//------------------------------// // 26 - Red // Story: The Hollow Pony // by Type_Writer //------------------------------// “You c-can’t be serious.” The mountain path wasn’t so much “hidden” as it was “so unreasonably rough and obtuse that no sane pony would try and traverse it.” I suspected even a goat would have difficulty climbing these rocks, and I would have to be extraordinarily careful when descending back down the mountain. The start of the path went up into a narrow stone gully lined with lumpy rocks, and presumably cut over the mountain somehow. From there, it must have descended into a parallel valley, which would hopefully be unguarded and easier to traverse eventually. I was beginning to rethink fighting my way back through the Gravewardens, as opposed to climbing through here. “Mmm, well. I can’t say as to whether that other pony made it down safely, but I certainly saw her climbing up here. I considered stalking her, and pouncing when she paused to rest, but I’d found such a comfortable spot in the sunlight…” Behind me, Opalescence rubbed her massive furry bulk against a large boulder which had been warmed in the sun for a very long time. I suspected she got sidetracked like that a lot. “R-right...I guess I’ll see where it g-goes, then. Are you c-coming with?” I started to slowly struggle up the large rocks. They looked as though they’d been somewhat smoothed by the water and wind on the top side, but the undersides were still rough, as though they’d just been broken from the mountainside. Whatever had loosened them must have happened relatively recently. “Hm? Oh! Yes, I suppose I will. For as long as you continue to be entertaining, at least.” Opal pulled herself from the warm rock with what must have been a titanic effort, and began to follow after me. However, the big cat was much less cautious than I, and as she leapt from stone to stone, I felt the rocks under my hooves quake. An earth pony probably could have worked out how bad the rockslide was going to be, but it was barely a warning to me. I threw myself to the side, just as a stone the size of a door skipped off the stone where I’d been standing only moments before and exploded into lumps that rolled down the mountain. “Woah! W-watch it, this is really d-dangerous!” “Oooh, fie,” meowled the massive cat. “You are undead, aren’t you? And I’m a cat; I can always land on my paws. What’s a few lumps of rock?” “I d-don’t think I can r-regenerate being crushed flat…” I murmured, but the cat was already bounding upwards again. I followed after her, with significantly more caution. After a short, but painful, climb up the rock-strewn slope, I pulled myself up onto a large rock. The top was wide enough that Opal could splay herself fully in the sun, and I could walk around her without much fear of the edges. I wished both those details needed not be discovered by experience, but progress was progress. As I looked further up the slope for the best path, I glanced back at the giant feline basked on the warm rock. “W-why are you so large, an-anyway?” Opal grinned, and once more I was reminded that her mouth easily spread wide enough to bite me in two. Thankfully, I think she was just excited to talk about her favorite subject—herself. “Large? Oh, I’m not large at all. I’ve always been this size.” I found a promising-looking path, and began to climb again while talking with Opal. “S-somehow I doubt that. How d-did Rarity keep you in her...er, y-your house, if you’ve always b-been larger than her?” “Well, my house used to be much, much larger. You little ponies used to be larger too, but then you all shrunk yourselves. It seemed a very strange decision at the time, I must say.” “We all sh-shrunk ourselves?” “Indeed! And the streets, trees, and everything else. I must say, it was as impressive as it was confusing.” Behind me, Opal rolled to her paws, and started to follow my path up the mountain again. “At the very least, it’s good that you left the prey untouched, or at least didn’t play around with their sizes too much. Can you imagine if you’d all kept the rats proportional to yourselves? Why, I’d have to eat a hundred just to sate my hunger!” I shuddered. So the rats were proportional to Opal, then. Not to ponies. Then going by that measurement, they’d have to be the size of large dogs now, or maybe even rival a shorter pony. I could have happily lived the rest of my undead life without that knowledge, and I hoped I’d never encounter dog-sized vermin for myself. “In fact, if anything, I’d say you improved their flavor. That odd sparkle they have now, that warm tingle of magic, it makes the prey quite delicious.” That caught my attention. “Y-you’ve been eating the C-Chaos-tainted animals?” “What’s chaos?” Opal asked, genuinely confused. “Is that another nonsensical pony name? Call a rat a rat, it’s much less confusing.” I stumbled over a rock, and dropped to my knees for stability while I watched it bounce down the mountainside, and into the dead forest below. When I stood again, my knees were sore, but it was better than falling with the stone. “N-no, chaos is...it’s l-like a form of m-magic, but it c-creates change for itself.” It felt like it had been months since Zecora had explained that to me and Dinky. With the sun stopped in the sky, maybe it had been. “Interesting…so that’s why you’ve all shrunk, then; that explains some things.” It most certainly did, though I strongly suspected that we were looking at the problem from two utterly different perspectives. In more than just the literal sense. So she’d clearly been exposed, but she wasn’t burning like the deer had been...I almost considered that her anatomy wasn’t twisted in any unusual ways, but a glance back at her far-too-wide mouth made for an excellent reminder. Even second-hoof exposure to Chaos magic could twist their body, then. It was much harder to say whether it had twisted her mind; while I doubted she’d so flippantly considered hunting ponies before, she was, after all, a cat. And cats were predators at any size, which constantly had me on edge around her. I paused to check my hooves, and the mud soaked into my flesh, and Opal continued up the mountain anyways. One of her paws pressed down on my back to walk over me, and I groaned as I fought against her weight. Then she stepped back off me, and I shot her an unseen glare, before I focused on my hooves again. While the blackest mud had boiled off in the sunlight, I still had a layer of dried mud that clung to my thin fur, and cracked and crumbled as I walked. It had been enough to dissuade Opal from eating me so far, apparently. Something about the black mud had disgusted her enough to completely ruin her appetite. While I wanted to get the disturbing mud off of me as soon as I could, I decided it could wait until Opal and I had gone our separate ways. Speaking of exactly that, I heard Opal yowl from up ahead; though not in pain or fear, but mere annoyance. I resumed my climb, and joined her a few moments later, where I found the cat pressed against the mountainside. She seemed to be trying to reach into a crack in the mountain with her paw, but wasn’t having much success. “Um. W-what are you-?” “Stupid mouseholes!” She yowled again, before she slumped against the broken stone wall. “Or ponyholes, I suppose. I can smell the sweet scent of rot through this crack, but it’s much too small for me. And there’s no way around from here, it seems. I’ll have to go all the way back down—what a pain.” Opal shrugged away from the wall, and looked back down the rockslide, which allowed me to investigate. It seemed as though a great force—such as a city falling into the valley—had split the very stone of the mountain itself, and left a significant crack. It was barely wide enough for a pony to carefully trot through, and seemed uniform for as far as I could see. The floor was barely that; mostly, it was made of broken stones that had fallen from above and filled the space below, forming a nearly-perfect tunnel. Up above, I could see the light of the sun reflected down the sheared rock faces, which provided just enough light by which to see. Well then. I could see how Mistmane would have noticed this path, and it made sense that Trixie would have passed through as well. Either she’d already moved through the tunnel and was long gone, or I’d come across her on my own way through, stuck in a space too narrow for her to traverse, where I’d likely join her. “G-guess this is where we sp-split up, then?” “I suppose so,” Opal murmured, with frustration still evident in her voice. “I may go looking for my other pet, or I may simply search for better hunting grounds. Should you wander into them, Undead, I should hope you’ll have washed that awful muck off. It’s a crying shame that your delicious scent should be overwhelmed by that...filth.” “Th-thanks? I think?” Opal was already pacing down the rockfall, and seemed content to ignore me as she left. As soon as she disappeared behind a large boulder, I noticed I hadn’t been breathing, likely since I emerged from the lake. Was that due to my submersion under the waters knocking me out of the habit? Or more likely, had keeping a massive predator as a guide been making me nervous? In either case, I turned back to the crack in the rock, and started my breathing exercises again as I climbed into the tunnel. I felt immediately claustrophobic in this space. While the air was fresh, and flowed through the cracked mountain with a loud whistle, I could hardly spread my wings at all. The sunlight from above helped a bit, and kept me from feeling too trapped. The knowledge that I didn’t even have enough room to properly turn around, and would have to walk backwards if the path turned out to be a dead end, was unsettling enough to outweigh that comfort. In the end, I managed to keep moving forward by occupying myself with my mantra of flare and flicker, as I took in the cold mountain air with ragged breaths. But it wasn’t enough to fully occupy my thoughts, and so my mind wandered. Now that I was alone again, my thoughts turned to Trixie, no matter how much I tried not to think about her. It wasn’t that I missed her. In fact, there wasn’t much else that could be further from the truth. I thought back to all the time we’d spent traveling together, and with only my own thoughts for company, a fact quickly presented itself: Trixie had never really cared about anypony except...well, Trixie. At least, not as far as our little adventures were concerned. Every single thing she’d done had been entirely motivated by her own self-interest, whether by her own decisions or through the ponies around her—myself included—twisting what we wanted to accomplish to make it work in Trixie’s favor. Trixie wanted out of jail, and then she wanted her wagon, and then she wanted revenge on Applejack? And reminding her of those facts, or at least not arguing when she tried to rationalize our objectives with those goals in mind, had been the only way to keep her around as a traveling companion. It was inherently deceptive, and I hadn’t even realized I’d been doing it. That thought unsettled me; how far could I have taken that, to further my own goals? Of course, the own lack of any major goal of my own would have made that difficult, but the opportunity had certainly been there. That was a rotten base for an actual friendship. Trixie and I had never really been friends. Unlike myself, Trixie had never seemed to harbor that illusion—she’d only called me “Hollow” or “Assistant” in the entire time that I’d known her, and all of her actions were at least consistent with that. My own were not; I had stubbornly—but naively—kept trying to get closer than that, so that we could form an actual friendship, like what I had with Dinky. That had only made sense to me, since, like Dinky, we were going to spend a lot of time fighting and traveling together. The worst part of thinking these thoughts was that now I was questioning that friendship as well. Was my relationship with Dinky a healthy one? She clearly saw me as a friend, and didn’t want me to remain in jail. But I was the one working to get her out, while my own fate was more-or-less undetermined. When she was freed, would we go our separate ways? Would she remain in Ponyville, free inside the walls, while I was effectively free if I remained outside them? And Trixie had referred to Dinky a few times as my “fillyfriend.” No space in the middle; she meant in the romantic sense. But that definitely didn’t feel right, not for the friendship that Dinky and I shared. I still had no libido at all, regardless of the other pony, mare or stallion, living or undead. If Dinky felt that way—which I doubted, as she hadn’t shown any sort of obvious romantic inclinations towards me—then I should probably gently dissuade her, just in case. That line of thought was easy to conclude, in the end: Trixie was terrible at reading interpersonal relationships, and jumped to conclusions a lot for the sake of a good story. Fittingly, I pushed past a sheet of ice-cold mountain water that had formed a thin stream down one of the walls. I glanced up, but couldn’t see a source; presumably, a spring or natural meltwater pool had broken into the mountain crack at some point, and simply flowed down the path of least resistance. It passed into the packed stones under my hooves, and disappeared into the depths of the mountain below. I did use the fresh flow of clean water to scrub the rest of the black mud from my flesh, and rinsed out my mouth a little bit more, to make sure I had left the physical remnants of Trixie’s kick behind. The mental ones, though, those would not leave me for a while yet. She really had just snapped, hadn’t she? She’d gone from grinning like a filly with a new toy, to a mare betrayed, in less than a moment. Like flipping a coin. Had that always been there, and I’d forced myself to ignore it so we could keep moving? Or was that a new development? She’d held the door open for me, out on the Rock Farm. She could have easily hidden herself away, and left me to die as a distraction, to ensure that she went undetected. But she’d let me catch up to her, before I bled out in the back of the windmill. She hadn’t seemed to care much about me past that point; as quite a great deal of time had passed in the interim without any aid given, but she still included me in her planning when I did wake up. Though even that planning...she’d made it clear that she could do it herself, but in doing so, she’d shown that she clearly cared enough to threaten me into compliance. With that, she’d convinced me to be bait for the lizard. She’d been very eager to kill the boss of the Ashen Wallowers. Entirely too eager for my comfort, and I had no doubt that if I hadn’t been there, she would have forced her way inside to kill him. That aggressiveness had reared its head when Apple Bloom attacked, and was thankfully put to good use by helping me slay her. But then she’d been extremely forceful about how I should absorb the filly’s soul; she’d pressured me to commit an act we both knew I was uncomfortable with committing. My thoughts drifted to her actions as a mentor. She’d taught me how to throw a fireball, and clearly placed a great deal of importance on the knowledge of casting the spell. But it was a spell powered by hate, anger, frustration. It was a spell that seemed as though it would be the first shot fired in an argument, and would invariably lead to bloodshed. It seemed as though the caster was meant to revel in their loss of control, in allowing their emotions to boil over into the metaphysical. That was a terrible thing to teach a student, even I could see that. Finally, in nearly every interaction we’d had with the Gravewardens, I’d felt like I’d been holding Trixie’s leash. I’d constantly had to talk her out of attacking them or fighting our way through them, for the sake of moving through without being detected, or without starting a massive fight. She’d been incredibly eager to slay them all, and the fact that I sympathised with her even a little bit...that genuinely upset me. Even after the mind control, they’d just been ponies. Stupid ponies, at least the ones who were using awful magic for their own benefit. But they hadn’t been complete monsters, or at least not all of them. Mostly, they just seemed like they wanted to be left alone, like the dead god they worshipped. After all that, I really couldn’t deny it: Trixie was an awful influence, and I was almost certainly better without her. Would I have been better off without her from the start? That was harder to say. Despite everything else, having a second pony to help me fight had been invaluable. Together, we had slain Apple Bloom, and I had little doubt that the filly would have wiped the floor with me if I were by myself. What about other ponies in the future? Dinky had made it clear that she had little interest in the world outside Ponyville now, so she would almost certainly resist any further exploration. I’d be by myself outside the walls, unless Applejack caught another fool to force into this odd expendable-prisoner arrangement. Could I trust anypony like that, or any other pony that I met out here who would join me? Perhaps not at first; I’d have to learn from my experience with Trixie. Some ponies didn’t want to make friends, or would be bad friends if we became as such. In general, I’d have to be a bit more discerning and a little more guarded. For some reason, accepting that fact made me horrifically depressed, and I sagged against a rock face for a short while as I came to terms with it. Ponies were naturally social creatures; if another pony was excluded from the social herd, then there must be a reason. Closing myself off to that, even just at first to get a better idea of who they were, that felt like it went against my very nature. Eventually, I swallowed and continued to move through the mountain pass. There was nothing to be done for it; that was the way the world was now. I could hate it all I liked, but the world wouldn’t change for me. So the only thing I could do was keep moving, and make friends where and when I could. * * * After I passed through the crack in the mountain, I found why we couldn’t have simply come in from this side. The tunnel terminated in a steep drop, and though the cracked rock face continued downwards, the sheared stone was too sharp and slick from rain to be climbed with hooves. I had to leap awkwardly from the end of the tunnel into the dead branches of a tree, and it hurt only slightly less than plummeting onto the jagged rocks would have. Still, I was able to stagger away after I fell out of the branches, and once I shook the twigs off, my worst injuries were a scattering of bruises across each limb, and a sore barrel. Afterwards, I began to limp down the steep valley. I felt distinctly lonely without another pony, or even a snobbish talking cat, beside me to watch for predators, and talk to as I traveled. I mostly spent the time taking in the scenery, which was nearly spectacular enough to replace it, but I still kept glancing around nervously for potential threats, just in case. The fog was thin in these mountains, and that allowed me to see nearly to the low end of the valley, where another meltwater river ran out into the misty plains of Equestria. Snowflakes drifted down this slope, as though they’d lazily rolled off of the clouds above. Not quite enough snow fell to cover the ground or make the steep path too dangerous, but I could imagine this valley being used for skiing or snowboarding before the sun stopped. It was probably even more beautiful in winter, back when seasons still changed, and winter was more than a word. My eyes also turned upwards, to the mountains that ringed the valley, and I was able to spot something beyond before I descended back into the mist. One of the other mountains nearby had a protrusion sticking out from the side at a sharp angle, an unquestionably unnatural formation, too precisely shaped amidst the surrounding slopes and cliffs. Though I couldn’t make out any clear details, I decided that must have been Canterlot, built off of the side of the Canterhorn. Dimly, I wondered if I’d ever get to go up and see it, though it was hard to imagine I would. From what everypony had told me so far, it certainly seemed as though the nation's capital was safely locked down. Even more interesting was the peak above it. The tip of the Canterhorn was obscured by a dark cloud that never left, and I spent quite a long time peering at the distant mountain to try and see if I could work out what caused it. Eventually, I decided that if I could get closer, then maybe I’d know what the black shape was. But until I did, a blurry, indistinct oddity against the skyline it would remain. Once I plunged back down into the fog, I was on edge again, but thankfully nothing came of it. I was left alone as I wandered downhill, and I was reminded how winding the road had been up to the fallen city of Cloudsdale. This valley seemed much more direct, but less interesting because of that. Eventually, the ground leveled out, and I found the river I’d seen from above, which I eagerly drank from before continuing on. A road was near that, and I could follow that for as long as it took to find some form of navigation marker. A small, thatched-roof inn provided direction. I could hear the shuffling of hooves from the rooms in back, but they sounded like those of a Hollow, mindless and meandering. I just avoided them as best I could, while I glanced at a small pile of maps and brochures for this part of Equestria. They were faded and weather-ruined, but they were still legible, if just barely. Using those, I was able to figure out that I wasn’t too far from Ponyville if I followed a few roads carefully. I took the map that seemed like it was in the best condition so I could navigate, and left without ever encountering the Hollow deeper inside the inn. It felt strange to trot along a main road. It felt as though I’d always been moving along back-country paths between farms, or small roads that led to smaller towns. But this had apparently been a major road between Ponyville and Buckhannon, and it felt lonely moving across the hard-packed dirt. It had been meant for large carts or wagons overloaded with cargo, and I was just a single pony wandering through the fog. Eventually, as the road slowly sloped downhill, it bifurcated. One continued on towards Ponyville, while the other led to Canterlot. There was a small carriage-repair shop in between the two roads, and I noticed a thin trail of smoke curling upwards through the fog from the crumbling chimney. The thought that there might still be a pony living out here interested me, and I approached the building slowly and cautiously. I did pause, before I reached the door, and dug around in the inky blackness of my bottomless bag for the sword I’d used before. After I finished re-tying the strap of the sheathed sword around my barrel, I also checked to see whether my flask of sunlight was safe. To my relief, it was completely unharmed—though I did notice it had a thin layer of chalky dust on the glass, which was strange. I wiped it off and slid it back inside. Hopefully I wouldn’t need it, but I’d suffered enough from being unprepared, so keeping it handy, just in case, couldn’t hurt. I rapped my hoof against the doorframe, and only waited for a moment before a deep, drawling voice replied, “C’mon in.” I stepped through the broken glass door, and looked around. The carriage-repair shop doubled as the owner’s home in times past, and living amenities were interspersed with replacement wheels hanging off the walls, bottles of wood sealant, and buckets of paint for painting over scratches from travel. The counter was bare, with the register having long been knocked off the wooden surface and smashed open. A pair of chairs sat in front of a fireplace in the back, which was lit with a very small but bright fire. A huge stallion, burly and thick with muscle, sat before the fire and gently pushed another log into the embers. For a moment, I thought he was Rockhoof, and that the light of the fire gave his fur an unusual color. But no, it seemed as though the stallion’s bright red fur was the natural shade of his coat. After he finished feeding the flames, he sat back on one of the chairs, and I could see that it wasn’t just muscle that formed his mass. He had a fair bit of a gut to him as well, but not an unhealthy amount. It was a thin layer over a hard core of muscle, and just from looking at him, I knew this was a stallion that could lift a house, or buck a boulder in twain. His mane was bronze and unkempt, and his beard, even more so. He wore a ragged set of hide armor, held together with leather straps and lined with the fur of a slain beast. He looked at me with the embered eyes of a Hollow, though that seemed to be the only indication that he was beginning to Hollow. Those embers softened in sympathy, as I took the other chair and started warming my hooves by the fire. “Hello.” “H-hi there,” I rasped. “S-sorry to intrude...I saw the sm-smoke, and I’ve b-been traveling alone f-for a little while.” He nodded again. “No trouble to me.” He glanced around the building, lit only by the fireplace. “Only resting here, myself.” He spoke in short sentences, without wasting words, and that put a lot of emphasis on what he did say. It was a surprising change after Trixie and Opal, who had loved to hear themselves talk. It was strange, being the pony who spoke more in the conversation. “S-sorry for how I l-look, too. Hope I d-didn’t scare you, I’m a m-mess.” The stallion looked at me again, but shrugged. “Hollows don’t knock. You’re fine.” “Th-thank you.” I smiled at him, and rubbed my warm hooves together, and then rubbed my shoulders. My barding had mostly dried by now, but the warmth felt nice, and the fire helped finish the job while I sat here. “M-my name’s Holly.” The stallion looked back at the fire, and lowered his head a bit. “Red.” That he most certainly was; the name fit him, short but just as descriptive as it needed to be. “Okay. W-where are you going to, R-Red? I might be g-going the same way. We c-could travel together.” The stallion glanced at me, then to the door. “Canterlot. Makin’ amends.” I sighed sadly. “Aw. I’m g-going to Ponyville myself. Be c-careful, a fr-friend told me the road’s b-blocked.” Red nodded. “Heard that too. Can still get in through Hammerhoof.” “Hammerhoof?” I wasn’t familiar with the town, but knowing how to get into Canterlot certainly seemed like it would be useful knowledge to have. “Mining town. Base of the mountain. They share a sewer system.” “Eugh,” I grimaced, and shivered. I couldn’t imagine climbing through that, even though it was probably long dry by now. Even Red’s nose must have been stronger than mine. “G-good to know, at least. Th-thank you.” “Welcome.” Red said. All was quiet for a minute or two, before Red sighed. “Mentioned Ponyville before?” I blinked at him. “Uh, y-yeah. Have you ever b-been there?” Red looked away again. “Long time ago.” Probably before the sun stopped, then. My voice was soft and sympathetic, but there was only so much I could do to soften the description. “Th-there’s walls all around it n-now. A m-mare named Applejack r-runs the militia, and h-had them built, but sh-she’s Hollowing pretty b-badly and tried to b-ban the army from moving through t-town. You sh-should try and av-avoid her, if you can. They sh-should let you in though, b-because you’re not Hollowing.” Red winced, but didn’t say anything, so I continued. “The r-rest of the town’s okay...P-Pinkie’s trying to h-hold everypony together, but it’s a b-big town and th-there’s a lot of buildings f-filled with Hollows. Ap-Applejack and her g-get into fights a lot. Outside, the Ev-Everchaos is still b-burning, and the soldiers are st-still fighting the d-demons.” After a moment, he finally had a question. “What about Princess Twilight?” I shrugged, and that seemed to really confuse him. “N-nopony knows. She left to h-help Princess C-Celestia with something, and n-never came back. St-Starlight too, according to Dinky; she m-misses both of them.” “Who?” “Th-their apprentice; my fr-friend. She w-was the Archmagus, too, un-until Applejack threw us in j-jail.”” At that, Red lowered his head sadly, and closed his eyes. He stayed like that for a while, as he breathed deeply through his nose. I almost thought he fell asleep. “S-sorry...again…” Red shook his head, but didn’t look up. “Not your fault. Good you told me.” “D-did you know anypony there-?” “Not anymore,” Red said quickly. “Gotta get moving; might already be too late.” He opened his eyes and stood up from his chair, and started to pull a beaten-up saddle bag onto his back. Then he reached behind his chair and withdrew an old, rusted battle-axe, which he slid into the leather loops of his armor. He started for the door, but paused when I asked, “W-wait, late for w-what?” He glanced back to me, where I had shifted in the chair to look at him as he left. “Need to apologize. Was three mares...might just be one, now.” He turned back and stepped through the broken glass door, and a couple of fragments made tinkling noises as his armor dragged them out of the broken frame. The last thing I heard him say was, “Safe travels, Holly.” Then he disappeared into the fog. I sat down in the chair heavily, and stared at the glowing fireplace. For some reason, the fire within didn’t warm my bones like it had before, and the building felt cold and lonely now that Red had left. I stayed for a little while longer as the log burned down to dead ashes, and as the carriage-repair shop became dark, I stood to leave as well. It would be a decent walk back to Ponyville now. Hopefully, everything I’d told the stallion was still true, and things hadn’t changed for the worse in my absence.