Fluttershy squeezed the stallion to her chest as she flew down the hall with desperate ferocity. She could feel the gash on his side staining her fur red, and with every jerky movement she made he let out a little groan of pain. Pain that, at least in her mind, was entirely her fault.
It was too late to stop any of it, though. Her only choice was to get through it.
She exploded out into the main lounge and found an unfamiliar scene. The room was empty, not even the bartender was left, and the fire in the center had smoldered down to glowing charcoal. The room felt cavernous without its denizens, far too open, far too quiet. The walls seemed miles away, but at the same time were completely suffocating. Every noise echoed in the vast emptiness of it, coming back to her only to remind her of how alone she was here.
The most glaring change, though, was that she couldn’t see the door she had come in through.
She knew it should have been there. There was only the one hallway, she couldn’t have possibly gotten lost. The wall was blank, though. She flew up to where it should have been and ran her wing across the wall, hoping that perhaps it had just been hidden from her, but it just wasn’t there. She was trapped inside the guild.
The sound of pounding hooves drew closer from the dark hallway.
There wasn’t enough time to think things through. She had to move, and fast. A quick glance around the room showed three hallways, the one she had just left and two others, and also the bar.
Her first instinct was to hide, to fly under the bar and pray that they wouldn’t look there, but she quickly ruled that out. She couldn’t afford to be caught that easily.
Instead, she flew into the middle hallway.
This one wasn’t nearly as dark and uninviting as the other. The walls were lined with dim candles that flickered as she disturbed the air, and they cast a barely visible glow over what seemed to just be a normal hallway. Both walls had an ample number of doors, all unmarked and identical, and at the end of the hall was an intersection. The walls were painted a humble beige, and the floor was lined with a plush red carpet. It made her think of a hotel or apartment building, with their endless identical hallways that existed solely as paths to more personalized spaces.
At the end of the hall, she turned right.
More of the same greeted her. Muted walls and faceless doors. She decided to rest for a moment, and placed the stallion gingerly onto the carpeted floor. He grunted as he touched the ground, but then went back to his slow, practiced breathing. For a moment, he seemed remarkably calm, considering all that had happened.
As Fluttershy settled down to catch her breath, she carefully unwound the tape wrapped around his muzzle. She tried to be as gentle as possible, but it was clear it still hurt; there just wasn’t a way to remove that much tape without taking some fur with it.
Still, though, she eventually got it all off. As soon as he was free, the stallion took in a huge gulp of air before letting out a long, quiet sigh.
“Thank you,” he muttered. His voice was dry and weak, and he winced with every syllable. It was clear that even just talking was enough to make the gash in his side send out another wave of pain.
“Please don’t thank me,” Fluttershy whispered as she got to work on the ropes binding his legs. “We’re not even safe yet.”
“Why—” He flinched and coughed, which only caused him even more pain. “Why not?”
Fluttershy gave him a strange look. “Well, we’re still in the building…”
“No, I mean…” He took a deep breath. “You stopped one of them.”
“Oh. I…” Fluttershy pursed her lips and turned her attention pointedly back to the ropes. “There’s too many,” she muttered. “I don’t think I can do it to more than one at a time.”
“But you could make one attack the others, or—”
“No!” Fluttershy responded, only realizing afterwards how loud she had been and hastily covering her mouth. “I don’t want to hurt them,” she whispered. “I don’t want any more creatures to be hurt because of me, not even them.”
“They already hurt me,” the stallion said. “They were going to kill me.”
“I know,” Fluttershy said, “and I’m sorry, but—”
She cut her sentence short. Her ears swiveled around as she strained her hearing, and just as she thought, there were hooves approaching them, and fast.
“We have to go,” Fluttershy said.
Without waiting for a response, she scooped up the stallion and started flying again. At the end of the hallway, she turned right again, into yet another identical hall.
The stallion coughed as he strained himself to talk while being carried. “What if they’ve split up?”
“What?” Fluttershy was only half listening. She was too focused on running away.
“If there’s only one, you can stop them.”
“I…” Fluttershy shook her head. “That’s too risky.”
She reached the end of the hall. Something started nagging at the back of her mind as she took another right turn.
“You can’t just run blindly forever,” the stallion said.
“There has to be a way out eventually,” Fluttershy said.
“You don’t know that.”
“It’s better than doing nothing,” Fluttershy said. “Please, I don’t want to—”
The nagging thought finally caught up to her, and her eyes snapped to the end of the hall. She hadn’t even looked, she’d just assumed it would be another intersection, but of course it wouldn’t be. Of course it had to end. If it didn’t, it would pass right through the dark hallway she was first taken down.
She slowed to a stop just as she reached the dead end.
She turned around, but the hooves were dangerously close now. It was too late to go the other way.
“We have to hide,” she hissed as she started trying doors. The first was locked, as was the second, and the third. None of the doors opened to her, and with every one she tried the thundering stomps drew closer.
It was after the seventh door that Dayfall skidded into view back at the intersection. Fluttershy gasped as her eyes focused into a hungry glare.
Dayfall bared her fangs in a wicked smile. “Nowhere left to run, Heiress.”
Fluttershy flew back away from her until she thumped hard against the wall at the end. The stallion let out a yelp of pain in her grip.
Dayfall wasn’t running anymore. She was walking slowly, with the overwhelming pride of a predator stalking their prey. “You should probably put the meat down,” she said. “I’m done being gentle.”
Fluttershy whimpered and decided to do as she said. She set the stallion down as gently as possible in the corner. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“Just… Stop her,” the stallion replied.
Fluttershy stood back up and looked at Dayfall. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because you need it,” Dayfall said. She continued her slow march forward, terrorizing Fluttershy with the futility of her situation. “Dracula brought you here to get stronger, didn’t she? You can’t very well become Dracula if you can’t even stop me from killing you. You wouldn’t last a day.”
Fluttershy bit her lip. “Please, you don’t have to do this. We can just talk about this and figure something out, we don’t need to fight!”
“Hah!” Dayfall smirked and licked her lips. “You really don’t know anything. I want to fight, Heiress. It keeps me sharp. Plus…” She snickered. “Well, it’s just fun! Really, I couldn’t care less about all that junk Windbreaker was going on about. I just want you to be more fun.”
She took a few more steps, and was nearly close enough for them to touch. Fluttershy backed into the corner, trying desperately to get away.
“Please, just stop,” Fluttershy begged. “Just…” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She had no choice. She focused and channeled everything she had into this one moment. “Stop!”
She snapped her eyes open and glared forward, her gaze quickly settling on—
Fluttershy gasped. There was nothing to look at. In the split second Fluttershy had closed her eyes, Dayfall had done the same, and now had her eyes clenched tight.
Dayfall started to laugh madly. “You idiot! I just saw you use that on Windbreaker. I don’t need my eyes, I could find you by smell if I had to.”
Fluttershy took a breath to say something else, but she never got the chance. In a flash of movement, Dayfall blasted into her and picked her up off the ground, then slammed her violently against the wall.
Fluttershy let out a guttural cough as Dayfall pressed the side of her leg up against Fluttershy’s neck. She let go with everything else, using only her own weight pressed into that one point to pin Fluttershy to the wall.
It was only now that Fluttershy truly realized how much bigger than her Dayfall was. Her hooves dangled several feet off the ground, and Dayfall seemed to hardly need to stand on her hind legs to do so. She was a mountain of a pony, and the full weight of that mountain was crashing down onto her new.
Fluttershy wrapped her legs around the one pinning her, trying desperately to hold herself up by something other than her neck. She could still breathe, but barely, and she was absolutely certain that at any moment Dayfall could choose to take that last bit away.
“P-Please,” Fluttershy grunted.
Dayfall sneered at her. “You sound pathetic, whimpering like that. Have some dignity. You’re The Heiress, act like it.”
Fluttershy kicked outwards with her hind legs, and they landed square against Dayfall’s chest, but the massive pony didn’t even flinch. Instead she pushed down ever so slightly harder on Fluttershy’s neck.
“You know,” Dayfall said, “I’ve always wondered if a vampire who hadn’t drank much blood would still taste like a vampire. Should we find out?”
“Don’t,” Fluttershy pleaded, “I—”
She was cut off as Dayfall used her free hoof to grab Fluttershy’s cheek and shove her head painfully to one side. Then, without any hesitation, Dayfall hissed sharply and buried her fangs into Fluttershy’s neck.
Fluttershy knew right away that something wasn’t right.
She’d cut herself on her fangs before. She’d even bitten herself on accident, and it wasn’t like this. It was supposed to be smooth, painless, more of a strange sense of pressure than anything else.
What she felt now was different. It was the hot, stabbing pain of a bite.
Fluttershy cried out as she felt the blood gush out of her. Dayfall hadn’t gone for an artery, but it was still a bite to the neck. She tensed up and writhed as Dayfall bit down harder, squeezing out her blood with all the ferocity she could muster, and by the time the bite ended and Dayfall pulled away, Fluttershy’s head already felt fuzzy from blood loss.
Dayfall spit the blood out onto the floor. “Disgusting,” she said. She let go of Fluttershy’s face so she could wipe her own clean, and in doing so left Fluttershy to dangle helplessly from her neck once again.
“Pl—” Fluttershy let out a wet cough, which made the fresh wound bleed even more. The blood was draining out quickly and falling over Dayfall’s leg, then onto the floor. “Please, stop this.”
“Still with the whining?” Dayfall snorted. “After you stopped Windbreaker like that, I was hoping you’d at least put up a fight. If you’re going to be such boring prey, I might as well just end it here.”
“No,” Fluttershy begged, “please, just let us go.”
Dayfall growled and pressed down harder on her neck. “You’re a miserable excuse for a vampire, you know that?” She kept pressing harder, and it wasn’t long before Fluttershy felt her oxygen supply cut off. “Heck, you’re not even a worthwhile pony. You deserve to be nothing, so how about we make that happen?”
Fluttershy kicked helplessly as her muscles started to burn. She wasn’t even reaching Dayfall anymore. Her legs were just thrusting blindly into the air between them. Her vision started to tunnel, and she shut her eyes tight as she tried desperately to think of a way out.
There was nothing, though. She only had one tool to use and Dayfall had made sure she couldn’t do that. Even if she could manage to catch her eyes now, it wouldn’t matter. She could no longer talk to tell her to back away.
Still, that really was her only tool, and if she didn’t do anything she would undoubtedly die here. She had nothing to lose, so she did what she had done before and focused every ounce of power within herself into her vision.
Again her limbs got cold, but this time she pressed harder. She pulled at the strength inside her until her legs were numb and useless. Her ears went cold as she pulled the power from her hearing, and the rest of her body started to chill as she slowly drained the rest of her senses.
It wasn’t enough. She could feel it now, just how strong she could make herself, and she wasn’t there yet. So she pulled from deeper still.
The ice started to spread inwards, robbing her of everything she had. First her lungs, which she stole her breath from, but that still wasn’t enough. Nor were her other organs, or anything else within her. She just couldn’t find enough strength.
So she took the only bit she had left, and stopped her heart.
Even with her senses gone, the pain was nearly unbearable. It wasn’t the sharp pain of the bite, or the dull pain of her many bruises. It wasn’t any pain she ever should have felt. It was the pain of unbecoming, of ceasing to be. What raged through her body, where once had been the strength that she so greedily gathered up, was the pain of death.
She wasn’t dead, though. Not yet, and she was finally strong enough. With a final snap, she flung her eyes open and glared straight at Dayfall.
For a moment, nothing happened. It seemed like she had failed.
Then, the massive pony faltered. Slowly, with jerky movements, she stopped her assault and stepped back away from Fluttershy.
Fluttershy crumpled to the floor in a heap. Tears welled up as everything came back, and all that was left of that horrific pain was the shadow of a memory. Her heart beat once more, her lungs filled with air, her hearing returned. She hurt all over, and was too weak to move at all, but it was all back, and no pain could compare to what she had just felt.
Dayfall stood still and stared blankly at the wall for several minutes as Fluttershy coughed and writhed on the floor. Every so often her eye would twitch, but she showed no other signs of being able to break free of Fluttershy’s Stare. She was utterly entranced.
For a few minutes, at least.
Then it all fell at once, and Dayfall slumped back as her body returned to her. She was stunned, and took a moment to recover, but slowly her gaze turned down to where Fluttershy was curled up. As she pieced everything together, a smile grew on her face.
“That’s more like it,” Dayfall said with a laugh. “Get up, Heiress. I’m not done with you yet.”