I woke up to the smell of sludge and the noise of creeping water. I was cold, soaked to the bone as I lay face down in a narrow and inundated tunnel.
I jerked out of the streaming water and took in a short, panicked breath. My head hit the ceiling of the tunnel, banging out a metallic echo. I was trapped in a flooded vent, somewhere I didn’t know about.
I groaned and hauled myself to a reasonable height. My hooves hurt and my ears rang out loud. I tried to stretch but there wasn’t enough space. Pain gripped my heart and I sought for more space. I wished I could breathe. I couldn’t find a comfortable position. Too high on my haunches, my head scrapped against the sharp and ripped apart ceiling. Too low, I was forced to swim and suffocate in murk and rotten water. In all my distress, I wanted out.
A violent shake tore through the vent, throwing me on my side and submerging me under the murk. My head hit a metal slab and white pain shot through my shut-closed eyes. I screamed and gulped rushing stream of mud. My body slid away dangerously. I felt like tumbling down the throat of a giant. MY head banged against a metal edge and I lost strength for a second. A disgusting taste of copper filled my mouth and I couldn’t scream, out of fear I’d drown. In here, trapped, darkness and deep water were my only companions.
Shivers wracked through my body and I shot my head outside the water. Struggling to breathe, I wailed and hacked my hooves around me in the dark until I settled against a small crossway in the vent. Eyelids heavy, I hauled myself up into the diverging vent, still spared from the flooding at the moment.
“… V-…!”
White noise crackled in the tight vent, shooting a sudden and nerve-paining 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, looking deep into my soul, seeking for some fears to feast upon.
“Vox!”
The voice came and go with interferences, spewed by a tiny metal box screwed to my belt. The red diode glowed brightly then died as 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!”
I scrambled to the com-link, prodded around in the blackness, and hit the outward transmission button.
“Vox reporting,” I croaked, trying to spit away the taste of spoiled mud. “I’m… here.”
“Vox, where were… Wh-… are you?” a mare’s voice cried out from the other side. “It’s been… five hou... I can’t reach... well.”
Five hours… I had been crawling in a gutter for five hours.
“I’m…” I hesitated, fell silent, and contemplated darkness around me. “I’m lost. I’m trapped.”
White noise was the only thing that answered me afterward. I switched the item on and off for a few minutes until I lay stoic, hugging tight the broken device.
The ground shook and roared under mighty forces, covering my sobs.
Crying out in pain, I pushed myself on my hooves and forward. I climbed and bit on whatever lay around to help me move up, away. Half drowning, half suffocating in the dankness of the place, I fought the whirl in my guts that wanted me to vomit and crawl into a ball. I was going to die.
Thunder cracked and spurted in the distance, distorted by the contorting and broke apart vent. Rumbles quaked through the pipes that bared my route. With a cry, I punched my way through, hitting down the vent holding my monkey wrench in my mouth. I felt a tooth crack and shatter. With no horn to lit my way onwards, there was just noises, water, and death.
I gasped in pain, shot forward on my shaky hindlegs and fumbled into a pit hole I hadn’t seen coming. In my screaming fall, my head hit a piece of steel. I rolled butt over head, hit a slope, and fast-paced forward through an old, rusty and patched up fence set to bar access to the rest of the vent. I came to a sudden halt against the dead-end. My body cried out in pain and breathless, weightlessness took hold of my senses.
I fell again and my back hit something squishy and wet. Light shot through my eyes and blinded me as a cold and raging rain battered my hide. I heard clearly the deluge of water happening all around me, drumming over my bare back. With the rain forcing me down, I crawled eyes-shut toward the nearest place where the downpour was less intense. I 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 and it was with fear that I slowly lifted my head to watch a dangerously grey sky, rumbling with thunderbolts that cracked across the natural low ceiling.
Life underground had had my eyes gone to shit. It had had everypony forget the concept of sunlight. After all, who wanted to live outside anymore? Life there was impossible, and it was why, as I sucked in the fact that I was cut from the city and left stranded outside, that jolts of adrenaline sparked in my chest.
I needed to go back.
Febrile, I looked upward at the smashed open vent I had fallen from. It stood out ten hooves above my head and extruded from a sandstone cliff that had no practical grip which could help me climb.
I was trapped. Outside.
A thunderbolt slit in half a nearby tree, starting a fire on its dead, bleached-white bark Deep shadows crawled on the surroundings like black, contorted, and moving hands. I was in the middle of a forest and the horizon was hidden by endless rows of dead trees. The sky was empty and grey and a crawling fog obstructed sight past a hundred yards at most.
It was raining, and that rain hadn’t stopped for twenty long and horrible years.
Equestria? Gone.
The diarchy? Gone.
All semblance of comfort and safety? Gone.
Civilisation? Don’t even talk about that.
I had no memories of the years before. I was two years old when the Deluge began. I had no recollection or memories from that time except, maybe, some wild dreams I had had during my childhood spent underground.
Raven-Flank.
One of the last equine cities that still survived the wasteland… murkyland that once was Equestria. We took refuge twenty years ago, deep underground, locked behind concrete walls the rain couldn’t reach.
A grave growl echoed in the distance, far beyond the veil of fog that stopped my vision. First inaudible, the grunt rose to a heart-sickening litany. The world shook around me and trickles of wet dust fell on my muzzle. I tried to hide under my improvised cover and shrunk on my shivering hooves.
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 crawled back in my memories. MY heartbeat upped a notch and my breath, erratic, pained my chest.
Something moved in the fog, skeletal, black, and of disproportionate crookedness. A shadow crawled at the surface of the fog, fast enough I questioned if my eyes were playing fool with me. Like a fin slowly surfacing the water, the shadow returned, and the growl became louder.
What did I saw? I couldn’t tell as I didn’t know what it was. The fog hid everything. But cold sweat ran across my back and my mane crawled. The rain had not been alone in bringing down our world. With the deluge something else had come.
Something lurks beyond the veil, fillies, so behind wielded vault hide and don’t seek, in fear it catch you, sillies.
And as all the souvenirs from my classes where a remorseful old buck had lectured us on the outside’s deadly manners, I tried to squeeze myself deeper in the mud. Below the concrete porch, I found myself alone, covering my eyes, listening to the song of rain hitting the ground and washing it away. What had once been a forest had become a dead swamp, rotten and stinking. And I wasn’t alone.
A bird chirped nearby, jolting me out of my petrified comatose. Small and rachitic, the bird had lost its colour. Grey and brown, fitting in the swamp, the petite creature chirped and tweeted. In starts and jerks, the bird jumped and turned on its branch. I focused and watched, fascinated to see that life stiff existed up above.
Then a rock snapped and gobbled up the tweeting thing. A maw made of sharp obsidian stumbled out of the cloud. High as a tree, the reptilian entity gulped down the prey and roared. Its back ran with sprouting plate of granite and the joints of its stone scales glowed a dull green. Then, it turned its head in my direction.
A rockodile.
Adrenaline shot through my veins as the monstrous being rushed in my direction, battling against the muddy ground that swallowed its heavy and large limbs.
It bought me seconds and the beast came crashing against the cliff, ripping it apart and throwing down a whole part of it. The vent opening disappeared below rubbles.
I screamed as I scrambled forwards, nearly swimming in the sludge that had covered the world. Algae wrapped around my legs and I felt trapped. The rockodile howled, turned, and charged. In its violent surge, the beast nudged me forward and threw me in the air. Thrust away, I hit a tree in a murky splosh and slid off its whitish bark. My head hit a rock and I staggered to stand up.
I ran. There was nowhere to go. I had lost my tools, my wrench, and everything else. Worse than anything, I had dropped my radio.
Swooping through the dead forest, hoping from stone to stone and slipping more than once, I put some distance between me and the monster. The creature barked and growled in anger behind me while it destroyed the trees that blocked its way.
Somehow, I found my way to a large clearing. Nearly straight and stretching far beyond the fog, it looked like a river that had spilled over. The rockodile smashed a tree a few throws away behind and I jumped.
As I expected to dive into water, I stretched my hooves to steady my river landing. I hid rock less than a hoof below the brown water. Something cracked around the kneecap of my right foreleg and I fell on the side.
Prodding the hidden ground below the water surface with my valid hoof, I felt many rectangular-shaped rock. My eyes shot open. This wasn’t a river. It was a road; an old, paved boulevard that had been swallowed by nature. I looked right and left and fear struck my heart. I had no hideout in my reach. Nowhere to hide. I couldn’t even crawled under water. I was dead.
I rolled over and saw the rockodile. Standing above me with a maw drooling murky green sludge, its foul breathe crawled upon my face. My heart came to a halt and colours drained off my face.