//------------------------------// // Chapter 18: Fighting Through The Pain // Story: Heir To Darkness // by Leafdoggy //------------------------------// “Come on, get up!” Dayfall growled as her patience wore thin. “Don’t you at least want a chance to play with those eyes before I take them from you?” Fluttershy barely heard the words. Her ears were ringing too loudly, and the world seemed too distant. Even the carpet under her seemed miles away as her mind and body fought to bring her back from the brink of obliteration. Dayfall walked up and loomed over Fluttershy. “You can’t go getting my hopes up like that, Heiress.” She roughly rolled Fluttershy over and pried one of her eyes open. “I know you can hear me. How long are you gonna make me wait?” Fluttershy let out a wheezing cough. Her lungs still burned ferociously, and every breath felt like too much. Her heartbeat was slow and not entirely rhythmic, and her legs were still completely numb. Her eyes were sharp, though. When Dayfall pried one open, she had no trouble focusing in and locking their vision together. “St—” Fluttershy gave a wet gurgle as she found her voice again. “Stop this.” Dayfall’s eye twitched. She tensed up, and for just a moment looked like she was going to step back. Then a shiver went through her body, and a smile grew on her face. “Try harder, little girl,” she jeered. “Fail too much and it won’t work at all, and well, neither of us want that. You’d be no fun anymore!” Fluttershy grunted. With all the energy she could muster, she tilted her head up in a slow, jerky motion and opened her one eye as wide as she could. She left the other closed, and put everything she had into the one-eyed Stare. Dayfall huffed with effort as she fought it, but after a moment she took a shaky step back. “Good,” Dayfall taunted, “you’ve delayed me. How long do you think you can hold me back, though?” Fluttershy’s head was still swimming too much to engage with anything Dayfall was saying. “Please,” she choked out, “just stop.” “Really, after all this, you’re still begging like a dog? If you want me to stop, you’re gonna have to make me. Get up and fight.” “N—” Fluttershy groaned as a wave of pain wracked her body. “No.” “No?” Dayfall laughed. She grunted with effort, and with a quick burst took a single step forward. “You don’t have a choice, Heiress. I’m almost out of this, and then I’m coming at you. And, hey, here’s a promise; Next time I get a hoof on you, you’re gonna lose that eye.” Fluttershy could see she was running out of options. In a desperate bid, she put one of her numb hooves to the ground and tried to push herself up. Her lungs screamed in pain as she did, but she ignored them and pushed until she was on her hooves again. Then one gave out, and another, and she crumpled back to the floor. All she had to show for her effort was a fresh new pain in her chest. Dayfall laughed. “Come on, you can do better than that!” She fought forward another step. “Another stumble like that and I’ll be free.” Fluttershy took a deep breath and tried again. First one hoof, then a second. With no feeling, and unable to take her gaze off of Dayfall, she had to just trust in her body to make the right movements. A third leg took hold, and finally the fourth. Once again she was up, although her stance was wide and shaky. “Sto—” Fluttershy started, but a cough cut her off and threatened to send her tumbling back down. Instead, she stumbled over to a wall and fell against it, hoping to brace herself. She chose the wrong wall, though, and was quickly reminded of the gash in her neck as it slammed against the hard surface. She winced. It was barely a twitch in her eye, only a shudder, but she winced. That was all Dayfall needed to break free. In a blur of speed she shot forward and slammed into Fluttershy, knocking the wind out of her and dropping her back to the ground. Fluttershy landed on her back, and Dayfall pounced on her. One leg landed hard on her neck, far harder than when she’d been pressed against the wall earlier, and the other rose into the air and prepared to strike. Fluttershy was at the brink again, and this time she knew exactly what would save her. Again, she shut everything down. Her senses, her organs, her heart, she pushed it all back up into her Stare. The pain was back in an instant, even worse than before. She’d barely even begun to recover, and her body was in no state to fight it back. It swept through her, filled every part of her that she’d just drained. It grew so strong, so agonizing and all-encompassing, that it soon no longer fit the word pain. It was a never ending, bottomless kind of torture that few living creatures, even few vampires, had ever felt. In the echoes of thoughts that still focused on things besides her Stare, Fluttershy recognized that she really was experiencing what it felt like to die. The rest of her mind didn’t care. She snapped both eyes open and locked them to Dayfall’s. She looked past Dayfall’s gaze, right into her very being, into her intention, and stopped her at her core. Dayfall’s hoof stopped, but she was still over Fluttershy, and her leg was still pressed into Fluttershy’s neck. Fluttershy couldn’t talk, but she didn’t need to. At this point, talking was a courtesy to let the other pony know what she was doing. She just reached into Dayfall’s mind and told it to back away. It worked. Dayfall stood up and stepped away from Fluttershy. With the immediate danger gone, Fluttershy could no longer ignore the pain. It swept through her mind, and she could hardly keep it at bay enough to think. She could feel herself sinking into it, and at the same time the corners of her vision were going black. She decided to let it come. The threat wasn’t gone, she knew. Dayfall would break out again before Fluttershy could recover, and eventually Fluttershy would be too weak for this trick. She had to stop things before she let her body’s weakness set in again. She dug through her mind, and found a way to move again. She couldn’t feel her body anymore, just a vaguely pony-shaped mass of pain, but she pushed it to move. Her shifts in weight were strange, more like a ragdoll than a living being, but in long, swaying motions she somehow pushed herself to her hooves. Her eyes never flinched. She kept them locked to Dayfall. Like a puppeteer, she pulled her own strings and walked awkwardly over to Dayfall. Her vision tunneled more with every step, but she knew it wasn’t making her Stare any weaker, so she didn’t care. She couldn’t talk, but she mouthed out words so Dayfall could understand what she was being commanded to do. “You will stop,” Fluttershy ordered. “You will take me and the stallion to a doctor, and then you will wait, and when I wake up, we’re going to have a talk.” Fluttershy thought for a moment, then added “Please.” With that, she ran out of whatever force she had found to propel herself forward. Her vision went black, the pain washed over her mind, and she fell to the floor. Fluttershy found herself next in a strange place. She was on a raft. It was old, made of rotted wood and strung together with frayed rope, and the boards shifted uncomfortably under her weight. It wasn’t small, but it wasn’t necessarily large either. If she’d been asked to describe it, Fluttershy would have said it was the size it needed to be. She was under a canopy of old, dry leaves that were speckled with holes. It did nothing to protect her from the icy wind that coursed endlessly through her body. Fluttershy herself looked horrible. Her fur was matted all over with blood, but the worst was on one leg. Thick streams of blood had been pouring from her neck ever since she was bitten, and they’d made strange, swirling patterns on her leg as they made their way to the ground. Patches of yellow shone through curves of red, and without seeing the gash on her neck, it would have been easy to assume the markings were deliberate. Below the raft was a vast river of dark blue. It stretched to the horizon in every direction, and the only thing that disturbed its perfect stillness was the wake left by the raft. It had a crystal clear reflection of the full moon, but otherwise showed nothing else. Then she looked at the sky above, and saw something strange. It wasn’t sky, not like she had expected. There was no moon, and it wasn’t the pleasant starscape of Equestria’s night sky. Instead, it was a swirling vortex of colors, reds and oranges and purples all sliding past each other without ever mingling. They flowed like gases, but the sheen they gave off made them look almost solid. After she’d taken everything in, Fluttershy noticed that she wasn’t alone on the raft. She could have sworn she’d looked that way, but at the other end sat a cloaked pony silently paddling the boat along, and Fluttershy couldn’t actually remember looking at where they were sitting. Their cloak hid them almost completely. Their face was completely shrouded in darkness, and the fabric wrapped around their body with ease, but she was able to see a pair of pitch black hooves gripping the oar they were using. “Um…” Fluttershy swallowed hard. “H-Hello?” The pony nodded. Fluttershy looked around awkwardly. “Princess Luna?” She asked after a moment. “Is that you? Is this a dream?” The pony shook their head. “Oh…” Fluttershy bit her lip. “Well, um, what’s going on?” The pony shifted their gaze towards Fluttershy, although she still couldn’t see their face. “You should already understand,” the pony said. Their voice sounded strange and hollow, as though their hood were a vast cave, and somepony deep inside was yelling out. It seemed to somehow echo over itself, like whatever they said was being spoken a hundred times over, all at the same time and the same pitch. Speaking to them felt like speaking to the sky itself, or to the ground beneath her hooves, as though the other end of the conversation was speaking in such a vast manner that it was, to her ears, completely indecipherable from a normal pony’s voice. “I should?” Fluttershy frowned and tilted her head. “Well, I just passed out I think, so… I don’t know, it really seems like I should be dreaming.” “You believe you fainted?” “Yes? I mean, it’s not like I—” The color drained from Fluttershy’s face. “Oh.” A strange, raspy chuckle came from somewhere inside the pony’s hood. “Worry not, Heiress. You are not dead.” Fluttershy let out a deep breath. “Oh, thank Celestia.” “Well…” The pony shrugged. “Perhaps you are. I was never actually that clear on where the line is.” “What?” “It doesn’t matter,” they said. “You’ll wake up regardless. This will not be your final trip down my river.” “Oh.” Fluttershy looked at them blankly. “Well… That’s good, I think?” They laughed and nodded. "Yes, it is. In truth, you should be in the realm of dreams, and the Princess will likely be very cross if she discovers that I weaseled you away, but what she doesn't know won't hurt her." The pony stopped talking for a few minutes. They looked up into the sky and watched it thoughtfully as they paddled along. "Anyhow," they eventually said, "it's lovely to meet you, Heiress. You may call me The Visitor. I'd like to have a chat."