XXXIV
Circles in Mud
XXXIV
Circles in Mud
The rain became a storm as we walked, the wind masking all sounds of an approaching monster, or even one another’s voices. At one point, when the storm first presented howling winds, Blizzard had offered to fly up and disperse it, but I cautioned her against it. This far from civilization, if a monster flew up to claim her as unsuspecting prey, I wouldn’t be able to see to help.
So we pressed on, coats matted down with mud and manes trickling rainwater like downspouts.
“How much further?!” I shouted over the storm to Hare after what seemed like a day’s march into the swamp.
She answered with a disheartening shrug. “I’ve never been to the place before! Ponies call it ‘the grove’—say there’s an enchanted tree or something there with bark that cures pain.”
I cocked my brow. “So just a willow?!”
“Do I look like I know, Mister Wizard?” Hare snapped back.
I sighed, and hung my head, thinking about how embarrassing it would be to die because of some ridiculous superstition.
Maybe three strides down the swampy path, another realization rose to the front of my mind: the rain had gotten colder. Before it felt simply unpleasant, but the water and the wind were starting to pierce through my coat now, chilling my back, and most especially my neck, right at the base of my skull…
My horn flared to life and I stood bolt upright. “Show yourself!” I hadn’t actually cast anything just yet, but the sudden sign of magic stopped whatever was reaching out for my soul from pushing its luck.
“Morty?” Blizzard asked, nervously searching the gray waters and the misty air for any sign of life.
“Is it the kelpie?” Hare asked, stepping closer to me.
I shook my head. “It’s probably a pony. Another wizard.”
“What are you talking about?” Hare watched the horizon. “Out here? I mean, who would even want to live out here?”
“I’ll explain later. For now, stay close to me, keep your eyes open for a pony, and if you start to feel cold on the back of your neck, say something fast.”
“I neck is cold,” Graargh announced. “Rain wet.”
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t spare the time to emit a groan. “More like ice, Graargh. You’ll know if you feel it. Now come on, and stay close.” With that, I broke off into a sprint.
Around every twisting turn and with each muddy step and stumble on an upraised root or a sunken hole, my mind painted Wintershimmer in the mists. To my knowledge, there were only two ponies in the world who had ever known how to rip out a soul, and I was one of them. But as I ran, keeping my horn lit as much as I could without spending another precious spell, my mind drifted to another name: Solemn Vow. My predecessor.
Something moved near my hoof in the murky water. Before I even had time to turn, Graargh pounced on the thing. When he lifted his head, muddy water dripped from between his teeth around the corpse of a frog, its legs hanging limply over my companion’s lips.
I shook my head, catching my breath as my heart pounded from both fear and exertion. “Keep going,” I wheezed, forcing my hooves to move again.
Everything was heavy. Everything was wet. Mud stuck higher and higher on my chest as my hooves splashed, throwing too much force into each time I lifted them from the soggy ground. I wish the threat to my life, and to the lives of my friends, had been enough to push such thoughts from my mind, but somehow they persevered.
Which made the sudden cessation of rain all the more welcome.
I should point out that the storm did not suddenly stop; rather, all at once, I passed some unseen line in the swamp, and entered a sunny day. Behind me, the storm still raged on, but in a visible circle perhaps three dozen strides across, the clouds were parted and the sun shone down. Overhead, I saw no pegasi, nor signs of any magic maintaining the weather. As moments passed and mud dried into my coat, the welcome warmth turned into a foreboding sensation. Somewhere behind me, hidden in the rain, somepony or something had tried to steal my soul. Perhaps it still waited there. Ahead, in the center of the dry clearing, a copse of trees concealed from my view a small area of the clearing that seemed to promise as much danger as potential for answers.
“Is this where the kelpie lives, Mister Morty?” Hare asked.
I shook my head, still catching my breath. “This isn’t a kelpie. There might be one in the swamp, but I doubt it took your mother. Kelpies don’t hunt ponies; they lure them in. Whatever… whatever’s back there is far, far worse.”
The words put an almost broken expression on Hare’s muzzle, and I only realized a moment later what I had implied. “Hare, your mother might not be hurt. We still need to keep looking.”
In part to answer my own question, but almost equally for the sake of relieving the young mare in my company, I started walking toward the copse. Willows and mangroves offered dangling leaves and numerous bushy stalks to block my view, and I had to force my way forward by brute physical force.
One branch gave way to another, and then leaves and stalks gave way to… a foreleg?
Thankfully, mercifully, it wasn’t severed, though the warm limb remained completely still until I pushed past it myself. That gave me a solid view of the center of the trees, and their grisly contents.
At least a half-dozen ponies lay scattered around the space, comatose. Or, as my mind immediately corrected, more likely soulless. They’d been discarded like ragdolls, left in the mud with legs blocking their faces. Mercifully, at least, none were maimed or injured… or even ill. Their bodies were being preserved by somepony, or some creature, though with only the same level of care one might grant a pet and not another pony.
In the center of the copse, I saw something else: a ritual circle. The glyphs and runes were smudged and misshapen by the drying of the mud they had been drawn into, but I could still see the vague shape. A septagram within a septagram, and maybe another still within it.
“Mom!” Hare shouted over my shoulder, and before I even had time to turn, she scampered up my back and leapt into the circle.
“Hare, wait—!” My plea fell on deaf ears, but for once, the sudden action proved harmless. No spell swallowed up the earth pony, no sudden beast emerged from the mud, none of the bodies rose up to attack her. Instead, the filly tromped over the middle of the circle, smudging a minor part of the exterior shape, and bent over one of the bodies. “Mom… it’s me, Hare! Are you… Can you hear me?”
I stepped into the copse, and the rest of our company followed shortly. “Hare, listen to me…”
“She’s not dead!” Hare shouted back. “She’s warm! I can feel it!”
“I know,” I told her. “Hare, please, I want you to listen closely. Before I explain, I want you to know that I might be able to help your mother. Might. But to do that, we’re going to need to find whoever, or whatever, did this to her in the first place.”
“What happened?” Blizzard asked, gently nudging another of the ponies with her wing, and getting no visible response. “They’re alive, but they’re all… comatose?”
I sighed, knowing exactly what response I was going to get. “Their souls are gone.”
“What?!” Hare shouted.
“Please be calm. Remember, whatever attacked your mother is still out there. We saw it.”
“That was what we saw?” Blizzard asked. “Is that why you said that thing about cold on our necks?”
“Yes.” I took a momentary glance around the copse, and then walked over to the ritual circle for a closer look. “Sentient creatures almost all have souls that are magically linked to their physical bodies at the base of the skull. There are other connection points too—horns for unicorns, wings for pegasi, basically anywhere your magic manifests—but those are secondary. They aren’t strong enough to tie the soul to the body. The base of the skull is how the personality of a soul gets into the brain, which is why that’s the main connection point even in dragons and vargr and other species.”
The ritual circle itself was far too smudged to decipher in any meaning, but I did take note of something globby and off-white near the edge of the outer ring. I picked up a piece of it in my magic and held it at eye height; it almost looked like fat, or perhaps tallow or bone marrow. A magical infuser for the circle, maybe? But when I looked down again, I realized that it had scraped out some writing in plain, non-arcane Equiish. I opened my mouth to ask for Blizzard, but Angel spoke up first.
“But, Master Coil, aren’t you and Master Wintershimmer the only ponies able to sever a soul from a living body?”
Blizzard turned on me with widened eyes. “You can do that?”
“Yes,” I admitted with a sigh. “That’s what I threatened your father with. And it was how Wintershimmer wanted me to kill Clover. Even she doesn’t know how to defend against a spell like that. And yes, Angel, to my knowledge he only ever taught me that spell.”
Hare stood up. “Then this Wintershimmer wizard is the pony who did this to my mom?”
“I doubt it,” I answered. “He’s been dead for several weeks now. I killed him.”
Hare winced, and stepped away from me with nervous eyes, but my mind was too busy running with possibilities to console her.
“Then who?” Graargh asked.
I shrugged. “I need to figure that out. Which leads me to this question: Blizzard, can you come over here and read this?” I gestured to the writing I’d found.
Blizzard approached and took note of the writing in the mud. “The hoofwriting is honestly great, Morty; are you having trouble reading it? Do you need glasses?”
“Just…” I shook my head. “What does it say?”
“Well, let’s see. Immersion of that— no, wait thammo…”
“Thaumo… it’s a prefix referring to the relationship between mana and physical matter, or vice-versa.”
“Oh. Immersion of thaumoreactive stabilizers into wa… That last word’s smudged. The next lines says yields receptive to… Blizzard scratched her brow with a wing. “Whatever that is, it isn’t an Equiish letter. Is it some sort of magical notation?”
I glanced at the character, but it wasn’t a glyph I had ever encountered before. “I have no idea.” I traced along more of the Equiish text to see if it was just a placeholder or a variable for some known magical formula, but instead, I only reached a smudged formula for a fairly simple form of seance; even more rudimentary than what I had used in town to earn us change for the road. “This is really fundamental necromancy here; if whoever, or whatever, knows how to use Wintershimmer’s spell, it’s way beyond this. And they screwed the formula up even on something this simple. Half the work is backwards. You’d think finding somepony’s notes on their evil plan would tend to resolve a mystery, but I guess—”
Graargh’s ears perked up, and his throat released a low, heavy vibration.
“Uh… Graargh—”
“Somepony is coming. Two somepony.” His right ear visibly twitched. “One fly.”
“He can tell a single fly, in a swamp?” Hare asked.
“He means flying.” I cast my gaze upward. “Probably a pegasus.”
Graargh confirmed my theory only a moment later, with an exclamation I cannot even pretend to claim I was expecting. “Fish pony!”
Sky blue wings and a stiff Cirran gladius emerged from the surrounding woods, followed by a face I admit I hadn’t missed much. If Tempest’s glare was a healthy dose of surprise and unwelcome, however, I was even more unprepared when the wood nearby cracked away and another familiar face emerged.
“Coil?!”
“Bad mare!” Graargh growled.
I brought a muddy hoof to my brow. “Hello, Silhouette.”