy who used that throne lived?”
“So, what, this is a stone bed?”
“What if the mattress is-”
A striped tiger was in the doorway, looking in his eyes. It was directly in front of him, and he remained standing. It’s head moved back as it brought air into its lungs. Air was somewhere just out of his sight, probably doing something. The tiger’s mouth opened and it made a noise that left a pressure on his ears caused him to cringe. His eyes were squinting from the pain and fluttering as he tried to keep them open. The tiger’s head and shoulders began to get bigger, coming closer, before the rest of it’s body did the same. He began to fall over, pushed by the claws. The ceiling swayed by, occasional bricks missing but mostly intact. He heard a sharp “toom” and his sword jerked and vibrated. The bed-slab was at the top of his vision. He could have hit it on the way down. The tiger’s breath was kind of bad, like a dogs, really. First, one of the claws pierced into the side of his barrel, then another, and then the other paw began to press into his other side and all the claws sank into him. The tongue and lower jaw’s teeth pressed into his shoulder. Two points of pressure, applied by two unyielding shapes, pierced his back, near his shoulder, splitting and tearing alerted, now-screaming nerve endings in his busted skin and pointing out the tiger above him with the sharpness of a polished scalpel or a tiger's tooth, where the tiger happened to be eating you. The full, heated, wide eyed weight of his adrenaline flowed through his heart and compelled him, “Strike it!” The first hoof bashed into the head, ripping his shoulder muscles all the more, but seemed to bounce off and the tiger growled and bit just a little harder and shook him slightly. The tiger let go and roared again, while turning away.
Hot was jumping from side to side, brandishing his little knife and yelling loud, vague sounds at the tiger. It swiped when Hot closed in, but hovered low over its prey.
He felt a yearning for escape and the call of Hot’s yells, but felt, even stronger, the need to be ignored by the cat, and remain untouched in the future. Something matched, a piece in his memory fit to the shape of the moment, and he began to endeavor to become untouchable and forget his body in the moment when he wished to save it, to escape the fuzzy weight pressing down on him, to forget the sting of the slices on his ribcage, to forget the burning holes in his back that served to give him the moment-to-moment focus of the adrenaline that was giving him the chance to think.
Black smoke drifted into the tiger’s vision. Hot reached into his saddlebag franticly. He looked down at himself, seeing only his shoulder. The tiger swiped a few times at the spot where his body should have been with jerky, spread open claws. As the cloud began to recondense, he slid away. The tiger stopped, and its eyes narrowed. Its eyes shimmered and its claws slowly began to glow. It swiped through the smoke, and left burning, painful trails. He escaped, under the bed.
The tiger couldn’t quite get in, but it turned sideways, laying the front half of its body down, next to his sword. Its paw slammed into his face, but he got his un-damaged hoof onto the hilt and turned the sword with as much force and at the best angle he could get. The tiger jumped away with a new hole on its chest. He pushed himself along the ground and his damaged shoulder yanked back, caught on a hard, raised stone piece, but he put the heightened pain into his good foreleg’s thrusts. The tiger moved forward, between attacks, and a small blade flew into it’s neck, leaving two wires trailing back to Hot. A familiar, clicking, rattling buzz sounded and the tiger spasmed and fell. He thrust his blade into the tiger. He kept thrusting, waiting for it to stop moving.
Hot’s forelegs wrapped and pulled him away from the tiger and took his sword away.
“You might… just… Buckin’ quit it! Calm down. Let me... Shhhhhhhhhh. It’s done. You got him.” Hot finally turned so that they could not see the tiger. He stopped struggling after a few moments. Hot slowly leaned him toward his back. “Ok, that doesn’t seem like much blood… He must not have clamped down much. I’m turning you over. Hot leaned him back up and put him down, on his belly. “Considering everything, it’s not even bleedin’ that much. It’s not all that bad at all. Once we’ve gotten back, we’ll cover it in gauze and call it a day, hmm? You there?”
He was staring at the tiger, breathing long, slow breaths through his teeth. His eyes were wide and his whole body tensed up a few times. “I think I saw something,” he said. “Under the bed.”
“We should really get back to my cart. It’s pretty far and-”
“No” he said, in a low, emotionless statement.
“Now, none of that. No need to get like that, no matter how bad getting mauled is. Get that chin up and come on.
“I’m not going.”
“Now, is anything really worth being out here when you’re hurt?”
“I found something under the bed of someone important. There is a good chance that it is worth looking at.”
Hot hoped for some sort of relent, but none came. “Ok, fine, just don’t use that leg much, ok? It shouldn’t be that hard with the way you walk. We leave if this is nothing, too! Ok?”
He turned his head away from the tiger. “OK.” He stood up. “Yes.” He began moving for his sword. “Yes, I’m good with that.”
The raised bit of stone under the bed was a stone handle. The stone under it was too heavy for hooves, so one of the ceiling bricks that had fallen over the years was used as a fulcrum. They pressed his sword’s tip into the handle-hole and rocked it over the brick, revealing a dark passage and a stone trapdoor under the bed. He bumped his shoulder on the way down. They left the brick in the doorway, keeping it open.
It was five minute’s passage through the darkness in that hall. They were at least both thankful that the ceiling was quite tall. His pain was quickly fading from its height when he was mauled. They thought their progress halted when they walked into a wall. But, they really would find it was a corner, a way forward. The far end of it was lighted with a square shape, dim, on a wall.
The chamber was a cube. Just a few spots of light existed in the roof. There was a small, flat, square piece of ground sitting in the middle of the chamber. An eroded, misshapen stone cylinder with one broken end was on it’s side, sitting on the small floor-square. Around the edge of the floor-square, there was a short flight of steps leading down, followed by a short, flat perimeter. There was another set of stairs, followed by another flat section, followed by another set of stairs, before the bottom, which was covered in water. On the top set of stairs, on the second stair down, by one end of the cylinder, there was a small, metallic item. In the center of three of the walls, there was an entrance, followed by stairs down to the bottom. They soon entered through one of those, and.he soon sat on his haunches, holding the metal object up, victoriously.It was one cylinder resting over a skinnier, slightly longer cylinder. On one end, there were two small, square nubs resting along one side of the smaller cylinder. There were three rings sitting on the other end, their edges touching each other and the cylinder, with the middle ring resting on the very end. The larger cylinder had a sunken in, dark rectangle, and innumerable buttons.
Hot was smiling, watching this. He brought the item back down and just sat there, smiling slightly. Hot slowly smiled less. He glanced a little lower, then back up. Hot looked back down at his flank. Hot snorted and shook his head. Hot looked back at his face and glared slightly and softly stomped a hoof. Hot turned and took a few steps and then turned again and stepped right back. “You feelin’ proud of yourself, there, at all?”
“I am so very satisfied with myself right now. The last week was worth it.”
“Yeah?” Doubt softened Hot’s glare. “Yeah?” Hot looked down and then sat on his haunches. “Ok. Ok, you did good.” Hot looked back up at him. “Let’s go home.” Hot moved back down the stairs and halfway up the stairs to the exit they entered through before turning around. “Come on!” The sound echoed in the small chamber, far louder than he expected. “Sorry.”
He stood up and began to walk. A pile of rock and dirt impacted the ground at the base of the stairs.
“Bucking Luna! Run!”
Only a little more dirt dripped down from the ceiling. He was looking up, tensing to charge across the dirt pile to get to the stairs he needed. He leapt, his hooves sinking into the freshly churned dirt, and stumbled his way across and up to Hot.
“Th- th- the other way. The other way. Run… Good nuff’.” Hot started moving back down the hall.
He looked back at the hole. It dripped dirt. A dull, yellow mare trotted up to the hole, looking down, and saw him. They just looked at eachother, for a moment, before her wings flared and she dove down into the air of the room. He brought his sword up. She had a whip in one hoof, which became apparent when it wrapped around the metallic object in his limp leg’s grasp and pulled it away. She was already flying away when he called out, “Hot, get back here! The mare is back! She stole the artifact!”
Hot was back in the room after just a few moments. “Where is she?!” He was floating for the hole with his back hooves dissolved. Hot flew out of the hole before he could answer.
He came to the surface. The only sign of anyone was a single swirling in the light, still fog. He moved that way, across dirt and dirty water. He moved slowly past the trunks. The bugs were awake and swarming, sending his tale on a twitchy rampage. When he came to ground, the ran through whatever bramble he could, gaining a little speed.
In the distance: “Where is it!” Hot was yelling. He moved for the sound.
There were two balls on strings, wrapped around each other and hanging on a trunk.
“You have to let me go!”
He followed the string around the trunk.
“Tell me where it is! I don’t much like threatening ponies, but you aren’t going anywhere and ain’t nothin nice happenin’ until I get what I came for.
“He already has it!”
“Who?”
“... You’re not lackies?”
“Hey, Hot, when did you get a bola?”
Hot turned to him. “I didn’t.” Hot turned back to the yellow mare. “Not that I’ve ever been made aware of.”
“Oh, thank Celestia. Let me go.”
“Not a chance.”
“Let me go!”
“Better idea: how about you tell me where it bucking is?”
She desperately ground her teeth. “Alright, just stop him. He went that way,” she gestured with her face, “and probably went inside. Hurry!”
Hot picked him up and flew off. They found a doorway sitting in the open swamp and landed. Past the door was a muddy, downward slope. They slid down, grazing the roof of the passage on the way. The room at the bottom was huge, with many large support pillars. There was a sizable pile of mud at the entrance, and a few feet of water on the ground. There was a single doorway at the other side. They trudged across the water. The back exit hallway was raised slightly by a few stairs. They galloped, splashing, into and down the hall. They passed another staircase. They passed hanging roots. They passed bloody, messy clumps of meat. They ran out of the darkened hallway and into a large room, covered in patches of moss. Light came in through missing bricks in the ceiling, showing a room divided in half by a set of three steps, with water and light only coating the lower floor. Hot looked rapidly around the room, at each of the entrances.
“This way.” He said. He slapped his back hooves into the steps, splashing and dragging water everywhere. They moved past the pillars holding the roof up and past an abstract designed and a fire designed stone wall-frame and through a regular doorway, leading into an open darkness that was dispelled by a flashlight. His shoulder ached with each heartbeat. Bugs the size of their hooves crawled along the walls. Thick webbing patches lurked on the ceiling. They saw saw the light of missing bricks in a wall ahead of them. The light was covered up as a dark shape shifted in front of it. They reached the end and squeezed themselves through the hole and into a pile of ceramic shards in a small space between white wall and the side of some sort of ramp in a large, cubic room covered in strangely designed wall-frames.
“The key to my vic-” a loud, deep, somewhat nasally voice declared as they ran around the side of the ramp to see a dark blue furred monkey with lighter blue skin and an incredibly long face holding the artifact in a hand on the end of its tail. He was standing on stairs. The ramp was stairs and the stairs stretched across nearly the whole wall. The wall was not covered in wall-frames. Instead, one great frame reached up, from either side of the stairs, nearly to the ceiling. It was decorated with images gears and lightning. “You are not Daring.”
“And you aren’t much but a three handed thief, but we’ve all got shortcomings.”
“Oh, what, are you going to tell me that it’s so much better when she puts it in a museum? Keep your values to yourself, they are of no consequence to me!”
“If you’re talking’ about that lovely nightmare strapped to the tree up top, she’s just as bad and I don’t give a buck what she does. We are following an official equestrian writ type document, and all I care about is getting paid.”
“Also, she stole it from me.”
“Also, she stole it from him.”
“Wr-” The blue monkey’s eyes grew wide and hard. “It’s been nine months! I was dealing with an entirely different plan when I put out that order!”
“Oh good, then hows’ about you can pay us, hmm?”
“I had to get it myself! You ponies were useless to me! You will get nothing! Waahaha muahahahaaa!”
“Look, you wouldn’t have that thing right now without us. We helped, we ought to get something for this.”
“Ahuizotl!” The yellow-ish mare fell from the hole in the roof and onto the ground at the base of the stairs.
“The key,” he held up the artifact, “to my victory is at hand.” He laughed deafeningly for a good five seconds. “You are too late, Daring Do.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing, Ahuizotl. You’ll die!”
“Oh, I’m so sure, just like I was going to die when I tried to bring years of limitless wetness or the great hardening or the need of burning. No, Daring.” Ahuizotl shook his head. “The most powerful equipment shall be mine!”
“Don’t do this!” Daring lunged forward, and was caught and pressed into the ground by the tail-hand.
“Honestly, Daring, I only have so many snappy comebacks.” Ahuizotl pressed the end of the artifact without the loops into the wall while Daring struggled to press up from the ground. The wall near the artifact became a dark purple. Ahuizotl moved back. The purple spread across the wall, stopping at the frame’s borders. Closer to the center of the wall, the purple darkened, the very center becoming black. The black shifted, seeming to face them and become deep. The purple waved and waved faster and seemed to spin. White began to appear from the black and streak to the edge, until it seemed that they were rushing, spinning, through nothing.
A red, round glass emerged from the wall at about the height of Ahuizotl’s neck, followed by a wider, rounded, grey surface with small, rectangular holes on the bottom. A metallic tube and a tight clump of sharp cornered, identical shapes right next to each other emerged on either side of the red lense, somewhat lower. The thing jerked and a flat-bottomed, metal shape emerged and pressed into the ground, connected to a set of metal tubes and joints clumped tightly together, but not so tight that there was no space to look between them. It jerked again, and another leg came out of the wall, along with the rest of its hand, part of its torso, and a fair bit of bulky machinery connected to pipe. It stepped out of the wall. An antenna extended up from the back of it’s long, rounded head.
Ahuizotl, smiling and opening his mouth, took a step forward. The tube came up and turned. Halfway up the wall, in the center of the room, a rounded, grey surface covered in a few hundred red lenses emerged. There was a flash and a bang and Ahuizotl’s head flew back. Then, there was another, then a third. The key fell out of Ahuizotl’s hand. The wall became pure white. Hot jumped back. Daring watched Ahuizotl fall. The tube began to turn on him. Warnings screaming in his head, he evaporated almost instantly. The muzzle flashed, and a bullet went through him. The wall’s original appearance faded in. The huge, rounded, metal object began to fall, scraping the wall loudly and cleanly separating. The tube moved, aiming closer to his center. It flashed again. He drifted slightly and it aimed for his center a third time and shot. Hot yelped. Daring looked up from Ahuizotl, finally, and saw the tube turning toward her. Her wings flared. Ahuizotl’s tail-hand fell off of her. She moved through the air, to the side, never letting the barrel aim directly at her. The giant metal head smashed the stairs and bounced slightly, filling the air with a deep ringing. Hot was on the ground. The robot sprang toward the sliced metal head. He shifted his position, keeping Hot out of its sight. Daring was on the ground, behind the bouncing head. The tube shifted at her as she jumped, and it fired. The head fell, causing the bullet to bounce off and hit the ground. Daring rose, fast and hard, flying for the hole in the ceiling. The ruined staircase shifted under the robot’s feet and the giant head bumped it. It pushed the head, sending it sliding and sparking along the ground until it ran into the dirt pile. It hopped and landed, balanced, and then lowered itself. It jumped through the ceiling hole, pushing off of the side of the hole with enough force to continue its ascent and follow daring, and sending a stream of dirt down.The dirt flowed, and it flowed, and it jammed, sealing out the sun.
He reformed. He tried to to look at Hot’s wound, but he couldn’t; the light bouncing off of him from Hot’s flashlight was to dim. Hot released a long, quiet, hissing “Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.” He continued to squint at the general area where the blood was flowing from. “Just stay still.” He pulled out a light pop-rock and tossed it at the ground, where it lit up. The blood was flowing from Hot’s chest, but didn’t seem to come from anywhere else. He pressed a hoof against the wound, causing Hot to gasp and struggle. He lifted his hoof. “Stop. Stop. This is going to hurt, but it’s supposed to help, ok? I’m going to help you. You’re going to be fine. Just,” he opened the saddlebag he didn’t keep his magic rocks in and poured everything out. He pressed the bag against the wound with both hooves. His shoulder ached. “Shhh, just stay awake. It’s gonna be ok, ok? Hot? Hey, Hot? Are you awake? Are you awake?”
Hot released a quick, “Yeah,” continuing to scrunch his muzzle.
He continued to apply pressure and mutter reassurances for long enough to begin to doubt that it was enough, that length of time being any amount of time at all, not that he could tell. His shoulder ached and felt numb and felt pressurized. He breathed through his nose and the air cut a tunnel of fluctuating snot that seeped down his neck and slightly clogged his lungs. He expelled the blockage from his lung and into his neck in a coughing fit, letting the pressure off of Hot’s wound and jerking his own.
His quickly picked the saddlebag back up and went to put it back, but the blood was dry, caked into Hot’s fur. Hot was asleep, and breathing. The breaths were short. He rubbed his hoof against Hot’s fur, trying to look at the skin underneath. The fur was damp and cold.
There was nothing in the room to burn. They didn’t have any blankets. He opened his non-poprock saddlebag, then looked on the ground behind him. There were bits and flowers, and the book, some dipped in blood. He opened Hot’s saddlebags and looked inside. There was nothing in the room to burn. He was the only source of heat. He could only cover one of Hot’s sides.
He floated above the metal bowl. It was cold and sharp and hard. He couldn’t even move it. Some of the ceramic pieces were somewhat large, and he stacked them on Hot’s side. They fit kind of nicely. They didn’t cover most of him. There was only one other thing in the room. He dragged Ahuizotl’s slightly warm body over and laid it on Hot’s back. He nestled as close to Hot as he could, and waited.
It was warm, but in a way where the tight space caused him to sweat, leaving him cold. It was cold and cramped and he felt a little stiff. There was a pressure in his head, like the pressure in the back of his shoulder, but worse, rougher. The force of the arm compressed him, and his breaths were short. He was getting tired. He was getting more tired than usual. He was tired, and that was unusual. He got on three legs, and the painful pressure in his head scratched at him like someone was spinning it, and his vision degraded into naught but furious white and black dots, dancing the mosh of the lost and the pointless. He was dizzy, but held still. A knot pulled loose and retied itself upside-down in his intestines while his vision cleared. He took a few wobbling steps and vomited near the corner.
He tried to think about what just happened, but his thoughts slid and bounced. Only with great difficulty did he force the feelings in his head into a coherent memory and then translate that into the incorrect words. He then tried to think about the words he thought, and came up with a frustrated blank. He was sick. Hot couldn’t have done it, bullets don’t make sick you can pass around. Ahwisobluemonkey wasn’t a friend, but he had the same deal as hot did. It is important to be fair in thinking. The thief bitch who hit him seemed to be fine.
His swollen shoulder throbbed, the shoulder the dog-smell mouth big cat made bad-hurt. The dirty animal’s mouth was on him. He maybe got it from that. It was one of those infe-thingies where the blood-bugs kept getting more and had to die with fungus and poisons. If Hot was awake, he would know how to do what about it. He must have been infected before, it was pretty not-unusual. He would pull something out and know what to do. He would just eat something from his bag.
The bag was still over there.
He pulled it out and started dumping things. There was an orange, but sour wasn’t really enough poisonousness. His eyes grazed over the spread pile of his stuff and Hot’s stuff, searching for the match to the vague call of in-my-blood-bug-killer, which tied oh, so closely to his concept of an “antibiotic,” and something white he saw struck a ping in his brain and his eyes traveled back across white food wedge clusters. The wedges were cloves. The whole bunch was…a bunch of cloves. Someplace, he knew, sort of, kind of, he could swear that the thought of a memory of something he read, and this memory told him that these were good for this. He ate one, then another, then a third one, then most of the last one. He didn’t want to eat another, but he wouldn’t die over that. It wasn’t enough, things needed to go where they did good. The hurt would stop or the hurt would not stop. He looked back to Hot. Hot also got hit. Hot might need some. He pulled the the last half into wedges and put them in Hot’s mouth. He snuggled back in and waited and focused as hard as he could on staying solid.
He was thirsty, and also a bit hungry. His mouth was shriveled. None of the water nearby was good for drinking, but he remembered where he could get some. He lit another pop-stone and searched the pile of stuff. His head didn’t hurt as much, anymore. He found a small, plastic object with a button and a knob. He tried to turn it to 17 and pulled out Hot’s prosthetic, aiming it at nothing. He pressed the button. Nothing happened. He pressed the button a few more times. He heard something moving behind him. He looked. Hot’s shades were descending and ascending repeatedly. He moved the knob 6 clicks clockwise, to 17, and pressed the button again. Clear water gently squirted out of the nozzle attachment. He lapped at the water stream, but became dissatisfied and tried to catch some of the water in his mouth, like a cup. When he closed his mouth to swallow, the water sprayed up his nose and everywhere. He flinched, then opened his mouth for more.
He picked something to eat. The orange was Hot’s. It belonged to him, he loved those things, and oranges helped with replacing blood. He only had three blue flowers left. He had been saving them. He picked a large, black flower that he hadn’t tried before and ate it.
He nudged Hot. “Hey.” He nudged Hot again. “HEY!” Hot’s legs twitched. He pushed Ahuizotl off and then kept pushing until he reached the dirt mound. He returned to Hot. “Come on, you need to drink.” He poked Hot’s face. Hot squirmed, reaching up to scratch at his muzzle, and was splashed with water. His head lightly flinched back. “Drink some of your water, ok?” Hot’s muzzle squelched open and placed the nozzle in his mouth and began sucking. this continued for a few moments, until he presented Hot with the orange, at which point that became Hot’s new concern.
They put away their items. He picked up and put away the key. Neither felt like they should be talking, right then, and Hot didn’t walk around. They just sat, leaned against a wall, next to each other, and waited. Hot fell asleep. When he woke up next, they shared most of the flower stash. After a few hours, Hot decided that he couldn’t sit any longer. They had to try and walk and see how far they could get. “Don’t step in that.” he had said, as they moved for the hole in the corner. They managed to walk down the hall, into the room with the water, before Hot was winded.
He convinced Hot, “Lay back down.” He convinced Hot “Stay for now.” He sat down with him. He ate one of his favorite, blue flowers, and gave Hot another other one. He put the last one back in his air-tight bag, after getting most of the air out.
Hot thanked him. Hot said he wouldn’t forget this. Hot said he felt guilty about everything bad he ever thought about him. Hot apologized for bringing him on this job. He said Hot couldn’t have known that this one would be like this. Hot said that that wasn’t the point, and that blue flower that he went on about was pretty good.
Hot went to sleep.
He waited.
He heard a material moaning. He looked to Hot. Corners of pieces of Hot’s plating were raising, pulling his skin. Hot was sliding toward him in short bursts. Hot was asleep.
He backed away, bumping into a pillar and then backing around it, entering the water, but not stopping. Hot came closer. Small bits of water jumped along the staircase. The jumping stopped, and Hot slid closer again, while vertical holes remained in the water, near the stairs, and, in the reflection, long, black, sharp segments arced out from beneath his armor, sprinkled with occasional eyes and fangs. His fear and aggression had a target.
He raised his sword and sloshed forward. The sharp segments raised and stabbed into the water again, scraping Hot closer. He looked at the water and swung his sword through the air, bending one of the spindly, black legs joints. The damaged leg slammed down, into the water, splashing a vertical line into the water. The leg rose back up without a bottom half. He swung at another leg, breaking it, and the first joint he broke slammed into the top of his head, knocking him into the water. It dragged along his head and off. He stood back up. Hot was resting near the water’s edge. He looked down and saw the sharp ends descending above him. He evaporated, and then brought his sword back together for a swing, snapping another leg. There were two sharp points left. One dropped in front of him, and he lunged forward, busting it. One landed just a little to the left of where he had been standing, and he turned and swung, backing up enough to hit it hard.
The leg he just broke closed in on him, pressing along his front. The other legs wrapped around him, pulling him toward Hot. He resisted, and Hot slid forward. He let the legs close around him, pressing him into Hot’s side. The legs lifted him, and his weight caused Hot to turn. They fell into the water. He could feel the water on every side of him, reminding him with the cold on his skin that his skin was cold and that he had a skin to be cold. He turned, facing Hot, who was flailing and hitting him, and brought his sword between them, wedged between the black legs and his body, near Hot’s side. He got the blade into the leg’s joints, and began to pry and saw and push. The legs popped off, dissolving into non-existence.
Hot sprang from the water first. He started to stand and was filled with a few jolts of electric pain. He got his head up.
“Just who do you think this is, that you’re messin’ with, huh?!? Ifn’ you wanted to have a go you could, at least, have been polite about…” Hot’s hoof was pointed at him. The knife was out and blue lines were thrashing in part of the prosthetic. “What?”
“Hot, there is something on you.”
“So, what, you thought to drown it off of me?!?”
“No, it was drowning me.”
“Funny, I don’t much feel something that could drag a pony on me.”
“Look,” he spoke with with unusual authority, “at your armor.”
Hot breathed in quickly and out slowly, in jerky bursts, and his eyes darted away a few times. Hot’s eyes darted to his side and then he looked quickly back forward and thrust his knife in the air and stepped.
“Other side! Other side!”
Hot quickly turned his head and then lowered his leg. Bits of armor were propped up. Two or three panels dangled. His wing hung limply.
He told Hot that it used to have more pieces. He wanted to cut off the remains, but Hot cut the remains off himself with some difficulty, and they bled and then disappeared. Hot had to remove his armor to get at them. It could not be put back on without tools that were in the cart. They stored the pieces in their bags.
He told Hot that he had seen them before, out in the wilderness, so they must be around. Hot said that he had never heard of anything like it. He told Hot that there were many things that he hadn’t heard of, implying that Hot was the same. Hot was still a little weak, but they were out of food. It was a long walk back to the cart.
