Cold Wind Blowing

by Rambling Writer

7 - Looking Back

Mistral stared numbly at the journal, feeling like history was repeating itself. A bunch of people trapped in this inn during a blizzard, tensions running high, one of them getting murdered-

She jumped when Griselda said, “Well? Keep reading!”

“Yeah,” Mistral said. She swallowed. “Yeah, okay.”

The earth pony’s dead. The unicorn killed her. She was going through the usual when he suddenly grabbed the package in his magic and just started hitting her with it. I thought it was reasonable at first, but he didn’t stop for MINUTES. By the time he was done- Celestia, I think half the bones in her body were broken and she was so bloody she barely resembled herself.

The unicorn took the package and went up to his room without another word. The griffon drew the short straw and dragged the unicorn’s body outside. Nobody said anything, so I went back to my room to write again.

If the storm wasn’t so strong, I’d be long gone, but it’s not, so I don’t know what to do. There’s a killer down the hall and everyone’s tense. I should probably just sit tight in here until the blizzard’s done, but I can’t SIT here that long unless I start writing hourly. (Well, if it works…)

“Geez,” said Griselda, “was it really that bad? Or was the unicorn just crazy?”

“I don’t know,” said Mistral. She tried to sound casual, but only barely managed it. She flipped back a few pages. “The writer doesn’t mention anything about that, and you’d she would if she’d seen it…”

“Maybe the unicorn was good at hiding it and the writer didn’t notice?”

“Look, I don’t know. All I’ve got is what’s here on the page.”

“I know that, I’m just putting forward theories. Or were you not gonna think at all?”

“It’s- I-” Mistral slammed the journal shut with a sigh and glared at Griselda. “Why is it so important? Do you want to spend time speculating on the hows and the whys?”

Griselda put up her talons in a ‘hey, now’ gesture. “Well, kinda, yeah. There’s a reason the innkeep used to be a stallion but they’re now a mare. And not only that, but that mare’s lying. You do wanna know that reason, right? ‘Cause I do. And that means speculating on-” She tapped the journal. “-that.”

With another sigh, Mistral ruffled her mane. The annoying thing was, she and Griselda were after the same thing: finding out what was up with Clarity. They just disagreed on how to get there; Griselda wanted to speculate on things that might not hold any information, but Mistral wanted to read to the end, find whatever secrets this journal held, since there’d almost definitely be something on the old innkeeper there. But, to play the draconequus’s advocate, that was still “might not hold any information” and “almost definitely be something”. They had no way of knowing until they got to the end of the journal. “Okay, fine,” she said. “Go ahead and speculate. But if you try using me as somepony to bounce ideas off of, you won’t get much.”

“Fair enough,” said Griselda with a shrug. “I talk to myself a lot, anyway. Ruins can be lonely.” She stopped focusing on Mistral and looked off into the distance. “Wonder if the writer ever saw the package,” she muttered.

Not paying attention, Mistral flipped the book open again.

The innkeeper and the unicorn are yelling at each other. I can’t really make out what they’re saying, but I think the innkeeper’s saying something about a magic dampener. If I can hear him right, he wants to be sure the unicorn won’t go nuts and kill everypony with his magic, and the unicorn’s really pissed about that. They’ve already been yelling for over five minutes, and I only started writing to try to take my mind off of it. It’s not working.

I’ve got no idea how the griffon and crystal pony are doing. I don’t think they’re up here. I haven’t been down since my last entry, so I haven’t had the chance to talk with them. If th

“-and it just stops mid-word like that,” said Mistral. “Not the last entry, though.”

“Hnng. She got interrupted, I’ll bet,” said Griselda. “Heard something, left off writing, decided not to finish it off.” She clicked her tongue. “Also, ten bits says the unicorn killed the innkeeper.”

Mistral looked briefly at Griselda, too quickly for her see. She was being very casual about wanton murder. Maybe it was just her way of dealing with things. Maybe there was something more to her. Well, one way or another, she was definitely more reasonable than Desmoda. Mistral kept reading.

The innkeeper just killed the unicorn. The yelling suddenly stopped, and a few seconds later, the innkeeper stomped down the hall, package in his mouth and dripping blood. It sounded like he went down to the cellar. I peeked into the unicorn’s room and his throat was slit. I don’t know how the innkeeper managed it. I don’t think I want to.

Telling the griffon and the crystal pony right now.

“Damn,” Griselda said quietly. A lot of the bravado had left her voice. “This just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Mistral said flatly. “Better and better.” And it all seemed to center around that package. The unicorn killed the earth pony because of it and immediately took the package away. The innkeeper killed the unicorn because of the first death, but then immediately took the package away. The obvious questions kept running through Mistral’s mind: what was that package and where was it now?

Griselda whispered again. “…D-do you think it’ll happen to us?”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

Facet would’ve been shaking, but she was paralyzed with fear as Desmoda pinned her to the wall, leering. The bloody stench of Desmoda’s breath washed over her; she gagged. She pushed weakly against Desmoda’s legs, but between Desmoda’s strength and her own lack thereof, she might as well have been poking a mountain with a feather.

“You really think you can do that to me?” Desmoda asked, amused. “Try to make me feel what you want me to feel? Yeah, no. I’m onto you.”

Facet fought to get a breath down. “How-” she gurgled. “How did- you- know about- my magic?”

“You- Oh, Luna, you really need to ask that question?” Desmoda turned to Cassandra and laughed. “Ha! Listen to her. She needs to ask that question.”

“Yeah!” Cassandra forced out. “Ha! Ha! Ha!” She backed away and attempted to smile.

Desmoda turned back to Cassandra, still grinning. “I’ve been listening to you and her talking all this time. You weren’t doing a thing to keep your voices down, and this isn’t the place to keep secrets, y’know? Way too small. Real easy to listen in. Besides…” With her free hoof, she pointed at her ears. “I’m a batpony. I’ve got good hearing anyway.”

Facet quickly nodded, trying to get on Desmoda’s good side. She didn’t even know what she was nodding about, just that it was a good idea to do so.

“Now, listen,” said Desmoda. Her voice was light and casual, as if they were chatting about the weather over tea. “Here’s the deal. You will not magic me again. You won’t even think about it. You won’t even look at me funny. Because if you do, or if I just think you did, I’ll rip your sunblasted throat out the same way I did the whiny bitch’s.” She ran her tongue over her teeth and leaned forward until their muzzles were touching. “Got it? Capiche?” She eased up on Facet’s throat by about an inch.

“Got it!” gasped Facet. “Capiche!”

“You dig?”

“I dig!”

“Groovy?”

“Groovy!”

“Groovy.” Desmoda threw Facet to the floor; her jaw snapped shut again the hardwood and her teeth rang. Her legs were shaking so hard she could barely get them under her, and she still had to lean against the wall for support.

Cassandra cautiously took a few steps forward. “Facet? Are y-”

“You stay away from her,” snarled Desmoda. She put herself between Facet and Cassandra. “You’re talking with her and you’re the one coming up with the plans to mess with my head.” She began advancing on Cassandra; the latter backed up, but Desmoda kept coming. “And if you think I’m going let the two of you keep that up, well.” She cocked her head. “That’s so stupid I don’t have anything to say to that.”

“But- but if-” Cassandra hit one of the corners and quailed down. “If we don’t do any ma-”

“Don’t care. You two were talking. Stop talking.”

“We will!” yelled Cassandra. “W-whatever you say! You want us to stop talking, we’re done talking! Pfft! Done! Got it capiche groovy I dig!”

Desmoda squinted at Cassandra. “You’d better,” she whispered after a moment.

Cassandra whimpered and mashed her face into the floor. In spite of their past, in spite of her previous intrusiveness, Facet couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.

But the moment Desmoda turned her back on her, Cassandra changed. She shook herself off and rolled her eyes as she stood up, as if she’d only been pushed into a pool by a bratty foal. She wasn’t shaking. She wasn’t breathing quickly. She didn’t look scared or nervous. She actually looked a little bit angry. No, not angry. Something close, but different. Maybe… frustrated? It was hard to tell. Facet stopped feeling sorry and started feeling intrigued.

Facet could understand being frustrated. She herself was frustrated right now. But for her, fear was completely overwhelming the frustration. Cassandra didn’t seem to be scared at all. She examined Cassandra, trying to see why, but Desmoda noticed her and drew a hoof across her throat.

For once, Facet actually wanted to talk to somepony, and this was the one time she wasn’t able to.

She went back to her table and resumed reading her book. But she couldn’t focus. She kept looking up at Desmoda and Cassandra. Desmoda sat at the bar, downing her beer without a care in the world. Cassandra hung back in her corner, licking her lips. She took a few steps forward. Desmoda didn’t respond. She took another few steps forward-

“Hey!” yelled Desmoda, turning and pointing at Cassandra. “Stay away from her!”

“Sorry!” Cassandra said quickly. “It’s just, I, yeah, sorry.”

Desmoda’s gaze flitted back and forth between Facet and Cassandra. “I’m watching you,” she whispered. “Both of you.”

“Um, c-can I at least go upstairs?” Facet asked tentatively. “I wo-”

“Oh, noooo, you’re staying right down here where I can keep an eye on you.”

Facet opened her mouth. Nothing came out. She just nodded instead.

The door banged open and Clarity staggered back into the room. “All set!” she said cheerfully. “It j-just took a-a little bit longer than I was expecting, since I needed to get it far away. You’d think it wouldn’t m-matter, but it could poison the well, and then the water o-of this place would be undrinkable.” She laughed. “I can’t go out all the t-time to get water!”

“Yeah I get it totally,” Cassandra babbled. Facet nodded like a bobblehead in a storm.

Clarity brushed some snow from her mane. “Anyway, you all doing alright?”

“Yep,” said Cassandra. “Great.”

“Great!”

Facet and Cassandra looked at each other. Ha, ha. Yeah, right.

Mistral turned to the next entry of the journal, only to see the ragged edges of three torn sheets of paper pointing up at her. She tilted her head. “Huh.”

“Huh?” asked Griselda. “What huh? Is it a good huh or a bad huh?”

“Someone tore some of the pages out. Look.” She showed the book to Griselda.

Griselda blinked. “That is indeed huh.” She held the book open so the covers were pointing up and fanned the pages out. No spare sheets of paper fell out. “Weird. You didn’t see any paper lying around and throw it away thinking it was trash, did you?”

“No, definitely not.”

“I say we take a quick look around the room for them. Just a minute, okay? There might be something important in them.”

Unfortunately, that quick look was fruitless. There weren’t many places sheets of paper could hide, and all of them were empty, even after being triple-checked. Resigned to missing those pages, Mistral started reading the next entry, hoping she wouldn’t be missing much.

The barricade’s still holding up-

“Wait, what?” squawked Griselda. “A barricade? When did this happen?”

“Shh!”

The barricade’s still holding up, but she’s still trying to smash down the door.

“Smash down the door?!”

“SHH!”

-still trying to smash down the door. I’m getting hungry; if worst comes to worst, I’ll starve in here. There’s still plenty of food outside for her. The furnace is still burning. The window can’t open and I don’t think I can smash it with my bare hooves, so I’m not going out that way.

I never imagined it’d end like

(“-but that line’s scribbled out-”, added Mistral.)

No. I WILL NOT die in here. I WILL survive this. I just need to think.

Things in room:

• bed (in barr.)
• mattress (in barr., mbe not nec?)
• pillows
• blankets
• coat hangers
• my stuff (mostly clothes, no weapons)
• end table (small)

“And then there’s a lot of rough sketches for stuff,” said Mistral, “but I can’t tell what that stuff is.” She leafed through the pages. Three of them — both sides — were completely covered in diagrams that looked like the writer was planning something. It kind of resembled the room.

“So that’s the point where it stopped being a journal,” said Griselda, “and started being a military playbook. Think she was a visual learner?”

“A- a visual-”

“She was trying to figure out how to defend herself when- when whoever broke into the room for whatever reason! I mean, lookit this. They’re totally pictures of the did we ever find out the sexes of the griffon and the crystal pony?”

Griselda’s segue was so abrupt it took Mistral several seconds to realize there was a segue at all. “I…” Mistral shook her head and barely managed to figure out why Griselda had asked that. “No, I don’t think so. But the person breaking in was a mare, right?”

“Or a hen,” said Griselda. “A ‘she’, either way. I was just thinking, maybe we’d heard that one of them was male, and… ah, well. Anyway, look. The writer’s trying to make some defensive position with what she has. Why do you think she made that list? For fun? She was cataloguing the stuff she could use.”

Mistral wrinkled her nose and looked down at the list again. “Why did she need to write it down? I don’t need that kind of thing. I just remember stuff.”

“Well, you’re not everypony!” yelled Griselda. “People do things differently!”

It still seemed to Mistral that simply remembering things was easier. But Griselda was getting antsy (hopefully not Desmoda antsy), so she just said, “Fine.” She knew that they were almost to the end of the journal; she just had to hold on a little bit longer. She went to the next page.

The difference between this entry and the last was immediately noticeable: where the writing had once been cleanish and crispish, it was now messy and uneven. Lines wavered across the page, words were packed together, letters had no consistent size, and there were no paragraphs — the letters simply ran across the page, starting on a new line the moment the old one ended. It ran all the way down to the bottom of the page

“Oh, mare. Look at the writing.” Mistral showed the journal to Griselda. “Why’s it so jagged like that?”

“I can barely make it out,” Griselda said, squinting. “Can you?”

“Yeah.” Years of delivering letters with poorly-scribbled addresses had given Mistral better-than-normal reading skills. “It says-”

cant keep it out can feel it barely move must keep it out so cold must let others know write it down hide this cant let them find it have others find it so cold-

“Slow down!” interrupted Griselda. “You’re reading it way too fast!”

“That’s the way it’s written!” said Mistral. She gestured at the page. “It’s all one big run-on sentence, and there’s no punctuation or anything. And it-” She flipped ahead. “Shit, it goes on for at least two more pages. Celestia.” A quick look at the content wasn’t much better; it was all incoherent, unstructured rambling. “It’s like she was going crazy.”

“It looks like she already was.” Griselda’s wings were beginning to twitch and she dragged one claw along the floor.

“Yeah. Maybe.” Mistral scanned the words a bit more intently, trying to find some meaning in them. But it was the same kind of mess of the first few lines: vague references to the writer feeling something, trying to let others know (somehow), trying to keep “them” out, and a strange chill. The room didn’t feel any colder than usual to Mistral, but that didn’t mean much.

Griselda tapped a claw on the head of the bed. “So,” she said thoughtfully, “who do you think ‘they’ were? The griffon and the crystal pony? I’m betting the crystal pony was Clarity.”

“I dunno. Maybe.” Somehow, the griffon and the crystal pony being “them” didn’t seem right to Mistral. It just didn’t really click at all. Clarity being the crystal pony made more sense, though.

“But,” Griselda muttered, clearly more thinking out loud than talking, “if she was Clarity, why did she…”

Tuning her out, Mistral flipped to the next page. The scribblings stopped about halfway down. Just to be safe, she skimmed it again, and was rewarded. “Hang on, hang on,” she said as she squinted at the words. “There’s something different in this last line. Listen.”

cant hide walls cant remove walls must tell know when see walls

“-and then it just trails away into a smear,” said Mistral. She flipped forward a few pages. “There’s no more entries after that. Just ink stains.” At least there wasn’t any blood. Mistral wasn’t sure she could handle that.

“The walls?” Griselda asked, looking up. She scanned the room’s walls, with their blank, mark-free wallpaper. “But they’re blank and they’re covered… with…” Her eyes slowly started widening. “…They’re… They’re covered…”

“I-I’d always wondered what that w-wallpaper was for,” Mistral said breathlessly. Her heart began pounding. “We’ve got to take it down.” She scrambled to one corner of the room. Pointing at the adjacent corner, she said, “You take that side, I’ll take this side.” She began working her hoof into the biggest gap between sheets she could find.

Unfortunately, that gap was still fairly small, especially for blunt hooves. “Sun blast it,” growled Mistral as she accidentally pressed she sheet down again. There was no way she could get her hoof in there, not on her own.

Good thing she wasn’t on her own. With her claws, Griselda had a much easier time, and was soon pulling sheets off easily. She ripped them off her side like a griffon possessed, and Mistral was able to bite down on some of the loose edges (even though the taste was absolutely horrible) and pull them down on her side. As the wallpaper fell away and the wall was exposed, Mistral sucked in a breath. “Oooooh, Celestia,” she whispered.

“By my mother’s egg,” swore Griselda.

Across every square inch of stone, top to bottom and wall to wall, words were irregularly scratched. The same words, over and over and over and over and over. Several of the scratches were smeared with a dark red stain.

Mistral and Griselda looked at the wall, then at each other, then at the wall. They stared at it in shock for a few moments, trying to take it in.

Eventually, Mistral spoke up. “Fuck this. I’m leaving.”