Tell me the name of God, you fungal piece of shit · 1:45am Jul 27th, 2021
An idea crawled into my brain tonight. It burrowed in deep and laid its eggs, and as the night has gone on more and more of them have hatched, and I've found myself with a theory that I must rid myself of (and perhaps, if the theory is successful, the ideas will crawl into your brain too.)
The Everfree Forest is one of my favourite aspects of MLP to explore. It's such a strange, dark, unpredictable place. It changes and warps around a pony, losing them in a dark labyrinth full of creatures and plants, each more dangerous and deadly than the last. It set me to thinking about why the Everfree is what it is. It's easy to call it a malevolent place: uncontrollable, packed with monsters and poisonous plants, it's not a good place by any means. But it isn't evil, though, is it? How could any force of nature be evil? We may combat aspects of nature, push against them, exert ourselves to keep us safe from exposure, but the cold wind and harmful bacteria are not evil. They simply are.
It's such a human, real life thing, the Everfree; natural, uncomprehendable, and dangerous to be exposed to. Though as I considered that, that essence of incomprehensive destruction, it reminded me of another entity many of us have heard of.
I believe the "Spirit" that gives the Everfree a seeming mind of its own is the secondary influences of a Great Old One.
Somewhere deep in the weald there is a basidiocarp, and from it a mycelium spreads across the entire domain of the Everfree. Tendrils worm their way into every tree, every blade of grass, every flower petal, and with them comes a Madness, simply because the Great Old One is so transcendental for the physics of Equestria.
From this mycelium, mushrooms sprout; and from these mushrooms, spores born of this fungus out of space lift into the air, the particles worldbending and free from the bindings of Time. With the extent of the mycelium's spread, the air is so dense with these spores that the Madness infects the very weather itself. Clouds are dragged across the sky. Rain is ripped down to the forest floor. Even the air is forced to move in gusts and billows, giving the appearance of doing so without intervention.
Of course, with every step of every creature—even the lightest touch of a hare's paw—another puff of spores is sent up into the air, into the lungs, into the blood, into the brain; and the animals, too grow and change. Wolves turn into bark and timber fueled by hatred alone. Chicken and snake eggs melt together to hatch Cockatrices, whose spore-speckled irises can petrify anything with a mind from but a glance. Bears and bees find themselves glued together by the spore-flavored honey they both crave, the defensive suicidality of the bees pairing treacherously with the unstoppable ferocity of the bears.
Not even the flowers themselves are saved from the second-hand Madness, bursting out spikes, writhing and crawling to ensnare prey, concentrating and synthesizing poisons that can make Irony take shape and even turn ligaments to lignin.
Ponies speak of wild magic in the Everfree. They talk as if it has a mind of its own. But there is no magic in the Everfree.
No, no magic at all, and certainly no mind of its own. There's no mind at all, in fact, for all sanity is annihilated simply from the proximity to the eldritch fungus that, even now, grows larger and larger in its slumber.
Equestria must pray that it never wakes up.
Now this, this I like
This reminds me of Hollow Knight, quite a lot.
Oh this totally makes sense! Wonder if the writers ever considered doing something like that in the show's canon.
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oh holy crap it does
Fascinating.
That... is honestly creepy and amazing to think of
Now you need to write it down as a story
Tell Horse Voice he'll love this
Delightfully eldritch!
There was something on my mind ever since I watched that episode. Thanks to Anonymous for uploading this to derpi so I don't have to explain it.derpicdn.net/img/2017/9/23/1542779/large.png
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Right?!