It was hard to know just how long I was unconscious, and even harder to know how long I was conscious and yet unaware of it. I could see nothing, I could hear even less, and without the wind or the dull ache of pain, I felt as though I had fallen outside of time itself. It held no meaning, and so I merely existed, without form or presence, or even the restrictions of thought.
What finally shook me from my trance was a blinding glimmer of light, a piercing bright intruding upon the abyss. I blinked, and before me floated a small, glowing gem tied to a string. The lightgem I’d been wearing as a necklace; I’d tucked it under the collar of my quilted barding, but the fall must have knocked it loose, and now it was floating away.
Away?
I focused on it again, and it burned my eyes, which were accustomed to the black abyss around me. But I focused on it all the same, and saw that, yes, it was drifting away. The glowing necklace was being drawn against the back of my neck, as the water tugged on the gem. I didn’t want it to go away—I liked the little light, even if it burned my eyes because I’d been away too long. The string went taut, as the necklace was pulled from me, and that pressure against my neck reminded me of my body.
All at once, sensation rushed back to me, and I was overwhelmed as I felt the pressure of the water as it crushed me. It was cold, so cold, and it pierced me through to my bones. I felt that burning cold in my bones, in my ears, in my chest. I had drowned, and the water had filled my lungs, saturated my corpse. And it felt wrong—it was too thick to be water alone, and as I tried to move my hooves, they were sluggish to respond, as though I were dragging them through black mud.
Points of pressure focused across my flesh, like goosebumps, or pebbles. Then sharper, and it felt like the water around me was filled with teeth, and the sharp ends of those teeth were being dragged across my flesh. They scraped, they sliced, and they threatened to crush and stab—but the hoof that I had extended towards my little light couldn’t feel them. Around that leg was only mundane cold. The light was protection from the dark.
I couldn’t lose it. I couldn’t afford to lose it, because if I did, then I would lose myself to the lake, and I would never again be able to escape. That gem on a string was my lifeline, and I grasped for it just as desperately. The lake, or the water itself, or something within the water—something didn’t want me to have it. It wanted to claim my body and mind for itself, and it resented the little glowing gem. But I knew that it was the only thing that was keeping me safe, now.
My pyromancer’s grasp was weak, but I barely needed any strength at all to grab at the gem. When I had it, I found that I could see the shape of my magic, against the darkness. A thin, glowing outline of a gryphon’s claw clutched at the gem, and held it securely, even as the water sought to crush the manifestation and tear the light from my hoof. But I held it tightly, and pulled it closer to myself. I clutched it protectively against my belly, while I curled up around it like a foal in the womb.
I didn’t know whether I was protecting it, or it was protecting me. But the dark around us didn’t like it one bit, and I felt it stab and slice at my back with claws larger than my body, as it tried to find purchase where the light couldn’t protect me.
I couldn’t stay here. Eventually, my little light would burn out, or my own magic would flicker, and I’d lose my grasp. I had to escape. I had to get out of here. But what was here? Where was up? Where was down? There was only oppressive darkness, all around me, and it didn’t want to let me free.
My vision clouded as my other hoof, the one not holding the light gem, began to search around me. I was lying on my side in a deep bed of mud, and I’d disturbed it, so now I couldn’t rely on my eyes. But it was a surface, a hard edge of reality against which I could anchor myself. It existed, and if the mud under the lake existed, then so must the shore. Oddly, I seemed to be heavy enough to sink. Either it was because the mud had invaded my lungs while I was dead, or it was something else unusual about the pitch-black water itself. At the very least, it meant that I could begin to drag myself forward through the cold black mud, hopeful that eventually, I’d escape this abyss.
The edges of my hooves, as I pulled myself forward...it was the strangest sensation, but they didn’t feel entirely real. As if pushing them outside the aura of the dim lightgem made them part of the darkness surrounding me. I thought maybe it was just because of how cold the water was, but the light gem didn’t produce any heat, only light. The fire within myself was fighting against the abyss as well, and that produced a little warmth, but not as much as a living pony would have, surely. But then…a living pony would have succumbed to drowning long ago anyway.
Instead, it was as though my fire, and the light from the gem, had formed a little bubble of reality within the crushing unreality under the water. It couldn’t extend very far; just enough for me to find purchase, and drag my little bubble through the mud. But maybe that was enough, for me to make my escape.
I only understood how long I’d been crawling, how long I had spent dragging my bubble of safety through the mud, when the light from the gem began to dim. It must have been a gradual process, or it had started to speed up enough that I could notice it. But it flickered, for a split second, and for that split second of darkness, I wasn’t sure whether I existed or not.
There was no transition, no steady brightening as I ascended, the dark soaking up all the light of the outside world with its absolute blackness. Instead, all of a sudden, I broke through the surface and was blinded. I never thought I’d see the sun again, and I’d been down in the deep for so long that I had been terrified that there might not have been a world to come back to when I emerged. The water had been freezing cold, but the feeling of cold air on my mud-soaked fur was even moreso, and I shivered as I dragged myself onto the shore and out of the water fully. I tried to look around, but the shore was just as blinding as the sky above. I could feel the faint heat of the sun, though, and I spread my wings and limbs to soak up as much of the sunlight as I could, while I lay on my belly.
My wing had already been broken when I fell into the lake, and while I couldn’t imagine the impact had done the limb any wonders, it seemed I had been under the surface of the lake for long enough for my fire to stitch the bones back together. While I was still blinded, I experimentally flexed and stretched my wing, and found only the dull ache shared by the rest of my skeleton. Occasionally, there was a sharp pain that reminded me that the bones hadn’t been set properly before they healed, but the wing seemed just as functional as it had before it was shattered. That was one benefit at least.
When I could open my eyes again, I found myself staring down at the bone-white soil of the shore. The dirt itself seemed to have mixed with a fine powder, and now the two were indistinguishable, though the bright white color faded the further away from the shoreline I looked. I gathered my hooves under myself, and rolled over to dry off my underside, and was met with an unpleasant writhing feeling from within as I flopped onto my back.
My whole body was still soaked with the inky-black mud from the bottom of the lake, but as I watched, it seemed to shudder and bubble when exposed to sunlight. I’d left a trail of gray in my wake, as the black mud had washed back down off my body and stained the white soil underneath. For some reason, the light seemed to repel it, and turn it fluid. What would have been gelatinous sludge became watery, and washed down the shore back into the water of the lake. It was even starting to drain out of my fur, although smears of the black muck stubbornly clung to every shadow and dark fold in which it could hide itself across my body.
My stomach lurched, and I sat up suddenly, then doubled over as something forced its way up my throat. Black muck painted the shore again, as the water and mud that had saturated my lungs and filled my stomach was suddenly and forcibly ejected. I felt it run out of my nose, and dribble down my lips, and it steamed in the sunlight as it rolled down into the water from whence it came. Three more times, I heaved and coughed, and more was evacuated from my insides.
When I was finished, I flopped back against the soil and resigned myself to lying in the sunlight for a good while. A discomforting wet feeling had saturated my cutie marks, as more black muck was somehow forced from within the darkness on my flanks. It had been inside the void, where my cutie marks should have been; it was inside of me, and maybe it always had been.
What was this darkness? It seemed to take the form of water and air, or perhaps it replaced them. Within it, time held even less meaning than it did in the light, and space seemed to shift and warp. It was everywhere the light couldn’t touch, including my own insides. My own blood had turned into it, or at least had been saturated with darkness—how long had I bled black ichor? Cutie marks were a representation of a pony’s talent, and it hadn’t just saturated them, but it seemed to have completely subsumed them. Not just mine; everypony’s cutie mark was now a black spiral of void.
I heard a bubbling, and forced my head up to look back down the shoreline at the lake. The black water seemed to be writhing, and I saw shapes, or perhaps the absence of shapes, swimming and churning under the surface. Invisible things moved through the lake, displacing water and replacing them with nothing, and they swarmed around the furrow I’d cut in the shoreline as I dragged myself from their grasp.
Slowly, the surface of the water shifted upwards, and I saw it strain against the light of the sun as it glinted off of the protrusion. The water rose in black spikes of liquid, trying to escape, and new furrows began to be dug in the shore. Some unseen force, or invisible creature, emerged from the water, and I saw its weight press the soil down as it crawled from the lake towards my hind hooves. I started to shuffle backwards in a panic, but my back thumped against the trunk of a tree, and I felt frozen as the sand indented towards me and the unseen enigma approached, eager to drag me back into the lake and-
“Heavens, you look like a drowned rat, covered in all that disgusting mud. Eugh.”
The feminine voice made me jump, and my eyes snapped up to find the source. A massive white cat, larger than me, sat in the crook of the tree above. She seemed twisted, mutated almost beyond recognition; her mouth, in particular, seemed grotesquely wide, and lines of teeth sharp as the teeth of a saw were exposed in a rictus grin at me. Her eyes were sharp, and her fur thick and pure white, brighter than the bone-white soil underneath. Even her claws seemed larger and sharper than they should have been, and they tapped an impatient rhythm against the tree trunk on which she rested.
“W-wha…”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh, say something of substance, won’t you? All you equines are boring enough, but at least some of you can hold a conversation. If you can’t even do that, then I might as well go find one that will.”
I glanced back down at the shore, where some unseen nightmare had been crawling towards me, but the indents in the sand were gone now. As if they had never been formed in the first place, and only my own panicked trail remained. What had happened? Where had it gone? Had it ever been there at all?
I shook my head, and focused back on the twisted feline above me. “S-sorry, I j-just...There w-was a…” Was a what? I didn’t even know how to describe the thing unseen. “N-nothing, nevermind.”
The cat raised an eyebrow. “So you can talk! Though you don’t seem terribly concerned with making much sense, so really, it’s as if I still can’t understand you at all. Your words need meaning, or else they’re just noises made by a wild animal.”
I was being lectured by a cat. Why was I being lectured by a cat? “Wh-who are you?”
“Ah! Finally a question. I’m a cat, of course. I might look a bit different than those with which you may be familiar, but I assure you, I am and have always been that pinnacle of predation which you equines have dubbed feline.” The cat stretched on her branch, before she shifted how she lay on the branch to show more of herself to the sun. “Unless you meant to ask my name; names are a pony tradition, are they not? In which case, the name to which I am referred to by my pets is ‘Opalescence.’ I believe it’s also meant to refer to a particular type of jewel, or gem; I don’t care terribly much which one, but I’m sure it is quite dazzling, to share my given name.”
“Op-Opalescence. Okay.” I mumbled to myself, before I looked back up at her. “Why c-can you talk?”
“Why can you?” She responded.
I blinked at her dumbly for a few moments. “I...I d-don’t know. P-ponies have always t-talked. Cats...d-don’t? Usually.”
“What a haughty assumption. Cats have always talked, of course; Ponies have just never listened before, beyond a few particularly clever exceptions. Now that you’re all undead, it seems as if you’ve finally learned how to listen. And now you’ve all such a pleasant scent...really, it’s all quite an improvement to how you fools were before...and oddly familiar...”
Suddenly, I was very aware of how she was looking at me, and I was glad that I was covered in mud. If I wasn’t, I think she would have simply pounced on me, and I would have been slain once again. “F-familiar?”
“Mmm.” Suddenly, she leapt out of the tree and landed in front of me, and her weight shook the ground under my hooves. Her nose twitched as she sniffed me, but then she leaned back, and wiped the mud off with her paw. “Mmmm, yes, definitely quite familiar. Even under all that mud, I recognize the faint scent of my pets. You’ve gone and met them, have you?”
“P-pets?” I leaned away from the giant predator, who loomed over me as she seemed lost in thought. After a moment, she wiggled her hips and leaped back into the tree, which creaked and groaned under her bulk.
“Indeed, the larger one, and the smaller one. I’ve never cared to learn their names, but you’ve unmistakably got their scent upon you.”
I shook my head in confusion. “Y-you mean your owners?”
She scoffed at that. “Hardly! A cat isn’t owned by any other creature except themselves. No, they are my pets, and not I theirs. After all, they live in my house, and I feed them, or try to. They always refused the prey I caught for them, which was quite rude. Until they moved out here, and I had to move my hunting grounds accordingly.”
“M-moved out here? D-do you mean the Gr-Gravewardens?”
“More pony names; I’m afraid I don’t know of whom you speak. Unless you mean the ponies down below, living and undead?” I nodded, and she rolled her eyes. “No, not them. Those undead make fine prey, and I hunt them from time to time. But no, my pets live in that building on the lake, or at least the larger one does. The smaller one has gone elsewhere, and I’m tempted to follow her. This place bores me to tears, without anything to watch or hunt—save for the shuffling dead.”
I felt a pang of guilt. “Y-your ‘pet,’ did she have white f-fur? And a n-necklace, with a g-glowing jewel?”
“Ahhh, you have met her, just like I thought!”
“In a m-manner of speaking,” I mumbled. “We...I k-killed her.”
Opal’s mouth turned into a wide grin once more. “A fellow hunter, then…interesting, my pets are no easy prey, though they are quite fun to stalk. Were quite fun to stalk, as their number has been reduced by one, or so you claim.”
I stared at the grinning cat in confusion. “Y-you’re not angry, that I k-killed your...pet?”
“Oh, I’ll find others,” she said, with a dismissive wave of her paw. “I’m actually much more taken with you, for I have no idea if you’re telling me the truth. You certainly don’t look like a hunter; you soft ponies make for terrible predators, much less undead ones that look nearly ready to fall apart. Tell me, how did you slay my pet?”
Hadn’t I just been doing this? Hadn’t I been doing this all along, giving what information I had freely, and never getting any back in return? When were my questions going to be answered? Because I certainly had a great deal of them, now that I’d spent some time in this world.
No more. I’d done a terrible thing in there, and I’d made a lot of mistakes to get to that point. I couldn’t stop myself from making terrible mistakes, not entirely, but having at least a little information would help prevent me from making more in the future.
I struggled to stand, and shivered as black mud of the unknowable slithered down my legs, and boiled in the stagnant sunlight. I stared up at the cat that was too large, with my eyes formed from strange magic, in a forest that was long dead by means unknown, on the shores of a lake that seemed more like a portal to non-existence. “You f-first.”
“I beg your pardon?” The cat propped her chin on her paw; a distinctly pony-like gesture. She claimed to be above us, but she had to have learned that from us at some point. She seemed more amused at my refusal than anything else.
“S-sick of telling, never l-learning. You f-first. Tell me about your p-pet, about the p-pony I killed. So I know s-something about her, so I c-can remember her as more than a g-ghost.”
“And why does it matter?” Opal said, with a smirk. “She’s dead now, or so you claim. That’s the way of things; predators hunt prey, and the old and weak are consumed by the new and the strong.”
“But you c-cared for her.” I pointed out. “You c-call her your pet, and you s-said you tried to f-feed her, and that she l-lived in ‘your’ house. You f-followed them out here, so you m-must have cared about them. How d-does that fit into your ph-philosophy?”
That seemed to sour her mood slightly. Opal shifted again to glare at me directly, and her claws began to drag against the dead bark of the tree absent-mindedly. “Because she amused me. I liked to watch the two of them scurry around my territory, busy themselves with strange things that didn’t matter at all. Clothing, little bits of metal, and shiny jewels. All meaningless, but they attracted new ponies every day, and they amused me as well, so I decided to leave them be. The clothing, and the cloth she made it from was good to nap on as well; it was a little game we played, where I would find the softest of the fabrics and sleep on them, and she would shoo me off.”
“She w-was a seamstress?”
Opal wrinkled her nose. “Is that what you ponies call it? I suppose so, then. She traded bits of metal and gems for fabric, which she worked at with her magic and strange vibrating desk, before trading it back for more metal and gems. Circular and pointless, as I said before.”
The conversation could almost be described the same way. But I persisted. “W-what did she look like? B-before she came out here.”
“If you killed her, as you so claimed, then I think you should know very well what she looked like.”
I shook my head, and my eyes wandered again to the bleached-white soil. “Sh-she was all wrong...m-made of dust, like b-bones ground into p-powder. No m-mane, no eyes. She was b-barely more than a sk-skeleton, once we…” I winced. “...r-removed the shell.”
“That’s not too far off, then.” Opal had calmed down a bit, now that I wasn’t arguing philosophy any more. She started to examine her claws, and the scores she’d dug in the tree trunk. “She’d always been pale, like bone, but lighter. Her—mane, you called it?—was a dark color, always loosely wound in a spiral like her rolls of cloth. She was much too thin, and she reminded me of a bird in some ways. My fattest catches were always brought to her, for I feared she would starve if I didn’t provide them.”
Somewhere, at the back of my mind, I had the haziest of images. I dug at it, focused on her face, and tried to add eyes and a curled mane to what I’d seen in the dark factory. There was something there, but it was vague, uncertain. I glanced back up at the cat, as she lazed in the tree above. “An-anything else?”
“You want more?” said the cat, with a huff of incredulity. “Well, I suppose there was always the stench.”
“St-stench?” That didn’t fit at all. Not with the image I had in my head.
“Oh, yes. She was obsessive about covering up her natural scent. She reeked of flowers and oils and outside, but never as it should be, not like the actual outdoors. No, she insisted on smelling like the most absolutely pervasive scents, like the pollen of flowers, distilled and focused into a horrific odor that drowned out any other in the room. Lavender, I think you ponies call it? She yelled that a few times before, when I knocked over a bottle of the stuff...”
Opal continued to ramble on, but her voice was lost to me, as the memory suddenly sharpened. I could see her now; standing in a town square in a ground-borne township. Ponyville, maybe? And she was elegant, beautiful. Her mane was combed and curled, and a shade of dark purple that made her carefully-brushed white fur stand out all the more. I couldn’t remember the color of her eyes, but her face was so different from the withered corpse made of dust with which I’d spoken. And through it all, the muted scent of flowery perfume.
I’d known her, or at least I’d met her often enough to remember her. And for the first time in a long time I had, just maybe, a hint as to who I had been before.
Opal hadn’t stopped complaining about the dead mare. “...And then there was the tea, and you’d think she never drank any water! The stink of that horrid liquid saturated the building, she drank so much of it. All these different types too; maybe I would have liked it more if she stuck to one, but they all mingled together and made it impossible to smell anything-”
“W-what was her name?”
“Pardon?” Opal shot me a glare when I interrupted her.
I pressed on, and asked again, “What was her n-name? Sh-she had a name.”
“You ponies put too much importance on names,” the Cat said, with a roll of her eyes. “What does it matter what her name was? She’s dead now.”
“It m-matters to me!” I cried, and I stamped my hoof into the mud. “It m-matters to me, and I’m al-alive, or at least...less d-dead. I w-want to know the name of the mare I k-killed.”
Opal made a hacking noise, which I think was her way of showing disgust. “Fine. The other ponies that were always coming by, and the smaller one of my pets—they usually called her ‘Rarity.’”
I’d hoped the name would jog more memories loose, or at least bring the image of her face into more detail, but I didn’t recognize it. It fit the mare perfectly, however, and I didn’t doubt Opal’s own memory. At the very least, I knew her name, even if Opal was right, and it was just a name. It made me feel better, to put a face and a name to a Hollowed mare, even if it wasn’t myself.
“Satisfied?” Opal said, as she glared at me once more. “I should hope so, now that I’ve told you all that. Now, I believe we had a deal, and you’d tell me how you killed her, for my own curiosity’s sake?”
I swallowed a lump that had suddenly leapt into my throat. “R-right. Another m-mare, she gave me a m-mace…”
I trailed off, before my explanation had ever truly started. Where was the mace, come to think of it? I’d been holding it when I talked to Rarity, and stowed it in a loop of my barding afterwards to chase after Trixie. The action had been instinctual, even after using the mace for only a little while. So it had fallen with me, into the lake, but I didn’t have it now.
My eyes turned back towards the black water, which even now, seemed black and endless and horrifically inviting. My hoof drifted to the little lightgem, which had already been flickering out when I made my escape the first time. It was hard to tell in this light, but it looked dim, as though it had already burned out for good while I had talked with Opalescence. I wouldn’t be going back into the lake to retrieve the mace, I knew that for sure. I sighed as I realized it had been lost for good; hopefully, Mistmane wouldn’t be mad that I had lost her gift. It was such a good weapon, too.
“It’s n-not important,” I said, with a sigh. “I was w-with another mare, Tr-Trixie…”
* * *
I gave Opalescence the abbreviated version of the story; she didn’t need to know why we’d come to the valley, nor did she seem to care. My description of Trixie held her interest, though she wouldn’t say why, and said she’d explain after I was done. The skeletons, by comparison, she nearly asked me to skip past. Clearly, they were of little interest to her.
When I finally began to describe the dark, endless interior of the weather factory, and Rarity within it, in the form of the Gravelord, that seemed to confuse her. I had to spend a while describing the dust, and how she’d crumbled at the end, before Opal let me talk about the fight that had led up to that point. While my theatrics in the battle itself seemed to amuse her, she was confused why I’d dragged it out for so long. I think she had trouble understanding that I couldn’t just go for the Gravelord’s throat, at least in any meaningful way.
Trixie’s actual contributions to the fight were mostly glossed over. She’d spent most of it out of my focus anyway, and I still wasn’t terribly happy with her, after that kick. Aside from a couple of moments where she’d stunned the Gravelord, she hadn’t done all that much in the fight to begin with. But then, that made sense for the showmare. She was an illusionist, and she’d mostly had me fighting her battles for her in all the time I’d known her. Presumably, she was long accustomed to it in all of her previous assistants. But I decided to put a mental pin in the subject of Trixie, so I could work out how I felt about her later, on my own time.
When I described actually how I felled the Gravelord, it confused Opal, because in her eyes, I was weak. Far weaker than the Gravelord had been, in nearly every respect. Eventually, she declared that I had been cheating, with my magic mace. In a straight fight, the Gravelord would have slain me instead, and I found it hard to disagree. With that, I mostly lost her interest, because I’d revealed myself to be “weak prey” after all. She decided to skip the rest of the story after that, including Rarity’s final words, which suited me fine; they weren’t meant for Opal, anyways.
But I did detail how Trixie had seemingly gone mad, and kicked me off the catwalk into the lake. The cat got a devious grin on her too-wide face at hearing that. “Serves you right, then. She was stronger, though she didn’t finish off her kill. Perhaps she thought you weren’t worth her time.”
“M-maybe,” I said, with a shrug. “Don’t really c-care. J-just want to go back to Ponyville.”
The Cat smirked again. “Well, you might be out of luck, in that case. The fastest way out of this valley is the same path she took, but it’s a steep one, and treacherous. No trouble for me, of course, being that felines always land on their paws. But ponies like you, ooooh, you might make a nice-smelling smear on the way down…”
I shook my head at the thought. Trixie seemed sure of hoof, and even if she slipped, we’d been here for long enough that she would have recovered from a fall like that. Not to mention however long I’d spent floundering at the bottom of the lake. “I d-doubt it. But can you sh-show me the path? I d-don’t care how steep it is, if it m-means I don’t need to fight past the Gr-Gravewardens.”
Opal smirked at me. “Normally, I’d say no, and remain here to lounge in the sun.” She wiggled her hips, and then leapt out of the tree, to land with a loud thump at the base of the tree. “But I think I’ll head that way anyways, to find new hunting grounds—perhaps my other wayward pet. Follow me if you like, or you can stay here. It doesn’t matter much to me.”
I nodded, and as the massive cat began to weave her way through the dead underbrush, I fell into her wake to follow behind her. At least the journey back to Ponyville would give me time and quiet to think, because I had a lot to think about.