//------------------------------// // Chapter Seven // Story: Book 1 The Darkness: with the darkest of ponies // by Penelope Anne Ink //------------------------------// *** *** *** *** *** *** Edgy had been tossing and turning. Tonight the nightmares had gotten worse. He couldn’t make out all that much from them but there was a dense atmosphere. Figures, voices, everywhere, screaming and groaning all at once and chasing after him. He couldn’t fight them off, couldn’t take it... *** *** *** *** *** *** Starry woke up in a daze. It wasn’t supposed to be nighttime, but she was surrounded by darkness. She rubbed her eyes and tried to make out the forms of the rocky walls that were supposed to surround them. She started walking forward with her front hooves out and actually bumped into a wall, dislodging a rock that crumbled onto the ground. “Star? What happened?” Edgy called out. She could hear him shuffling around in the dark. “I’m not sure. I’m going to try to see what’s going on,” she called back. She started thinking about producing a warm glow from her horn. But even though she could feel her magic wanting to come through, she couldn’t see the glow lighting up anything. “Edgy? Can you see my horn?” “No? Where are you?” he continued to shuffle around so she started trotting toward the sounds. “I’m right here, I think I can reach y-,” was the last thing Edgy heard before a scream and then utter silence. “Star? Star?? Star!” Edgy yelled, but he didn’t get a response. He was panicking. It was the first time in their whole journey that she was actually gone. It was really the first time since he found himself in the crate that he had been physically alone. He wanted to scream. “No, don’t leave me alone.” He sat down and felt like he was going to cry. After all the villains they had faced, this was suffocating and confusing. There was no entity they could punch. No place they could jump from. And at this moment, there was no they. His hoof touched something cold that began rolling away. He launched himself toward it and found that it was a tiny vial attached to a chain. Even though he couldn’t see what was inside it, he knew not to open it. It was Starry’s mercury vial. She’d never part with this intentionally, he thought and his eyes grew big. Frantically he continued feeling around the floor for any sign of Starry, or even their campsite at this point, but he couldn’t feel anything. Suddenly, the darkness began turning cold, a breeze started lifting up in the darkness and it began to turn into the harshest cold blasts of a wintry blizzard. He found that after a while, he couldn’t feel it anymore. All his senses numbed and he felt like he had lost all sense of his physical form. There was nothing but darkness. Suddenly, his memories of the time before the crate and the airship hit him. All at once in a pain of agony. He had tried to raid a town of...he wasn’t even sure. By the time he walked around it himself it was already wiped out, the citizens long carted away or chased off. He had felt so proud that he didn’t even care. He had a few of the storm guards loot the wealthier looking buildings before they boarded their air ship again. Tempest looked at him in disgust. The Storm King raged. It wasn’t the right village. It wasn’t the one he thought he was supposed to attack. Grubber had changed the name on the map he pointed out. It was the wrong place. Grubber had tricked him. The pain got worse as his memory turned to the moment Tempest sent a blast toward him, from what, he couldn’t tell. But he knew it was what erased his memory. From then on he had been in the crate, ready to be dropped off into some other dungeon far, far away from the Storm King or anypony that could help him. Edgy slumped over. The pain left, but his insides burned with knowing he was once a part of the Storm King’s army, and he was going to be sent to die. He had sent the raid to destroy so many innocents. For a while he just sat there, still huddled over. Until finally he saw a light up above him. It looked warm and inviting. Star?, he thought, but it was the sun itself. He looked around to see that he wasn’t in the gorge anymore but a grassy hill. All around him were small huts with smoke billowing drearily from their rooftops. Edgy got up and managed to take a few steps before he remembered. This is the village I came from. He started thinking back in his mind and found he remembered. Trot Town was one of the most ancient villages. After the Windigoes were defeated and Equestria was made, small outcrops of pony villages grew stronger and spread out and many new ones were founded. Trot Town was on the far reaches of Equestria. It had a solid pony population, but it was also home to creatures from the outside world. The primordial world before ponies began their civilization. Edgy could recognize some of the types of creatures that had been at the circus were walking around freely in the town. They wore their raggedy aprons and hobbled about with their carts of merchandise. One older gentleman with a cart of cabbages had been trying to sell his wares to many of the passersby, but he had priced them too high for the majority of the citizens. Edgy could see a tiny colt with a grey coat and dingy white hair creep up from under the cart and grab a cabbage before darting back into the alley. It was him. He had, during the journey, remembered a little of his childhood. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about. Not while he was with the Storm King, and not now. His time trying to take care of his aging mother. The years alone. Even then, he still didn’t have a name to call himself and gave nopony any to call him by. It was there that he realized that, even though he wasn’t a unicorn, he could control magic. With the use of his scars he could recite the same spells as unicorns to get the same results. But he found he could do even better. He practiced forming figures out of the darkness, at first to be his friends, but then to be his accomplices. No one in the town was better off than any of the others, but he was able to rob any travelers that came near enough to Trot Town. It was this that Tempest saw in him. His willingness to live independently of everyone else. His talent that led the Storm King to agree. But it wasn’t just this. The Storm King had been alerted to the great amount of magical energy Edgy had when Edgy performed the greatest feat of magic he would ever commit, that he wasn’t sure he could even do again. He paused the moon. Edgy watched the memory fly by. His weeks of agony afterwards. The scars on his arm had never shone out brighter and it had burned him the whole time. The storm guards that came and hauled him away when his own town gave him up, betraying him for the promise of a few months’s worth of food. Edgy shut his eye to everything. All his memories of his time with the Storm King came back into his mind and he didn’t want to relive it. It wasn’t him anymore. It kept replaying over and over and as it was coming close to the time his memory was being blasted away, he saw a face.