//------------------------------// // XII - Into the Dark // Story: Into the Dark // by Corejo //------------------------------// The dream he dreamt that cycle was not a peaceful one.   There was no meadow of bobbing grasses or white-flowered bushes along the tree line, no birdsong alighting from the distant forest or gentle wind against his face.  The empty sky loomed over him, black as death, and a distant grinding sound drowned out any memory of the beforetimes.   He stood in the village square, eyes raised to the top of the village walls.  He knew without seeing that his sister stood beside him, eyes trained upward like his.  The darkness beyond rumbled with the approach of the Devourer.   The huts around them shook, and as the sounds grew louder and the earth rumbled beneath his hooves, the sound of splintering wood and tumbling stone erupted all around him.   He couldn’t turn to look.  He didn’t need to. His dream mind knew the world was falling apart as the rapid-fire staccato of nails being driven into stone carried over the wall.   The Devourer roared, and it felt like the air itself was being sucked from his lungs.  There was nothing now, nothing but him and the Devourer. All else vanished to the void of dreamspace and the emptiness of the world as it would be.     He stood alone on nothing, stared into nothing, breathed of the suffocating nothingness, and he watched with eyes wide open as the Devourer descended with spiralling, grinding teeth.   “Live.”   He jerked awake.  He scanned the darkness around him, hooves light as feathers and ready to run at a moment’s notice.  But there was nothing here except the silence of the empty throne room.   It was just a dream.   He took a deep breath to settle himself and gave Sunlight at his chest a glance.  The flames within danced with reservation, as if they mourned for the loss of their sister.   Luna…   He cast a heartbroken glance at his sides, still bare.  His eyes lingered there as his heart slowly wrung itself out like a wet towel, and when he found the strength to pull his gaze away, he realized he held his hoof against his heart.  He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his teeth until they hurt. The wound in his heart tore open anew, and he lay there trying to hold in the tears.   This was wrong.  The darkness, the Moonless sky, the empty space beside his heart.  They were this close to defeating the darkness. It wasn’t supposed to end this way.   All his life, the darkness had ruled the world.  It filled in the cracks of the village wall, loomed around every corner of every home, gnawed at the edges of brazierlight within the village square.  Darkness was eternal and inevitable.   But he had taken Sun and Moonlight beyond the walls, found the Moonlight brazier, and freed Luna from her prison.  They defeated every challenge placed before them and by the grace of the Cinders found themselves standing before the Sun brazier, mere moments away from banishing the darkness.     They held salvation within their grasp.  The impossible almost came true. But after coming so close, only to have victory snatched away and darkness again retake its dominion…   It wasn’t supposed to end this way.   He realized after a while that he was staring directly into Sunlight.  Its afterimage danced in his vision when he blinked to, and its inverted colors reminded him of the Sunset and the color-stained sky.   Beautiful.   No, it wasn’t supposed to end this way.  But this was the way it was.   He looked up at the thrones.  Sunlight flickered off the stone and highlighted their gold and silver trim.  Above them, there was a circular window, whose purpose he ventured was to let in the Sun or Moonlight.  But now, with Sunlight washing the stone around it in a warm gold and absolute darkness peering through from beyond, it stared down at him like an inverted Moon.   He turned away.  It couldn’t end like this.  He had seen the wonders of the beforetimes, of speech and Moonlight, of water and wind and flowers and the laughter of foals running freely through the streets of bustling cities.  It was a beautiful world full of beautiful things, and he needed to see it again.   He…  He needed to see Luna again.   Why was impossible to say, but he felt it all the same.  It pumped through his veins with every beat of his heart that would never again know the apathy of a life lived in darkness.   She had commanded him to live, but to return to the village and eke out his existence would be its own form of death.  It would be a life lived in submission of the dark, and that he could not abide.   Survival above all?  No. Not anymore.   To hell with the Elders and their tenets.  He would rather die on his own terms and rage against the dark until the light left his eyes.  The dreaming ponies deserved that much. Luna deserved that much.  They deserved Justice.   He stood and headed for the treasury.  Past the mounds of gold, past the gouged dais and the Sun-chased shadows cast by the discarded stones of the back wall.  There he came to the giant hole bored through by the Devourer itself, and he gave the dark a defiant glare.   Luna was there with him, not in wing or voice, but in spirit.  He felt her, inside his heart rather than beside it. She needed a champion, and though he was merely a pony who survived these birthcycles by luck and happenstance, she needed him all the same.     And with that feeling held close and Sunlight raised high, he took his first step forward, into the dark.   The tunnel again led him downward into the heart of the mountain, getting steeper the further in he went.  Sunlight threw flickering shadows along the longitudinal ripples in the stone. It seemed wary of their place, here without Luna to guide and guard them, but it sported a bravado previously unknown to him, bright enough to illuminate the entire tunnel.  It needed this just as much as he did.   The tunnel opened up to that same cavern of purple crystals and wet stone, and no amount of Sunlight’s courage could broach the upper reaches of this place.  Long points of stone poked down into the dome of light like gnarled teeth as he passed them by.   He wasn’t far now.  If he remembered right, the hole was just past the—   Pebbles tumbled on stone.   He threw his cape over Sunlight and flattened himself to the ground.  His cape glowed a faint yellow, unable to completely hide away the glow.  He swivelled his ears in every direction, straining to hear another sound that might alert him to what it was or where it came from.   His heart beat in the stillness, ever clawing at his sanity as the hairs stood up on the nape of his neck.  He covered his mouth, for fear of even the tiniest sound that could alert whatever it was prowling these caverns.  There was the soft padding of paws, and then the low growl of a hungry animal.     Talon scrabbled on stone, and he had only a moment to react.  But Luna’s magic had left him whole and hale, and with a quick pivot he gave a powerful kick that rivalled even the largest hammers made in the village.   His hoof found the heavy push-back of a body, and the blade drove home to the schlick of meat and sinew.  Something shrieked, and he was off as fast as his hooves would carry him.   Fractal and geometric flashes of Sunlight skimmed past him as he took flight down the cavern.  The crystals jutted from the walls as if trying to get a better view of the chase, and it was like he ran through a series of mouths for all the pointed stone reaching down at him.   The creature was gaining on him.  Its heavy footpads shout-backed off the cavernous ceiling, and its breaths crawled up his spine.     A hole appeared to his left, and he ducked in with the hope of shaking it off his tail.  He scrambled under a boulder wedged between two walls, over a stone-tooth jutting from the floor, and around a massive pillar of stone, but still it hounded him.  His saddlebags caught on a jagged outcropping of crystal, and he ripped it loose with a quick snap of his teeth. He couldn’t afford to slow down.   But his heart leapt into his throat as his lead came to an all too sudden dead end, Sunlight splashing up the walls blocking off every direction except backward.  He whirled around to see the creature already leaping at him, its jaws split wide with row after row of jagged teeth. He stumbled sideways and swung Sunlight haphazardly, just missing its belly as its lunge went wide.     The creature grazed him along the neck with its talons, and he felt the sting trail all the way down to his shoulder.  Its teeth snapped shut just shy of his ear, the full speed of its tumble giving it enough momentum to roll up the curve of the wall.  It scrambled for footing and charged back down in one smooth motion with a raspy snarl, but this time, he was ready.   He’d had his fair share of scraps in the streets of Canterlot, and in a twist of his hips he squared up with it, bringing Sunlight around.  A tad early, but it gave the creature pause enough mid-lunge to miss its bite.   It tumbled past him and rolled onto its hooves to gave him another snarl.  It paced around him, thick scales marching down its backside and whip tail lashing back and forth behind it.  Now with this pause, he could see that it was another fang beast creature like the one he and Luna first fought back in the hilltop cathedral.  This one was smaller, though, hardly larger than himself, but that said nothing for the lean muscle rippling up and down its legs with every step.   It clacked its cluster of teeth together and charged him quick as a flash, and he didn’t have the swiftness to dodge.  A sharp pain blossomed in his shoulder as its teeth sank in to the bone.   He screamed in pain and cracked it over the head with Sunlight.  Fire washed down its back in golden flames that flooded the stone-toothed cavern with light.  It threw terrible shadows across the walls that looked like hungry spectators waiting for one of them to fall.   The fang beast yelped and scrambled away from the flames, but not without catching his hind leg with a sweep of its tail, wrapping around his back pastern.  Pain erupted in his hoof, and it was then he realized it had little barbs all along the length. Before he could react, it yanked his hoof sideways out from under him.   He went down, landing on Sunlight and knocking the wind out of himself.  He sucked air, suddenly blinded as he was by the flare of Sunlight in his eyes, but he heard the high-pitched screech and the pad of meaty paws on stone.  He had just enough time to get his hooves up before it bowled him over.   They went tumbling across the cavern floor, where he cracked the back of his head against a rock.  The world went fuzzy. It was as if time came to a standstill in that ever-lengthening moment, until a heavy weight forced the air from his lungs.  There was the sharp pinch in his stomach as of claws trying to dig through his fur and tear out his innards, and the adrenaline lent him enough clarity to bring Sunlight around.   But this creature wasn’t stupid.  Before he brought Sunlight to bear, it leapt backwards, using the momentum to catch him around the neck with its tail, tight as a noose.  It gave a merciless yank, and it dragged him forward across the stone.     Hooves clawing at his throat, he felt his eyes bulge and his head pounding in time with his heart.  The world was going dark, all the while he kicked frantically at its tail with his buck knife.   This was it.  This was how he died—unceremoniously, strangled to death by some hideous creature in the dark.   Consciousness was slipping from him.  His hooves became like lead weights. He kept kicking at its tail, but even that was getting hard to focus on.   If he could just…   He felt the tension in his hoof as he connected with its tail, and the buck knife sang its tune to the sound of slicing meat and a shriek of pain.   The fang beast didn’t unravel its tail from his neck, but it loosened just enough that the blotches in his sight went away and clarity returned.  Bloodlust sharpened its roar to a knifepoint, saliva flecking from its teeth, and it was already on him.   He threw his hooves up to catch it by the throat and hold its snapping teeth an inch from his face.  Its talons dug into his chest, but he couldn’t spare a hoof for fear of being mauled. All he could do was grit his teeth and endure.   He craned his face away from its slavering jaws in an attempt to look for Sunlight fallen just out of reach.  That’s when he saw its tail. The buck knife hadn’t severed it, but it had left a nasty gouge in it like frayed rope, and a desperate idea came to him.   Hooves still shielding his face, he wrapped his hindleg around its tail on the near side of the wound and squared his hips to kick the other as hard as he could.  The two halves pulled taut, and it ripped clean in half.   The fang beast shrieked in pain and scrambled backwards.  Its disembodied tail thrashed around his neck as if it had a mind of its own, speckling his face with little spurts of blood and blinding him in one eye.     He frantically pulled the cords loose from his neck, the little barbs tearing painful bits of skin free with them.  Blood ran warm down his front, but the sweet breath of life was worth any price. His head clear and his blinded eye blinking away the blur, he got to his hooves with Sunlight at the ready.   The fang beast snarled at him in a crazed frenzy.  It had no eyes, but he could see the fury in the flexion of its leg muscles and the drool pouring from between the cluster of teeth.  It dove at him again, and he ducked, swinging Sunlight over himself where his head was an instant ago.     A force caught Sunlight by the lantern, ripping it from his grasp.  The crunch and moan of iron split the cavern, and the roar of fire rode the waves of nightmarish shrieking and the flopping of meat on stone.   He turned to see the fang beast with its jaws clamped helplessly around Sunlight, and he watched as the lantern poured a river of fire down its throat.  As quickly as it happened, the flames died away, leaving him to stare at the corpse of the fang beast, roasted from the inside. A trail of smoke drifted from its mouth.   That… wasn’t what he had in mind, but it was certainly effective.  He picked up the Sunlight lantern, whose chain glowed white hot but was somehow cool to the touch.     Its flames flickered proudly, as if satisfied with its handiwork.  Rather gruesome, he had to admit, but he sure couldn’t argue. Out of breath, wobbly from the spent adrenaline, and his brain catching up with all that just happened, he needed a moment.   But that moment was short lived when a cry went up in the distant dark.  It was a high, raspy, death rattle-like screech that stripped the warmth from his bones.  Others joined it in frightful harmony, and soon the entire cavern resounded with the deafening cries of a dozen fang beasts out for blood.   No time to rest. He took off.   He blew past outcrops of crystal and stone in his mad dash away from the cries.  Sunlight bounced wildly against his chest, its light casting terrifying shadows along the walls.   The path twisted and turned like knots in a rope, over and under and around stone-teeth and jagged pillars.  He twisted his ankle in a shallow groove worn into the ground by a trickle of water, but he couldn’t stop, not for an instant.  Behind him, he heard their footpads on the stone.   He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to gauge the distance between, but he caught sight of a cliff out the corner of his eye.  He skidded to a halt just as his hooves pushed a dusting of stone over the ledge of the abyss. Sunlight couldn’t reach the bottom, and the pebbles he cast down never shouted back up at him.   A heavy set of footpads thumped behind him.  He turned in time to bear the brunt of a fang beast’s weight with his shoulder, and down he went.   He flailed in hopes of grabbing hold of the ledge or any number of rocky outcrops in reach, the fang beast somersaulting overtop him and off into the darkness, its yelp lost to the vastness of the cave.   Outcrops from the cliff face whizzed past terrifyingly close.  One rose up to meet him in a sickening crunch and a flare of pain in his left side.  It cartwheeled him sideways further down into the darkness, and the next thing he knew, he lay on his back with a heavy ringing in his ears.  Everything hurt.   His lungs felt flattened inside his chest, and heaving for breath stoked the fire that was the wound in his left side.  Dazed, he rolled onto his good side and looked around for Sunlight. It was like everything moved in slow motion, and his head pounded with every heartbeat.   Sunlight lay just out of reach, its frame bent inward and missing part of the latch that held the lid in place.  Its flame within danced like mad.   He reached out to grab it by the chain lying between them, but the motion brought to life a dozen other pains that had him seizing up and heaving for breath.  He gritted his teeth and stared determination at Sunlight before reaching out again and dragging it in. With its flames dancing warm beside his face, he let himself breathe easy.   He was alive.  He still drew breath.  He still defied the darkness.   The same couldn’t be said for the fang beast that sent him tumbling over the cliff.  It lay about two lengths to his right in a motionless heap, its neck bent at an impossible angle.  It wasn’t moving.   He put a tender hoof to his side and winced as it came back slick with blood.  In a sick twist of irony, it seemed he was only spared the same fate thanks to the outcrop that broke his fall.  And maybe a rib or two.   Worse, the wound would fester soon, and without his canteen, which he had shed along with his saddlebags when they snagged on the rocks, he had no way to clean it.  Whether by tooth and claw or disease, it was only a matter of time before the darkness claimed him.   He held Sunlight close to his chest, let its warmth fill him with thoughts of the Sun and the cool breeze of the meadow.  He thought of Luna standing beside him with her wings spread wide, wearing a smile more radiant than the Sun itself. Even here in the dark and loneliness of the crystal caverns, all he wanted was to hear her voice.   The world had a cruel sense of humor, dangling their victory so close only to yank it away as they reached out to grasp it.  He squeezed his eyes shut to hold in a wave of tears. The glow of Sunlight through his eyelids reminded him of the Sunset in the meadow, and with its warmth, he could almost feel Luna lying beside him.   Even in her absence, the mere thought of her warmed him from the inside as Sunlight warmed him from without.  She was near, despite the distance between them. No matter what the Devourer did, it could never truly take her from him.   He didn’t know what this sensation was, only that it felt right, that he was one with her, that he needed her more than anything in the world.  This wonderful sensation rose up from the depths of his heart to envelop him in its warmth.     There was something different about it, though.  It felt fuller, like wings spread wide, as if she really were still with him.  But whatever it was, it wasn’t his imagination. There was a sentience alive inside him, just how Luna had occupied the space in his chest.  He couldn’t help but perk up his ears, open his eyes to stare into the waiting darkness, and dare to hope:   “Luna?”   The warmth within faltered for the briefest moment, but resurged like a consoling smile.   “Hello, Champion,” a voice said between his ears.   His heart sank, and he flicked an ear in dismay.  It was not Luna.   Still, he gazed on in nervous hope of who or what this new voice might be.  Feminine like her, but with a more youthful energy—what he imagined a young mare on the verge of her adult cycles to sound like.   It giggled like the little green-eyed filly in Luna’s dream.  “It’s so nice to finally meet you.”   He held his breath, as if any sudden movement might scare it away.   “My name is Cadance,” it said.  “And you are going to save the world.”