//------------------------------// // Part 31 // Story: Silent Ponyville: Reunion // by Chapter 17 //------------------------------// Silent Ponyville: Reunion Dead on arrival. Part 31 ------ The sirens had stopped but he did not remember them stopping. His limbs were free but he did not remember the enraptured monster mare getting off of him either. About the only thing that felt familiar about the process was the way he could already sense he was no longer in quite the same place even before opening his eyes thanks in large part to the stench of decay around him. When he raised his head off the cold metal floor and finally chanced to part his eyelids the mercifully pitch black darkness was there to shroud his surroundings. … He laid his head back down and remained there motionless, wondering what the point was anymore, or even had been in the first place. ... ”If that's true then I guess she deserved it didn't she?” … “That wasn't her,” he said as he started forcing himself off the ground with a determined groan of pain. He'd lost track of how many injuries he had and for once in his life he'd lost interest. If he was not dead and could still move that was all that mattered. “Posey would never say that.” His front hooves shook as he planted them in the ground and started gritting his teeth against the pain in his two back legs as he started to move them into position. His despair was igniting into something more useful. “This stupid, pointless bucking waste of space is just making me see things again, and that's all there is to this.” With final grunt he was on his hooves again, legs shaking a bit from the pain. At the time he had not paid it any mind but now he was feeling the after effects of the sovereign's latest indulging in tossing him around like a rag doll. Lance reached into his saddle bag and pulled out the first bottle his hoof touched only to be brought face to face with that implausibly stubborn frozen health drink from the hospital that still had naught but a tiny sip in the bottom. He shoved it back into his bag with a scowl. If worse came to worse he would just have to stomp the blasted thing until he could get a few chunks out to chew on. After finding the other bottle he drank about half of what remained and then sighed with relief at the feeling of the pain in his body subsiding a merciful bit to let him resume functioning. He knew he was right. There was no reason to assume his wife was really dead yet. For all he knew she was somewhere waking up after having seen him die and doubtlessly coming to the same conclusion. If he just kept going, they would find one another all the quicker. He reached up and switched on his surgical light. Lance was immediately confronted with the sight of a rusty, dented, scratched up morgue drawer that looked to be very slowly leaking...fluids that trickled down the concrete wall behind it. The floor below was mercifully built at a very slight angle so that the drain at the end of the room kept the pungent fluid from pooling in any way. It was not the only drawer either. As the beam of his light moved upward away from the drain it saw another corpse drawer, and another, and another. The walls were covered with them all around him. Most were visibly sealed from ever opening by steel rebar that had been bent over them after nonsensically jutting out from the wall. The barriers dripped with blood from several spots like somepony had ripped their hooves open with the effort of bending them. More distressingly than even that though, several of the drawers were dented outward. He gave a silent thanks that only a few of them were leaking. He started to turn around but stopped when his light caught a brief flash of a curious bit of color high up on the wall. It was a severed, blood splattered, amber wing hanging from a string looped onto a hook. Lance narrowed his eyes at the completely unnecessary reminder of his new found permanent grounding. The wing was hanging too high off the ground to retrieve, though he wondered why that even mattered at the point. It was nothing but a dead lump of feathery meat at that point. It could not be reattached. He would never fly again. He turned with a resigned sigh and was met with the welcome sight of a door...albeit one that looked less like a proper door and more like a segment of rusted chain link fence with numerous strips of not quite dried out skin woven into it and a bloody door handle. Click. Locked was fine. Locked was something he had been able to work with plenty of times before. In fact after he spent a moment wiping the bit of blood off his hoof before looking at himself and wondering what the point was, he spotted the last peculiarity of the room. It was a metal light switch panel right beside the door, but instead of a switch there was a circular hole about half the size of his hoof that had been drilled through it. A quick peek with his light confirmed that the hole went clear through the wall, although he couldn't necessarily make out what was on the other side with such a limited view. Scratched into the metal above the hole were the words “Truth and Justice”. “There's something in the drawers...of course there's something in the drawers,” he muttered to himself bitterly as he came to the only logical conclusion. He would have to sift through them until he found what he was looking for and then force it through the hole to the other side of the wall. After that, the door would unlock...somehow. Lance could not think of any obvious reasons for it off the top of his head, but he was not questioning it. The drawers held shut by the bent rebar were obviously out of the question, leaving with him five to search through. One of them was leaking. … He groaned and started moving toward it, careful to step over any of the already present streams of fluids on the floor. Though considering what he was about to do there might not be any point to that effort at some semblance of cleanliness either. “Let's get this over with I guess,” he grumbled, his hoof raising to grasp the handle and pull on it before he could stop to think about it. A small flood of foul smelling maroon colored soup started to pour out and he could help but gag at the stench as he took a step back and let it spill out. Only when the flood had calmed to a trickle and the bulk of the contents had gone down the drain did he dare pull the drawer fully open and look inside. It was not the corpse he had expected. It was a cage stuffed with burlap sacks and trash bags. He had no desire to sit there and ponder what was in them exactly, but they all looked so small...and incomplete. Lance took hold of the slab and managed to pull it out with some effort as either the wheels or tracks had been partially corroded. Sticking slightly out of the side of the mess was a relatively clean looking metal cylinder with a cap he assumed would twist off. Though it did not stick out far enough to make it easy to grab through the gaps in the bars, he was still able to coax it out with his hoof and then take firm hold of it to pull it free of the mess. It was followed out by a small, partially rotted hoof that had apparently been resting on top of it. Lance's eyes slowly widened as he realized what was in that cage...and then he carefully took hold of the tiny hoof and set it back inside the bars out of sight. In the end the action accomplished nothing but to him sparing them the indignity of continuing to rot out in the open was better than letting the poor thing's hoof continue to dangle. He swallowed hard and looking down at the cylinder, blinking a few times and silently hoping the rest of the drawers were not similarly occupied. The cap did twist off as he'd anticipated, and thankfully had been water tight as the scroll inside was still in pristine condition. He unrolled it to find a single passage written in red ink. He feasted 'til the foals he took had no more meat to give, but heedless of the lives he took was left his own to live. Lance furrowed his brow thoughtfully and read over it a few more times before returning it to its place in the cylinder. He then set it down in front of the door for safe keeping. The specifics of this lock were not yet concrete in his mind but he was keying in on it. He either needed two cylinders to represent both truth and justice, or one cylinder that represented both. There was grim truth in this first cylinder, but no justice to be found, a fact he pondered bitterly as he pushed the slab back into the drawer before closing it and hiding away the grisly sight. After that first drawer the second looked positively inviting. He opened the door and was greeted with a far less overbearing death stench, with the shape inside looking far more familiar though...still a bit off. It was indeed a corpse, but he would have probably reported somepony for misconduct if he ever found a body in such conditions even in a coroner's office. It looked to be the remains of a stallion, held firmly in place by tight leather straps lying on his side. The entire body was covered in deep chemical burns, the limbs not so much pinned to the torso as much they had been melted into it. Speaking of the torso, it had been cut open, and Lance could tell at a glance that some of the expected contents were missing. The final oddity was the head, mostly the fact that half of it was missing. Everything past the ears was gone, and what was left was pinned to the slab by a rusty knife. In a moment of hope Lance took hold of the knife's grip only to have the blade break off when he tried to yank it free. The rust had corroded the metal past the point of any practical use. “Right...why would that possibly have worked?” he asked himself sourly as he tossed the handle away and started looking for another cylinder. It proved a good deal more elusive than the first, but just as he was about to consider whether or not there even was a cylinder in each drawer, he caught sight of a metallic glint in the beam of his surgical light...inside the opened gut. … At the very least the act of pushing his hoof into a wound would feel somewhat familiar. Though, all the times previously had not been with a hoof covered in bloody bandages over still stinging wounds. All the same, Lance gingerly eased his hoof into the incision and tried his best to ignore the sickening squelching and feeling of ice cold innards. Once he had a firm hold of the cylinder he eased it out and then hastily stepped back to shake some of the chilled blood and juices off of his hoof. He could not help but cough a few times in disgust but was able to quickly put a lid on it, and then twist open the cylinder with some difficulty, covered as it was in congealed grease. He came alone at night to take the killer's face away, and the guards were all too happy when they lied for him next day. “Justice...but no truth.” He placed the second cylinder next to the first, and then made it a point to pick out the cleanest looking drawer to check next. It was probably just a trap but he felt like at least attempting to take it a bit easy on himself after the first two. One of the accessible drawers did indeed look conspicuously less worn down than all the others, which had the effect of making him assume the contents were going to be all more horrible for it. Yet when Lance unlatched the drawer and pulled it open, no horrible remnants or pungent odors spilled out. Now even more curious and reasonably assured by the silence of his watch he attempted to pull the slab out but hit resistance after about an inch. A few tugs did nothing to fix the situation either. Something was broken inside. Pointing his light to shine inside readily solved the mystery or at least gave him suitable reason to believe the track was just bent beyond use. Something that had been sealed inside had struggled with every bit of strength it had, destroying itself and everything inside in the process while leaving its own blood everywhere. It was a miracle then that the two objects resting peaceably in the middle of the bent slab were perfectly intact. One was the metal cylinder he had been expecting to find, and the other was a syringe with the plastic cap still over the needle. He pondered whether or not the drawer had been sealed previously as he reached in and fetched the two items. Either the occupant had been left there to die and later removed by something else, or the way out had been open the entire time leaving them to die a slow death alone for no good reason. Lance opened the cylinder and read the note inside, his eyes widening before he then looked down at the syringe he had set down on the floor. … “Fine.” Now without any interest in looking through the last two drawers, he stashed away the syringe, replaced the note in the cylinder, screwed the cap back on, then strode back over to the wall before pushing the cylinder as far through the hole as he could manage. … Lance tensed as he heard his watch start to buzz. The cylinder shifted slightly as something on the other side got a grip of it and pulled it free of the hole on its end. He heard the cap unscrew and then drop carelessly to the floor prior to the soft sound of crinkling paper followed by agonizingly lengthy silence. … The clicking of the lock on the handle made Lance flinch back a step, watch still steadily buzzing. The fur on the back of his neck then started to stand on end as he heard a familiar squeaking of wheels above the outside of the door. But founded as his worries may well have been nothing came of them. The buzzing of his watch steadily died down as the sound moved away from him and with distance faded back to silence. He still waited a minute longer before moving. Sufficiently lacking in an excuse to wait any longer, he pushed the now unlocked door open and was allowed the privilege of seeing what the nightmare had done to his house. If what he recognized of the layout was correct he was emerging from what was previously one of the upstairs rooms. But instead of a solid path with railing to walk on, he was left nothing but a narrow pathway made of rusted grating only barely thicker than the panel of chain link fence he had just opened. It also bore similarly interwoven bits of not quite dried leather, though the architect had been kind enough to leave enough missing for Lance to get a clear few of the void beneath him. Moving his gaze upwards to the far walls, he saw that his house had been gutted into something of a massive chute, one with a worryingly high number of large missing sections that had been rusted through leaving streams of blood to seep from the damaged walls like a wound gazing out into pitch black nothingness. Just so he would not even have the barest minimum of an illusion of safety, the rails were mostly missing save for the odd bit of jagged metal framing that would do a fine job of impaling him prior to his plummeting should he lose his balance. This was of course assuming that the walkway did not simply buckle beneath him. A pair of wings at that moment would have been indescribably useful. Lance carefully put his two front hooves out onto the walkway and let a bit of his weight settle. There was some creaking, and he felt it give very slightly beneath his weight, but it was still better than he had been dreading. After fully stepping out of the room he looked down to his right to see that the discarded cylinder had been left there, note and all. There was enough time to read the red ink of the note before it caught fire, paper and metal alike burning down to ashes Knew he never took a life but deserved it all the same, compared to what he'd done the death he gave himself was tame. “Guess it was supposed to be both,” he muttered before inching toward the edge of the walkway to get a better look downward. The lower level of his house still existed but a majority of the floor was gone, the bits that were left along the far wall at least looking to be made of much sturdier rusted grate than the upper floor. It was almost inviting in comparison. The stairwell in the far right corner had been replaced with a ladder that linked the upper and lower pathways. It was not nearly as inviting. His doors had also been replaced with flesh woven chain link panels, but it was more than just the doors that had been replaced. The walls around them had become old iron bars heavy with the ever present rust with sections of strange twitching fleshy growths between them that seemed to fuse into the bars themselves like some sort of especially macabre mold. Even the doors had bits of tendon-like flesh seeping onto them to hold them closed...although he had to admit there had never been skin covering any tendon he had seen. These were not rooms so much as jail cells that had been closed off by an infestation. On a whim, Lance inched a bit closer to the edge of his path and looked straight downward fully expecting to see nothing but the walls extending downward forever into the darkness. However he was surprised to see that they were actually finite in length with the bottom of the chute plenty distant but still close enough to see in the beam of his light, if just barely. There seemed to be little other information to glean other than knowing the bottom of this nightmarish house existed from that distance, so he was about to move along when his light so happened to catch a glimpse of something uncharacteristically purple. He let out a small gasp and squinted hard, finding himself calling out moments later with little regard for who heard as though by reflex. “Posey?!” The bit of purple below shifted at the sound and Lance could clearly make out a face that was...only somewhat familiar? “Is that you?! Are you alright?!” The figure below seemed to be seated on top of something instead of on the floor, and did not call back to him. The distance was too great to even try and make out the expression on her face. Before Lance could shout to her again she, or rather the thing below her, started inexplicably moving along the floor and retreated out of view through a large door. He was left puzzled but at the same time absolutely certain that he needed to get down there as soon as he could. Lifting the beam of his light back up to the catwalk below, he followed it until it looped around out of sight beneath the upper walkway, which was odd considering he could not see anything through the gaps of the floor beneath him. He started along the path to his right, teeth clenched with nervousness at the way the weak grating below him slightly yielded with a quiet creak to the weight of each of his hoof falls. When he had a better viewing angle to the unseen corner he checked again to see that it stopped at another ladder leading downward to a platform on an even lower level. There was not a path beyond that platform that was readily apparent at first but a check of the adjacent corner illuminated another platform with a door that lead Celestia knew where. The most notable feature of this second platform however was a section of metal grating leaning against the wall and blocking the door. It was attached to the end of the platform via a set of hinges and looked long enough to bridge the gap if he could find some way to pull it down. His eyes drifted back up to the flesh infested prison cells, because where else would he find the things he needed? There was one cell on the lower path where his front door would have been, and another three on the upper path. Two of them were behind him, replacing the doors to his office and hall closet, and the other was at the end of the path where the master bedroom had been previously. The doors to his library and upstairs bathroom were both missing and he could only assume it was because space where those rooms would have been were taken up by one of the cells and the body storage that had replaced...that room. Lance trotted past the corpse closet to the door at the end of the path but found himself hesitating yet again as he stood before the flesh riddled chain link door. Even as he stood there mere steps away watching the erratic twitches in the bloody flesh-like material he could not rightly discern whether it was actually alive or simply appeared to be so thanks to some trick of the light. After a brief pause he gave the door handle a try. It readily turned at his touch, but the door itself would only swing open about half an inch before hitting resistance from the many small tendons that spanned the gap from the door to the wall...but not that much resistance. He opted to at least try forcing it open before embarking on yet another hunt for the appropriate tool. Lance adopted a more solid stance before starting to put progressively more strength into his attempt to pry it apart. As the opening in the door widened bit by bit the tendrils stretched thinner and the twitching of the fleshy mold grew more intense. The thinning tendrils paled and then finally snapped apart causing Lance to stagger back a step as the door freely swung open sending a spattering of blood flying out, part of which caught him in the face. Once he'd wiped it off as best he could manage he looked up again to see the tendons bleeding copiously...except the blood was not dripping onto the floor, and he became conscious of a very distant, distorted screaming noise. Every pulse of bright red blood sent seemingly sentient drops crawling back up along the fleshy infestation, soon building into a sanguine swarm trickling its way across the door and cell wall in all defiance of gravity. As the severed flesh bled copiously the twitching motions grew steadily fewer, and as Lance watched it faded into a deathly pale color as the lost and wandering blood turned a sickly black shade. After a while, all motion had ceased, the quiet unnatural screaming in the distance had stopped, and whatever black, dead blood was left began dripping to the floor from the severed tendons as one would have expected from the start. Lance was left feeling vaguely as though he had just killed something, but soon discarded the sentiment as he opened the door and stepped through. He'd already killed things in that place that were overtly alive. What did he care about some growth on a door at that point? What had been he and his wife's bedroom was now a bare room, or at least what he could see of the room was bare. The majority of the available space was shrouded from sight by a long hospital curtain that spanned the length of the room to his right, the hanging fabric unable to make up its mind as to whether it was skin or curtain. He glanced downward and dismissed any notions of pushing the curtain aside, as bits of the bottom of the curtain stretched down and fused into the metal flooring. Still, it was a fairly thin looking material, and he knew for a fact that there was plenty of empty space behind it in which something might hide. There were no guarantees that the continued silence of his watch ensured his safety either. On the opposite side of the room, a hole had been eroded through the rusted iron panel that now passed for the wall near the far corner. He could see the remnants of a jagged railing through the hole, indicating that it lead out onto their balcony. Keeping close to the left wall as far from the curtain as he could manage, he crept slowly toward the balcony. At a little past the midway point, his ear twitched and he stopped, turning his light toward the curtain and staring intently. … Lance brushed it off. He was reasonably certain he'd heard something quietly rustle the curtain but it had been such a slight noise that the culprit may well have just been displaced air from his own movements. The amber surgeon put a bit more speed in his step all the same though. If there was something behind the curtain it likely already knew he was there anyway. The balcony was in about as severe a state of disrepair as the walkway inside, with nothing but a vast empty black void stretching off in every direction all around him. The door that would have let him inside onto the no longer existent walkway over his living room was missing for fairly obvious reasons. Against the wall where said door would have been now rested an old rusty fold out step stool. What caught his attention before either of these however was the mildew eaten worn down table on which sat a health drink. A single, completely empty health drink. “Oh buck off,” Lance seethed quietly as he back hoofed the bottle off the table, sending it flying off the side of the balcony and into the void below. Even if he would need an empty bottle to solve some kind of problem in the near future, he already had a couple. The stepping stool on the other hoof struck him as having too many uses to simply leave there, even if it was too big to carry in his saddlebag. He could at least lug it back inside so it would be closer when he needed it. Though it was not that heavy to him he still found himself hissing with pain after managing to get it resting on his back, his wing stumps protesting the added weight no matter how slight. Mentally assuring the frayed nerves that had once been connected to his wings that it would be a short trip, Lance was about to step back inside when he heard a door open below that, judging from the direction of the sound, would have been his front door if said front door were still there. He then heard the hoof falls of a group of ponies moving along the front of the house on ground that he knew for fact was not there, piquing his curiosity further as he looked over toward the corner they would be rounding at about that very moment. His light flickered and went out. There was a brief moment of panic at the sudden blackness around him that he managed to subdue by noting the silence of his watch. Though given the propensity of the rollers to hide from the vigilance of his timepiece his hooves still moved with plenty purpose as they tried fiddling with the surgical light in hopes of turning it back on. He had not ruled out the possibility of the grinning stalker turning on him yet either. “So Mr. Strongshy let's go over the events again, as you told them to me,” came the voice of a stallion below at the corner of the house. “From the start.” “Is there...any particular reason you all had to come out he-” “From the start Mr. Strongshy,” the stallion reminded him firmly. “Alright, I...heard glass breaking upstairs, and then Posey screaming. I told Fluttershy to hide beneath the sink in the downstairs bathroom and then ran upstairs. When I was almost to the door I heard hoofsteps running toward the bedroom window, and by the time I made it inside I only caught a glimpse of a pony's tail and wing as they flew away through the broken window. I didn't chase after them because I thought I could still save my wife but...it didn't work,” Lance's voice replied in the dark. “Right, sounds reasonable. Although...your neighbor told us there were bars bolted over the window.” “...” “Wait no, sorry, your neighbors told us this. Plural. The husband and wife across the street said the same thing. Those bars had been bolted over the window for at least a month or thereabouts. So according to your story, the intruder was in full view of the window for long enough to undo the bolts and your wife didn't see or hear a thing before the window broke.” “Posey was-” “Napping, right. Convenient she's not here to confirm that, but let's just assume that it's true. The intruder, according to your story, undid the bolts holding the bars over the window, hid the bars somewhere because reasons since we couldn't find them on the ground below, indicating he didn't just chuck the panel over the side of the cloud here, then after having taken so much effort to not make any noise so that neither you or your wife was aware of him, proceeded to carelessly bash through the window as loud as could be.” “...” “But let's play devil's advocate some more here! Maybe your wife noticed him as he was about to start dealing with the glass more delicately, and he noticed her noticing him, so he had to act fast if he was going to get to her before she screamed. But it didn't work, so he stabbed her...what, twenty-seven times?” “Thirty-seven,” a third stallion corrected. “Right thanks. So he stabbed her thirty-seven times while you were bolting up the stairs, and you look like a fairly fit stallion, so that's quite an impressive stabbing speed! So now I'm right here wondering...why the hay didn't this burglar you propose exists just...fly away when your wife noticed him? I don't know if you know anything about burglars Mr. Strongshy, but they generally want to avoid getting into confrontations. So you're going to have a tough time selling me on your wife getting stabbed thirty-seven times during daylight hours by a burglar that didn't even grab so much as the jewelry box on the dresser.” “...” “So are you going to cooperate peacefully or are you going to make another scene for your daughter to deal with alongside her dead mother and that shiner you gave her? Because let me tell you, we would not mind in the slightest if you decided to resist arrest right now.” “...” The stallion let out a grumbling disappointed sigh. “Ah well...one for the road at least.” Lance heard himself let out a pained grunt in tandem with the sound of a stallion's hoof quite competently striking him across the jaw, followed by the sound of him collapsing in a daze. There was another pause before the stallion spoke again. “You want to make something of it Strongshy?” … “Yeah I thought not. Geldings like you only have enough spine to take on little fillies and mares too sick to fight back. Read this dirt bag his rights.” The Lance of the present was left to stand there in the darkness a moment longer before his light flickered back on of its own accord. He looked around to find no visible changes to the immediate vicinity, and his watch was still quiet. With no urgent danger present he spent a moment thinking back to the incident he had just listened to for a second time, mostly trying to remember that police stallion's name... “Blue Shield...Detective Blue Shield,” he muttered to himself as he found the memory in question. He recalled it distinctly now. Having finished his recollection he turned back to the more important business of bringing the step ladder back into the house and then finding something to do with it. Upon stepping back into the house was stopped in his tracks by the sight of a long, actively bleeding cut slashed into the curtain, large enough for a full grown pony to worm their way out. There were a number of red hoof prints on the floor now as well. They lead to the wall, and then into the house, the bloody hoof prints growing messier as the got closer to the master bedroom door. Lance glanced at the wall to see the words 'WHICH ONE' messily scrawled on the wall in blood...but he did not think it was blood from the curtain. It was too consistent...the author would have had to go back to the curtain a few times to get enough of the sanguine ink. Some bleeding pony had cut their way through the curtain, wrote on the wall with their own blood, then departed into the house without making a sound. With not much else in the way of options Lance again steeled himself and continued inward, noting with some dismay that the hoof prints vanished at the threshold of the bedroom. If they were inside, he had no idea where, especially considering he could see that the three other doors would still closed at a glance. There was nopony new in the corpse closet either. He set the step stool against the wall next to the door inside for safe keeping and moved on. If the pony that had been hiding behind the curtain wanted to bother him again there was nothing he could do about it and little sense in worrying. Next door. Lance groaned softly in pain as he wrenched the flesh infested door open without nearly as much hesitation this time, not even bothering to watch it die before examining the room inside. It was...oddly normal actually. Certainly not the hall closet but simultaneously nothing like the nightmare outside. He strode further inside and found himself standing in a police station interrogation room with a table in the center, at which himself and Blue Shield were seated at opposite ends with a one way mirrored window on the far end of the room. The room was pitch black but the two seemed to act as though there were plenty of illumination beyond Lance's surgical light. Blue Shield placed a piece of paper on the table and slid it toward Lance somewhat impatiently. “Sign it.” “Sign what?” Lance asked pointedly as he glared at the other stallion, a pronounced bruise with a bit of dried blood on the side of his muzzle. “Your confession. I figured we'd wrap this up quick. Make it easy on yourself and your daughter. She's had a bad enough time without you drawing this out,” Blue Shield explained as he just as pointedly placed a quill and inkwell beside the paper. “And what does that say I did exactly?” “That's a fair question I suppose. I'm not going to read you the whole thing but, the gist of it is that you got tired of taking care of your wife and wanted your life back. It was a long, taxing convalescence and in the end you couldn't resist letting out a little of that pent up rage, hence the thirty-seven stab wounds. Your daughter tried to stop you, but a little tap from daddy was all it took to discourage her. Afterward you set up the crime scene in order to make it appear like a break in to cover your flank, and I have to say it was probably one of the worst efforts I've seen in my career. You had the good sense to break the window from the outside but that's about it, the rest was pretty much a transparent lie,” Blue Shield explained. “Again, not the exact text of the document, but that's pretty much what it says.” “...” “Look, Strongshy, maybe there was a time in your life when you commanded respect. That time is over. Now you're garbage. Stallion shaped garbage. Nothing you've ever done before this point counts anymore. Save yourself the time, save your daughter even more pain, and sign the confession so we can toss you into the bin, forget about you, and get on with our lives.” Blue Shield reached over and dipped the quill into the ink a few times before holding it out for him. Lance did not utter a single word in reply as his wing unfurled and slapped the quill out of Blue Shield's hoof. The detective glanced over at the wall that now bore a small splat of ink after the quill had struck it, and then chuckled to himself. “You know technically that's assaulting an officer, but that's fine. We already have plenty of evidence for a murder charge and five officers willing to testify that you resisted arrest. Won't take much convincing at all to get a jury to buy it, and then you're buried for life in Foalsome with the rest of the garbage.” He chuckled to himself again, sounding even more malevolent this time. “Your fellow garbage though, that's the special part. See, they're going to know what you did to get there. Even their sort consider the kind of stallion that would kill a helpless mare and lay hooves on their own daughter like you did the lowest of the low. You won't last a week in there before some kind of 'accident' happens, and then nopony has to deal with you anymore, and some lucky prisoner's going to be a lot more popular for a while.” “If you're so intent on seeing me dead why didn't you just use that 'resisting arrest' as an excuse to break my neck back there?” Lance spat back glaring daggers at him. “Wouldn't have mattered back then, truth be told. You would've died defiant, and that's not what I want. I want you broken. I want to see you in a cage. I want to watch the hope leave your eyes. I want you to live long enough to die inside before the rest of you follows. That's the only way I'll be able reconcile the sight of your wife lying there with blank eyes wide open wondering why the world let a monster like you have your way with her. Normally I'd lose sleep over wanting to do what I want to do to you. After I see this through properly though...and get to see you on a slab in the prison morgue...I'll sleep like a newborn foal. Not a care in the world.” The detective reached down and picked up something that had been resting against the side of his chair on the floor before letting it drop loudly onto the table. It was a nice thick phone book. “Now I'll ask again nicely, because I look forward to that beauty sleep. Sign the confession, Strongshy, before this gets even worse for you,” Blue Shield repeated himself, staring down Lance patiently. … “I'm not going to sign anything. I had blood on my coat because I tried to help my wife after I found her. I'm a doctor, what else would I do? The neighbors saw the bars earlier but they never saw me take them off, because I didn't take them off. For that matter, they didn't see anything of what happened and can't falsify my story anyway. My daughter was hiding through the whole thing so she can't confirm anything one way or another either. You have no murder weapon, because the intruder took it with them. If you were so sure this was a slam dunk you wouldn't be here trying to beat a confession out of me,” Lance said with narrowed eyes before tearing the confession in half and tossing it back onto the table. … “Alright Strongshy, don't say I didn't warn you.” Blue Shield got up from his seat, lifted the phone book off the table and then...set it down on its spine, opening it before browsing through the business numbers. “What are you doing?” Lance asked, having expected something far worse. “Truth be told with everything stacked against you right now the odds are good that the kingdom's attorney could convince a jury...but I don't want 'good'. The sort of lawyer a stallion like you could afford might just turn 'good' into 'reasonable doubt'. I want 'dead to rights', and right now the stallion that can do that for the department is in Ponyville visiting his grand daughter after having warned me not to call the spa they went to unless somepony was murdered, and hey...guess what you did?” the detective explained as he found the number he was looking for and then slammed the book closed before...freezing in place? Lance blinked in confusion, wondering when they were going to burn away like the other visions he had seen in that house. His light started flickering, again with no siren to be heard. He did not do much besides glance down at it and wait since there had not been anything to do about it in the past. However he was made much less apathetic by the last flickering of light revealing for an instant the two figures of the past suddenly looking directly at him with eyes wide before the room was plunged back into pitch black darkness. Lance backed away a step but knew he could not dare to try moving around that place without a light, and was left standing there blind for a few agonizing seconds before his light came on again, starting off dim but steadily brightening until the true nature of the room became apparent. It was every bit the jail cell that its outward appearance suggested. Aside from the filthy, half broken toilet in the corner and a slab of misshapen metal jutting out of the wall that he could not definitively place as a table or a bed, it was nearly completely empty. The things that made it only nearly empty were somewhat...interesting. Against the far wall was a suspended pony figure. It's coat was not quite all gray, bearing something of an amber tinge. Across its body was an assortment of deep cuts, out of which seeped sentient drops of black blood that flowed in any direction they pleased to reach another adjacent wound that they might re-enter the corpse. None of these injuries looked immediately deadly though, especially next to the noose digging into its neck so tightly that the skin had worn through. The face was obscured by what resembled a surgical mask made of pale, flayed skin that had long ago dried into a toughened hide. This mask also covered the knot of the noose behind the neck, making it impossible to untie. A rope seemed like an excellent starting point in getting that pathway down to bridge the gap to that door. Lance's eyes followed the rope up to see that it disappeared into a small hole in the ceiling. That was no good...clearly he would not be untying the knot but even if he found something with which to cut the rope there was no way of knowing if he could dislodge it from whatever it was attached to, because it was clearly attached to something else the body would have fallen to the floor. He gave the room another quick look over and found a likely lead. On the side of the room opposite the corpse was a similar looking rope emerging from another hole in the ceiling, traveling perhaps a third of the way toward the floor, and then retreating into another hole in the wall. It was impossible to know exactly how many twists and turns the rope took in the unseen space above the ceiling of the cell, but if the distance between the two ends of the room was any indication it would probably do the trick all the same...assuming it was even the same rope. It was something to work with at the least, and Lance retreated out the door not looking forward to cutting the rope free of that hanging corpse as he took the few steps it took to reach his office. “If I remember right...this'll lead back into that same interrogation room,” he mumbled to himself before taking firm hold of the door and starting to wrench it open. After the last bit of meat mold had snapped free and the door began bleeding out he was proven right as his light illuminated a different but still familiar face. It was an older stallion sitting across the table from Lance's past self, with Blue Shield standing patiently at the door boring a hole into the murder suspect's skull with his eyes. His seated counterpart had his attention elsewhere though, intently sifting through and examining the various reports and crime scene photographs. The three stallions uttered not a single word as the moments ticked by, the older seemingly apathetic whilst the passing time weighed heavily upon the two younger. Finally the older stallion looked up at Lance over his glasses, then took them off while glancing down at the papers in front of him again. “So Mr. Strongshy...you and I have something in common,” he began. “That being...?” “Neither of us hold the rules of our professions sacred. This would usually be a problem, but with the results the two of us produce our bosses stopped caring a long time ago. So understand that literally every other officer here would never do what I'm about to do by telling you that I am about eighty...maybe ninety percent sure that you didn't kill your wife.” Lance's eyes widened. He did not say a word further. It was an altogether oddly fearful response for somepony that was about to be freed from a murder charge, and the lack of reaction from the older detective belayed the fact that it was exactly what he had been expecting. Blue Shield took on a sharp frown and stepped closer. “You're...what? Hey, I know our case might get sucker punched by a slimy lawyer and a dense jury Pinot Noir, but that's no reason to throw it-” “Thirty-seven times is...excessive,” Pinot continued on, completely ignoring Blue Shield. “Your wife was probably gone before the tenth. To keep adding so many after that you'd have to be enraged, panicked, insane, vengeful...let's just call it a crime of passion. I can think of two reasons you might have done this that would fit the bill, but you having done this for either of them doesn't add up. If Blue Shield here is right and you resented your wife for her illness essentially taking your life away, you could have thought up methods much more painful than thirty seven stab wounds. If on the other hoof you loved your wife, you could have sent her on her way painlessly. In both of those scenarios you would've been a hay of a lot cleaner about it too. You're a doctor.” “You can't seriously be suggesting that your first impressions trump everything else at the-” “I wouldn't be saying word one if my first impressions were all I had,” Pinot interrupted again whilst casting Blue Shield a sidelong glance that managed to get the other officer to take a step back. “But somepony could hardly be blamed for thinking you did it. Muddled motive aside, you clearly had the means and your attempt at a story is the most hilarious thing I've seen in a good decade. The DA could put you in front of a jury and probably have a conviction the next day, even if I got called to the stand to testify that I'd said all of this to you. For that matter, you could probably tell them exactly what did happen and they wouldn't believe you anyway. I've seen enough trials to know he doesn't need you dead to rights, because any jury that saw a suspect as unsympathetic as you on trial for murdering a victim as sympathetic as your wife would need far more than reasonable doubt to resist a guilty verdict. Blue Shield's only feeling doubtful because he's failing to consider I could just pass your case file on and call it a day.” “So do that,” Blue Shield suggested. “Won't fix anything,” Pinot Noir said as he closed the case file folder. “Anything you'd like to add before I walk out that door, Strongshy?” Lance sat there looking back at him, determined to keep invoking his right to remain silent. “Probably for the best. Nopony will believe what actually happened until I find enough evidence for it anyway,” the detective replied, taking the folder with him as he exited the interrogation room. Once Pinot Noir had exited the scene, the two other occupants of the interrogation room froze as Lance's light began flickering. By now it was expected and even though he felt the urge to make an early exit from the room he was not about to risk falling off the precarious pathway outside just to avoid his memories leering at him so intently. Near the end of the flickering something was indeed staring at him as predicted, but it was neither of the stallions in the room. He saw the pale visage of the deaf colt in the reflection of the interrogation room's one way mirror as his watch began to softly buzz. With the last flicker of light there were menacing cracks creeping outward from the center of the pane of glass, and his past self was starting to be overtaken by vein like tendrils of black blood appearing on his face. Lance was somewhat less willing to stay put for this unexpected entrance and promptly excused himself to the pathway outside, slamming the door shut behind him as his light went out completely. He stood there in the dark with his side pressed against the wall for a few tense moments, listening intently for any sound in the darkness aside from his own unnerved breathing and the generals creaks and groans of the structure around him. His light made a soft clicking noise as it came back to life and returned to him his sight, his watch now silent. Knowing that he was going to have to go back in regardless of his feelings on the situation, he cracked the door open again and peeked inside. It was another jail cell, much like the first save for the absence of a hanging body in the center of the room. Lance quickly found that the denizen of this cell was on the bed instead. He was covered with what looked like an assortment of bloody, mold encrusted, dusty surgical sheets, the inner edges of which were stuffed inside a large gaping wound that traveled from the bottom of his rib cage clear down to his groin. There were several odd bumps around the wound and Lance felt comfortable assuming they were entrails that had leaked out but were now hidden from sight. The instrument that had cut the stallion prisoner open was still there, and the sight of it gave him pause. It was a rusted metal hook attached to a chain by a simple clasp. The chain traveled to the nearest bit of iron bar that was peeking out from the interwoven bits of fleshy fabric, attached to which was a small chain pulley with another segment of the chain emerging from the other side. Lance's eyes followed that second length and found himself looking at the ground just beside the bed at a hoof hanging out from beneath the surgical drapes, clinging to the chain tightly even in death. There was no way to know if this stallion had done so under coercion or by his own will, but it was clear that it was the stallion who had pulled the chain and done this to himself. No matter what this poor soul's problem had been the hook with which he had ended his own life was something Lance needed as it looked sufficiently large to be able to latch onto the edge of the walkway he needed to pull into position. Lance gave the corpse a tentative nudge, just in case, and then tried to remove it. At first it was stubborn, probably lodged in one of the dead pony's pelvic bones, but a bit of wrenching it back and forth proved adequate to dislodge it. It was still dripping with dead clotted blood, and Celestia knew what else given all that it had cut through. He grimaced but resolved to shake off the worst of it and then wipe off most of the rest with one of the blank pieces of paper in his saddlebag that soon found itself crumpled up and discarded. Naturally thinking that a chain would be even more useful than a rope, he pulled the end of the chain free of the stallion's hooves and gave the other end a pull. It did not budge in the slightest no matter how hard he pulled. Setting the chain down he stepped over to the pulley to give it a closer look, finding that the entire assembly had been long ago rusted over into oblivion. He gave the chain a few more strong tugs but found it unyielding as ever. “Figures,” he muttered bitterly as he unclasped the hook from what may have been a very useful item and stashed it in his saddlebag. He exited the room with a bit more urgency to his hoof steps, practically able to hear the buzzing in his ears from the deaf colt's gaze already. What was worse is that he would have to use that blasted ladder multiple times in his considerably injured state, but there was no way around it. At least the lower walkway looked far more stable. Lance reached the end of the upper pathway and then let out a hissing groan of pain as he took hold of the ladder and then eased his back legs down onto the next lower rung one at a time. Not wanting to aggravate his condition, he took the descent slow, stopping to look around periodically in service to the hairs standing on the back of his neck but eventually reaching the bottom unscathed before limping his way over to the last jail cell. He felt a fleeting appreciation of the way the floor didn't partially give way beneath his hooves before he wrenched the next door open, not even waiting for it to bleed to death before peeking inside. Having expected another instance of the same interrogation room, he was surprised to see a jail cell with none of his memories painted onto the surroundings. The ceiling of this cell was completely overtaken with the dark red flesh mold that had seemingly spread out from the interwoven bits of cloth on the front panel of bars. Along the walls a tendril of the mold had periodically spread downward seeking anything else to consume and had fallen short save for the one in the far corner of the room. In the corner lay another deceased stallion with his back against the wall, body partially overtaken by the consuming flesh that also completely covered his face. In his hoof was a fairly old looking knife that looked sufficiently large enough to have caused the damage to his neck. His head had been pulled back at a right angle, pulling open the jagged looking cut in his throat that had gone deep enough to expose a portion of his spine. Several tendrils of flesh mold were traveling down his exposed trachea through the fatal injury he'd given himself. Normally he would have been of a mind to ask why these stallions had all apparently taken their own lives, but given his recent experiences he did not feel it was much of a mystery. He mostly noted the fact that he had just found a knife that would likely be able to cut through the ropes back in the first cell. One might assume he was also thrilled to find an actual weapon, but he was thoroughly expecting it to burn to ash the second he was done using it to cut the rope. He reached down and found the stallion's hoof easy to uncurl, letting him pick up the knife by the handle instead of the blade. “Thanks,” he said with sincerity toward the corpse, wiping the cold congealed blood off the blade with another errant piece of paper before he placed it in one of the tool holders on the front strap of his saddlebags. Lance then turned and curiously found himself looking into the same interrogation room...more importantly he found himself looking into the same interrogation room at the same angle from the other side of the room leaving the cell's usual exit blocked. His past self and Pinot Noir were seated at the table with a small pot of planting soil, a bottle of water, and a manila envelope between them, with Blue Shield standing nearby with eyes intently on their suspect. None of them seemed to notice that the one way mirror had been shattered with large jagged shards of it lying all over the ground with nothing to separate them from the black void beyond it. He did not wait for the memory to even begin before he strode past them and attempted to open the door. It was locked, naturally. No police station worth their salt was going to leave the door unlocked for a potential murderer to leave as they pleased. “Not even going to ask why I brought this in here?” Pinot Noir asked as he flipped through a folder, eyes still on the paperwork as he nodded in the direction of the small plant pot on the table between them. Lance did not ask. “Fair enough. Your right to remain silent is kind of irrelevant at this point since you've already spoken, but suit yourself.” The older stallion set the folder down and then gave it a tap to direct Lance's attention. “Do you know what these are?” Lance glanced downward, recognizing the file instantly and then glaring daggers at the detective. “Yeah you do. We'll come around to that. First off I want to say that one of the many things I've learned in my career is that even if they try their very hardest, foals are terrible liars. Not in the sense that they're terrible and liars. I'm saying they're terrible at lying. Your daughter is no exception. I sat down and had a chat with her about this case. Cute kid. Polite too, even with all of this happening to her. You and your wife did a good job raising her.” Lance did not thank him for the compliment. “Now when I was talking to her about it there was a pattern. For every question I asked she either hid behind her mane and said nothing, or spent a moment looking downward before she answered. It was almost like she had a script she kept trying to remember...and had no idea what to do when I asked a question that script didn't cover. This pattern of hers changed for one question. You want to know what I asked her, Doctor Strongshy?” … “What did you ask her?” Lance finally spoke up. “Oh it does talk,” Pinot Noir noted with a brief grin before continuing. “I asked her if her daddy had done this to mommy...and she came to life. She teared up, her eyes went wide, and she looked me dead in the eyes and cried out that daddy didn't do this. She looked me dead in the eye without even a half second's pause and told me her daddy hadn't done anything. Your daughter begged us not to put you in jail, because you were a good pony. She was a completely different filly.” “So why do you have-” “Let me finish,” the detective said, silencing Lance with a briefly raised hoof. He then fished a small vial of fluid out of his shirt pocket and set it on the table. “Do you know what this is?” Lance looked at the label, not recognizing the name on it. “No.” “Makes sense, I doubt they use this in your line of work. This is called luminol. You spray this on a surface, get it under a black light, and if there was blood on that surface recently enough it'll light up blue. Can't use it on ponies though, it's toxic. But being able to do that would be pretty nifty for us investigators...which is why a few years back the justice department got in touch with some forensics unicorns and tasked them with seeing if those effects could be replicated with a nice, safe spell. I think one of your old college buddies was even consulted on it. Ranny or something.” “Manny.” “Thank you. Anyway, those unicorns managed it, and the spell they made was tested until it was proven safe and reliable enough to be admissible as evidence, so long as the unicorn casting the spell has been properly vetted. We have one such unicorn on staff here, and a small lab in the building just for catching little things like this before the trail goes cold. We didn't use the spell on you because there wouldn't have been any point to it. Like you said to Blue Shield, there would be blood on you because you're a doctor and would have naturally tried to help your wife.” The detective picked up the manila envelope and started opening it. “Your daughter on the other hoof was supposed to be hiding away from any of the dreadfulness that happened in that bedroom, per your story. If this spell could find blood on her in any amount we might have to start looking for explanations for that.” Pinot Noir pulled a few photographs out of the envelope and set them on the table. They all portrayed Fluttershy standing in a dark, sterile lab environment looking like she was exerting all her effort to not cry. Her entire body was also glowing a bright blue color. “We'd especially need to find some way to explain blood having recently been copiously present on literally every inch of your daughter's body. Don't worry too much though, we already did. I sent the boys back to your house and had them spray down your bath tub with the real stuff,” he added before pulling another set of photographs out of the envelope of the aforementioned bath tub glowing blue beneath a black light. “What I didn't expect them to find on top of all this was the little trail of very faint hoof prints on the carpet right outside traveling down the hallway.” He set down the third set of photographs alongside the other two. “I guess she wasn't completely dry yet.” “What are you-” “Would you like to revise your statement yet?” Pinot Noir interrupted him sharply. Lance was silent as Blue Shield approached the table and looked at the photographs, his hardened expression softening to one not nearly as certain. “Alright. That brings us around to these,” he began again, setting a hoof on the folder that had provoked Lance's ire. “I had a particularly speedy pegasus take a request to a judge and got a subpoena for your wife's medical records. Truth be told I didn't trust you to not omit a few things if I had asked you directly, assuming you'd even reply at all. I don't think we have to go over the details again. You'd know them, and why they're relevant right now, better than anypony. So doctor, I ask again, would you like to revise your statement?” His lack of response indicated that he did not. “I really have to give you credit for this next one. Your entire cover story was a disaster but you did manage to hide the murder weapon fairly well. We went through your house and the surrounding area, cloud and ground alike, over and over but didn't turn up anything. You had everypony in the department stumped...except for me,” he said before reaching into his coat pocket again to produce a knife contained in a plastic bag with an evidence label. Lance looked in alarm down to the knife and then up at the detective. “You gave it a thorough washing and then put it right back in the knife block where nopony would think to even check for it. It was hidden in plain sight,” Pinot Noir said with a grin bordering on admiration. “In the end I only found it on a hunch when I ordered ever knife in that block to be tested for blood and there it was. But that's not even the most interesting part.” He pulled one last photograph out of the envelope. It pictured a knife on a lab table, glowing blue all over save for a thin curved line on the handle in the distinct shape of a very small hoof. “I don't need the hoof prints you washed off to prove who was holding that knife at the time of the crime, Doctor Strongshy. Not with a hoof that size.” “What in the...” Blue Shield said as he stared at the snapshot in disbelief. “In summary, your daughter was not where you said she was, had a large amount of blood cleaned off of her in your bathtub, was holding this knife when it killed your wife, and said wife was on record as mentally unstable with a terminal illness. It also happens that the nature of the damage done fits much better with the profile of a panicked child that doesn't know what they're doing than that of a well learned doctor. Are you sticking with your story?” “I'm...I'm not saying anything,” Lance reaffirmed, looking somewhat less headstrong as he lowered his gaze down to the table. “You're buried in a mountain of circumstantial evidence right now, and I doubt any jury is going to buy the efforts of a defense lawyer to pin the crime on your daughter no matter what the facts of the case say. Basically, you don't have to say anything, because it wouldn't matter either way. But I have something right here that is potentially going to have you and your daughter both walking out of this station this evening.” Pinot Noir set a small plastic bag on the table that contained what looked to be a single seed. “This is a seed of truth. It grows into an exotic flower, one that is very difficult and expensive to cultivate here,” he resumed explaining as he pulled the planting pot and water bottle to his side of the table. “The kingdom invests in keeping a small supply of them for such murky occasions as this when we can't afford to be wrong. Most ponies will tell you that these things bloom in response to the truth, but that's not quite right.” He poked a small hole in the planting soil before opening the bag and letting the seed drop into it. Then he buried the seed beneath a small mound that was promptly moistened with water poured from the bottle. “You can't just do something like plant one and say the sky is blue. The truth about this seed is that it's a sadistic little bastard. The truth it hears has to cause pain before it'll bloom. Doesn't matter if it's grief, regret, embarrassment, sadness, it only has to hurt. So what we're going to do right now, is you're going to sit there and not say a single word, and I'm going to hurt you.” Blue Shield had been sifting through the photographs, the brimstone and fire gone from his eyes as he was finally feeling the weight of what he'd almost done to him. As Pinot Noir began explaining what had happened in the Strongshy residence upon that wretched day the younger officer simply sat there and listened. “I don't know exactly what was going on in the house just before, but given the time of day you were probably in the kitchen preparing a meal. One way or another your daughter winds up in that upstairs bedroom alone with your wife, maybe having been sent up there by you to ask what she wanted to eat..kind of odd since you knew Posey couldn't keep anything down at that point. Maybe you were in denial, maybe you were just keeping things going the way they'd always gone for Fluttershy's sake, I don't know. Once your daughter's up there, she-” The Lance of the present flinched as his light suddenly went straight out without even the slightest flicker like somepony had simply flipped the switch. The detective's words were drowned out by a combination of the extreme buzzing of his watch that was itself then drowned out in turn by a ringing in his ears that quickly grew deafening to the point that he was left clutching his head in pain. His light started flickering back to life, but he was still trapped in the same interrogation room with several alarming differences. His past self was now faced away from him, sitting in a corner convulsing as black veins overtook him. The table was now vacant, save for the blood that was pooling atop it from the two stallion sized, blood drenched burlap sacks that were held against the ceiling by a combination of rusty lengths of chain and the many large, jagged shards of glass that had been stabbed right through them. The deaf colt was casually strolling his way across the room toward him, the rate at which he was approaching rather out of sync with the speed of his motions. Lance sneered instead of trying to retreat from his spot. There was nowhere to go in any case. “So what are you going to do this time, huh?! All you can ever do is delay me, you haven't been able to stop or undo anything I've done!” The deaf colt stopped within hoof's reach of Lance and stared him down, the amber surgeon almost certain he was going to be knocked around and then put under to awaken in another locked room. Instead the flickering of his light stopped and the room was shrouded in darkness. Lance let out a grunt of pain as he felt something seem to bite his foreleg, and then the ringing in his ears receded until there was silence to match dark, uninterrupted save for his own labored breathing. He wanted to reach down and feel his leg but did not dare move a muscle. … The light flickered back to life. The cell, open door and all, was back, and the deaf colt was nowhere to be seen. On the floor now rested a small potted plant with the dried husk of a long dead flower hanging over the edge. Without any new threats to consider, Lance let himself look down at his leg at last, finding that the deaf colt had decided to opt for convenience and nail the newest note directly to him. ”You confuse 'perpetually unable' and 'currently unwilling.'” “Thanks for the napkin,” Lance sneered as he tore the note off and instantly regretted it due to the resulting pain from the nail stuck into him. Normally he advised ponies to not pull such things out and wait until they got to a hospital to not risk further damage, but Lance had no idea how much was still ahead and knew that leaving it in while having to run for his life probably do even more harm than removing it. With a hiss of pain he carefully pulled the now bloody nail out bit by bit until it was free and then discarded it on the floor. He then crumpled up the note and pressed it tightly against the bleeding puncture wound, since that scrap of paper was currently the cleanest thing in the entire room. He looked down at the knife he had removed from the dead stallion's hoof as he sat there waiting to stop bleeding. Finding the knife in the corpse closet had initially inspired a surge of hope at the mere prospect of being able to defend himself. But now that he actually had a knife, he realized that looking at it as anything more than a piece of a puzzle was foolish. This world so outclassed his ability to defend himself that his merely still being alive felt like a conscious choice that somepony else had made instead of being the result of his own efforts. A knife would change nothing, and he had come to doubt that any weapon he could possibly find really could. Lance lifted the balled up paper from his puncture wound to see that the bleeding had stopped, then let it fall to land beside the nail. The trip back up the ladder after leaving the cell behind was made that extra bit more difficult from the lingering sting in his foreleg, and he even had another descent to which he could look forward. He made his way past the other two cells to retrieve the step stool from the corpse closet and then doubled back to the first cell containing the hanging stallion on the far end. After putting the stool in place he was unable to help but groan as he was forced to used his back legs to step up within reach of the rope and start cutting away at it. Bit by bit the rope frayed until it snapped, the corpse making several unsettling thuds as it dropped to the ground and then flopped forward. The stool suddenly gave way beneath him and he likewise hit the floor with a cry of pain followed by a sharp groan as he righted himself among the flurry of glowing ashes. When he caught sight of the corpse it instantly convinced him to move with a bit more haste. The sentient blood drops that had been content to stay on the hanging stallion were now steadily spreading out from him along the floor. Lance could not know if they would make things worse for him or not, but he did know he needed that rope. He limped quickly to the corpse, a shiver running down his spine as he felt drops of the roaming blood start trailing up his legs. Doing his best to ignore it, he grabbed hold of the rope with one hoof and cut through it with the other, the knife breaking apart and burning to nothing the very instant the last strand of fiber gave way. With more of the black blood crawling along his body he did not pause to pull the entire length of rope from the hole above, instead grabbing the end and taking off for the door as quickly as his legs could manage. His skin now literally crawling with the blood that was swarming over more and more of the cell's interior, he hurried outside and turned to quickly pull the rest of the rope out before slamming the door shut hoping that the outbreak would be contained. He then started trying to wipe away the droplets slithering all over his legs and body, but his motions couldn't possibly be fast enough and his panic rose at the feeling of the black blood seeping beneath his bandages. Lance gave a shudder of revulsion as he felt the wounds beneath his bandages being violated, but before he could try and get even a single bandage off a strange but intense feeling shot along his spine from the two stumps that had been his wings. Unable to stand up he was forced to lean against the wall gritting his teeth until the feeling steadily ebbed away back to the more familiar and far less intense sore throbbing, leaving him panting for breath as he gingerly placed his weight back on his briefly wobbling hooves. “The buck was that...” he muttered as he picked up the coil of rope and started limping back to the ladder. After climbing down to the lower walkway, and then walking its length before climbing down to the lowest platform, he retrieved the hook from his bag. He tied one end of the rope around the hook, and the other around his wrist so that he would be certain to keep it even if his grip slipped when he tossed it. Taking a last look around to see a dearth of any creatures about to end him, he got on with it and made his first throw. It clanged off the underside of the metal grating he was aiming to pull down, the hook failing to find purchase. Having expected a miss or two anyway, Lance pulled the hook back up and gave it another go, the second throw proving high enough but veering slightly wide and missing the mark. The third finally sent the hook sailing over the grating, and Lance pulled the rope back bit by bit until he felt the slack lessen as the hook snagged. “Now for the hard part.” He planted his hooves and started pulling, putting more effort into it until the hinges started to creak and the length of grating moved that initial hopeful inch. It was far more difficult than tearing open the cell doors had been but he could manage it. With a last grunt of pain and effort the hinges gave up the ghost with a long metallic groan before the length of grating passed the midpoint and gravity took over. Lance let go of the rope and stepped back to avoid being crushed as the grating fell with a deafening clang, bounced once, and then was still as the noise echoed up and down through the massive metallic chute into which his house had been deformed. Now Lance had a path to whatever lay beyond the door on the other side, the hook and rope burning away to confirm that he had used them as intended. A few experimental steps assured Lance that the grating was just as sturdy as the walkway above him, and he strode a bit more confidently over it. The door that awaited him was just a plain rusted metal door with not a single hint of the flesh mold infestation from above. Add to that the fact that it was mercifully unlocked and it was easily his favorite door of the past twenty or so minutes. This sentiment changed somewhat when he opened it to find that it lead to nothing. Not just an empty room or balcony, literally nothing. He peeked out and looked down hoping to see anything at all, but nothing was there to greet him, only the great yawning dark. Lance closed the door in mute confusion. He had hit stumbling points before where the way forward had not been immediately apparent but there had at least been something he could use to try and make things work, or even just a sign that there even was anything to make work. He turned and started back across the grated bridge, wracking his mind for even the smallest thing he might have missed and resolving to go back through each of the rooms...well, each of the rooms that he was still willing to enter anyway. His planning was cut short by the gurgling, retching sound behind him that accompanied the buzzing of his watch. Lance looked back just as the roller gurney on the wall began spewing deep red acid all over the hinges holding his bridge in place, immediately producing thick wisps of white smoke and a loud sizzling noise as it ate away at the already rusted metal. If those hinges buckled the bridge would drop and take him with it. He made it two steps in his attempt to bolt for the other side of the bridge but then noticed a brick wall of sorts standing in his way. The sovereign stood there staring at him silently, and if he wanted to get to the other side before it fell he would have to run directly toward her. For an instant he found it impossible to decide between the fall and risking another encounter with her. No, actually, there was nothing of risk about it. If he chose to gallop toward her she would grab him and have her way with him again, it was a simple fact. It was a marvel all on its own that she was standing that distance from him and had not already snatched him up with her tendril, looking almost as if she had already gotten what she wanted from him for the moment. There was a metallic snap behind him and the bridge lurched down at an angle, putting even more stress on the remaining latch that was sure to follow suit in mere moments. Lance made a snap decision that he would prefer more pain instead of death, but his run toward the sovereign was short lived. The other latch snapped off and the bridge vanished from beneath him. By sheer luck he was able to reach out with one hoof and grab hold of the edge as he fell, saving himself and forcing a groan from his throat from the pain such a maneuver had sent shooting through his body. He tried to pull himself up, or even just get a grip with his other hoof as well, but his injured, exhausted body was simply too worn out and beaten up to accomplish even that simple task. As his grip started slipping irreversibly bit by bit, he looked up at the monster mare looking down at him and said something he thought he would never be desperate enough to say to her. “Help.” She remained where she was, deep sanguine colored mane floating in the unseen currents as the echoes of the metal bridge bashing against the walls in its descent rang throughout the nightmare house. “Help me,” he repeated, his voice choking up and his eyes wide as his foreleg burned with the futile effort of holding on a few moments longer. She took a step toward him, regarded him with a slight tilt of her head for a moment or two...and then pushed his hoof off the edge with a casual flick of her own. His gut lurched as he started to plummet, the muscles on his back reflexively trying to use wings that were no longer there to try and save his life. But there was nothing for it. Lance did nothing. He did not even bother trying to see the ground below as he fell. He did not even bother flailing around in search of a last second hoof hold. The amber surgeon simply allowed it to happen. There was no stopping it. ------ His nose caught the scent of rot and wet dirt. It went a fair ways toward explaining the way half of his body felt dampened and cold, but it did little to explain the sound of...things crawling around unseen on the walls far above him, punctuated by the occasional metallic groan. He opened his eyes to pitch black darkness yet again, and only then did he recognize the sound of his own breath and the feel of his own heartbeat. Lance was alive. The foreleg that had so valiantly attempted to prevent his fall was fairly sore from the combined stress of holding up his entire weight and then bearing the brunt of one of the sovereigns 'taps', but it still responded as he tasked it with locating his light and turning it on again. With a sharp click, his pupils narrowed and the blinding presence of any light at all eventually gave way to the sight of two freshly dug graves complete with headstones. One bore Fluttershy's name carved into the stone, the other Soft Cure's. Lance struggled back to his hooves with yet another groan, feeling a bit more pain than usual but not doing bad for somepony who had apparently slept through a fatal fall. He limped closer, and aimed the beam of his light down into the holes. They were empty. There was nopony to fill those graves yet. Lance blinked the sleep away a bit more before blearily aiming his light upward. If he squinted, he could barely make out the walkways far, far above, but that detail paled in comparison to the way that the metallic walls of the deep pit were alive with swarms of sentient black blood droplets. Apparently the infestation in the cell of the hanged stallion had found its way out. Shaking off the last of his sleep addled haze, he took another look around. Directly in front of him was a set of metal double doors, partially rusted over but still looking well off enough to function. Next to those doors was what resembled a ticket window, although it looked a great deal less functional. The speaker in the center of the glass had been covered with duct tape, which looked to have trickled out blood at some point judging by the stains left behind. Most of the glass itself was obstructed by slats of metal that came out of the walls around it, and what meager amount was left uncovered was instead shattered to the point of being impossible to see through. About the only thing to be said for it was that at least the slot on the bottom was not blocked. To his left was a long passage. The floor was more of the same dirt, while the floors and ceiling were both formed from metal that had rusted through at various points revealing nothing but darkness beyond. Lance had been through plenty of claustrophobic passages in his time there, but this tunnel before him had the opposite problem. It may as well have counted as an extension of the room itself rather than a mere passage. So much space into which something horrible and immense might fit, and yet so few options to react to such an abomination. But even though it was difficult to discern exactly what was on the other end at such a distance, there was indeed something on the other side, and Lance might need it. His course was once again lamentable but clear. Besides, even if he could outpace anything that attacked to make it back to the main room, what good would it do? He was at the bottom of an inescapable pit. He limped along the passage, eyes continually darting between holes in the metal. Lance could practically feel the entrance of the passage getting further and further behind him as he advanced. He dared not look back lest he be tempted to give in to the tension in his chest growing ever tighter with every stray noise in the nightmare around him and run back for the safety he knew to be false. From the general ambiance he was able to pick out an odd sound though...a tiny dripping noise that seemed to be coming from one hole above him. He stopped and shined his light upward toward the likely source, but found nothing in the dark. His watch was not buzzing either, so he kept going. It was considerably more of a jolt when he heard soft hoof steps following him from above, traveling from that hole to another. Somepony was trying to keep an eye on him...but was also content for the moment to not do anything else. After a considerable pause Lance started on his way again, finding himself oddly indifferent to the hoof steps and dripping noise that periodically followed after him from above. In fact it was strangely comforting. He found himself easing into the pace of his limping while obsessively checking the holes in the walls around him far less often. Finally, feeling a bit more soreness in his limbs from the lengthy exertion, he could make out what was waiting for him at his destination. There were another set of bars with something woven between them, but it was no longer the strange sheets of flesh. Instead it was a dense tangle of thorny black vines that glistened in places with some mysterious fluid ranging from maroon to a deep red. As Lance and his unseen traveling companion drew nearer he could also see a small movie film canister for use with a projector tangled among the vines, and near to it was another note that had been stuck onto one of the thorns. Do you think me unreasonable? Do you think I couldn't possibly have a good reason for doing the things I do? That the actions I choose to take are indefensible? Because you're wrong. We both have our own 'you're okay' voices, Lance. But unlike you, I can't afford to just talk. If you had known, would you have told her? Would you have told her when there was nothing she could do about it? For once, the note caused Lance to hesitate. It gave voice to a feeling that had been steadily creeping over him in spite of his refusal to acknowledge it. Something was wrong. Something was deeply, deeply wrong, and no matter how long he stood there looking from the note to the canister and back again he could not for the life of him place a metaphorical hoof anywhere near it. For the first time he felt his faith in his own conclusions start to tremble the slightest bit, and even that tiny disturbance was enough to unsettle him, like the cracking of the supports of a presumed reliable bridge suddenly sounding in the silence below. Which one? A soft dripping noise behind him snapped him out of it. No matter the state of the bridge in his head, he had to keep walking it. There was no other path through the dark. Though his resolve was visibly starting to waver he reached up, took hold of the film canister, and pulled until the thorny vines holding it in place snapped. Upon inspection it looked a bit old and worn, but seemed to be holding together especially well considering the location. It struck him as far from impossible that the contents would still be usable, and so into his bag it went. After closing said bag and bringing his eyes back up, he spotted a gap in the vines that had previously been covered by the canister. Curiosity naturally took hold, but Lance at least had the sense to wait a listen another moment before bringing his light up to it in order to peek through. It was the final, short section of hallway. The floor was still dirt, the metal walls were still full of holes, but there was another gravestone. This one was overgrown with vines that blossomed some time ago judging from all the wilted flowers hanging off of them. It just so happened that the vines left a gap in just the right spot to read the name upon it. Posey Strongshy Her last name had been viciously scratched away until it was nearly illegible. There was no hole at the foot of the gravestone, rather a quite visible burial mound that had been there for quite some time judging by how low it was. Seemingly just as Lance had realized what he was looking at the vines began to slowly slither between the bars with a small chorus of crackling, squishing noises. He backed away quickly for fear of being engulfed by the moving plant tendrils, but the only things the vines were intent on doing was to shift enough to slowly close the gap, separating him from his wife's grave. “It...it doesn't matter...I'm just seeing...I'm....” Lance lingered quietly for a moment. He never finished the denial. He simply turned around and started back down the hallway without addressing it. The holes in the wall had changed a bit in the absence of his gaze. They were a bit less random, and seemed to appear in groups opposite one another that had an arrangement much taller than they were wide. He no longer heard hoof steps above him or the gentle dripping that followed behind him. Instead his long trip back through the passage was accompanied by quiet voices, though he would hardly describe them as soft. They were words that tore out of one's throat in a desperate scream, barely audible from an immense distance just like when he had been prying open the flesh covered doors. He could make out nothing that was being said and yet his spine still tingled with a dreadful familiarity that lurked at the edge of his mind but always moved away whenever he tried to focus on it. Lance was broken out of his mental haze by the sudden shift in the way his hoof steps echoed off the walls around him. When he bothered to get his eyes back on his surroundings he found himself back at the other end of the passage in the room with the two empty graves. He looked back and saw that said passage had not suddenly gotten shorter, he had simply lost himself in...what was it? Calling it thought would have implied something concrete to consider but the only thing in his head that he had to work with was a formless mass of...something. Which one? His body was left to move itself toward the double doors and ticket window as he continued mentally gazing into the static in his mind desperately hoping that the shapes he was beginning to see in the random noise were merely imagined. When he was stood before the window his brain returned to the present, being required for slightly more precise action. Something was obviously meant to be fed into the slot below the window, and the film canister was a likely candidate. He still had a one bit coin leftover from the hospital if there would be another toll, but there was little sense in trying it without first seeing if there was no toll to pay at all. After pulling out the canister and placing it in front of the slot, he nudged it partially inside with a hoof such that if nothing happened he would be able to easily retrieve it. … The canister shifted slightly as something got a hold of it before slowly pulling it the rest of the way into the darkness on the other side. After a while longer the double doors let off a metallic ping as they were unlocked, indicating that Lance had stumbled into choosing the correct first path already. He opened the door and limped inside, musty air enveloping him as he found himself standing once again on old, moist, mold riddled carpet. A single chair awaited him in the otherwise mostly empty, somewhat large room. From the wall that the chair faced hung what resembled a dirty projection screen made out of...well, at that point Lance felt somewhat disinclined to guess what anything in particular was made from anymore. On the opposite wall was a small square opening through which the aperture and lens of an old projector had been pushed. It was a theater for one. The lone wooden chair proved only slightly damp, and appeared completely free of mold. It was practically a luxury item compared to everything else, yet he was still wary of accepting the unspoken invitation and taking a seat. The deaf colt obviously did not want him seeing what was on that film. Normally this would prompt him to immediately view it but the gnawing doubt in his mind was biting deeper than ever. What exactly had he been pushing toward all this time? For so long he had been doggedly determined to escape with his miraculously resurrected wife but...how much sense did that really make? One moment he had been standing inside the library in Ponyville, and in the next he was in some terrifying, impossible world where the dead had come back to life. It was true that Twilight Sparkle was the royal student of the princess but somehow he doubted that she had the ability to bring back the long departed. A possibility began to enter his thoughts, one that would have been impossible for him to even consider prior to his blind need to find and save Posey being so abruptly blunted. It was easy enough to conclude that the three nightmarish transitions were not real, or at least somewhat less real than the fog filled 'normal' version of that world. But what about the rest of it? Was any of it real? Had it ever been, at any point? Was he asleep...or dead? … Lance did not know how to wake up. Lance did not even know if he could wake up. All he could do was stand there a moment longer and mindlessly sit in that chair, staring forward blankly as he waited to see what the deaf colt had been trying to keep from him. The projector suddenly coming to life behind him made him flinch in his seat prior to switching off his light to not drown out the image in front of him. It was a fairly grainy image, and the projector was a bit dim, but the image of his past self seated at the interrogation table was unmistakable. He was in the background however. In the foreground was the potting plant. Lance could also hear Pinot Noir's voice, but the sound quality was so low and the voice so quiet that he could not hope to make out his words. The effect on his past self was clear though. As Pinot Noir recounted his take on what happened in their house that day, the amber surgeon of the past quivered as the soil in the center of the pot surged upward in response to his pain. As he broke down further, grimacing, closing his eyes tightly, and ultimately burying his face in his hooves on the table as his body shivered with silent sobs, a tendril from the seed of truth emerged from the soil, steadily growing until it sprouted a bud that then bloomed into a beautiful flower. The image distorted, shifting into something of a blurred, shaky mess. It was still sufficient to let him see the mass of deep red tendrils that suddenly emerged from the pot, half reaching downward to grasp the table and provide an anchor as the rest coiled into a single large black tendril that grabbed his past self around the neck and thrashed him about for a short while before the film cut to black. As unsure of things he was at that moment he was still reasonably certain that last part had not happened. When the image returned he was looking at his wife, looking haggard, thin, and exhausted. Her pale face was framed by a ragged, thinning mane as she desperately tried to make use of the knife in her hoof. But it was futile, her body was simply too weak to do it, and her teeth grit as she scowled at the knife in anger, tears streaming from her eyes in frustration and a sadness deep enough to practically sap away all the light around her. Then the door opened. It was little Fluttershy, looking uneasy as she stepped further into the room and asked her mother something, shying away nervously as Posey suddenly burst with laughter. Once again he was unable to make out what either of them was saying. The dying mare then motioned her daughter closer, wearing a weary smile undermined by her erratic, pained movements that soon had her falling off the bed in her efforts to yell a command of some sort. The little filly gasped and ran to her mother's aid before they briefly exchanged words and Fluttershy turned to leave, only to be stopped short by another command from her mother that put quite the confused look on her young face. Lance's eyes widened as he witnessed Posey shakily hold the knife out to their daughter. The little filly dutifully took hold of it but looked utterly lost as to what to do with it. Posey said something, and Fluttershy froze with her eyes wide. Her mother began shouting at her, their daughter offering progressively weaker protests as Posey berated her relentlessly to do as she was told. Things reached a peak when his wife suddenly attempted to bite their daughter, only for the confused, crying foal to finally give in to her demands and plunge the knife into the mare's side. The amber surgeon could not tear his eyes from the image as he watched his daughter's mouth kept open in a perpetual silent scream as she stabbed her mother over, and over, and over. When it was all over, when Posey's blood was practically everywhere it could possibly be, the bereft filly was left alone to cry and quiver as the film distorted and then cut to black again, but kept running. Lance felt sick...he brought a hoof up to his head, eyes unable to focus on anything. He felt...he felt... He started to laugh. It started as a soft chuckle but then the dam burst and he could not stop laughing like mad until he had to stop for need of breath and the sheer pain in his body from such mirthful exertions. After a last few chuckles he brought his head back up and took a breath to speak, the deep sense of relief apparent on his face. “You almost had me...you almost had me. Everything I've seen here since I woke up in the library has been a memory of mine...but how can this be a memory too, huh? I'm not even in the bucking room! This is nothing...this is a lie...or a dream I had...and your stupid flower can buck off to Tartarus for all I care. My daughter was a monster, and that's all there is to this,” he assured himself as he got back to his hooves and moved toward the exit of the room. Just then, as though the film had been spliced together knowing exactly when the stallion would finish his tirade, the image of the same bedroom popped back into focus on the projection screen and grabbed back Lance's attention. He was now standing in the room with Posey's corpse, now covered with a bloody sheet to give her some measure of dignity, the lone stallion pacing back and forth near to hyperventilating as a stream of tears continued to seep from his bloodshot eyes in his panic and sorrow. But then he stopped...seeming to notice something about the pillows on the bed. The Lance of the present stepped closer to the screen again, head tilted slightly. He remembered this part clearly. Once he had been able to think straight in the slightest after holding his dead wife and crying until his throat was hoarse, he had immediately realized he would have to come up with some explanation for what had just happened even as his grief wracked thoughts remained scattered to all corners of his mind. But as the recording of the past continued and the younger self on screen moved toward the bed, he could not for the life of him remember anything having to do with those pillows. Yet all the same, he watched himself move one of the pillows...and then pick up two envelopes. His sudden confidence shattered into a thousand pieces he felt an ice cold dagger stab into his head as he suddenly recalled with crystal clarity the image of his hoof holding two envelopes. One was marked with his own name, the other was marked with their daughter's. Lance groaned and fell to a sitting position as he held his head, struck by another intense headache as though merely recalling the memory had set off a small explosion in his head. “What did the notes say...what did the notes say?!” he growled out loud at the screen as he fought against the pain to stand up again. He remembered the notes, perfectly and completely. They existed, but he could not remember what they had said no matter how hard he tried to recall it. Instead of offering anything in answer to his question, the screen went black again only to return to another room in the house at a much later time in the day. There was a single small bed, the walls were painted a bright cheery color and adorned with pictures and posters, and there were toys scattered here and there upon the floor. It was Fluttershy's room, dimly lit by the setting sun outside. The door opened and Lance was immediately struck by the sudden massive jump in audio quality as he watched himself, looking utterly lost and broken, step inside of the room with a similarly shattered Fluttershy on his back, the pained filly having cried herself to the point of exhaustion several times over the course of the day at the police station. He stood there in the darkened room, stripes of dim light from the shades covering Fluttershy's window striping his body as he did nothing and looked at nothing, his face an utterly blank slate with no indication of any mind left remaining behind those eyes. “...Daddy?” Fluttershy squeaked weakly as her father continued to do nothing. Rather than press him she started to carefully attempt to climb down off his back, only to lose her grip and fall to the floor with a tiny grunt. She let out a soft whine as she stood back to her hooves but seemed no worse for the wear as she looked up at Lance, her large eyes still glistening with the tears that had been ever present that day. … “Daddy?” she repeated, starting to sound worried as her little hoof rose to touch her father's leg. Her eyes, one still bearing a bruised ring, continued gazing upward silently begging for him to say something, anything that would restore even the slightest bit of normalcy to her tiny shattered life. … “Why did you kill Mommy?” he finally asked her, not bothering to look down at her. “I...she told me to,” she answered with a touch of confusion to her voice, having already told him earlier that day. She had been telling the truth just like her parents had told her she always should. “Why did you kill Mommy?” he asked again, slowly bringing his head round to glare at her as though she had answered incorrectly. “She...Mommy she...said to-” “Do you remember the talk we had about telling the truth and fibbing?” Fluttershy's ears flattened fearfully as she backed away from her father, the much, much larger stallion pursuing her. “Do you remember...the talk we had...about telling the truth and fibbing?” he repeated as venom began to drip into his voice in the face of her lack of an answer. “Y-yes,” she squeaked, finding that no matter how many steps back she took, her father would always cover the distance with but a single step of his longer adult legs. “Then tell the truth. Why did you kill your mother?” he asked again, brow furrowing more sharply as the anger built on his face causing the little filly to feel all the more frightened. “I...I...told you the truth Daddy,” she repeated timidly as she cowered, realizing that she could not escape from her father. “And what truth are you telling me...Fluttershy?” “That...that Mommy told me to-” She let out a cry as a large amber hoof struck her solidly across the face. “That's a lie. That's a lie and you know it!” he growled at the filly that was now shaking with sobs as she hid her head in her hooves. “Your mother was too strong for that! Nothing would ever break her! She would never have given up like that! So tell me the truth! Why did you kill your mother?!” he demanded, now outright shouting. “Mommy told me to! Mommy told me to!” she sobbed out in desperation as she continued to do what she thought her father wanted. Her only reward was her father grabbing hold of her mane and pulling her head away from her hooves before another couple blows rattled her tiny skull. “Stop lying! Stop lying to me and tell me the truth!” he raged at her with just as much desperation as tears streamed down his face unrestrained. The second his hoof released her mane, the crying filly fled to the far corner of her room as her father doggedly pursued her. “Mommy told me to do it! Please stop!” she screamed while instinctively curled up in protective terror in the corner. Nothing she could do would stop him though. He picked her up again, this time pinning her against the wall with one hoof while raining savage blows upon her with the other. She was screaming incoherently now, unable to comprehend anything but the sheer impossible amount of pain shooting through her body. His hoof soon starting to bear spots of blood as his continued assault opened up a cut on her lip and a gash on the side of her head. “TELL THE TRUTH! TELL THE BUCKING TRUTH! STOP BUCKING LYING TO ME! STOP BUCKING LYING TO EVERYPONY!” Lance bellowed, wide eyed and tearful as he continued to beat his helpless crying daughter without even a hint of mercy. The truth he claimed to want was clearly insufficient, and it seemed he was literally unable to stop until he got whatever he wanted from her, as though his entire continued existence hinged upon her saying a very particular thing for him through his continued assault. Finally Fluttershy managed to catch enough of a breath to form an answer, blood streaming down her face as she finally learned that the truth would never save her from this. “I WANTED TO KILL MOMMY! I WANTED TO KILL MOMMY! I'M A MONSTER DADDY! I'M A MONSTER!” she shrieked through the blinding agony and confusion. She did not care about the truth. She did not care to do what mommy and daddy had told her anymore. She just wanted it to stop. She just wanted the hurting to stop. Lance finally relented in his assault...and then gave her one last back hoof across her swollen, bruised, and bloody face before dropping her. She did nothing but crumple to the ground, curling back into her protective ball, crying as loudly as she ever had whilst the blood from her face smeared across her hooves and in her mane. He made no motion to comfort her, once again rendered mute...although his face was anything but blank. As he gazed down at his crying, bloodied daughter, his eyes remained wide open in sheer shock at what he had just done...and yet something felt right again. As the moments ticked by her confession ringed in his ears and somehow he reached some accord with himself, the shock on his face lessening bit by bit until he looked like his old composed self again. He wiped the tears from his eyes and then wordlessly started for the door. “D-...Daddy?” Fluttershy squeaked hoarsely between her sobs. He stopped, and looked back at her. “Are the...” she hiccuped, “are the police ponies going to take me away?” Lance silently stood there a moment longer before stepping through the door and taking hold of the knob before pausing. “No, Fluttershy. They're not going to punish you,” he began, his body covered in darkness save for the last stripe of light from the shades that illuminated his reddened, bloodshot eyes. “That's my job now.” The film went black as the Lance of the present heard the door slamming shut, followed by the cries of his daughter that grew ever more distant until they were finally silent. First, the film itself melted in the projector, followed by the screen catching fire and burning down to nothing but a small pile of the familiar ash. He stood there in the dark...unable to do anything but shiver wordlessly. The doubt that been merely gnawing at him had now ravenously torn deep into his flesh, and the mere cracks below his feet had given way to an utter crumbling away that left him to mentally flail in a free fall. His thoughts of finding Posey were gone. He paid not a single consideration more to escape. In fact the amber stallion did not do much of anything for a while, until he began haphazardly limped in the general direction of the door without so much as a single word of argument against what he had just seen. To his credit he was fairly close in his guess, brought back to a portion of his senses as he walked right into the wall to the right of said door. It was only at that point that he realized he had forgotten to turn his light back on and was still standing in pitch darkness. He fumbled briefly to correct the situation, and then pushed his way back out through the doors. His light fell upon the sovereign leering at him, standing in the space between the two empty graves, but he could not summon the will to care at that very moment. For a while longer he stared back at her with nothing but the sounds of the nightmare around them, the brief metallic tap of the door swinging closed behind him, and the buzzing of his watch that went completely ignored. … … … Which one? “I...I knew about Fluttershy when I came here. I always knew what I'd done to her,” he began. Talking to her made just about as much sense at anything else in that moment. “Maybe I reconsidered my stance on it as the years went by but...I never forgot, even the least bit. That has never changed, so it makes no sense that I would suddenly be having nightmares about it some two decades down the line.” The unusually patient mare took a seat, content to listen to him think aloud for the moment. “But why did I do that to her? Why did I need so badly to force her to lie when everything Pinot Noir said added up perfectly, and even the flower agreed with him? It never would've grown if I hadn't known he was right either...I knew what he was saying was the truth,” he continued, taking a seat himself whilst his eyes began examining the ground. “Why did I need Fluttershy to lie? Why did I need that delusion as though I would die without it?” The sovereign offered nothing in answer, merely watching him as her mane and tail continued to eerily flow in the air. “I know I wasn't the most well rounded pony, but especially in my profession I should have known that sometimes you're just really...really unlucky. Posey died from something we could never diagnose or treat...she was far from the only pony that ever had that happen to them. I know she was my wife...and I loved her so bucking much...and watching her wither away and die hurt like nothing else has ever even come close to hurting.” She let off a distorted noise that almost resembled a fond purr at the thought. “But I've had so much training and experience...I've seen it happen to other ponies...I should have been able to handle it without resorting to that. It makes no sense that Posey dying on its own would force me to do that. So what did?” … “Which one...which one is the condition and which one is just the symptom? Something else happened...something else happened with Posey that started this. It wasn't just the disease. It couldn't have just been the disease. It wasn't Fluttershy either. What happened that made me have to do that to Fluttershy? What caused this symptom?” … Lance could feel it. He still did not have anything like an answer, but it suddenly dawned on him that he had not been asking quite the right question. His eyes raised from the ground back up to the steely eyeless stare of his perpetual tormentor. “What did I do?” In reply she slowly turned to look over to his left, toward a wall that had contained nothing upon his first waking at the bottom of the pit. Now that he followed her gaze his eyes came to rest upon a door identical to the one above that had been at the other side of the now dissolved bridge. He looked back at her briefly but otherwise offered up no further questions as he got back to his hooves and slowly limped his way over to it. She continued allowing him to move about freely and unmolested...as though she had already somehow gotten what she wanted out of him for the time being. Lance opened the door and found the same vast expanse of darkness on the other side, but this time he did not close it or turn back. He stood there looking down into the endless chasm. There was nothing forcing him to do anything, no imminent threat to his life to scare him back into the room or out that door, nor even the desire to find Posey as soon as he possibly could. The only thing that was left to him was the question...and for the first time in forever he was in a position where he could not possibly lose. He let himself fall forward. Lance would either wake up and find answers to his question, or he would disappear and never be bothered by it again. In that moment with the wind whipping past his body as he fell into the abyss, he felt fine with either outcome...