Fluttershy stood at the top of a dark staircase.
At least, she would have called it a staircase. That was the closest thing to what this steep, jagged tunnel was. It wasn’t a slope, there were too many sharp landings jutting out at every angle, but they weren’t nearly uniform enough to actually be considered stairs. Paired with the stalactites that hung from the roof of the cave, they looked more like teeth than anything else.
Fluttershy stood before a gaping maw of stone.
“So, uh… Good luck.” Vale stood nearby with his mouth pressed into a thin line.
“You’re not coming?” Fluttershy’s eyes went wide.
“I’m not allowed down there anymore,” he said. “Apparently I ‘disturb the peace’ or something.”
Fluttershy frowned. “Oh…” She looked back at the hole that seemed so eager to swallow her whole. Her ears drooped. “H-How do I find her?”
Vale shrugged. “It’s a maze down there. I guess just wander around ‘til you find her or, like, die.”
“That’s not very reassuring,” Fluttershy murmured. “You said she was guiding a bird?”
“Yeah, some kind of lizard-bird thing.”
Fluttershy gulped. “That’s not good.” She closed her eyes tight and took a deep breath. “I can do this,” she told herself. “For Pinkie. I have to do this.”
There was a beat of silence as she stood there, not doing anything.
“Well?” Vale asked.
“I’m trying,” Fluttershy said. “My legs won’t move.”
Vale groaned and, without warning, shoved Fluttershy into the tunnel.
She yelped and shot her eyes open to see rock rushing past her. She panicked and flailed her legs, but quickly realized that trying to land on the jagged rocks was a bad idea. With how steep the path was, it would have been like trying to cling to a wall, and she’d be lucky to get out of that without another trip up The Visitor’s river.
Instead, she spread her wings in an attempt to control her descent.
It wasn’t easy. The tunnel barely had room for her full wingspan, and it was definitely too small for the movements it would take to slow down. All she could do was keep herself afloat as the world became a blur around her, and even that proved difficult with how uneven the walls and roof were.
She kept gaining speed as she fell. More than once, she scraped the tip of a wing against a wall and swerved violently as the stone scraped at her mercilessly.
Just as she was starting to really panic, the end of the tunnel came into view. Light bounced off a floor that she was hurtling towards at alarming speeds.
She tilted her wings back in an attempt to slow down, but in doing so drifted too close to the ceiling. Just before she reached the bottom, her wing clipped a stalactite. The soft stone shattered easily, but the impact still crumpled her wing, and she almost twisted straight into the wall.
With a desperate flap of her other wing, she just barely managed to keep herself in the air until the ground leveled out under her.
A second later her hooves hit the rocks. She landed awkwardly on two legs, skidded a few feet, then tripped and tumbled over herself. When she finally rolled to a stop, she was on her back with her injured wing lying limp beside her.
“Oww,” she moaned. She clenched her eyes shut and focused in a futile attempt to will the pain away.
After a minute of failing that, she groaned and rolled over onto her stomach. Her bandaged shoulder complained as she pushed herself upright, but she ignored it and managed to find some small amount of comfort by adjusting herself on the stone floor.
Nervously, she grabbed her limp wing and pulled it forward to look it over. It wasn’t obviously broken, nothing had pierced the skin and everything was the right shape, but the sharp pain that shot through her every time she touched it still had her worried.
Finally, she clenched her teeth and tried to fold the wing back to her side. To her relief, she at least seemed to still have enough mobility to manage that.
She sighed and started taking deep, practiced breaths. As she gathered herself, she took a look around at where she’d landed.
The tunnel hadn’t quite ended so much as it had just shifted to a more gentle slope. It was definitely still going down, but not by any significant amount. It was a tight fit, still barely her wingspan from wall to wall, but the ceiling was a lot higher. The strange, unmatching dimensions gave the hall an unsettling atmosphere, as if from the very foundation the construction of this place was just wrong.
Sconces lined the walls, but only a few had lit torches in them. While it was more than enough light for Fluttershy’s eyes, it was clear that the shadows ruled these depths. They flowed along the walls like a murky liquid, breaching constantly into the few dim pools of light that still fought them off.
Lastly, there were the doors that made this place more than just a tunnel. The countless entryways that made it, without question, a dungeon. Most didn’t actually have anything closing them off from the hallway, and were only recognizable as doorways by their shape and size. Presumably they lead to rooms, but Fluttershy couldn’t tell. All she saw past them was darkness, solid walls of black that seemed to sap her energy just to look at. A kind of darkness that told the deepest parts of her mind to stay away, as it was a darkness that could support no life.
A select few doorways had actual doors, which stood out as the only thing in the tunnels, beside the torches, that wasn’t made of stone. Most were made of a thick, dark wood that looked charred and stained with smoke. They were held shut by heavy iron bars, sitting snugly on holders lodged deep into the stone. Some doors, though, were more. They were made from some dark, ancient slabs of metal that Fluttershy didn’t recognize. The metal itself was a deep, dull gray, but over the millenia, as water had run down from the ceiling and across the metal, they’d been stained with thick, rich veins of red. They spread out in lightning bolt patterns as they ran down to the floor, and the doors which had been bombarded the most were covered with indecipherable webs that grew more and more tangled as they approached the floor.
Once she felt up to moving again, Fluttershy pushed herself unsteadily to her hooves and stretched out her legs. Then she set off and followed the path onwards.
For a while, nothing really changed. The dimensions of the hall around her shifted constantly, but the path was straightforward and easy to follow. She didn’t hear anything else scurrying around her, she saw nothing in the countless rooms she passed by, and eventually she started to calm down a bit as the unknown became known.
Then she came across an intersection.
All three paths were completely indistinguishable. Endless layers of stone that stretched out into oblivion. There were no signs, no tracks to follow, nothing at all to guide her way.
At a loss for better ideas, she stepped up to the path on her left and called into it. “Pinkie?”
Her voice echoed down into the hallway for a moment, then was lost into the caves. She stood there and listened intently for any noise that might return to her. At first only silence answered her, but after a few anxious minutes she heard the faint whispers of a returning call.
Then she recognized the voice, and her heart sank. Behind her, from the right path, came her own voice.
“Pinkie?”
“How…” Fluttershy pursed her lips and moved over to that tunnel. It didn’t seem like it should have been possible for the sound to travel around like that.
She decided to try calling out into that tunnel. “Hello?”
The wait was a lot shorter this time. It was hardly thirty seconds before the sound came back down, this time through the middle tunnel.
“Hello?”
Fluttershy bit her lip nervously. This definitely felt wrong.
She moved back to the tunnel she’d entered from, and faced the three unexplored paths. “Is someone messing with me?”
She had hardly finished the sentence this time when it came back to her.
“Is someone messing with me?”
She would have thought it was just an echo that time, if not for the fact that it was crystal clear, and also coming from behind her.
She spun around and crouched down defensively. She couldn’t see anything down the tunnel, but that did little to put her at ease. She called out again, as it was all she could think to do. “Who’s there?”
The reply came from the left tunnel.
“Pinkie?”
Fluttershy clenched her teeth. “No you’re not! Stop it!”
All three unexplored tunnels called back in an eerie chorus.
“Who’s there?”
“What do you want?” Fluttershy’s voice cracked. She backed slowly into the center of the intersection and looked all around, searching for any sign of life.
All four tunnels started calling out to her.
“Pinkie?”
“Who’s there?”
Stop it!”
“Pinkie?”
“Is someone messing with me?”
“Pinkie?”
“Pinkie?”
Fluttershy dropped to her knees and covered her ears. “Stop! This isn’t funny! What do you want?”
The voices started to come from every hall, all saying the same thing over and over without stopping.
“Pinkie?”
“Pinkie?”
“Pinkie?”
The noise washed over her. Fluttershy’s legs were trembling. Her breathing got faster. Her heart was beating as hard as it could. She was drowning in a tidal wave of echoes.
Fluttershy took several fast, deep breaths that were too rushed to actually give her any air. Then she shot her eyes open wide and Stared down one of the hallways.
“Stop!”
All at once the noise ended. All that remained was Fluttershy’s panicked breathing.
Things stood like that for a long moment. Fluttershy kept her eyes trained on the empty hallway, refusing to allow herself to blink even as her entire body shook.
After a moment, a single call came from the hall she was looking down.
“Who’s there?”
Fluttershy clenched her teeth. She pushed herself to her hooves, stumbled a bit, then stepped towards the hallway. “I am The Heiress, next in line to the title of Dracula, and until she steps out of the shadows again, I am Dracula. I run these halls, and if you want a place here, then this behavior is completely unacceptable.” Fluttershy straightened her back and stood taller as she fell into the role she was so used to using on the creatures of the Everfree. “You do not torment guests to these halls. If you want to be a bully, you can do that outside. Do you understand me?”
Fluttershy took a long, slow breath, and relaxed her vision.
There was a beat of silence before the creature called back to her one final time.
“I am Dracula.”
Then there was a gust of wind and a rush of shadow that poured over Fluttershy. It blinded her for just a moment, and when she could see again she was in a long, straight hallway with no intersection to be seen, and whatever presence had just been there was gone.