//------------------------------// // 32 - Baltimare, the Silent City // Story: The Hollow Pony // by Type_Writer //------------------------------// The rain eased up a bit as we moved under the blanket of fog, and towards the distant city. Maud was at the top of the formation, as she led us towards the road marked on her map, and Raindrops and Gilda fell into step behind her. Every once in a while, Raindrops would glare at the gryphon hen beside her, which only seemed to amuse Gilda. With how she cackled at the dirty looks, it almost felt like she wanted Raindrops to attack her, though I couldn’t imagine why. We managed to find the highway without breaking out into infighting, and we continued to follow that. I took the time to examine the gravel road, which was one of the largest I’d ever seen, and seemed hard-packed despite being left to decay for who knows how long. Rivet chuckled from behind me. “First time seeing a macadam highway?” “A w-what?” The stallion scuffed the gravel under his hooves as we walked. “This is called a macadam road. Near a century back, this clever earth pony worked out a cheap way to build good roads, so he could move carts of nuts from his family farm. The Princess saw how valuable the design was, and she started having ponies build the roads between most major settlements.” I nodded, then looked back down the road. The highway I’d followed back to Ponyville, after Cloudsdale, it had probably been one of these too. “I’ve s-seen them before, I think, b-but this one is so wide…” “Yeah, this one runs down the coast, and they probably widened it further to play around with those...auto-mobiles, I think they’re called.” I turned back to Rivet, whose muzzle was screwed up in thought as he tried to dredge his memory. “Auto-w-what?” The stallion was silent for a few moments as he tried to remember, then shrugged. “I never saw any of them myself, just rumors from out here. Like carts, but they burn prismapetrol to turn the wheels instead of being pulled by ponies. Or maybe magic crystals, or steam power, like the trains? All experimental stuff, and I didn’t see the point, really.” Powered carts? Maybe those would be useful for hauling cargo, but trains did that just fine. Carts would be limited to roads like this, and prismapetrol was dangerous and expensive to refine from rainbows and lightning. That couldn’t be worth the effort, surely. Not when pegasi could just fly something where it needed to go, or hire an airship for long distances. I shook my head in confusion. “W-weird.” “Yeah, I didn’t really get it either,” Rivet agreed. “Seems like they’re just tinkering with them, or at least, they were. Even if things weren’t how they are now, I don’t think it ever would have caught on. At least the wide roads are better for hauling carts.” I shrugged, and turned my eyes forward as we approached the city. * * * Baltimare, or what we could see of it, was actually somewhat reminiscent of Cloudsdale to me. It had a similar sort of sprawl, but it had to be constrained by roads that wove between the buildings. Even on the edges, where the roads speared out into the wilds away from civilization, the buildings followed alongside. Little restaurants, and stores selling camping and survival necessities for travelers, had all been built to tempt those same travelers into making just one last stop before they left Baltimare behind. There was no wall around the city, and no gate to mark the entrance, only the road in, where the buildings stopped. Out beyond was the dim glimmer of sunlight upon the ocean, but from this vantage point we couldn’t identify any of the docks and portside storefronts that the city was known for. And so, Maud had us pause here. She stepped under the awning of an abandoned shop to shield herself from the rain, and unrolled her map again. “If Trixie came to Baltimare, then she most likely came through here. It’s the closest road into the city, from the valley where Cloudsdale fell.” “Assuming she didn’t go through the tunnel.” Posey said quietly from the back of the group. Raindrops shook her head. “If she did, then we didn’t find any trace of her in there. If she did go through the tunnel, and disappeared like...like…” She swallowed, before moving on. “If she did, then she’s gone too, and the artifact with her. We have to assume she went around.” Rivet, Posey, Raindrops and Roma all crowded around the map to trace their route back, which left me, Star Bright, and Gilda by ourselves. I moved to a bench at the side of the building, where I looked out at the fog. Star Bright started to pick through the building itself, but, oddly enough, Gilda followed me. I would have figured she’d want to do some scavenging of her own. She took a seat at the other end of the bench, and I felt her avian eyes as she looked me over. After a moment, she spoke, “You said this Trixie gal killed you, right?” I winced, then nodded. As much as I didn’t like to think about it, and though I knew Trixie wasn’t exactly in her right mind...she had kicked me to yet another death. And I knew that she had the nastiness within her to do that again, if sufficiently motivated. Even before that betrayal, she hadn’t had any problem blowing flames in my face. “Y-yeah. But I’m t-trying not to think about it.” Gilda nodded at that, and looked out at the fog with me. There was only the murmur of quiet conversation from the group, until she spoke again. “I get that. But it’s not healthy; you can’t just shove those emotions down and not think about them, or else they’ll strain you, stress you out. The pressure will make you crack eventually, and it’ll all come pouring out.” She flexed one of her claws, then clenched it into a fist, which she squeezed tightly enough to draw a drop of blood. “For me, I get violent, and stupid. You ponies...I don’t know, you’ll probably break down crying, or something soft like that.” I blinked at her for a moment. “Um...” “Yeah, yeah, I know, this is uncool. I’m not good at this, and I don’t open up much because I suck at it. Just...I’ve been screwed too, alright? You and me, we know what that feels like. These other ponies, they don’t know.” Gilda fluffed her feathers and wiped rain off her breast. “If you ever wanna talk, plan things out, it’s cool.” Plan things? “I...I d-don’t wanna hurt T-Trixie.” “Right. Right, I getcha. But if we do have to fight her, and you wanna screw her back for screwing you, then I’ll cover for you. ‘Cause I know how that feels.” Gilda slid off the bench, then started to make her way back to the group. As she left, she turned back to me and added, “That’s the best way to make things right, when someone screws you. Screw them right back, so they can’t screw you—or anyone else—ever again.” I watched Gilda rejoin the group, but I lingered on the bench. That was something I hadn’t considered; I didn’t want to hurt Trixie, but if she was going to hurt others, then...would I have a choice? It was good to fight in self-defence, or to defend others. And though I wasn’t vengeful, if Trixie was going to hurt others and I happened to be the one to stop her… I sat there for a while, thinking that over. Long enough for the group to say their goodbyes. Maud handed Raindrops the map so they could use it to navigate the foggy roads. Star Bright had found a map of Baltimare itself inside the abandoned store, and Maud replaced her own map with that one, and began to study it just as intently. With one final wave, half our number started back down the macadam-topped highway, and soon had disappeared into the mists. I watched them go in much the same way that I had watched Pinkie Pie when we left Ponyville. How many of them would I see again? There was already one member of the expedition who wouldn’t be returning home. The rest of us soon started to move into the city, and I finally slid off the bench to follow behind Gilda, while Star Bright trailed behind me. He mumbled absent-mindedly about the world around us, but I didn’t hear any of it. I assumed he might have just been counting things again. I was too focused on wondering what would happen when we finally found Trixie. * * * Once we’d entered Baltimare properly, it reminded me even more of the fallen ruins of Cloudsdale. Though the city had been built with brick and mortar instead of cloud and cloudwood, the urban environment made me nervous, and I started to watch the streets and peer through windows in search of glowing skulls. But we never found any. Oddly enough, we never found anything; no piles of bones, no blood, not even really any damage. There were some shattered windows on the edges, but once we really got into the city, it seemed almost preserved. There was no wreckage, nothing had been broken, and there were no fortifications of any sort. Store displays were undisturbed, the carts on the streets had been parked properly, and even the brakes on their wheels had been fully engaged. Nothing was left half-done, nothing was amiss, nothing was missing...except for the ponies. There was simply nopony here. No ponies looked out through the windows at us, nopony peered around the corners of buildings, and the city of Baltimare was eerily silent. Sometimes we thought we saw silhouettes deep in the fog, but whenever we got close, they seemed to disappear as though they had never been there in the first place. And there was nowhere they could have gone, most times; sometimes they could have disappeared inside a building or down an alley, but often they just faded into the fog. If we hadn’t all agreed we were seeing them, then we might have thought we were going mad. I still thought we might have been, and perhaps there had been some lingering damage to our minds from the journey through the tunnel. But Gilda was seeing them too, and she hadn’t been in the dark long enough to be affected by it. Whatever was going on, it had started to affect us. Star Bright’s mumbling had gotten louder, as he counted things without rhyme or reason, and multiple times, Gilda had squawked for him to shut up. But after the third time her voice had echoed through the silent city, she gave up, and we just tried our best to filter out his mad murmurs. I tried to focus on the city around us again, and found that Rivet had been correct earlier; every once in a while, we’d pass by what looked like a cart carrying mechanical parts, only to realize they were part of the cart itself. I saw several different designs of “automobile,” from the basic ones that looked like the wheels were turned by the machinery, to other, more exotic designs that were jet-propelled or seemed designed to “walk” like ponies could. I even found a strange one that looked more like a boat with a flat bottom, and Star Bright paused in his rambling long enough to speculate that it was some sort of hovercraft, that used industrial levitation to push itself away from the ground. They seemed to be more common the closer we moved to the city center, as well. The streets narrowed, cement paths taking up space on the outermost edges of the roads. A sign called these stone paths “sidewalks,” and warned us to stay on them to avoid being struck and killed by speeding automobiles. That wasn’t a problem for us, now that we appeared to be the only ponies left in the city, but it seemed like it must have been a major point of contention for the residents of Baltimare before they disappeared. We passed by old, painted graffiti—not the sort made with glowing orange soapstones—that decried the automobiles, and protested their growing dominance over the roads that had always been used by pedestrians. In some places, the sidewalk had been smashed to expose the stony soil underneath. I relished those more than I thought I would; both the surface of those sidewalks and the roads between them were hard on my bare hooves, and they began to ache as we moved deeper into the city. Maud and Star Bright seemed unaffected, but their horseshoes sparked on the cement as they walked. Gilda was just generally uncomfortable, and I couldn’t imagine the surface was any more pleasant on paws and claws, but maybe she just couldn’t ignore the feeling of being watched. And soon, neither could I. While I couldn’t actually feel myself being looked at, the creeping feeling of dread, of being stalked, began to build. It was like the tunnel, almost, but in the sunlit fog, we knew that nothing could hide. There were only the distant silhouettes, and I swore we began to see those even more than before. And then we heard singing. It was almost imperceptible at first, just more whispers in the distance. But soon, it began to echo down the streets, and our group pulled together into a tight cluster as we watched the foggy streets all around us. It was a slow, sad, mournful song that had no words, and only one voice, but it had no source. And for me, it was unnervingly familiar, because it was the song of the Gravewardens. I knew it almost instantly, after having only heard it clearly for a few moments, but it was unmistakable, even if it was slightly different from the song I knew. It had been modified, or maybe without other voices to repeat it and sing in harmony, the memory of the song had wandered. Whoever the lone singer was, we never saw them. Or at least, we never saw them clearly. The song seemed to come from everywhere, and soon, the silhouettes did too. We saw them on rooftops, down the streets, sitting atop the carts. They still faded as we got close, so we could never see them clearly. But I noticed that they were undeniably equine in shape, like shadows of the ponies that were supposed to be here, supposed to reside within this city. Soon, we came across a large square built around a stone monument. While the base seemed to be a small, boxy museum that described the history of Baltimare, the top section was a narrow stone tower that seemed to be just over sixty leg-lengths tall. A small balcony ran around the top, and at the absolute apex of the tower, a weather-worn statue of an old earth pony general looked out over the foggy city. I considered suggesting that we should climb up to the top to look around for the library, but there was no need; Maud pointed at a large building on the other end of the square. “There; that’s the library. Let’s get inside. Quickly.” We broke into a brief gallop as more silhouettes seemed to emerge from all around us, coalescing out of the fog. Something was wrong here, I knew we weren’t imagining these ghosts, but we couldn’t stop and inspect them. And I had the horrific sense that to stop now would be death; I got an awful feeling whenever we came too close to one of the pony-shaped specters, as though their very touch could turn us into one of them. Gilda took wing, and was the first to reach the door, which she ripped open before she waved at us. “Come on! I don’t wanna stay out there for any longer than we need to!” I only got a few seconds to glance at the library before we sped for the door, but I could tell in that glance that it was a grand, two-story building that seemed to combine both modern unicorn design and ancient pegasopolian columns around the entrances, both rendered in weathered stone. Two sets of old narrow wooden doors waited at the top of a short staircase up from the sidewalk, and Gilda was the first one to reach them. She shoulder-charged the doors to knock them open with a slam, and we quickly followed her inside. As soon as we were in the building, the gryphon hen slammed the doors shut once more, and we heard that slam echo through the building. While we took stock of ourselves, and Maud checked on the shuddering Star Bright, I glanced around the narrow lobby. It looked, surprisingly, as if only half the building was actually the library. Half was dedicated to a college, to which this library had been part of, perhaps to provide reference materials for the students, and this lobby sat between the two halves of the building. Opposite the front doors, a corridor with a skylight extended down a staircase to the back entrance. The floors inside the building were made of gleaming marble, and a chandelier hung above us, while a small reference desk sat in a nearby corner. A lone, still-standing sign clearly marked that the library was to our left, while the college was on our right. Gilda noticed it too, and after we caught our brief from our brief sprint, we moved deeper into the library, while Maud pulled Star Bright to his hooves so they could both follow behind. After we passed through a small art gallery, we entered the library itself, which would have been Elysium for a bibliophile. It looked almost like a grand ballroom, but five floors of balconies reached high above us, each one laden with hundreds of bookshelves packed with thousands of books. The center was mostly clear, but benches and tables ran in two lines down the length of the room, with built-in reading lamps and for ponies to sit at, late into the night. But the room looked like a hurricane had torn through it. Books had been torn from shelves and lay in great heaps, ruined by damp, and several shelves had collapsed in dominos that had fallen across one side of the room. Several shelves had fallen, or been pushed, from the literal heights of knowledge above and reduced to splinters on impact against the marble floor. Benches had been overturned, tables had been smashed, and several panes of the massive skylight in the ceiling had been shattered, allowing pale sunlight gentle rain to filter into the room. And yet, somehow, against all odds, a pony resided in the center of the room. The tall pony sat open one of the few intact benches, at a table which looked to have been smashed and then propped up by a stack of books. The flickering light of a lamp illuminated the mare as she turned towards us, and I was able to take in her purple fur, and her pink-and-purple mane. A long, delicate horn spiraled away from her forehead, lit with green magic, and her wings fluttered nervously as she turned towards us. Maud blinked in disbelief. “Twilight Sparkle?” But the missing Princess was terrified as she saw us. Her eyes instantly went wide, and a strangled cry leapt from her throat in panic. She was surprised, as if we weren’t supposed to be here, weren’t supposed to see her. But I think we were more surprised than her, when a half-dozen dark shapes leapt from the balconies above, and the air was filled with an angry buzzing as they swarmed around us.