//------------------------------// // Act II: The Shadow in the Clouds // Story: The World is Filled with Monsters // by Cold in Gardez //------------------------------// The door opened onto a white field. It extended in all directions, formless and ever-shifting. Whirls of mist flowered beneath Vermilion’s hooves with each step. In a short distance his sight faded, then failed. There was nothing there to see. Too warm for a blizzard. The air too thin for fog. Vermilion gasped for breath, like he’d just galloped up a dozen flights of stairs. A faint headache began to prickle at the edges of his mind. He lowered his head between his forelegs to fend off a wave of dizziness. “Where are we?” he mumbled. A line of spittle dripped from his lips onto the ground. “A cloud city,” Cloud Fire said. He sounded just fine, actually, not winded at all. “Take deep breaths, Cherry. We’re higher than most mountains up here. You’ll start to feel better in a few minutes.” A cloud city? Sure, a cloud city. Vermilion focused on the mist beneath his hooves and saw that it did not, as he’d assumed, merely conceal rocks or soil beneath. There was only mist and more mist. Nothing but clouds all the way down. No, that wasn’t true. Below the clouds were thousands of feet of empty space, and then – somewhere far below, so far below that his mind’s pitiful attempts to comprehend the distance ended in mutiny – was the earth. A long way down, but it wouldn’t feel all that long when he was falling. The fathoms would slip by in an instant, and before he knew it the ground would regain all its lost detail and rush up to embrace him, reuniting earth pony with the earth in an abrupt, messy instant. He was panting, he realized. Uncontrollably. Hyperventilating. He was also lying on his side, though how he got in such a position he couldn’t recall. Cloud Fire’s face, filled with concern, hovered inches away. “Breathe, Cherry. C’mon, you’re starting to worry me here.” Vermilion’s legs lashed out, snatching ahold of Cloud Fire with enough force to drag the pegasus onto the ground – cloud? – with a startled yelp. They grappled clumsily, one panicked, the other confused, until Vermilion finally came out on top with his legs wrapped around Cloud Fire’s torso. He ground his face into Cloud Fire’s wings and squeezed his eyes shut. “Don’t let me fall,” he whispered. The horrifying thought of all the air beneath them, the infinite drop to the ground, squeezed his mind into a ball. It penetrated every pore of his being, it flooded his heart with ice water. He started shaking uncontrollably. Cloud Fire stopped struggling. “Seriously? Luna damn it, you’re not going to fall. And let go of me.” Vermilion shook his head. “Cherry… For the love of—” He tried to squirm again out of Vermilion’s grasp, but Vermilion was by far the stronger of the two, and much better motivated to hold on. All Cloud Fire managed to do was run himself out of breath, until he finally sank down onto the clouds, his chest heaving, with Vermilion still firmly attached to his back. They lay like that for a while. Eventually, Cloud Fire caught his breath enough to speak. “Okay. Cherry, if you were going to fall, don’t you think you would’ve by now?” That was a reasonable statement, a distant, quiet part of Vermilion’s mind noted. He should’ve fallen as soon as they stepped through the door into the cloud city. But the louder, insistent part of Vermilion’s mind, the one in charge at the moment, noted that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to fall as soon as he let go of Cloud Fire. As long as he held onto the pegasus, he was safe. Cloud Fire managed to get a wing free and beat uselessly at the clouds with it. “Seriously, please let me go.” Vermilion shook his head again. The sweat in his coat was beginning to cool and turn to ice where it touched the cloudstuff. “Luna, this is my life now.” Cloud Fire let out a long, deep breath. “Cherry, do you remember why we’re here?” Why they were there? Thousands of feet in the air? He had no idea. No earth pony should be in the clouds. However he had gotten here, something terrible had gone wrong. All he could do was hold onto his friend, the only solid object for miles around, and pray. “Zephyr,” Cloud Fire said. “We’re here for Zephyr. And the others too, I guess, but since we’re in the clouds I’m pretty sure this is her dream.” Zephyr, Zephyr. Was she here, too? Vermilion forced his eyes to open. From his new position, lying on the ground and wrapped around Cloud Fire, he could almost imagine they were on the ground again. Only the constant, screaming refrain in his mind, that he was moments from falling to his death, reminded him of their place in the sky. “Zephyr,” he said. “Yeah, Zephyr,” Cloud Fire said. “She’s in here somewhere, and we need to find her. How are we going to do that?” “We’re, ah…” Vermilion ran out of breath after just those few words. “We need to search for her.” “There you go. Now, how are we gonna search for her like this?” Vermilion licked his lips. “We can’t?” “Now you’re getting it. Do you think you can let me go, so we can get moving?” “I just… I don’t want to fall.” “Listen, you’re not, okay? I don’t know what kind of dream this is, but you were standing on the clouds just fine a few minutes ago. Look, you’re lying on them right now, aren’t you? You’re not falling.” That was true. Slowly, as though they were hiding within them a nest of vipers, Vermilion pressed his muzzle against the clouds. Softy, springy coolness pushed back. They felt almost like a sponge. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Okay. Just, uh…” He slowly unclasped his forelegs from around Cloud Fire’s chest. The pegasus, to his credit, didn’t bolt away instantly. “See?” Cloud Fire said. “Nopony’s falling. Now, try standing?” The clouds squished beneath his hooves, almost like slushy mud. They were cold too, but after Hollow Shades the concept of cold had assumed a new meaning in Vermilion’s mind. This? This was nothing. Carefully, his heart still pounding, Vermilion pushed himself back up. “There, see? Easy.” Cloud Fire used his wings to brush some errant slush from Vermilion’s shoulders. “It’s just like the ground, okay?” It wasn’t okay. Not by a long shot. But for the first time since his little panic attack, an emotion other than fear rose to the top of his mind. Embarrassment for falling apart in front of his friend, and worse, shame. A hot flush chased away the cold of the clouds, and he shook his head to clear it. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m fine. So, uh, where are we?” “Well.” Cloud Fire spun around. “I mean, it’s a dream, right? It doesn’t have to be a real place. It could just be Zephyr’s memories of the clouds.” “So how do we find her?” Vermilion lifted a hoof and carefully took a step. The cloud gave beneath him slightly, like he was walking atop a bed, but otherwise it held firm. He took a second step, and then a third. “Start walking, I guess,” Cloud Fire said. “Gotta be more up here.” If there was more, Vermilion couldn’t see it. The mists swallowed everything after fifty paces in every direction. He spun in a slow circle. “Alright,” he said. “Uh, lead on, then. You know clouds better than I do.” Cloud Fire started walking, seemingly in a random direction. An icicle of fear shot through Vermilion’s belly at the sudden I’m alone I’m alone he’s leaving me I’m alone, but instead of collapsing for the second time he ordered his thoughts into line and followed his friend across the cloudscape. “I don’t think knowing clouds matters in here,” Cloudy said. “I think knowing Zephyr matters more.” “Well, you know her better than I do.” “Eh, sorta.” Cloud Fire paused, turned slightly, and continued walking. They seemed to be on a slight downhill slope, if such a thing was possible in the clouds. “I think she’s more comfortable with mares, you know? She chatted a lot more with Quicklime than me.” “Aren’t most mares like that?” Vermilion froze when they reached what seemed to be steps in the clouds, leading down into the mist. He set a hoof on one, testing it, and when it held he kept trotting after his friend. “Some more than others,” Cloudy said. “Some mares hate other mares, you know? Like, just can’t stand them.” “I never really noticed.” “Then you aren’t paying enough attention,” Cloud said. He paused, sniffed at the air, then continued down the odd stairs. As they descended, the mists surrounding them began to lighten. A brighter spot appeared in the gray haze above, as if the sun were battling its way through the cloud. He could see further now, dozens of yards instead of just a few. In the distance, dark shapes seemed to rise high above their heads. They walked like this for hours, or so it felt. Lower and lower through the clouds, always following the stairs. Vermilion’s legs began to complain. Cloud Fire hopped down dozens of steps at a time, his wings outstretched to catch the air. It seemed like the stairs would never stop, and eventually they would reach the ground, or they would keep marching down forever, victims of some pegasus’s dreams of clouds that never ended. Until, finally, it did. The stairs terminated in a broad, flat section of cloud that felt firm beneath Vermilion’s hooves, drier somehow, more solid. Almost like sand. Around them, the wind began to stir, tugging at the mists and speeding them away. The sun brightened, and in moments the mists vanished. The vista round them was revealed. They stood in a vast plaza. Huge towers of clouds rose around them, swirling and twisting and bent by the wind. Airy, threadlike bridges connected them, breaking apart and reforming in the space of heartbeats. But none of those things held Vermilion’s attention. Instead he looked up, up at the real cloud city. Not the pitiful thing they had spent hours walking through. Not the silly, ephemeral towers around them. Not the endless stairs behind them. He stared up at the mountain before him. If all the water in the world’s oceans were boiled into steam, they could not have created this thing, this monstrosity. The cloud pyramid before them wasn’t just miles across or miles high – each of its blocks were measured in miles. All of Everfree could nestle on its slopes with room to spare for more capitals. And above, so high above that Vermilion had to crane his neck back to see, drifting feral clouds broke around the peak of the pyramid. “Oh, huh.” Cloud Fire said. “I guess we’re in Derecho.” * * * For all his life, Vermilion had been the small one. Smallest of his siblings, even smaller than his little sisters when they reached his age. Smaller of course than his father, a rock of a pony. When he finally escaped the farm and began encountering pegasi and unicorns for the first time, he found himself eye-to-eye with them. Even pegasi like Cloud Fire or Zephyr, who only weighed half as much as Vermilion, still looked down at him when they were speaking. It no longer bothered him, much. He had learned over the years that height was a poor indicator of a pony’s qualities – Major Canopy was one of the shortest adults he’d ever met, only barely losing that title to Quicklime. But it was hard, especially when he spent most of his days around the company’s corps of earth ponies, to remember that being small was nothing to be ashamed of. In time, he simply internalized his small stature. He was small, and other ponies would always see him as small. It was the way of the world. Staring up at Derecho, Vermilion realized, for the first time, how small he really was. The center of the city rose like an unimaginably large mountain, a perfectly symmetrical ziggurat of dark gray cloudstone, etched rough by centuries of wind. Loose clouds, fluffy and white cotton balls, caught on the crags and tore themselves apart in the wind. A wave of vertigo gripped Vermilion’s mind at the sight – the pyramid was too large to be anything but the ground, which meant he was staring up at the ground, and he was about to fall again, and he was hyperventilating again, and suddenly Cloud Fire’s face was in front of him again, blocking his sight of the colossal city. “C’mon, not again,” he said. “I’m right here. Close your eyes and breathe.” “Sorry, sorry.” He squeezed out the words between panicked breaths, and forced himself to stop. In and out, slowly. He closed his eyes and focused instead of the feel of the clouds beneath his hooves. They were close enough to sand to pretend, again, that he was on the ground. Not miles in the air, not staring at a cloud city too large to exist. All this is a dream. He focused on that thought, repeating it in his mind like a mantra. Impossible things didn’t matter here. They just needed to find Zephyr and get out. Soon, preferably. “How are we supposed to do this?” Vermilion opened his eyes and stepped around Cloud Fire to view the city again. He felt like a gnat against the side of a dragon. “I mean… Look at this place! We could search it for years and never find her.” “It’s not a real city,” Cloud Fire said. He turned and began pacing alongside Vermilion across the vast plaza. Ahead of them, the city grew infinitesimally closer. “It’s just Zephyr’s memories of Derecho. And it’s filled with those monsters, those things… what did Luna call them?” “Dreamoras.” Vermilion turned to peer at the clouds around them. Did the shadows shift in the corner of his eyes? Did dark shapes retreat from his gaze, or was he imagining monsters where none existed? “You fought one, didn’t you?” “Yeah, but I didn’t, uh…” Cloudy stuttered for a moment, nearly missing a step. “It wasn’t a monster. It was a pony. Somepony I knew.” “That was an illusion. They… they’re not like ponies.” They lapsed into another bout of silence at that, each consumed by their thoughts. The cloudscape around them was too real to be a dream, but with each step their surroundings changed in ways both subtle and vivid. The sun vanished and reappeared. Cool winds teased Vermilion’s mane, chilling him, and he sweated in waves of sweltering, muggy heat. The towers of the clouds grew, cast shadows over them, and vanished in the distance. They walked, and they walked. Around them, the clouds formed and dissolved and reformed. Shadows lapped at their hooves, snapping at them like vipers. Wisps of vapor caressed their cheeks and whispered in Vermilion’s ears. He shrugged them off and kept walking. In time, they reached the base of the massive pyramid. Stairs, helpfully carved in the dark cloudstone, rose impossibly high into the already thin sky. The headache that had never quite vanished from Vermilion’s skull dug its pincers into his brain again. “Up there?” Vermilion asked. “It’s a dream,” Cloud Fire said. “If you dreamed about a city like this, where else in it would you be but the top?” There were many places Vermilion would rather be than atop an impossibly high cloud fortress. On the ground, for instance. But this wasn’t his dream – it was a pegasus dream. And pegasi dreamed of high places. He looked up, up, up, and forced his legs to stop shaking. “It’s really high,” he whispered. “Yeah.” Cloud Fire spun in place, then looked back at the high peak. “You know, I don’t think the real Derecho is this big. Like, it’s big, huge, but not… not like this.” “Zephyr just remembers it this way?” “She must.” Cloudy bit his lip, and Vermilion sensed for the first time how unnerved he must be as well. But the pegasus devoured his feelings, and after another moment of silence he charged ahead toward the base of the pyramid and set his hooves on the stairs leading up the side. “You know how, when you think of a place you knew as a child it seems so huge, but then you go back and it’s all so small. Well, what if the place you remember really was huge? What if it was like Derecho? Then you must remember it as something like this. Something… unworldly.” They walked side-by-side up the stairs. A cool wind met them head-on, flowing down the slopes of the pyramid like a waterfall, carrying with it the scent of rain and shadows. It tore little tufts of cloud away and dissolved them into thin air. Pits and crags opened in the dark cloudstone around them, forming fissures, canyons that ran with water down past Vermilion’s sight. A deep, somber groan floated up from the fortress beneath their hooves, shaking their bones. Off in the distance, so far away that the humid air nearly shrouded it in haze, Vermilion saw one of the city’s many towers sway, crumble and collapse, its pieces drifting apart like seeds dispersing from a dandelion, each catching the wind and riding the gusts away into space. He took a step, and something cracked beneath his hoof. Surprised, he looked down to see the cloudstone stair broken into pieces. It was dry, dessicated, rough as a sponge and strong as rotted wood. The scent of stale water rose up from it. He lifted his hoof away and carefully stepped over it. “What’s wrong with this place?” he asked. “It’s Derecho,” Cloud Fire said. He glanced down at the crumbling stairs and quickly looked away. “It’s… it’s old.” Vermilion shook his head. “Not just old. It’s falling apart.” Cloud Fire sighed. “Cloud cities don’t last forever, Cherry. It’s not like stone or even wood. If you leave a cloud home alone even for a few days it starts to revert back to a wild cloud and does its own thing. Derecho’s only lasted this long because the first pegasi were so crazy about strengthening it.” “So why don’t they fix it?” Vermilion slipped on a loose tile and skinned his knee on the cloudstone. It stung, and bled, and then he blinked and the wound was gone. Only the pain remained, until after a few more heartbeats it vanished as well. He puzzled over that, then wondered why he was staring at his leg at all. “They can’t,” Cloud Fire said. “Maybe when all the pegasi lived here, but since the Unification more and more ponies are living in places like Everfree or Cloudsdale. I doubt there’s more than a thousand pegasi left in Derecho. You think a thousand pegasi can keep a place like this together?” Vermilion looked around again. They’d climbed perhaps halfway up the pyramid’s side, and the world stretched out behind them. In the distance, on the horizon, he could see the gentle curve of the world’s surface. No. A thousand pegasi could not maintain this city. It would take a million. He closed his eyes against a fresh wave of vertigo and turned back toward the city’s peak. “Zephyr still lives here, though?” “Yeah.” Cloudy started climbing, and Vermilion followed. “A few of the old clans do. Too set in their ways to leave for new cities or the ground.” “I thought stubbornness was an earth pony thing.” “Pretty sure it’s an everypony thing.” They climbed, and they climbed. And in time they grew closer to the peak. But before they reached the summit another broad plaza opened before them, a ledge that extended for hundreds of paces and circled the pyramid. Towers and grottos and the shattered forms of broken cloudstone boulders littered the space, transforming it into a wasteland, a dissolving ruin that swayed in the wind. Shadows cluttered it, shadows darker than any shadow had a right to be, so dark they seemed to drink away the light and offend his eye. They moved in between his blinks. Something that was not the wind groaned. The deep, sonorous sound vibrated the clouds, shaking the towers into dropping tufts of cotton. A blizzard of rotting clouds scraps filled the air. He swallowed. “Cloudy, is this normal?” “No. Luna didn’t give you a weapon, did she?” Weapons. That’s what they were missing. “Uh, no. You?” “No, I didn’t ask. She…” Something else moved in the shadows, emerging from them, and Vermilion’s voice abandoned him. He stared, uncomprehending. It was not a cloud – it was too well formed for that. It had limbs, and a head, and wispy vapors for a mane and tail. A mare, perhaps, though Vermilion could see clean through her. She stepped out from the shadows and paused in the sunlight. Eyes that were hollow pits peered up at the heavens, and she raised a phantom limb to shade her face. Vermilion stared at her, too stunned to move. In the back of his mind, something began to whisper quiet meaningless words. Beside him, Cloud Fire took a cautious step forward. His jaw hung open as well, and though he looked straight at the phantom mare his eyes were unfocused, distant, as though gazing at something far away. The whispers in Vermilion’s mind grew louder. Welcome, they said. Welcome back. Welcome, welcome, please come closer. Please come closer, just one more step, just one more step and— Something flashed in front of Vermilion’s face. Brown and quick. He flinched away, and when he looked again Zephyr stood before them, her wings outspread, mane and tail still settling from her sudden landing. A blast of air followed an instant later, nearly knocking him off his hooves. As his senses cleared, another thing became apparent – she, unlike they, had a weapon, a long wicked halberd that ended with a slender semi-curved blade. Said blade was dug into the clouds, having just split the phantom mare clean in two. The ghost’s separated halves drifted in the wind, turned tenuous, and vanished like morning fog. He blinked. He swallowed. “Uh…” “There’s thousands of them,” Zephyr said. She spoke casually, absently, as if commenting to herself about the weather. She turned, and Vermilion saw the glazed look in her eyes. Eyes that had seen too much and now saw nothing at all. But her motions were as precise and sharp as he’d always known from her, and she walked with the spear held in one leg like it was an extension of her body. Vermilion looked around the plaza. Aside from him and Zephyr and Cloud Fire, it was empty of other ponies, corporeal or ghosts. “Thousands of what?” “Thousands of them. All this city’s ghosts.” Zephyr raised the halberd. Despite the exhaustion in her voice and the limp set of her wings, the weapon held perfectly steady. “Just like you.” Okay. She was confused, that was all. Vermilion took a careful step back, and beside him Cloud Fire hopped into the air, his wings beating gently. “It’s us, Zephyr. We’re not, uh, whatever those things are.” “Just ghosts,” she said. She took a step toward them. “But I can’t leave until they’re gone. So sorry.” “Zephyr, wait!” Vermilion held up a hoof, as though it could block the steel spearhead. Cloudy beat his wings for altitude and circled above them, just out of range of the spear. Though, considering that Zephyr could fly as well, all ranges were notional. “Listen, we’re in a dream, okay? These ghosts don’t exist, they’re just images being created by—wait!” She didn’t wait. If he hadn’t been watching her eyes, he’d never have noticed the strike before it came. Zephyr flowed forward, swift as a cobra, crossing several body lengths in an instant. Her spear drew back as part of the same motion, then lashed out at his chest. The tip of her spear split the air. In a blink she closed all the space between them, her lance seeking out his heart. Vermilion twisted left, a clumsy move that tangled his hooves and spilled him onto the clouds. It was enough to save his life, but Zephyr’s spear sliced easily through his coat and skin and pectoral muscle before glancing off his ribs and continuing onward to nearly bisect his shoulder in a spray of blood. A numbing sensation burst across his chest, like somepony had jammed a hoofful of ice cream into his coat and smeared it around for good measure. Pain exploded an instant later, a howling, crazed pain that kicked his lungs and stole his eyesight and left him gasping on the clouds, unable to draw the breath he needed to properly scream. “Cherry!” Cloud Fire screamed and dived at them. Zephyr turned, bringing the spear around to spit her attacker, but he was a hair too fast. Cloud Fire slammed into her with a meaty, bone-rattling thud, knocking the spear away and sending them both tumbling across the courtyard. Twin fans of clouds sprayed up around them, momentarily obscuring everything. The world was ringing. Pounding. Somepony was blasting a shrill whistle in Vermilion’s ear, drowning out everything else. He rolled, tried to stand, and collapsed when his right foreleg failed. It dangled limp and lifeless as he forced himself onto his knees. Blood, shockingly bright and red against the gray clouds, sprayed from the wound in time with his throbbing heart. That was bad. Really bad. He remembered that much from the bit of medical training all ponies of the company received. He snatched up a loose tuft of cloud with his free hoof and jammed it into the wound. The gray cotton turned red in seconds; blood streamed down his chest and side. “Cloudy,” he mumbled. The pain was almost gone, he noticed. It had simply drained away, and now he barely felt anything at all. “I’m hurt.” No response. He looked up and saw the two pegasi locked together a few yards away. Even numb, in shock and inches from passing out, what he saw rattled him. Both were broken just from a few seconds of fighting. Zephyr’s face was battered, one of her ears split and flinging drops of blood with every jerk of her head. Cloudy limped, one leg lifted off the clouds, the hoof twisted at a wrong angle. They circled each other, snarled, and embraced one another again. Cloud Fire’s teeth found the root of her left wing and he bit, crunching through the feathers and flesh until he found the bone. Zephyr screamed, more in rage than pain, and smashed her hooves against his throat until he fell away with a gurgle. It was hard to focus on anything. A gray curtain closed in from either side, stealing away Vermilion’s vision. He lowered his head below his heart and took deep breaths, ignoring the sounds of his friends slowly dismantling each other, until his sight returned. When he looked up, he saw more clearly, and he saw them for the first time. They swarmed around Zephyr. A mass of them, writhing like snakes, their mouths planted against every inch of her skin. He could barely see the pegasus beneath the plague of worms that engulfed her. And, lording over them like a king, the largest dreamora of all coiled around her neck. Its fangs, invisible, ethereal, unnoticed to all but him, drank from the crown of her skull. He was up, somehow. A fresh gout of blood splattered the clouds beneath him, but he ignored it. All that mattered was the dreamora; if he could just reach it and free Zephyr they would be saved. He stumbled forward, tripped, pushed himself up onto three legs, and closed the rest of the distance. Cloud Fire saw him first. His eyes widened, and he opened his mouth to say something. Vermilion never heard what it was. He jumped, hooves grasping for the dreamora wrapped around Zephry’s neck. It flowed like oily smoke through his legs, thrashing in his grip, but compared with an earth pony’s strength it was nothing. He fell away, dragging it with him. Zephyr couldn’t help but notice that. She turned, eyes wild and wide, and her good wing lashed out at him. Vermilion saw the flash of steel hidden in her feathers, and then the wingblade sliced clean through the dreamora on its way to his throat. He felt a sudden shock, then pain, then nothing at all.