She was running.
No place to go, but she ran. As fast as she could, with all her fear and distress fueling her, she ran and ran, adrenaline strengthening her muscles that carried her through the obstacles, the tiny light above her being the only guide.
A bush branch cut into one of her hind legs, and she fell. Her lower jaw hit the dirt floor, sending a wave of electric pain through her teeth. The injury on her leg already began to burn. She ignored it, stumbling to her hooves and began sprinting again. Her gait became slower; she couldn’t place her back leg right. It hurt. But, even if her whole leg were to be cut off, it would never compare to what would happen if they caught her.
How did she get here? She was in the castle… then a void. A lapse in her memory she couldn’t push through. It irritated her. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t remember after she felt they were tugging at her brain, after her will began to fade.
She tripped again. A rock she didn’t see. It hit her front hoof, another shock of pain. She clenched her teeth, and this time made sure to not fall on her face. Her other leg paid the prize, although it was small compared to her back and right legs.
She grunted as she pushed herself up. She could try to teleport, but she didn’t know where to. Besides, they could still find her, or worse, threaten to hurt her loved ones. Fighting was out of the question, magic couldn’t affect them.
She yelped when her right leg gave out. Her hoof hurt so much. She began to sob. She had to try something, anything. Again, she attempted to push herself up, and her horn began to glow brighter.
Her mind was struck.
The magic flow stopped, and her head boiled as if it was going to explode. She screamed through her clenched teeth, grabbing her head with her front legs. It was calling, ordering, shouting at her. The machination couldn’t continue without her. She shouted back.
“Leave me alone! Stop!”
It kept its grasp on her mind for a few seconds before deciding to comply. As the incorporeal tendrils retracted, Starlight stayed belly-down on the floor.
She kept her eyes closed as tears flowed from them, wetting her hooves. Her sore muscles began to loosen, not from tranquility, but surrender.
She didn’t even bother to look or move when she heard the sloshing and damp shifting that slowly crawled up behind her.
At least they would cure her injuries.
Twilight woke with a jolt.
She shot up straight, clutching the covers against her chest.
Her gaze was lost, looking past the wall, into her dream-memories. Her breathing was shaky and cold drops ran down her temples.
There were the shadows, the crawling and running, the colossal thing looming above, and then…
She sighed.
Letting the covers go, she got off the bed, dropping on her hooves. It was dark. The day had gone by in a second; she couldn’t lose more time. She could only hope nothing else had happened, but if nopony had disturbed her, chances were things stayed calm. Maybe they even found the missing ponies.
She shook her head. She would be lying to herself if she believed that.
She didn’t feel rested. It felt like she had fainted, rather than falling asleep. That could explain why she was out so long.
Now she had to make some kind of plan. Without the Elements of Harmony, the best immediate options she had were vanishing or imprisoning spells. Problem was, the old unicorn tribe learned how to seal them via connecting directly to the “hive-mind”. Magic had come a long way since then though. If Starlight could vanish Discord himself, it could work on the Sagae.
‘We understood the why of their shape and nature, since they came from another realm of what we may call infinity…’
But what if it didn’t? Would magic apply the same way to something that comes from somewhere else, wherever that may be? And wouldn’t Starlight have tried it already, before they took her?
She shook her head again. There was no point in overthinking it anymore. She was out of options, and she lacked knowledge. The only thing she had was a symbol that Starlight had scribbled seemingly at random. Some kind of branch or un-webbed leaf. If it was a sigil, she would use it, somehow. For now, she could only go with her great arsenal of spells that hopefully wouldn’t become useless.
A chill ran down her back, and doubt began to accumulate around her. The feeling of duty, however, was enough to push her past the growing swirl of fear, past her bedroom door, and into the hall.
She stood there for a few seconds. There was a growing feeling of paranoia, of impending danger from something invisible, of something intelligent that heard her every step and movement. Her ears flicked and shifted, trying to hear back.
And she heard.
“…it’s almost ready… waiting past the walls…”
Starlight.
All her attention poured into the voice. She tried to make out as much as possible, but it was far away, probably at the entrance.
“The words… no need to worry… very little…”
She was tempted to get closer, but she couldn’t risk alerting Starlight, and whoever—or whatever—was with her.
“…in the wagon…”
Her eyes widened. She had forgotten. It had slipped her mind, brushed aside by everything else. The enveloping doubt was fed by guilt, by the fact she had forgotten about Trixie and her own promise to be there for her.
“…blood… needs an offering…”
The swirl of emotion didn’t engulf her. Instead, it concentrated and pierced right through her stomach, which contracted in response.
But before she could think about what she heard, another feeling immediately followed. Some kind of buzzing, a mental brume suddenly surged on her head. Like a pulsation that came from all around her. Yet, at the same time, it flowed right unto and from her mind. It began to cloud her senses, wavering in her cranium. Her ears felt plucked, only a soft ringing audible. Her vision began to slowly blur. There wasn’t any strong pain, but she felt lightheaded.
She began to lose balance. She sat down, trying to focus her sight on her forelegs, which shifted and doubled. Twilight rubbed her eyes, and then pressed her hooves against the bridge of her nose, her face pulled in a wince of nausea.
She tried to move as little as possible. That seemed to work, as the disorientation began to fade. Her hearing came back and the ringing faded, and when she lowered her hooves from her face, there were only two of them, now clear.
“What… ow!” She shut one of her eyes when a small knot of pain went through her temples. She rose a hoof to her head. “What was…?”
Her ears suddenly flicked, catching sounds again. She thought there were steps, Starlight walking out of the castle, and something else she couldn’t quite make out.
Time was running out. She sprinted down the hall, and her mind began to work again. Dealing with ‘Starlight’ would be another problem. There was a chance whatever used Starlight’s body maybe didn’t know everything about magic. Unless it was only mind control, then they would know each and every spell Starlight had at her disposal. Friendly magic competitions already showed Starlight was a formidable opponent, and she had already fought her seriously once, although she was sure neither of them truly wanted to hurt each other. How would a fight without moral restraints turn out? She didn’t want to hurt her, but ‘Starlight’ would surely have less hesitation.
‘It eats at the mind and replaces it with its own essence, making use of the body, like a puppet of meat…’
She gritted her teeth, as her brows knitted and tightened. She couldn’t accept that. There had to be a way. She would stop ‘Starlight’ and then bring her friend back. Nopony, no creature, nothing would take her loved ones away from her.
Anger began to surface in her heart, pushing through all the dubiety and paranoia that pressed her down. She began to run faster, with more determination, but it wasn’t long before the air became poisonous, and acrid.
She had arrived, there was the door to the entrance room. The horrible stench already seeped through the door, making her face scrunch. As she began to breathe through her mouth, the memory of the stained living room—the deathbed of Octavia—flashed through her skull.
Why didn’t she at least help DJ Pon-3 clean? Would that have even helped? A hideous thing, which left its gruesome mark, had defiled her house and she had just left, far too encased in her own mind to try to help.
Twilight shook her head with force. There was no point, it had already been done. She would fix Starlight, she would fix her and they would once again greet each other in the morning, have breakfast together, speak about their problems and things they liked and have fun in friendly magic competitions and experiments that didn’t have to do with age-old entities and promises of the world’s end.
All she had to do was say yes. All she needed to do was to explain herself and say yes. Instead she went all bossy and upset her friend. And now she had once again unleashed the greatest threat to everything she knew and loved. No excuses this time, no lack of insight or knowledge. It had all been her fault.
With tears flooding her eyes and heaving breaths, she almost tore off the door with her magic, throwing it open with a scream of rage.
The puddle of sludge was there, uneven and loathsome. She ignored the nasty lumps in it, instead following the trail that went towards the open door.
Her eyes widened slightly, the dripping tears stopping for a moment. That hadn’t happened with the musicians’ house. She tried to control her energetic panting, and walked towards the door, eyes still on the lining of slime.
The door was wide enough for the thing, since the whole threshold wasn’t covered in slobber. Careful not to touch the substance, she stepped out into the cold, fresh night air. A bit of relief came over her since she could breathe better without the compacted smell of the air inside the castle. She took a few calming breaths, her beating heart slowing its rhythm. She wiped the tears she had left, and looked over the trail again. It went further into town, as if a giant snail had crawled through the dirt street.
She didn’t think about the monster being in town again, or wherever it may be going. Instead, she looked up. The moon was bright, looking down at her like a great white eye, lacking a pupil to see. Around it, the stars twinkled and sparkled, making up the many constellations she had devoted to learning as a filly.
She looked right at the starry sky, at the stars she had once wished to reach in childish fantasy, the points of white or blue light that always hid away from the sun.
Starlight had mentioned stars, Twilight thought, stars that beckoned… yet mocked…
Did they come from the stars? Or from somewhere beyond them?
The light from the celestial bodies reflected in her eyes. She kept her gaze on them, as if awaiting a response. However, the stars stayed silent, as always, preferring to keep their many secrets to themselves. They didn’t mock or beckon to her. They just stared back, quietly.
She hung her head, letting air out heavily through her nose. Maybe it was for the best that they never responded. Besides, it wasn’t like she would understand them either.
She turned back to the stinking slime, and began to walk besides it, hoping it would guide her towards an unseen, but known destination.
With the dim moonlight, the darkness hesitated to cover the woods, but the strange leaves of the crooked trees aided the dark in its purpose. In spite of that, another, softer light shoved the shadows away, keeping them at bay, unable to engulf the creature that produced it.
Even then, the whitish magenta point of clarity on the tip of her horn wasn’t necessary. The spectral light of the night sky broke through the twisted branches enough so the world was visible. But the cold air and bulky, callous trunks made Twilight’s senses stay sharp, her ears were tense, flicking attentively for any sound, and her eyes hurt in their attempt to dilate and look further, deeper into the eerie forest around her. The light spell, at least, gave her a minimal but welcome sense of security, even though the beast that had stained the dirt and left the bushes dripping would probably not care for her magical candle.
The trail was constant, always straight, without turns or changes in direction, even in seemingly impossible spaces, like prickly brambles or between two closely grown trees. Twilight had to encircle or fly over these locations, though she never went above the trees, scared that she may lose the messy, odorous streak.
The last obstacle were some deformed roots that bulged from the ground. After that, a change in scenery finally happened. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart hammered against her chest.
There wasn’t a clearing, nor an opening between the trees. Nature had been merciless, but failed in its task to devour the elder building that still stood tall. The tower got lost in the shrouding arms of the trees, leaving the steeple—if there was one—unseen. Vines, moss and greenish-brown stains had managed to cover the walls, but some of the shapes on the flint had already been there a long time ago, carved on its foundation.
Twilight stared, mouth open, eyes wide, standing in front of the shattered stone steps that had strands of grass, glistening with fetid ichor, growing in them.
She was here. She was finally seeing it. The source of everything that was wrong. The reason Starlight wasn’t the same.
Her eyes shifted from the stairs, to the open passage that they led to, a rectangular chasm in the Temple’s forth, then back at the stairs.
For a few seconds she stood there, afraid. She was still shocked; even with all the proof, what she had gone through, it still felt unreal. Had this building really been here since before Equestria itself was founded, possibly even further back?
She closed her eyes, focusing. She took a deep breath, opening her wings, her horn lighting up fully. With risen defenses, she began to take wary steps forwards. She firmly stepped up the stairs, ignoring the strong stench of the slime beside her.
She couldn’t ignore, however, the returning, growing paranoia, the extreme maliciousness that the corroded stone-house in front of her reeked, the fact that the trees at the edge of her vision seemed to lean in, their branches lowering, their roots rising like giant claws. She ended up looking to the left, to the right, behind her shoulders. She had the unending pressure to watch out from every direction, to keep an eye on everything, may something miry move and brush on her side, or jump towards her, or bite right into her neck with needle-teeth and glowing eyes.
The only reason she didn’t raise a shield was because her mind told her she was being irrational, and that would mean she was succumbing to fear. Her gut screamed loudly however, and her rapidly beating heart didn’t help in the slightest.
Her eyes finally settled in something when she reached the top, beside the unclean, gaping entrance. Under the light of her spell, she saw a plate about the size of the door-hole, which looked as if it were brand new, since there wasn’t any moss, or any kinds of organic life for that matter, covering it. The only thing on it was the symbol. The five-armed branch, painted white, with uneven drips that ran down dry and still.
It is a sigil! she thought, as a small spark of hope flashed in her eyes.
She looked at it attentively, memorizing every curve and length, saving its exact shape in her mind. She still wasn’t sure how she could use it. Maybe she could project it with her magic, but the fact that it was drawn on a solid object gave her doubts. She thought about maybe engraving it on a stone or branch with her magic, but then what was she supposed to do with the thing? Wave it around?
She sighed, looking at the opening. With a full glow of her horn, she tried to clean the viscous substance away, but confusion arose in her face when, no matter how hard she tried, she seemingly couldn’t even make contact with the substance.
Realization suddenly set heavily, painfully, throughout her chest and abdomen. If a simple levitation spell didn’t work on some slobber… What about all her other spells?
The concentrated darkness of the entrance felt almost alive, about to ooze out pressing at the seams. Twilight stared at the hole as if it extended forever forward, further and further away, black and cold, inapprehensible, an abyss of uncertainty that was sure to devour her reason, her normalcy.
Her heart was beating so hard she could feel the pounding in her neck, in her ears. She shortly managed to break the visual connection with the dark rectangle, floating up a pebble from the green-gray floor. From her horn a zap was shot, and the rock now had the branch-like sigil engraved on it.
She turned back to the nighted gulf cut from stone, holding the improvised amulet close to her chest. For a reason she could only guess came from the sigil, a small wave of serenity washed over her, although it was far too weak to clear off her crushing fear, her screaming, incessant paranoia that hadn’t left her since she came out of her room.
She wouldn’t step on the revolting slobber. Instead, she made the point of light she held above her brighter, and she managed to see some of the floor inside the Temple. Bright, red and immaculate, it was the complete opposite of the outside. There wasn’t even a drop of the acrid pus, which brusquely cut off, besides some drippings that had slid in.
Her horn began to glow brighter, but this time the magic burst in a flash that enveloped her for a second, leaving nothing of her or the rock behind.
She reappeared in another flash inside the Temple. When she reopened her eyes, she took a few steps back, startled.
Instead of unending blackness, there was a wall. A tall stone wall that, like the outside of the temple, was highly carved, senseless lines and curves covering the whole expanse.
Her eyes weren’t on the wall however, but in the thing embedded in it. What seemed to be an inky black orb, like a spider’s eye, protruded from the grey surface. As her mind tried to make sense of the engravings, she realized that almost all of them seemed to intersect, or start in the orb, extending outwards like waves or rays.
She looked back, finding only a tangible darkness where the only exit should’ve been a few steps away.
Her breathing was already disheveled again. She kept her eyes in the dark for a few seconds, not daring to look away. An object floating on her line of sight broke her trembling vigilance. She stared at the small sigil, still steaming slightly on the pebble.
Unsure, she floated it against the dark, simply leaving it suspended in midair. Her gaze stayed for a moment on the tiny rock, seemingly helpless against the vast, threatening darkness that filled everything in front of it.
Her ears flopped down as she turned back to the blackened sphere. Once again there was a pause, nothing was said or done. Twilight was truly now without lead or direction, lost inside a building whose nature itself seemed defiant. The entire floor was only red, flat and uniform. She was sure she had concentrated her thoughts right on that point in the front of the entrance.
She didn’t even think of doing what happened next. The Temple—or the presence within it—suddenly seemed to envelop her, to press against her, to affect her own decisions, as her horn suddenly began to flare, and Twilight could do nothing but look up in terror as a ray of magenta energy shot out against her will, and struck the shimmering orb right in the center.
The output was short, but Twilight’s muscles stayed tense, almost sore, with her eyes fixated on the increasingly shining sphere, whose light started as a point, and now filled its entire circumference, almost no magenta shade left with the blinding white that was taking over.
Nonetheless, she didn’t have to cover her eyes, since in a brusque turn, the sphere changed color, tinting her face and walls with the most horrid, seething shade of radiant red.
A single pulsation followed, a wave that flowed through all the lines and markings. Then, they were slowly filled with the red phosphorescence, not becoming clearer, but blinding, terrifying. Nebulous shapes and geometrical figures gained a burning life, and they seemed to shift and waver in place, as if the red filling them was brume.
Everything faded suddenly, expect a branchy arm, which Twilight, maybe in coincidence, thought looked similar to a neuron’s axon. It went far into the right, barely visible in the dark, until it went out of view.
Now she had a direction to follow.
She ignored everything that had just transpired, placing her mind deep in the present. Never seizing her illumination spell, she followed the axon, the sound of her hooves echoing into the shrouded insides. The axon went relatively straight, though it twisted or crooked brusquely at some points. The red light inside it pulsated slowly, and at some point Twilight thought she could hear a soft buzzing. She didn’t bother to stop and check. She just wanted to finish this.
She had already lost her sense of time. Had she spent minutes, hours, maybe a day going forth, down by the red river? Maybe, since her legs were getting slightly sore, but her alicorn stamina kept her going. The only change was around the red arm. The numerous carvings, once so chaotic and shapeless, not following any patrons, began to lower. There was never a defined shape, just less lines, less angles overlapping and fussing.
She reached a point where there were barely a few random lines thrown here and there, always around the axon now, never intersecting it like the ones before. She didn’t notice, or at least didn’t pay attention to it, now basically categorizing the changes on her surroundings subconsciously. She kept a steady, trotting pace, her senses still alert, her defenses still risen. Her mind hadn’t forgotten of that feeling, of some crouching thing waiting behind the shadows. She didn’t look at the darkness, however, only forward or at the red branch. If she looked right at the massive pit beside her, she would be paralyzed again.
Her gaze and almost blank expression only changed when her surroundings changed. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but the single line of red suddenly spread, dividing into many dendrites that spread out. And it formed an image.
At the center, there was a vast splotch or mass of red. From it sprouted many appendages or dendrites that connected to things around it. Guessing by the shape the light took in this carving, Twilight guessed the artist had attempted to imitate a cloud, or something that was cloud-shaped, since its edges were irregular, making it formless. However, while this was the center of the carved scene, being the biggest figure, it was its surroundings—the things that the cloud connected to—what made Twilight give a low, but horrified gasp, her expression tensing in a grimace of terror.
There were some sort of beings, far too hideous and deformed to be any animal she knew, making most, if not all beasts in Tartarus pale in comparison. Their bodies didn’t have a defined shape, seemingly lacking any kind of bone structure, only a few tentacular growths or pseudopods that varied in number acting as extremities. At best, she could say they were proboscidean, since from their heads—if a bloated globe can be called a head—sprouted a sort of trunk, ended in a sucker or mouth she couldn’t quite make out. The worse wasn’t their appearance however, but the things they did to their companions, that, while they didn’t glow red, were still visible under her own magenta illumination.
Ponies. Pegasi, unicorns and earth ponies alike, being attacked, grabbed, and devoured by those bestialities, with crudely made, but still evocative expressions, desperately running, screaming for help.
She didn’t break eye contact, not until her vision lowered, following the tendrils from the central shape that went down, and she would wish she could erase that from her memory, that the blasphemy carved on that wall was just her overloaded imagination playing a sickening joke.
The thin, red appendages didn’t finish on another monster. It finished in a pony. A pony that, as soon as she placed her eyes on them, made the extreme distress be joined by familiarity. A pony with a streaked mane and tail, with the horn of a unicorn, and a cutie mark, carved in detail, glowing with that hellish red that had haunted her since the start…
Twilight managed to open her wings in time and cover her mouth, so she could stifle the piercing scream that tried to come out at the top of her lungs. She almost fell as she backed away, a heartrending fear coiling around her chest, slithering around her ribs and lungs, crushing them, making it harder to breathe right. She went back until the blasphemy against her control over her own sane world was out of sight. Then she sat down, wings still over her mouth. Now they weren’t trying to stifle a scream, but to control the extreme nausea that had suddenly come over her.
She ended up lowering her wings, raising her head and trying to breathe, which came out as shaky panting, cold sweat running down her forehead. Her stomach felt like it had become a single point, feeling the pressure on her bosom and throat, which bobbed with each raspy breath. She ended up coughing, her head palpitating in pain.
It’s not real… It’s not real…
Suddenly, her eyes opened. She looked around, but there was only darkness. When a literal hole seemed to be tearing open in her abdomen, she let her horn flare fully, searching.
The stone… where’s the stone…
She felt something. Her eyes widened, and she pulled with her magic. The tiny stone with the powerful symbol floated at exceeding speed towards her. Her hooves were stretched out towards it, almost like a frightened filly reaching for her teddy bear. Twilight grabbed the stone as it were one, holding it to her chest with her hooves, closing her eyes, and trying to normalize her breathing.
Her heart pushed against the solid pebble, right on the face where the sigil was. Twilight tried to ignore, to reject the whispers, the cackles from the demons in the dark around her, the same demons from her dreams, the same she felt first in the shadows at Ponyville.
If she had her eyes open, she would’ve seen the rock glowing softly, the sigil brightening and dimming in rhythm with her heart. Each beat sent a calming wave through her whole body. The hairs in her back lowered slowly, the trickling sensation on them fading. Her muscles loosened, her breathing rightened. Her paranoia stayed, but she couldn’t hear the demons anymore.
She opened her eyes, staring at the solid dark for a few seconds. Her senses began to reopen to the outside, and her ears began to attempt to hear something, anything. Before, there had been an almost absolute silence, only the very soft, possibly illusionary humming of the accursed red axon breaking it. Now, her ears caught something else. Something she recognized. For a second, that glowing image floated back into her mind, but she pushed it back to her subconscious, concentrating, once again, in the present, in the unintelligible vocalizations she was hearing, that could barely be qualified as words.
“H’ee-lgob fk’nee… ya-b’thm… ph’bme Masogda… n´ghai, Yog-Sothoth…”
For some reason, it took her awhile to notice. The words, guttural and seemingly without meaning, didn’t come from the distance. They came from right behind her.
She practically jumped to her hooves, turning brusquely, horn shining. She floated the rock and left it suspended between her and what was in front of her. Her defensive stance fell immediately when she saw the scene of dementia, but the rock stayed in its position.
There was, what at first glance seemed like a rock, but was far too uneven to be a natural one. What gave away its intelligent origins were the many light-absorbing holes in its surface.
‘The eyes, the eyes darker than black, they are opening again.’
It seemed to extend across the floor, which she now noticed had two golden streaks that lead towards the statue. It was as if it was melted, spreading around like water. It stayed solid, however, never disappearing from her sight, as much as she wanted it and the whole scene to be an illusion.
Beside it, was Trixie, laying on the floor, her head resting against one of the stone roots. With her limp but accommodated legs, she looked peaceful, as if she was asleep, her silver mane and tail in almost perfect condition. The crimson liquid that ran out a cut in her neck told otherwise, trickling down the gray foot of the statue and into some of the red floor. The stain wasn’t big, but she could suffer severe blood loss if the wound wasn’t treated.
In front of the statue, was her. A completely disheveled dark purple mane and tail with aquamarine streaks, sitting down with her hooves raised in seeming praise. There was a common, but sharp kitchen knife beside her, already stained with red.
“N’gah n-yha Yog-Sothoth… cf’ayak, gh’fom bwan, muggodon, Masogda…”
Starlight lowered her hooves, letting them rest on the floor in a normal sitting position. Then, she got up, each step echoing deep into the lightless chamber and into Twilight’s head, who stared at the mare with eyes that screamed disbelief.
Twilight didn’t really react when Starlight turned to face her. Somehow, Starlight had managed to cut a deep gash into her chest just with that kitchen knife. The reddish dark liquid had completely stained her torso, and continued to drip against the floor. Her face didn’t show any pain, her eyes were both lightless and alive, and she actually received Twilight with a small smile.
“You’re here… It took you awhile.”