The Needle

by Rambling Writer


11 - Ever Deeper

Daring screamed, twisted in her ropes. They cruelly dug into her, biting into her skin, her flesh. Her heart was beating itself to death and she needed to run. She’d never been so scared in all her life. The terror slithered down her spine and sank its thorny claws deep into her nerves. She needed to run. She needed to get away from here. No matter what it took.

She felt lightheaded. She forced herself to stop screaming and look around. On either side of her, the sides of a tent sloped upward to a point. One of the poles was a bit askew; she must’ve knocked into it somehow. Nothing else in the tent could do that.

Daring’s breathing was light, shallow; hyperventilation. The gag ensured she was soon sucking down her own carbon dioxide. She started beating out a slow metronome in her head: inhale… exhale… 3… 4… inhale… exhale… 3… 4… inha-

The tent flap was swept back and Windrose leaned in. She stared at Daring, and Daring stared back. Windrose looked back over her shoulder. “She’s alive!” she yelled. “She just stopped screaming.”

After a second of confusion, Daring started wriggling away from Windrose. She didn’t know why she’d been tied up, but that didn’t matter. Windrose and Fallende were trying to stop her and she needed to run.

“Whoa, wait!” Windrose was kneeling by her side. “Listen, you- Are you doing okay? You stopped screaming. You better be doing okay.” She laughed nervously. “It’s either that or you’re not okay at all.”

Daring stopped trying to get away. Anypony could see the confusion on her face. A long moment, and then she shrugged as best she could.

“Good. Um, sorry about, you know, tackling you. I didn’t dislocate your wing, did I? Heh. Um. Please don’t start screaming again, okay?” Windrose’s hoof went to the knot on Daring’s gag. “You better be lucid,” she whispered, and undid the gag.

The air that flooded Daring’s body stuck her throat with frigid needles, but she didn’t care. She took giant gulps of clean air. Her legs started twitching in their ropes. She needed to run. They needed to run. “We need to run,” she gasped. “Now.” That much was certain. Nothing else was.

Windrose pulled her head back in shock. “W-what? What do you-”

“Running,” snapped Daring. “It’s not that hard. We can’t stay here.” She leaned forward and gnashed her teeth, but she couldn’t reach any knots.

“Why? What’re we running from?”

Daring laughed bitterly. “You don’t know? From-”

Her brain skipped a few thoughts and words suddenly refused to come. She rolled her thoughts back a bit. “We’re running from- From…”

From what?

She was scared. Daring was well aware of that. But when she thought about it, what she was scared of was a gigantic blank. She kept thinking and came up with nothing. Zilch. Nada. She was just scared. She couldn’t even think of anything that might have made her scared. She just remembered seeing the spire’s shadow and then waking up bound and gagged.

It was like a switch had been flipped in her head. The fear bubbled away so quickly it was like she’d never been scared in the first place. “I don’t know,” she admitted eventually. “I was scared of something, but I can’t remember what.”

Windrose tilted her head and frowned. “Okayyyyyyy…”

“That’s it, really,” said Daring. “It must’ve been left over from some nightmare I’d had while unconscious.” She couldn’t think of anything else. She wiggled a little in her ropes. “Could you, uh, untie me?”

“Okay,” Windrose said, but she sounded skeptical. After a moment, she untied Daring. Daring rubbed at her fetlocks, but they didn’t hurt that much. She must’ve not been out for too long.

They were still stopped not far from the pillar, the sun not far from its zenith, and Fallende was pacing outside the tent. When Daring and Windrose came out, she looked up. “She just stopped screaming?” she asked Windrose.

“That’s what it looked like, yeah,” said Windrose. “And I don’t think she remembers what she was screaming about.” She turned to Daring. “Do you?”

“I don’t remember anything,” said Daring. “I was walking around, looking at that pillar. Then I was tied up, gagged, and terrified of I don’t know what. What happened to me?”

Windrose and Fallende Looked at each other. Fallende shrugged and said, “I- We don’t know, we don’t know, really, my comatose comrade. You stopped walking, stared at nothing on the ground for a little while, and then just started screaming.”

“It was… It was real bad,” said Windrose. “I honestly thought you were going to suffocate. You never stopped, never even took a breath. I tried to shake you out of it, but you lashed out at me. You nearly cut a gash right along here.” She traced a line just below her cheekbone. “You didn’t say anything, didn’t stop screaming, didn’t even move except when we tried to touch you.”

“So I used magic to gag you and tie you up,” said Fallende. “When it stopped being scary, it was really annoying. Oh, don’t look at me like that, my angry ally,” she said in response to Windrose’s stinkeye, “it was! I couldn’t think enough to care!”

Windrose huffed and continued, “We decided that if you didn’t stop, we’d carry you back to Light’s Edge. I, I mean, you can’t seriously think about still going on. …Right?”

Daring looked at her hooves. It was hard to say. On the one hoof, she’d just been struck with a bout of panic so severe that her brain apparently felt the need to black it out, and for no obvious reason. On the other… that was it. Her head wasn’t pounding. Her heart wasn’t racing anymore. She didn’t feel the base, instinctual terror she once had. She’d just been super scared for a while. She stalled. “How long was I out? Between starting to scream and getting untied, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” said Windrose. “Maybe ten, fifteen minutes?”

“Something like that, yeah,” said Fallende.

Fifteen minutes. She’d been scared literally out of her mind for a full fifteen minutes. And she didn’t even know by what. Could she justify going on after that? But she wasn’t remotely frightened now. Could she justify turning back? She’d come all this way through Needle Vale, unlocked more of its mysteries than any pony or reindeer before her, only to turn right around because she was scared?

She looked at Windrose and Fallende. The former was shuffling on her hooves and chewing her lip. The latter looked like she was waiting in line at the grocery store. Fallende probably wouldn’t be hard to convince, one way or the other. Windrose, though, was another matter. She definitely wouldn’t agree, but would she go along with it anyway? “Well,” Daring said slowly, “I feel fine now, so-”

“I’ll get started packing,” said Windrose sourly. “I know when I’m betting on a dead horse.” She immediately walked over to the tent and began dismantling it.

“…Okay, then,” said Daring. “Fallende, do you think you could… I don’t know, scout to the north for a bit or something? For a campsite for lunch. It’s almost noon.”

Fallende grinned. Or maybe just bared her teeth at Daring. Those teeth looked awfully sharp, either way. “Finally,” she said. “I’ve been sitting around waiting on you for ages. Back in five.” She began trotting northward.

Daring turned to Windrose, but then remembered something. “Hey!” she yelled as she turned back to Fallende. “Remember to-”

But Fallende was nowhere to be seen. Her tracks stopped several yards away.

Daring grimaced, prayed that she could ignore that for a little while, and walked up to Windrose. Already, the tent was almost packed. “Hey,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“Obviously not,” said Windrose, not looking up as she haphazardly stuffed the poles into the tent bag. “Do you have a death wish or something? Is that why you want to keep going even though you nearly lost your mind?”

“I’m fine now.” And she was. Right?

“Are you?” Windrose looked Daring in the eye. “Needle Vale is weird. Okay. So what? In trying to investigate it, we’ve lost our memories, nearly gotten stuck in some kind of spacetime loop, found a deserted facility, and you just got so terrified of something that you don’t remember it. And you still want to keep moving. Is nothing going to stop you?”

She returned her attention to the tent bag and tried zipping it up. “No, I don’t want to hear your excuses. They’ll just be something like ‘we’ve come so far, we can’t stop now’. Yes, we can. But, hey, I’m just a lackey, what do I know?” She smashed down a portion of the tent that was sticking out. “At least we’ll get away from here.”

Daring wasn’t sure Windrose had ever experienced the feeling of having to work just a little bit longer to finish a job. That extra hour of overtime on a project, those sleepless nights of research, they stuck with you. You knew when to keep at it because you close to the end. And Daring had so many puzzle pieces, they simply had to fit together somehow. She just needed to think a bit more.

And yet, she couldn’t deny that Windrose was making, had always made, some very good points.

“We’re getting close to the end of the valley,” she heard herself say eventually. “If, if there’s nothing obvious, we’ll turn around, go right back to Light’s Edge, and I can look for some more experienced ponies. Are you still making that map?”

“Yep.”

“I mean, just that will-”

“Hey!”

Daring and Windrose turned around. Fallende was skidding back into the campsite, not breathing especially heavily. “There’s a good site about half a mile from here-”

“Half a mile?” Windrose asked. “You were gone for barely a minute.”

Fallende shrugged. “I’m a fast runner when I want to be, my sulky skeptic. Anyway, it’s flat and it’s near a cliff for some shelter. It’s perfect for lunch. Nothing’s wrong with it. I don’t know about you, but I’m just dying to get away from here.” She looked at Daring and all levity she had vanished. “Seriously,” she said, her voice flat, “if I have to hang around this rock for another minute, I’m gonna hurl.”

“Fine,” Daring said. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s get going.”

As she hitched her bags across her withers, Daring couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something important at the pillar. But Windrose and Fallende were right; she’d spent too much time here. At least she had a good starting point for if she ever returned.

Fallende led the way out of the clearing, Windrose close behind, Daring lagging. It was hard to leave such an obvious mystery unsolved. She glanced at the pillar one last time, then turned ahead. “Hey, do either of you-”

She whirled back to the pillar, breathing heavily. She examined it intently from top to bottom, looking for the shape she knew she’d seen in there. Almost, but not quite… Almost, but not quite…

“Do either of us…?” prompted Fallende. She looked over her shoulder and twitched. “Daring!”

No… There was no way she’d seen that… right? Her eyes began watering, she was staring so intently. She leaned left. Almost, but not quite… She leaned right. Almost, but not quite…

“Hey! Daring! Wake up, you equine egghead!”

It was taunting her. It was almost the right shape, all the time, but the lines never quite matched up, like a badly-drawn optical illusion. And if she was right-

Wham. Fallende clouted Daring hard on the head. “Ai! You’re not having another episode, are you? Windrose, get over-”

Daring pushed Fallende away. “I’m fine,” she said. “Give me a second. I thought I saw something.” But the shape refused to solidify. Where was it?

“You- You want us to wait again?” gasped Fallende. “Windrose and me, we’ve already been waiting on you for ages, and-”

“Give it a rest, Fallende,” said Windrose. “It won’t take long.”

“That’s beside the point! I don’t want to sit on my tail here any longer!”

“I only need a sec, honest,” said Daring. She took a few steps towards the pillar. Maybe she just needed a better look at it.

“…You know what? No.” A magical haze surrounded Daring’s head and she was wrenched to one side, muzzle-to-muzzle with a snarling Fallende. She prodded Daring hard on the chest. “If you don’t snap out of it now, my dimwitted dope,” Fallende said, her teeth bared like fangs, “I am going to take all your crap, and I am going back to Light’s Edge, and you can freeze to death out here, grazing on your own pubic hair for all I care.”

Daring smacked Fallende across the cheek, disrupting her concentration enough to pull out of the telekinetic grip. “Just hold on for one second,” she said, pounding on the ground with her spear. “There’s something here, I just saw it, and I’m not going to leave-”

“Do I look like someone who gives a rat’s ass? I am not going to sit on my butt all day watching you drool at some stupid column of rock!” yelled Fallende. “A sec’ll become a minute’ll become an hour! At this rate, you’ll die before you can get back, and-”

“Whoa, hey!” Windrose yelled. She forced herself between the two of them and shoved them apart. Daring couldn’t have resisted even if she’d wanted to; earth pony magic was a potent thing. “Break it up, you two! Fallende, for Celestia’s sake, quit whining!”

“W-whining? Whining? My dedicated dearie, I’m not-”

“Yeah, you are,” said Windrose bluntly. “I know the feeling. I’ve been whining for the past few days and I’ve been waiting on her every second you have. But, sweet Sisters, don’t act like it’s the end of the sunblasted world! She just wanted to stop for a little while longer, and, yeah, that’s annoying, but you’d think you caught your significant other cheating on you with her! Calm down.”

“I will if she moves,” said Fallende, her ears back. She pawed at the ground and her sharp hooves carved furrows in the snow. “I’m sick and tired of waiting.”

Daring opened her mouth, but before she could say anything, Windrose turned on her. “And I know she’s overblown in her whining, but she’s got a point. We spent like an hour watching you walk around that stupid rock, then we had to wait another fifteen minutes while you screamed your head off, and now-” She clamped her mouth shut and took a few forced breaths. “Look, if you’re so sure that that’s the key to Needle Vale, can’t we just all head back and you bring in more trained ponies or reindeer later? Then you can at least have more eyes on it and us two won’t be sitting around doing jack squat.”

“That’s my vote,” mumbled Fallende.

For all she liked self-reliance, Daring knew there were a few advantages to working with somepony else. Like having a different perspective to slap her around if the tunnel her vision was in got too narrow. It was easy to get lost in her own thoughts, and that wasn’t nearly as fun for anyone else. “Sorry,” she managed to say. “I… thought I saw…” She glanced at the pillar again. Nothing. “I thought there was something there, and I just- got caught up in it, I guess.” She flicked her tail and shuffled her hooves. She suddenly felt like an anchor, dragging everyone else down. Even though this was her expedition.

After a second, Fallende’s jaw slackened and she sighed. “Fine, as long as we keep moving. I ain’t the best at sitting still. Also sorry, I guess.”

“Good,” growled Windrose. “Now kiss and make up.”

Daring and Fallende looked at Windrose, then looked at each other. “Uh…”

“It’s a joke,” sighed Windrose. “A joke.” She set off down the valley, contemptuously flicking her tail at the two of them.

Fallende quickly trotted after her. Daring waited a few moments more. She looked back at the pillar, tilting her head this way and that, but she couldn’t replicate that one second that had caused a double take. For a single instant, the slabs had lined up and she’d thought she’d seen the silhouette of a writhing pony. She couldn’t find anything like that anymore.

Must’ve been her overeager imagination.


Lunch was supremely awkward. No one wanted to look at anyone else, and conversation was a whole lot of nothing. Everyone sat as far away from each other as they could without being far from the fire they’d decided to put together. For noontide, the wind was awfully cold.

Daring picked at her vaguely food-ish mush. Her argument with Fallende felt like it’d been seared into her mind. Fallende was completely correct about her actions. She had been hanging around that pillar for a reason she’d known was false. She had been holding up her own expedition for no real gain. Really, one of them should’ve spoken up sooner. And now that she was away from the pillar, that nagging feeling that’d been driving her now felt hollow, forced.

And then there was Fallende’s… extreme reaction. Hostile, aggressive, overblown. Fallende hadn’t struck Daring like that. A bit uncaring of others and crass, perhaps, but not frothing-at-the-mouth crazed. Maybe it was the idea that she’d finally been leaving only to stop again that’d made her snap, but Daring wasn’t sure.

Which got her thinking: was the valley getting into their heads?

They’d already gotten amnesia from the cliff; skewing their emotions or thoughts wasn’t that far away, metaphysically speaking. And assuming that was true, was something deliberately causing it or was it just a side effect of… ley lines or whatever? Was it only this deep into the valley? Was it detectable with magic?

Or was she just being paranoid? Stressed? So unwilling to admit her disappointment in finding concrete causes for Needle Vale that she was blaming vague forces of otherness rather than just packing up, going home, and losing? Daring hated losing, even if that losing didn’t doom the world or result in some scumbag getting filthy rich. And when she “lost” to just her own expectations, well, she couldn’t even punch her expectations in the face.

The end was near, though, one way or another. The valley wasn’t much longer. They’d reach its northernmost point tomorrow evening, at the latest. And if there was nothing easily understandable, they’d turn around. Period. Sometimes striking out blindly rewarded you with hidden paths, and sometimes it rewarded you with endless work beneath constant promises of, “Just a bit more…” Daring was good at field work, but she saved the specifics of artifact arcanoanalysis for the experts.

Fallende shoveled a bite of bread into her mouth and stood up. “Mind if I do a little more scouting?” she asked, jogging in place. “You look like you won’t be done for a few more minutes, my munching mares, and I still don’t like sitting around.”

“Go ahead,” Daring said, vaguely waving her away. “Just don’t take too long.”

The words had barely left her mouth before Fallende took off, galloping to the north. Daring glanced after her. There were footprints.

“Daring?” asked Windrose.

“Yeah?”

“Is this worth your life? Or your mind? You’re so… focused that I bet you’d still crawl forward if both your rear legs were broken.”

“I haven’t lost either yet.” Technically. Besides, she’d been through worse.

Windrose grunted. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Then let’s find the heart of Needle Vale before that time comes.”

“Your rousing speech leaves a lot to be desired.”

Daring couldn’t argue with that. She’d never been good at speeches. She pulled her cloak around herself and stared into the fire.