I woke up to the smell of sludge, to the noise of creeping water. I was cold, soaked to the bone while I lay face down in a narrow, inundated tunnel.
I jerked out of the water and took in a short, panicked breath. My head hit the ceiling of the tunnel and a metallic bang echoed.
Trapped in a flooded vent, I found myself somewhere I didn’t know.
I groaned, hauling myself to a reasonable height. My hooves hurt and my ears rang in pain. There was not enough place for me to stretch. My heart bumped wild in my hissing chest while I sought for an escape. Stuck in an uncomfortable position, I wished I could breathe. Air wasn’t there to brush my face. If I stood too high, my head would scrap against the walls. If I were to crawl low, swimming and suffocating under the murk awaited. Please, I wanted out.
A violent shake tore through the vent.
Thrown aside, I sunk under the torrent of mud. My head hit a metal slab and white pain shot through my shut-closed eyes. I screamed but murk rolled down my throat and silenced me. Coughing, I could do nothing but drift away.
Tumbling down the throat of an underground and steel-made giant, my head ricocheted against the edges of the vent. My strength drained away from my limbs and a coppery taste filled my mouth. Encaged in deep water and darkness, the fear of drowning crippled my thoughts.
Shivers wracked through my body and, in a surge of survivalist instincts, I shot my head out of the water. Struggling to breathe, I wailed and hacked my hooves around me until I reached and held onto a small crossway in the vent. Eyelids heavy, I hauled myself up into the diverging and –praise the princesses– dry, narrow alley.
“… V-…!”
White noise cracked aloft in the tight vent, sparking a short but numbing shudder along my backbone. I looked down and saw a tiny red light glowing right next to my flank. It was like a devouring eye to my dizzied self, looking deep into my soul, seeking for some fears to feast upon.
“Vox!”
The voice came and went with interferences, spewed by the tiny metal box screwed to my belt. The red diode glowed bright until it died while I tried to reach for the contraption. I dropped against the metal floor and the tools strapped to my hide with long leather bands banged loud and clear in my ears.
“Vox, answer me!”
Prodding around in the darkness, I scrambled to the com-link. I hit the outward transmission button after turning it over twice.
“Vox reporting,” I croaked, trying to spit away the taste of spoiled mud. “I’m… here.”
“Vox, where were… Wh-… are you?” the voice of a mare cried out. “It’s been… five hou... I can’t reach... well.”
Five hours… I had been crawling in that gutter for five hours.
“I’m…”
I contemplated darkness around me in utter silence.
“I’m lost,” I whined. “Do you know where I am?!”
Static noise was my only answer. With my head hanging low, I switched the item on and off for a few minutes until I ended up lying stoic, hugging the broken device.
The ground quaked and roared.
In pain and sobbing, I pushed myself back on my hooves and rolled forward. I climbed and bit on whatever lay around to help me move up and away. Half drowning, half asphyxiating in the horrid stench of the place, I fought the whirl in my guts. Crawling into a ball in a dank corner had never been so tempting.
I heard thunder crack in the distance. That sound, distorted by the contorting and broke apart vents, gave me a direction.
Rumbles shot through the pipes that bared my route. With a cry, I punched my way through with the monkey wrench in my mouth that was still attached to my belt. I felt a tooth crack and shatter. With no horn to light my way, there was just noises, water, and death.
I gasped in pain, screamed, and hurled forward on my shaking hindlegs. I fumbled into a hidden pit hole. In my fall, my head hit something. Rolling butt over head, I hit a slope and fast-paced through a rusty, and patched-up fence set to bar access to the rest of the vent onwards. I came to a sudden halt against the dead-end. Breathless, my body crawled in pain just seconds before weightlessness took hold of my senses.
The dead-end broke apart and I fell through. After a couple of seconds, my back hit something squishy and wet and the ride was over.
Light shot through my eyes and blinded me as a cold and raging rain began to batter my hide. A deluge of rain filled my ears. With coldness drumming over my bare back, the rain forced me down. Struggling, I crawled eyes-shut towards the nearest place where the downpour was less intense. I soon found refuge under a decrepit concrete embankment and dropped exhausted on the wet and grassy floor.
It took me minutes, if not an hour to get my eyes to open. The light was of a blinding white. With fear, I lifted my head to watch a dark grey sky looming over. Thunderbolts streaked across the sky like zebra-stripes. I closed my hurtful eyes and the roar of nature reached me soon after.
Living underground for years had deteriorated my eyesight. It also forced ponies to reconsider the concept of sunlight. After all, who wanted to live outside anymore? Life there was impossible.
Sucking in the fact that I was far away from the city’s safety, jolts of adrenaline burst in my chest.
Febrile, I looked upward at the smashed open vent I had fallen from. It stood out twenty hooves above my head and extruded from a sandstone cliff that had no practical grip which could help me climb back up.
Outside and left stranded; two facts I had a hard time wrapping my head around.
White blasted through the air and deafness dizzied me. When I opened my eyes again, a nearby tree had exploded to smithereens. Flames devoured the bleached-white trunk, throwing deep shadows crawling on the surroundings.
Endless rows of dead trees of the same white dissimulated the horizon. Above all, a bubbling fog obstructed my sight past a hundred yards at most, melting sky and earth together.
While adrenaline filtered through my brain, I contemplated the fact that I hadn’t been outside for years. It was a raining day and, without a doubt, a perfect day if you had asked somepony a long time ago.
For me though, rain hadn’t stopped for twenty long and deadly years.
Equestria was gone.
The diarchy? Gone.
All semblance of comfort and safety? Gone all together.
Civilisation? Surviving behind cages.
I was only two years old when the Deluge began. To this day, I kept no recollection or memories from that time except some wild, colourful dreams. Of course, the city’s elders loved repeating over and over nostalgic stories of the glorious past. If those bored fillies to death, let’s not start with the history books my city had printed for the school.
Raven-Flank was my city’s name. It was one of the last equine cities that still survived the wasteland… murkyland that once was Equestria. We took refuge deep underground twenty years ago. When we had collected everything we could, mother told me, we locked ourselves behind thick concrete walls. There, we thought that rain couldn’t reach us. We were wrong.
The world shook and trickles of wet dust fell on my muzzle. First inaudible, a grunt rose to a heart-sickening litany. A grave growl echoed in the distance, far beyond the veil of fog. I tried to hide under my improvised cover and shrunk on my hooves. That litany came back and forth like a heartbeat… like a slow march.
In the earth’s bowels we despaired behind closed doors,
For we knew that the outside was not for ponies anymore
The verse I had once read in a book which name I had forgotten popped back in my memories. My heartbeat upped a notch and my erratic breath pained my ribcage.
The fog buzzed, rolled, and transformed. I watched with horror a shadow crawl below its surface. Skeletal, black, and immense, and crooked, it went by fast –fast enough that I questioned my trust in my eyes. Like a fin surfacing the water, the shadow returned for a split second, and set ablaze fear in my heart. The growl came louder and, to my dismay, closer.
The nature of the thing I saw... I refused to guess about it. 'The fog hid everything away from sanity' I remembered the mayor saying. Rejecting reality couldn’t erase the cold sweat running down my back though.
The rain had not been alone in bringing down our world. With the deluge had come other unequine entities.
Something lurks beyond the veil, fillies,
So behind wielded vaults hide and don’t seek,
In fear it catch you, sillies
The school memories where a remorseful old buck had lectured us on the outside’s deadly reality rushed back. With those painful moments knocking in my mind in larger numbers, I tried to squeeze myself deeper in the mud. Covering my eyes, I listened to the song of rain hitting the ground and washing it away. What had once been a forest had become a dead, rotten swamp. And I wasn’t alone. Nopony was alone outside, ever.
A bird sang nearby, jolting me out of my petrified comatose. Small and rachitic, the bird had lost its colours. As grey as the swamp itself, the petite creature chirped and tweeted. In starts and jerks, the bird hopped and turned on its branch. I watched in silent, fascinated to see that life stiff existed up above. I was happy to have something that could relieve me from stress, even for a second.
Sharp obsidians stumbled out of the fog, snapped, and gobbled up the grey nightingale.
High as a tree, a reptilian rock gulped down the prey and roared. The creature’s back ran with sprouting plates of granite and the joints of its stone scales glowed a dull green. It then turned its head in my direction.
A rockodile.
The monster rushed at me. Fear struggled in my legs. I screamed and leaped aside, hearing its large legs battling against the muddy ground as it gave way under the beast’s weight.
It bought me seconds. The beast crashed against the cliff where I had took refuge. The shattered slope crashed down in boulders over the beast and the vent I had fallen from disappeared, broken.
Scrambling forward, I swam in the sludge that covered my way out. The algae that had grown over the ground wrapped around my legs and hindered my run. Behind me, the rockodile howled, turned, and charged. In its violent surge, the beast nudged me forward with its gargantuan muzzle and threw me in the air. Thrust away, I hit a tree in a murky splosh and slid off its whitish bark. My head landed on a rock and I staggered to stand up.
There was nowhere to go but I ran. I had lost my tools, my wrench, and everything else. I had dropped my radio. Something hit me, a thought I cast away in fear: The rockodile was too small to be the creature that had pierced through the fog.
I swooped through the dead forest, jumping from slippery stone to another. I was able to put some distance between me and the monster while it growled in anger, destroying the trees that separated it from me.
I found my way to a large clearing. Straight and stretching far beyond the fog, it looked like a river that had spilled over. The rockodile smashed a tree a few throws behind me. Whining, I jumped away.
I stretched my hooves to steady my river landing. I was ready to dive and swim as fast as I could.
My hooves hit rocks less than a head below the water. Something cracked around my right frontleg kneecap and I fell on the side.
Stunned, I prodded the hidden ground below the water surface with my valid hoof. I felt many rectangular-shaped rocks.
This wasn’t a river. It was a road; an old, paved boulevard swallowed by nature years ago. I looked all around me and fear struck my heart. I had no hideout in my reach, nowhere to hide. I couldn’t even crawled under the water. The layer was too thin. I was dead.
I rolled over and saw the rockodile. Standing above me with a maw drooling murky green sludge, its foul breath crawled over my nose. My heart came to a halt and colours drained off my face. I was, indeed, dead.
The snapping maw never came. The rockodile lifted its heavy head, sniffed the wretched air, and grunted. The earth shook and the frizzle of a hellish fire rolled over in the distance, getting nearer and nearer. Something ominous was coming.
The rock-armoured beast whined and ran away in the cover of the dead forest. Only then did the hurricane burst out of its hiding spot. Leaving a wide, billowing hole through the fog, a metal monster fenced above my head like one gigantic, rushing bullet.
Let there be silent, I thought, as air leeched away from me, swallowed behind the steel canonball. My head snapped back as if somepony had bitten on my mane. Clawed away in the trail of the racing engine, water blasted away from the ground in countless drops and flying puddles.
Sounds rushed back to my buzzing ears, booming like many explosions. Heat washed over my face and only then an invisible force tore me off the ground.
I felt like butcher hooks had sunken into my back skin and, though I had no wings, I flew.
Screeching roared over the flooded road from which the water had fled in a blink of an eye. Landscape snapped pas me in a blur and I landed in a loud, squishy thump. Rolling over, my body took a sudden halt in a gruesome and methane-scented pond.
Steam decompressed from many pipes and pistons. To the violent hissing joined a sudden mass of water. Rain rushed back to the ground and with it, the Deluge’s cacophony claimed back its rightful place in this world.
An amp cracked up to life and a voice called out to me.
“You okay over there?” said a digitalized voice, definitely the one of a mare.
I rolled my head over, my neck cracking in the process, and lay my eyes above a beast. Fullmetal, mat as one dark grey stone, an elongated vehicle hovered at a couple of hooves above the ground. Sending ripples on the water below, its engine wubbed, passive and slow. Steam whistled and dissipated in the cold rain above the fuming hood of the flying cart. Two long red stripes traversed the engine, from bumper to spoiler, circling around a glass cockpit. A speaker hid under the carbon-coloured frame, right above one cooling vent. The whole looked like an arrow type, thin, sharp, ready to fend through anything, from air to granite and concrete.
“You’re okay…?” the voice trailed over. “It’s not that but I’ve got a problem a bit further back, you know. I don’t wanna have a skunk catching me anytime soon. Neither do you, I think.”
Febrile, I stood up on my hooves and climbed over the hood of the vehicle. The mare inside the machine smirked and, I had no doubt, gave a nod behind her dark-tinted cockpit glass.
“Don’t worry, lad,” the mare boomed over her interphone. “The city’s door ain’t not that far.”
As I clung onto the bolide, misty air brushed in my mane. I was flying. Not for long though as the door was already in sight after a minute faring along the dead forest. That door… A one meter thick piece of steel that stood for over five storeys. I knew it well.
“Transporter matriculate number one-two-one ‘o nine, request access,” the mare said.
The mare was a transporter. One of the ponies that dared face the outside and link the cities together like business logisticians. Meeting one was an occurrence, but owing your life to one? That’s more than luck.
My legs trembled and I couldn’t stop my hooves from shivering, clattering over the metal hood. My mind reeled and my eyes rolled as exhaustion wracked my muscles. I wanted in and knowing that I was going to leave behind the outside rejoiced me. I was safe, safe… safe.
The massive vault’s door creaked and started rolling on its two-decade old pony-sized hinges. Though the cockpit of the transporter’s ride was thick, I heard a voice traverse a speaker and the glass.
“Access granted. Opening of Raven-Flank’s northern door engaged,” said the operator. “Welcome home, Scootaloo.”
And so forth we entered the city. Swallowed in the penumbra inside, I finally entered the place I had grew up in with a smile. Raven-Flank was where I expected to spend my days in, till the end, away from the worries of up above. The deadly outside.