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// Chapter 7: The darkness 
// Story: A voice in the dark 
// by EmberLight 
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I had to get back to the caves, I had to! If what they told me during my time at the pond, I had to get back before they were gone! I'm running through the woods, there are trees everywhere but they can't get in my way. My friends are in danger and apparently everyone else is too, and unless I get there before they catch them. I'm about halfway between the pond and one of the cave entrances. All my friends, the other eleven foals that are all outside, but hopefully, they'll be close enough to the entrance to hear me telling them to get back inside.

I'm almost at the clearing, the one beside the entrance, but something's not right. Everything has a... Shiny sort of look to it. As though they're made of crystal. The ground I'm walking on, the trees, the leaves on the trees, everything just doesn't look quite right. I haven't stopped running yet, I can't, I'm too scared to stop, in case I lose my friends.

I'm back at the clearing. I open my muzzle to yell, but just before- I take a look around, and suddenly yelling doesn't seem so appealing. The ground around me is green and purple crystal. Pristine, perfect, flawless crystal. It's shining so brilliantly I can see my reflection in it, my fur is completely devoid of colour, I’m absolutely grey. If you were to check every hair on my body, you wouldn't find a single atom with colour in it, the colour represented my fear, my being was overwhelmed with an impulse to run. And yet, beside my reflection, I saw the moon, still sitting there gracefully hanging above my head looking down, as all the stars beside it had been snuffed out. It was the only thing I could look to for familiarity right now.

I want to yell for my friends, but I can't. For some reason, my mouth won't listen to what I'm telling it to, I want to scream for help but my voice won't come, I'm frozen and I can't tell anyone. My friends are probably somewhere out there, completely oblivious as to what is going to happen, but I can't do anything for them now. I slowly back myself towards the entrance to the cave system, I'm facing away in case they're here. I'm inside the cave now, the Ivy is glowing, and I notice suddenly. The ground isn't crystal anymore, there's a border right where the clearing turns to cave. I turn around and run as quickly as I can, no-one seems to be around. I hope it's not too late, for everyone. For all the adults and the foals. Everything seems abandoned, so either they've gotten here first or my family have managed to group themselves together, if they have managed to group themselves together, the only place large enough for everyone would be the garden or the dining hall.

I'm just passing my bedroom, I take a glance in at it as I gallop past, and see the mess it's in. it's a familiar mess, my mess. I understand it and no-one else does, everything has its own place as well as purpose. My bed and desk are really the only two furniture items in there. I'll miss it if we have to run away. Us everfrenians were always so very paranoid that eventually someone would come here to hunt us down that we had an entire system in case of such an emergency. Basically, we would gather everyone up, and then the one's with magical prowess would create a portal to somewhere else, where we could set ourselves up again. I'll miss this place, but we need to get away. But first I'll need to get them to bring in the others. Jam, Chaio, Hex, Heather, Swirl, Clover, The twins. 

I've just arrived at the kitchen, I dash through and into the dining hall, but nobody's there. Everyone will be in the garden then... Hopefully. I dash back out and continue my running, my legs are getting tired but I won't stop. I don't know what to do but I know that step one will always be the same, find the family. 

Whatever it is exactly that is turning everything to crystal out there won't be able to bother us once we're all out of here.

I can hear voices in the distance, it has to be the family, I'm getting close to the garden too, the garden doesn't have a door so I can hear them much more clearly... I think I can hear mom. She's mixed in with a lot of other voices too, but I can tell that my mom is definitely there. I'm running past the library now, all the books in there that I loved to read. I'll really miss those too, they were like my friends as well. I'd imagine that the characters in the books were beside me and I would talk to them, I'd give myself magic powers and play with them. They were a part of me, and they were just as alive as everyone else was. I wish I could have taken them with me, I'll be all alone... alone... That's my worst fear. To be alone. To be completely forgotten, to have nothing to hold on to. I'd go mad.

"We can't leave yet! My son is still out there, and so are the other eleven poor souls you would have left behind! They're only Teenagers! By leaving them you're killing them, leaving them to whatever monster it is that's out there! Is that what you want?!"

That's my mom. She's near the entrance, but she hasn't noticed me yet, probably because of all the other creatures walking around in the garden, all having their own fights. The magically skilled creatures are at the end of the garden, making their portal. They've set up a barrier at the entrance to keep the monster, or whatever it had been, out. Unfortunately, it also kept me out.

"Oh and you think I don't know that? Miss Web, my son is also out there, do you think I want to leave him behind? We can't stay behind! And you're not either, not unless you want that shiny blue carapace on your back being skewered by whatever was out there!"

That's Grass Blade, I mentioned her earlier, she's Chaio's mom.

Oh, and yes. My mom's a changeling.

My mom ran away from her old hive, she didn't like the way that her queen was acting so she left one day, and fell into the everfree forest as she was flying over it. Uh- oh, she's looking at me.

"...Fyre, Fyre's at the entrance! Let him in! Open it quickly!" Mom yells at one of the draqoneqi working to make the portal. He does it immediately, as soon as he sees me. The barrier lifts for a moment and lets me in, I walk forward and past the entrance just before they 

"Oh thank goodness you're alive!" My mom says as she runs over and gives me a death hug. I'm struggling to breathe, but at the same time I return the hug. Once the hug ends, which felt like forever, even though it was probably only two seconds, she takes my face in her hooves and stares at me. "Are you okay, you're completely grey!".

"I'm fine mom, but everyone else is still outside, we need someone to go out and help them!" I asked. We needed to help them before we left.

"Honey, I want to do the exact same thing, but everyone's too afraid to go, your father went out a while ago though, alone. He's brave but he's still an idiot, I should have gone with him..."

Everyone's in too much of a commotion to notice that I'm back, everyone's pacing around and talking, but there's one thing they all have in common, they're all afraid. Some of them are looking at the entrance where I just came in, I turn around and look, before I notice why they're all so scared. The cave system outside the barrier has already been turned to crystal, the same colours as earlier, green and purple. The ivy kept its colours, the regular green, but they're not lighting up the system anymore.

"Fyre, are you okay, you look a bit dizzy."

That was the last thing I remember, before I woke up, and everyone was gone. 





"Fyre, are you okay? You look a bit dizzy."

As soon as this sentence had been said, the twelve year old foal known as Fyre web collapsed, his coat turned pitch black, and his eyes snapped shut. His mother looked helplessly at him, not knowing what to do. The colour of his coat was not just the night sky black, but the black of the void, the black of emptiness, the colour of death.

The foal, stood up, and lifted his eyelids. His eyes were devoid of colour. They were pure black as he walked forward towards the entrance, unaware of all the creatures asking him if he was okay, and what he was doing. He took one last step toward the door, and with a single tear dropping from his eyes, he broke the barrier, and let everything in. The monster outside.

Just as the barrier was broken, the portal was finished. The creatures all run into the portal, all of them ran towards it except one. Fyre's mom stayed behind for him. She ran towards her little colt, but the monster got to them both. The colt survived, the mother vanished.

When the little colt woke up, the cave system had returned to the way it was before anything had happened. But all the residents had vanished. The little colt's worst fear, came true.