//------------------------------// // Chapter 25: Progress // Story: Heir To Darkness // by Leafdoggy //------------------------------// Fluttershy awoke to a world of darkness. She recognized it as the tunnel she had been attacked in, even though it was clear that wasn’t where she was. There were no solid surfaces, no floor, no ceiling. The water she floated in wasn’t wet, and it didn’t stop her breathing. There was no pull of gravity, nor the push of atmosphere. All that was really around her was… Nothing. In truth, Fluttershy wasn’t anywhere. She wasn’t in Equestria, she wasn’t in space, she wasn’t in some other world. She was in a place that wasn’t. It existed only because it didn’t exist as anything else. It was a place born of context, of what it was not, and more than anything else, this place was not the tunnel Fluttershy had been attacked in. As she woke up more, her body started to ache. Her wing throbbed, and the places she had been cut were hot and itchy. Tentatively, she reached up and touched her cheek, and was relieved to find that doing so didn’t bring a shock of pain. She still felt the cut there, running from just under her eye to the edge of her chin, and she felt certain it would leave a scar, but it seemed to have already healed almost completely. Curious, she pulled her wing out and gave it a few experimental prods. It ached, but again it seemed mostly healed. At this point it felt like just a bruise, and while it would still hurt to fly, it wouldn’t be impossible. Finally, she unwrapped the bandages around her shoulder and gave it a test. That was a wound she had expected to last for several days, no matter how fast she healed. A stab wound several inches deep into a joint wouldn’t just go away, she thought, and as expected, it was still there, but it had healed far more than she thought it would. She seemed to have her full range of motion again, and while it still complained if she put pressure on it, it didn’t hurt so badly that she couldn’t use it if she had to. She took the rest of the bandages off and dropped them. The darkness devoured them hungrily, and then they were gone, completely removed from existence in any context at all. Their obliteration was absolute, and watching it struck Fluttershy with a pang of apprehension. She decided she shouldn’t stay in the darkness any longer than she needed to, and began to plan her next move. She couldn’t just return to the water, that much was obvious. She could still see the creature there, hazy and indistinct as it swiped fruitlessly through her shadow. So, she looked around until she found what she believed to be the hole she’d been dragged in through. It was tiny from where she was, but eventually she found it, and saw that her hunch had been right. Across from it, on the far side of the deep chasm, was another hole leading up into the dungeons. She had to get that far, at least, but what then? Her mind filled with images of the creature crawling out of the water and chasing her, bent on revenge, and she winced. She decided to experiment a bit, and tried to reach a hoof out towards the creature. It darted away from her as she did, which confirmed her suspicions. This place seemed to be keeping her safe, but it didn’t hide her. Her shadow followed her every move. She could worry about that at the surface, though. The most important thing was to get out of the water. She tried to swim upwards, but nothing happened. Her legs flailed uselessly through the nothing around her, unable to propel her without water to push off of. Her wings, similarly, failed to move her, and she certainly couldn’t just walk. Then she had a thought. What if she could walk? She’d been able to pull the shadows in, so why shouldn’t she be able to manipulate the ones around her now? She just had to figure out how. Her first attempt was just blind concentration. She put a hoof out and, without any focus, tried to exert her power into the world. Unsurprisingly, nothing happened. Next, she tried to mold it. She ran her hooves through the air in complicated patterns, trying to do what she thought might shape the shadows into a usable form, something solid that she could push herself off from. Again, she accomplished nothing. She pursed her lips. It was so easy before, she just saw a curtain of darkness and pulled it down, so what was wrong now? She didn’t see the darkness around her as anything but emptiness, and she had no idea how to shape it into something else. Unless…  She had an idea. Maybe, she thought, she didn’t need to reshape the darkness. The darkness around her was clear to her as not being water, but it wasn’t anything else either. If it wasn’t anything, and she could interact with it like it was, then maybe it was already... Everything. She wasn’t entirely sure what she was doing, but she tried to just imagine a floor under her hooves, and started to walk. She grinned as she began to move up towards the tunnels, and soon enough she breached the surface. After such a harrowing experience, the sight of those identical, neverending tunnels was a welcome relief. That relief was short-lived, though, as a moment after she got out, a set of sharp talons shot out of the water and tried to grab her shadow. She wasn’t safe yet. She walked the short distance to the first intersection and looked down the halls. Her heart sank as she did. It was just more tunnels, more branching paths, more endless wandering. A part of her was hoping that such a large roadblock meant Pinkie would be waiting on the other side, but now that she saw the reality, she was starting to lose hope that she’d ever see Pinkie again. Beside her, the creature started to pull itself out of the water. She still couldn’t quite see what it was, but she made out what seemed to be a beak as its head emerged. She took a few tentative steps away, even though she knew she was safe. She bit her lip. How long could she go on like this? She’d survived this, but what about the next creature? Or the one after that? She wasn’t ready to be down in the dungeons, that much was clear, and the longer she spent there the more likely it got that she’d never leave. Something had to change. She looked away from the creature and stared at the wall to think. She had to find some way around the tunnels, some method of avoiding the endless labyrinth entirely. She got an idea. First, she reached out and tried to touch the wall. It stopped her, like a wall should, even though it wasn’t really there. She had expected as much; It was a wall, so it would act like a wall. It wasn’t a wall, though, and Fluttershy thought she could use that. She tried to push the idea out of her mind, to forget that those shadows were in the place of a wall, and instead to just see the nothingness that they really were. Gradually, the wall started to fade from her view. She reached out again, and this time her hoof went through the space with ease. Nothing was there, so nothing stopped her. She smiled and stepped into the now empty space, then looked back at the creature. It stared in confusion towards her and took a swipe, which met solid rock, and recoiled from the shock. After another moment of blank staring, the creature turned and dove back into the water. Fluttershy was ecstatic. She’d done it. She’d survived, and without hurting the creature at all. She didn’t resort to Dracula’s violent ways, and instead she’d found something better, maybe even something stronger. For the first time, she found herself thinking that maybe she would be a better Dracula. She shook her head and shrugged that line of thought away. It wasn’t the time. She had to find Pinkie. Her next experiment was simple enough, but it took a lot of effort. Just like she had done with the wall, Fluttershy stopped seeing the shadows around her as anything at all. Then, when they faded, she did the same with the shadows that were behind them, and then further and further until the entire world no longer existed. She was in a world of darkness, of pure nothing, and there was nothing to see or touch at all. Then, she looked for one thing. Somewhere, out in the world, was a bit of darkness that was meant to be Pinkie, and all she had to do was find it. She pictured Pinkie in her mind and looked around. First she tried the level she was on, but saw nothing, so she started to expand her search. She looked up and down in wide circles, methodically searching every bit of nothingness that surrounded her, trying to find the beacon of Pinkie’s existence. There was nothing. Fluttershy felt fear starting to well up inside, but she pushed it down. There were plenty of reasons she could have failed. Maybe she could only see so far, or maybe it just didn’t work that way. There was no reason, she told herself, to start jumping to conclusions. Besides, she had other options. Instead of Pinkie, she decided to look around for a cockatrice. She found it almost immediately. It was nowhere near her, maybe miles away, but there was no doubt it was a cockatrice, and it was the only one she saw that was even remotely close to her. The search did make her more worried, though, because it wasn’t the only cockatrice she saw. She saw hundreds, all around her, and one group in particular unsettled her, because she knew them. The size of the family and the ages of the birds were so exact that she had no doubt she was seeing birds that lived in the Everfree Forest, half a world away. She started moving briskly towards her goal, ignoring the ache in her shoulder as she pushed it. It was an agonizingly long walk through the empty darkness. The bird came closer at such a sluggish pace that at times she worried she’d forgotten the floor and stopped moving at all. The pain in her shoulder only got worse as she kept going, and it didn’t help anything that she refused to rest. Even her other, uninjured legs were starting to ache by the end. She had no way to keep track of time in the darkness, but she walked for at least an hour. When she finally reached the bird, she was so relieved that she nearly moved back into the world of light without a second thought, but she just barely caught herself when she realized that that would be a very bad idea. She took things slowly. First, she looked for the nearby tunnels, not the bit of tunnel she wanted to emerge in but rather the parts connecting to it. She used those to orient herself into a position where she didn’t think she’d be in any walls, then she slowly filled in the world closer and closer to herself until, at last, she saw everything once again. The tunnel was nothing special. It was exactly like all the others, with a low ceiling and very few doors. The only defining feature was the little alcove that held the sleeping cockatrice. Leaving the world of shadows was as natural as walking through a door. All she did was step into her shadow, and at the same time her shadow stepped into her. Then she was back, and the place she had been was no longer a place at all. Stepping out into the real world was a shock to Fluttershy’s system. The air pushed in on her, crushed her from all angles, and at the same time gravity took hold again and tried to pull her to her knees. The forces that suddenly ravaged her body knocked her off balance, and she had to lean against a wall to avoid falling over. More than that, though, was just the pressure of existence. Her body still held all that shadow that she’d pulled in, and reality pushed in on it unceasingly. The world wanted nothing more than to be, and now she fought against that as she clung to the part of herself that was no longer there. She could have let go, stopped fighting and let the weight of existing crash back into her, but she didn’t want to. The darkness just felt right. It was a constant comfort, and she never wanted to lose it. She didn’t want to have to be more than was comfortable, and with the darkness she didn’t have to. So, she fought for it. She pushed back against existence and kept it at bay, just as she kept the air and gravity at bay, and accepted it as just another force of the world. It didn’t take too long for her to acclimate to the real world again, and once she did she crouched down beside the cockatrice and gently shook it awake. It looked up at her with tired eyes and greeted her with a curious cluck. “Hey, little guy,” Fluttershy said sweetly. “Sorry to wake you, but I’m looking for my friend, and I think you were the last one to see her. Do you know what happened to the bubbly pink pony that brought you down here?” The cockatrice tilted its head, then clucked back with a response. Fluttershy gasped, and her eyes went wide. “You what? How could you? Oh, that was very, very naughty of you, young man. You turn her back this instant.” She looked around, then her expression softened. “Um… Where is she?” The cockatrice turned its head away from her, unwilling to answer. “Oh, come on, don’t be like that,” Fluttershy said. “I won’t be mad, I just want her to be safe.” The bird shook its head defiantly. Fluttershy frowned. “Why won’t you tell me?” It gave her a short, concise cluck. “You can’t?” Fluttershy hummed curiously. “Why not?” It shook its head again. “Please?” Fluttershy pouted and begged the animal. “I need to find her.” The bird looked up at her in thought, but after a moment just shook its head more. “I—” Fluttershy stuttered nervously. “I don’t want to have to, um…” She tapped her hoof on the ground for a moment, then shook her head vigorously and opened her eyes wide to Stare at the cockatrice. “Tell me where she is.” The cockatrice caught her eye and flinched before giving a quiet, half-spoken answer. Fluttershy blinked and stepped back. “What?” Her bottom lip trembled. “What do you…” Fluttershy tripped as she stumbled back and fell onto the ground. “What do you mean Dracula took her?”