//------------------------------// // 2014 project - From the Workbench - 3. Void // Story: RoMS' Extravaganza // by RoMS //------------------------------// Chapter 3. Void The run lasted some long minutes as Celestia heading first, the trio made its way through a vast esplanade through a thick smog. Once the laughter had vanished into thin air, lost in the far away, only then they slowed down and stopped. As they finally rested, no landmark to guide them out of the mist, they kept silent, lost to what their mind believed could dwell beyond the mist. Only the muffled zoom of a far landslide broke the setting immobility. “The empire of Kralle?” Discord asked, looking at Celestia who, prostrated, was eyeing her own hooves. She cringed in reaction, biting her lower lips in full resignation before lifting her head, overwhelmingly slowly. “Why the fook did ye have to lift that fooking window!?” she burst out, Diamond Tiara jerking away from her in sheer reaction. “Why did ye have to do such crap move!” Discord began to back away as Celestia crawled forth to him, casting shadows with her murderous eyes. Diamond Tiara smirked at the glass draconequus and waved a goodbye from the tip of her hoof. “I was just being curious, sweetheart,” he blabbered. “It’s not like I wanted to harm us in any way.” Celestia steadied, stiff, taking in a long, noisy breath. Eyes closed, she breathed out as slowly. Her left hoof was hovering over the ground, swaying swiftly up and down, betraying an intense flow of inner questions and thinking. “First, dontcha call me that way, Ah’m not your thing,” she dropped like an anvil on Discord’s head. “Ye’re. So. Disappointing.” He sighed and looked down, defeated. Both turned their head away from each other, a pregnant and awkward silence slowly setting like a knife in a wound. “Hey, the two lovebirds,” Diamond Tiara cut in, calling from behind. “We’re not together,” both said gullibly, swivelling toward the voice’s direction. However, Diamond Tiara was anywhere to be seen, the fog creepily intensifying for Celestia and Discord, two dots of life in an ocean of dead grey nether. “Remind me why we should take care of her?” Discord wondered aloud, massaging his temples. Celestia huffed, “She’s a child. Ah won’t let her walk arou’ here. An’ so will ya!” Discord gave up, his shoulders levelling down a little, “Alright, alright. But trust me, it’s gonna be a lot of trouble.” A high-pitch scream echoed, piercing through the smog like through a thick metal door. It repeated, not only once. “Celestia?” Discord brought forth, staring at her, an eyebrow cocked up. She shook her head and walked away, rapidly disappearing beyond the misty veil. Discord grunted. “Damn good, it couldn’t start any better,” he reprimanded himself, another scream flying by. “Tiara?” Celestia called, already gone through the mist. “Celestia?” Discord howled. “I’m here!” a voice popped from somewhere. “Oh, I’m going to like this thorough,” Discord exasperatedly said, rubbing his forehead. Half an hour later, Discord and Celestia reunited in front of a large brass pond. The water that had once filled it and reflected the intertwined figures of two mighty alicorns, one younger than the other, had dried out. The bottom of the pond was covered in shatteringly old leafs, fallen from a nearby barren and black tree. “Tiara,” Celestia beckoned loudly, instantly answered by a shrilling scream. She was running along the edge of the pond, head and mane shaking as if she tried to get rid of something stuck on her. “Catch her,” Celestia ordered. “Why me?” Discord pondered, his paw on his chest in a gesture of incomprehension. Celestia punched at his face, doing nothing but tearing a bit of the paper she was made. Her eyes narrowed, speaking silent words. Discord rolled his eyes. “Oh…” he nodded. “As you wish Princess.” As Diamond Tiara passed by, Discord grabbed her by her flank, his paw etching slightly in the wood of the filly figurine. She kept running, Discord looking now at where his right paw was missing, stayed on the wooden hide of the filly. Both Celestia and he looked at the stump. Celestia burst in laughter. A playful pout settled on the draconequus face, decided to retrieve his hand made of glass. “Diamond,” he called, starting running behind the poor filly that was still bigger than the doll of glass. Watching Discord bouncing behind his hand, stuck in Diamond hindquarter, Celestia puffed a little, and narrowed her eyes. Diamond Tiara was… glowing. Indeed, Diamond Tiara, from her imposing size in spite of her filly appearance was glowing with a faint yellow light, going through her mouth, belly, and eyes, the whole amplified by the dust and mist blanketing the castle. Something struck Celestia. She had already thought about it, but nearly completely paid it the attention it deserved. The sound of silence. Apart from her two companions, chasing in other on the other size of the pond, everything was drowning in a sarcophagus of silence. It was unsettling to Celestia, in her memories, she had always the souvenirs of the craftmaster tinkering around his workbench: pulling, lifting, welding, and sawing. She had become acclimated to it, and now, dwelling in the silence, she felt eerily out of place. She wanted to go back in the basement and take her place back in the frame of paper. But the beast might be waiting, patient. She shivered and looked away from her paper-hooves. Discord jumped, grabbed Diamond Tiara, and, from the destabilising weight of his thin body, made her fall in the pond. Together, they hit the rocky bottom, passing through leaves so dried they crumbled to ashes and dust. “Got it!” Discord eructed in victory. “Get it off! Get it off!” Diamond screamed out. Reaching in the broken panel on Diamond Tiara’s chest, Discord caught in his paw a firefly, buzzing loudly. Holding it above his head like a vrooming trophy, Discord cracked a laugh at the filly, “I think you had a bug! Isn’t that uproarious?” Diamond Tiara, who had been silent for most of the time, drawn in her thought, narrowed her eyes and unveiled her teeth, missing a part of their pristine white paint since her assault on the pickle jar. “Hey, Fragments. If I wanted you to lend me a paw, I’d have asked. Oh, that’s true, how would I count on you as you just come to have the ability to lose ‘em all!” she drawled, punching in Discord loose claw who bounced away on the ground, leaving Discord with only one paw, tightened over the whirling insect. His eyelids closed to a knife’s width, slowly stretching a long face as he neared at a hoof-length from Diamond Tiara’s muzzle. “Lady, why would not you go planking around away from me? Eh, coconut head!” Celestia slipped in between the two of them. “Calmos, fellow!” she spat, and ended crushed between the two of them trying to pinch-punch each-other. They rolled over into a whirling childish fight, balling over Celestia’s flattened form. She pouted, stretching her hooves into a pop as she buried herself from the cover of ashes covering the bottom of the pond. Both Diamond Tiara and Discord had noisily spread chaos across it. Huffing, Celestia sat, slowly unfolding herself, her eyes wandering over the mighty statutes standing on a pedestal in the centre of the construction. There, a bigger representation of herself was cast into iron, covered with a thin layer of gold that had started falling into patches at her own hooves. The once shiny statute was twining with Princess Luna, cast in the same way but with silver. Residues of pollution had set onto their features, trickling down into dried blackened and rusted tears, the iron beneath prey to the elements. She looked at the two fighting pieces of craft and sighed. Lifting herself up, Celestia neared toward the pedestal. Above the water mark lay a single sentence. ‘To our dearest fallen Princesses, your memories will be kept ablaze in our heart, in times of peace as in times of wars.’ The firefly whizzed past before Celestia’s eyes who cocked her head back by instinct. The insect rounded above her head and landed on her streaked doodled main. Celestia laughed until her held tilted down under the weight of the animal. She bit the dust. The insect was still waving its translucent wings above Celestia’s head when she heard Diamond Tiara and Discord stopped. A long moment of silent ensued that washed over Celestia with a growing shame. The two distinct burst of laughter that followed made her hope the firefly would have buried her face only deeper. “You’re unfortunately not going to find a brighter light down there,” Discord cooed. “The idea might fly over your head.” Diamond and he kept laughing together. Celestia even caught the thump of a rump hitting the floor. She muttered. “Can’t hear you,” Tiara added. “Wasp the point in talking to her?” Discord grinned. “If she cannot be made understandable. She won’t catch us.” “True, true,” Tiara confirmed, nodding firmly. The firefly suddenly flew up around the statute, giving the poor doodle of a princess time to crawl up back to her hooves. “Ah’m going to whip both of ya!” she growled. Discord was ready to drop another anvil, which would have quickly been follow by a piano as he saw Celestia, crying silently, minuscule dot of blue going down her cheeks. “Oh, come on, Celi,” he asserted. “We’re just joking. Look around you. All’s grey and dull. Spoon some uncertainty and chaos in your mood.” She didn’t answer. She didn’t even give him a hard look. Celestia weaved in between the two bullies and climbed up to the edge of the farthest part of the pond and sat, alone. “Excuse me,” Discord said, walking away from the two statutes. “I have to apology.” His face was tired, marked with remorse with that twitch of a lip. Looking at his feet, he slid between the crumbling grey leaves and made his way to Celestia’s side. Both started talking together but Diamond Tiara was too far to hear something but a low murmur. “Why be sorry?” she reassured even if she was the only one to give an ear to her words. “It was funny.” Rolling her eyes, she wandered away across the pond to a part that had been broken by an unknown feat of time. Walking over the rubbles, she stepped out of the pond and looked back at the two forms in the fog. By her movements, they were vehemently talking, maybe shouting, but the sounds were lost in the mist. Straightening herself, Diamond Tiara scanned the surroundings that were still visible. Something fluttered in the distance, eerie, like a thin piece of paper waving under an absent wind, fixed onto an invisible support in mid-air. Curious, she made her way to the apparition, and, as she closed in at each of her footstep, more appeared into thin air. There were hundreds of them, tiny pieces of paper pinned onto the many branches of a metal pole. A soft breeze was sweeping by, making of that artificial tree a phantom waving his appendices, casting its overwhelming and bizarre presence onto its spectators. Prayers. Each piece of tissue, wool, parchment, or simply paper, wore one of two sentences, often scribbled. Words of faith. Words of fear. Diamond Tiara tore one off the metal tree. ‘Dear Celestia, help us.’ Surprised she pull a second. ‘I wished it had gone different, pardon me. BonBon.’ Diamond Tiara discarded it. ‘Make him come back in one piece.’ that one was signed with a cross. Diamond Tiara shockingly let it drop. ‘Celestia, Luna, if you’re here somewhere, please, give me back my girl.’ She bit her lower lip, meeting the hard structure of the wood she was made of. She managed to take off another one. Old darker marks had been sprained on it. Tears ‘Hello daddy, mommy is sad, when are you coming home? I miss you.’ claimed the next, full of mistakes with a side marred with remains of a pastel badly drawn pictures. It had been ripped off a drawing book and nailed there. Hanging her head low, Diamond Tiara continued, starting to lack of prayers low enough to be reached. ‘Give me back my Sweetie Belle’ ‘Please, let me repair all of this.’ ‘I don’t want to be alone anymore, please!’ ‘Give me strength.’ ‘Help me out.’ ‘I can’t continue anymore, if somepony reads this, please help me.’ ‘Let me be heard!’ ‘I want to live.’ It continued, over and over again until Diamond Tiara snatched the last two she could. She was crying… Or more likely she wanted two. Two porcelains eyes that couldn’t go red, that couldn’t bulge, that couldn’t water, that could do nothing but see and witness. She couldn’t even blink. She opened the before-the-last and her eyes would have widened in shock if she had been able to. ‘don’t read the last one, not yet. Pinkie Pie.’ “Diamond Tiara,” Celestia called from behind. “Are you okay?” The filly, still twice Celestia’s size gasped in fear, holding the two pieces of paper tight to her chest. She turned and faced Discord and the alicorn, worry cast onto their features. She opened her mouth, ready to lie, but just dropped her stare. “No,” she confessed. “Not really.” Celestia drew a meekly smile and hugged the filly, for all it could mean. Diamond Tiara hesitated but finally lifted her hoof and gently shared the embrace. Discord caught the two tiny sheets in her hoof. He smiled comprehensively. He would have liked to boast the mystery, but he had once learnt that hurting was bad, and hurting what was already wounded was just vile. “We must go, now,” Celestia urged them. “I don’t feel safe here.” Both Discord and Diamond Tiara approved of the idea and fell in line behind the frail alicorn. Before stepping forth however, Diamond Tiara looked one last time to the first bit and Pinkie’s message. “How did…” she whispered, glaring at the second one, still folded. She looked down at the paper and shoved it in the hole in her chest. There, maybe, would it be safe for later. Walking away, Celestia looked back first at the pole of prayer, then at the pond. The firefly was still flying softly around her statute’s head. In the blink of an eye, the light flashed out of existence so fast she blinked away. Like a pony catching a fly with a cigarette in its flight, the fog had swallowed the tiny creature in an instant. Somehow, Celestia wondered how long it would take to gobble her up. Overthinking brisk events was never a good thing. This in mind, Celestia gulped and stared gravely at her two companions, oblivious of such event, urging them to move faster.