Stiff grass and loose pebbles crunched under their hooves. They’d been walking for barely an hour and already Daring was out of breath. She heaved and gasped while Calcine trotted up a steep trail that wended its way between sheer rock faces and groves of shrubbery. “We… almost there?”
He paused, but only long enough to spare her a glance. “You are not used to the mountain air.”
“No… no, I’m not. Then there’s the whole… being out for two days… after flying across the desert… plus—”
The sound of beating drums stilled them both. Calcine stared up at the blanket of stars, muttering curses at the heavens. “We are late. This way!”
He turned and pushed his way through the undergrowth, leaving her alone on the path.
Daring did some cursing of her own as she followed him. Branches as sharp as griffon claws raked against her sides, and her open mouth inhaled more leaves than air. At least the leaves tasted better than Calcine’s soup. Still this was insane. Here she was, pushing through the undergrowth on a mountain in the dark. Her next step could send her plummeting down a cliff or into the hooves of another bunch of murder-happy villagers. The only hint that she wasn’t following a crazy-pony was the rhythmic thump of drums echoing through the air, the sign that there were indeed other ponies living on this rock and not just some Calcine-born delusion.
That didn’t mean he and his fellow mountain dwellers weren’t all crazy, of course. In her experience, crazy topped the list of reasons why ponies chose to live in extreme isolation and secret, followed closely by hoarding priceless treasures. Assuming Calcine had told her the truth about there not being treasure here, bad food would be the least of her worries.
Calcine’s voice hissed in her ear. “Stop here.”
Her forehoof froze in midair and hovered over a sheer drop that she hadn’t spotted in her haste to keep up. The underbrush ended abruptly inches before the ground itself did. Daring crouched down and peered through the leaves with well-practiced stealth. Calcine stood nearby, as still as stone and nearly invisible, even to her.
“Now we watch,” he whispered. “Do not interfere. Do not be seen. If you are discovered here, it will mean our doom.”
Daring nodded. Now the adventuring started in earnest: see what the bad guys were up to, then foil their evil plan. Before her lay a crater, wide as a small village at its top edges and sloping down steeply to a flat rock base. A group of ponies garbed in black stood at its center, gathered around a vertical rock face jutting out into the crater’s interior.
The mass of black cloaks obscured whatever was actually going on down there, all except for curious firelight glinting off the rock face. The only movement was that of the drummers, two sets of ponies on either end of the group pounding on large, painted drums that shone like marble in the meagre torchlight. At least now she knew what else Calcine made on that potter’s wheel of his besides urns, and what his black cloak was for. Why was Calcine standing up here with her instead of down there with others?
If only she could see the scene up close. Maybe he’d been leading her to a better vantage point before the drumming started. Or maybe he’d been heading for the staircase carved into the crater wall, so she could be the ‘guest of honor’ for the night.
“What happens next?” she asked.
“Midnight. It always happens at midnight. There!”
The drumming stopped as abruptly as it started. The huddled ponies spread out to the crater’s walls with the grace of dancers and the speed of shadows. An orange light glowed where they once stood, but it wasn’t firelight like she expected. A narrow chasm stretched across the ground at the base of the vertical rock face, its depths alight with magma.
The Wailing Mountain was an active volcano.
A single pony remained near the chasm, a bone-thin stallion tied to a stone altar at the edge of the precipice. The magma’s hellish light cast his emaciated body into sharp relief, from near-nonexistent stomach to visible ribcage to skull-like face.
Daring gasped and stood. “Once they spot me, cause a distraction, something to draw their attention while I grab him.”
Calcine’s hoof jammed into her back, forcing her back down with all his bodyweight. “No! Do not be seen!”
Rage boiled inside her, along with a half-dozen ways to break free and throw him over the crater’s edge. “I’m not letting somepony get thrown in the lava!”
He pressed down harder still. “That would be a mercy, if it was not too late for him already! If we are seen, others will suffer the same fate!”
Daring’s muscles relaxed, if only to feign agreement. Her adrenaline was pumping hard enough to turn outrage into action in a heartbeat. If this was the evil Calcine was talking about, tipping starved ponies into a lava vent, then she’d gladly bring the practice to a violent end along with every pony involved.
“He began the ritual months ago,” Calcine muttered, “there is nothing left in him to save. What is left belongs to the traveler.”
Daring’s eyes bored into the stallion on the altar, searching for even the slightest signs of life, the call to break Calcine’s jaw and swoop in to save the day. “Who’s the trav—”
A shadow fell across the altar despite nopony approaching it. At last Daring noticed the rock face beyond the altar, the smooth, vertical surface that had been polished to a mirror-like shine. And at last she noticed the blurry silhouette of a pony standing within it, like a reflection without a caster.
The silhouette in the mirror leaned down towards the stallion’s reflection, and suddenly the awful silence hanging in the air vanished. The stallion’s eyes flew open and an ear-splitting scream escaped his lips, a shrill note too prolonged and deafening for a single pony to produce, a sound that fixed Daring to the spot in abject horror.
The stallion convulsed and squirmed against his bonds for second after terrible second, his long cries shaking the heavens and then dying in gasps for air. Over and over again this cycle went, unending and unendurable to anypony within earshot.
And then silence fell like a hammer blow. The altar lay empty aside from the now limp ropes, and the bright magma illuminating the scene dimmed from a furnace-like gleam to a dull glow that the stars outshone.
Daring kept staring at the altar. She couldn't stop. “Is he… I mean… What just happened?”
Calcine withdrew his hoof from her back. “Something that must never happen again.”
---
Daring walked the length of the crater, from staircase to altar, for the fifth time, pausing only when her legs started to shake. It’d been less than an hour, she knew. Less than an hour ago this spot had been swarming with black-robed villagers and a pony had been dematerialized on that stone altar by some sort of pony-shaped shadow monster. She’d seen and heard it, and yet those horrors glimpsed from afar felt too alien to have taken place in this very real and relatively mundane spot.
Even the lava vent felt unimpressive. Up close it was just a crack in the ground roughly a hoofspan wide radiating a little light and a lot of heat. She’d dealt with lava before, a few times nearly nose-diving into the stuff on her way to another thrilling escape.
“How do they do it?” she asked. She had so many questions, many that deserved to be shouted.
Calcine still hadn’t said a thing since the stallion vanished. After that moment the ponies from the ritual removed what looked like earplugs from their ears and vanished up the crater’s staircase. Daring had taken wing as soon as the coast was clear, gliding over the crater’s expanse and touching down at the base of the stairs.
“How do they do it?” she said a bit louder. Calcine was seated on the steps, staring straight ahead at the mirror.
What was it about the mirror? At a distance she’d assumed the vertical rock face had been polished. Cults loved lairs with spooky ambiance, after all. Up close she could see the gargantuan piece of glass properly, the perfectly smooth surface devoid of scratches, pockmarks, and smudges. Mirrors this big and perfect shouldn't have been able exist outside of ornate mansions and museums, protected from damaging elements and dirty hooves.
“Is there a cave behind the mirror?” There had to be, she reasoned. How else did whoever was casting the shadow get close to the altar?
Calcine said nothing.
“Talk to me, already! If you want me to help you stop this, I need to know how—” Daring’s overarching pragmatism faltered in the face of a far more important question “Why? Why do they do this?”
Calcine finally stirred, uttering a cough that echoed across the crater. “Payment. Payment for the lava not covering the mountain and destroying us all. A new sacrificial pony must be provided whenever the old one finally vanishes, and when we can’t abduct one from across the desert, the eldest member of the village is chosen.”
She leaned over and spit in the lava vent. “Monsters. You're all monsters.”
Calcine nodded, his face ashen. “We are. We don't deserve to draw breath.”
“So what’s gotten you thinking different?”
“Once I knew a pony who thought just as you, who spoke in whispers about escape, about our all leaving the mountain before the traveler could return and demand a new sacrifice. She was no monster… She was my wife.”
Daring held back an eye roll. “And then her time was up, right? And suddenly because it's somepony you cared about—”
“It was not her time!” Calcine said with a snarl. He leaped to his feet and matched her irate glare. “She was young! Younger than I! Yet when a pony from our village was required as sacrifice…”
Daring hated long pauses almost as much as pony-eating monsters. “What?”
Calcine looked past her, glaring at the mirror. “The traveler knew, somehow. When the time of choosing came, he picked her out of all of us, out of hundreds of ponies young and old he picked the one who dared think of leaving his mountain. Our chieftess didn't even look surprised. Some ponies even looked… relieved.”
A tinge of sympathy diluted her glare, but he bared his teeth. He crossed the crater, one thundering step at a time, until only the altar stood between the mirror and his ravenous, animal glare. “I am a monster, but I will do only one more terrible thing. I will shatter the mirror while the traveler stands within it. I will condemn the mountain, its monster, and its keepers. I will end the sacrifices and the village that provides them. I will end it all!”
“No you won't,” she said with a sigh. “I get that you're angry—”
He rounded on her. “You don’t understand!”
“I don’t have to! Just because I haven't been in your horseshoes doesn't mean I haven't seen ponies in your place, so angry and hopeless they want the whole world to end… and a few that want to end it just to hurt everypony else. I don’t think you’re one of them.”
“I was going to jump.”
“Huh?”
The sullen frown he'd worn when she first woke up was back. “When I saw you falling to your death. I was on that ledge because I was going to jump to my own.”
Silence hung in the air for a moment. Daring folded her ears back; for her, silence still rung with screams. “So what stopped you?”
“Hope. Hope and instinct. I couldn't stand there and watch you fall, and then I couldn't leave you on the ledge to die for want of water. Saving you reminded me of what my wife would have wanted me to do in her stead… and what I must do to avenge her.”
His gaze returned to the mirror. She joined his vigil a second later, studying every inch of the mirror for weak spots or hidden levers. “However this trick works… I'm putting a stop to it. Whether you help or not, I'm ending this.”
He nodded. “There will be a choosing ceremony tonight. When the traveler appears, we must break the mirror and him with it.”
Daring crouched low and tensed her hind legs. “Why wait? How about I just shatter it right now?” Then she could go deal with the actual monster.
Calcine snorted. “Try if you must.”
One blow was all it should’ve taken. If that perfect wall of glass was half as old as Calcine claimed, breaking it would be foal’s play. Daring launched herself forward, spinning in midair and expertly planting her back hoof on the mirror with all of her bodyweight behind it.
The mirror hit back. Pain shot up her leg, and a second later she shot across the crater and skidded to a stop by the stairs. She flopped onto her back, grunting and cursing. What did this mountain have against her and her dignity? “The hay was that?”
Calcine trotted over and helped her up. “Only the traveler can open it. We must wait for him to appear.”
Bushes rustled all around them. Daring rolled onto her back and spun around. It didn’t matter which way she turned; cloaked ponies lined the crater’s edge, aiming spears at them from all sides. “I guess we won’t have to wait very long.”