//------------------------------//
// 34 - City of Ghosts 
// Story: The Hollow Pony 
// by Type_Writer 
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The Baltimare public library was a grand, classically-styled building, which meant that the roof was decently high. While we couldn’t see over the sea of fog that blanketed the city from here, we could at least see a bit further, and that allowed us to do some scouting. I held the map under Gilda’s outstretched wing, to shield it from the rain, while she pointed north. “Okay, so it’s somewhere on the waterfront southeast of us. I can’t see it from up here, but it’s an enclosed bay; if you hit the bridge, you’ve gone too far. Don’t move along the open roads or you’ll get spotted, stick to the side roads running in parallel.”

I pointed at the tall stone monument in the center of the square, directly adjacent to the library. “Sh-should we go up there? We m-might be able to see a little f-further from the top.”

Gilda glanced over the tower, but shook her head a moment later. “Nah. They’d see us if I carried you up there, and they’d be on us before we saw anything useful. Plus I’ve never been good at carrying heavy weights while flying—same reason I can’t just fly you to the museum for this supposed knife.”

“S-supposed?” I asked.

Gilda shook her head. “I’m not doubting it exists, I saw the pamphlet. But I do doubt that it can kill ghosts or whatever, I bet it’s just an old knife in a museum. I’m thinking that the bug was desperate and crazy, and convinced herself the knife would solve all of her problems so she had something to work towards. Except she never actually went to get it herself, so she’s too lazy to do anything about it.”

“M-maybe she really was just scared of the g-ghosts?” I asked, as I leaned over the side of the building. I could see vague silhouettes as they milled around the front door, and the shadows of flying pegasi on nearby rooftops. They were watching us atop the roof, but they couldn’t get in, thanks to Ocellus’ wards.

In fact, we wanted to be seen up here, so their attention was focused on the roof. That way, when Gilda took off for the outskirts of town, they’d be following her. Their attention would be off of the side doors, and hopefully I could sneak out on the ground level without being detected. Between the four of us, we’d decided that was the best way to go about things; Gilda would fly back to the other group to bring them back here as reinforcements, while I snuck out to get the ghost-killing knife, and brought it back to the library just so we had some way of actually fighting back. Maud would stay here with Ocellus, to keep her company and help her gather herself, and they’d both be ready in case other changelings managed to sneak past the blockade of ghosts for themselves.

It was tempting to want to ask Gilda to get the knife first and then get reinforcements, or simply wait to get the knife until Raindrops, Rivet, Roma and Posey had all come here, but then we wouldn’t have a distraction, and it’d be monumentally harder than it already was. And GIlda had just shot down the idea of flying me over to the museum, plus she already was grousing that she might not be able to outfly the ghostly pegasi. Carrying a pony with her would slow her down, and nearly guarantee that both of us were slain.

This whole city felt like it had been set up as a trap for curious travelers. I could only imagine the years of attacks and counter-attacks the changelings had attempted that would lead to this being so commonplace. Ocellus even speculated that the ghosts must have thought we were changelings ourselves, or that maybe all ponies were changelings in disguise, which was why they attacked ruthlessly on sight. But they’d let us get into the city almost completely unmolested, so that couldn’t have been totally true.

It was a shame we couldn't just talk to the ghosts. But we’d tried from the open front door of the library, to no effect, except that they tried to beat themselves against the wards to get at us even more frantically. They seemed mad, like they’d been Hollowed before they became ethereal. Could ghosts go Hollow? Or had becoming specters driven them insane?

"Scared of them?" Gilda repeated, with a scoff. "Ehhh...I could see that, I guess. I agree they're stars-damned creepy, at least. I can't see them clearly, just their wake in the fog, so it makes it rutting impossible to watch them. And then there's the rutting singing that just keeps going!"

She'd ended her sentence looking over the side of the roof with me, as she shouted at the spirits below like a mad hen. If the source of the endless, haunting dirge heard her, it paid Gilda no heed, and didn't even pause. Even the echoes of the hen's shout were drowned out by the slow song from below.

Gilda fluffed the feathers of her crest, as she shook her head. "Rut 'em. Whatever. At least I won't be able to hear that while I'm flying, at least not as clearly. I hope."

I didn't quite share her sentiment. The relentless dirge was unsettling, to be sure, but after having heard it for so long here and in Cloudsdale, it was starting to grow on me. It helped that here in Baltimare, the unseen singer had a beautiful, singular voice, as opposed to the version hummed in harmony by the gravewardens before. Theirs was a pale rendition of the song being performed for us now, and I dearly wished that same singer didn't wish me dead so I could tell her so.

Maybe I would anyways. Part of my mind wanted me to step out and find her regardless, even though it would be suicide. The rest of my mind tried very hard to keep that desire in check, because that seemed like a strange compulsion that I shouldn't listen to, even though it was getting louder and louder the longer I listened.

But another thought did occur to me. I looked back at the gryphon and asked directly, "Y-you are coming back, r-right?"

"What?" Gilda tilted her head at me, and narrowed her hawk-like eyes. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"I—" I swallowed. "—I d-don't know. C-call me paranoid, I g-guess. It'd b-be really easy for you to l-leave, and f-forget all of this…"

I trailed off, but Gilda completed the thought for me. "You want to know I won't flake on you. Yeah, alright, I get that. Hay, I'd be wondering the same thing in your place."

She looked back down at the ghosts, and then she turned south, towards the foggy outline of the Canterhorn range. "And I'd be lying if I told you I hadn't considered it. But there's two reasons I won't; first, I'd be screwing you over if I did. Then I wouldn't be any better than the pony that screwed me over." Gilda shook her head. "As easy as it would be. I've got just enough pride left to be stupid, I guess."

"W-what did Pinkie d-do?" I found it hard to believe that the radiant mare could hurt a pony—or gryphon—this badly. Maud wasn't the only one curious of Gilda's intentions and motivations. But Rockhoof had said Pinkie had led a battalion in the army, against the dragons, so maybe the mare had a nasty streak that I somehow hadn't seen yet…

"I'll tell you later, I think." Gilda said, with the ghost of a smirk at the soft edges of her beak. "After all, I'm not the only one that could run off on their own. We just met, and I still don't exactly trust any of you."

"That's f-fair," I conceded. "W-what about Ocellus? What's your t-take on her?"

"That's a lot easier—I don't trust bugs, and neither should you." Gilda shook her head. "Rutting naive ponies, you get suckered in too easily with some tears and a sad story. I've seen the bugs pull that a few times, it's one of their favorite tricks. Mostly because it keeps working on you morons. Never worked back in Gryphonstone, though. We're too damned smart for it, so they need to play nastier tricks to feed off us. That's the way the world's always worked—one blade sharpens another, tempers steel with steel.

“Besides, they’ve always been shapeshifting soulsuckers, even before everyone else picked up that little trick. You ponies always pretty up the story so it doesn’t scare the foals and chicks too badly, but softening the story, making it so they drain ‘love,’ or whatever, instead? That means they miss the lesson. Ponies tell their foals that, and no wonder Maud ends up with bugs in her classroom.”

Speaking of Maud...I glanced back at the door that led down into the grand library below us. “D-do you think she’s okay? You don’t t-trust Ocellus, but we left them t-together…”

“Eh,” Gilda grunted dismissively. “I’m already pretty sure this whole story is some ploy to get us split up so we’re easier to kill. Or get the ghosts to kill us, so she doesn’t have to. If we go down there and Maud’s already a Hollow husk, then all that tells us is that we can leave, because the mission’s over.”

“W-what about Trixie?” We couldn’t just leave her in a hive, or the Element of Generosity.

“Well, if she is lying to us and Maud is drained, then it’s easy to gather that she was lying about that too, and your ex-friend Trixie was dead before we got here. So we leave, you go back to whatever you were doing, and I go back to trying to figure out some way into Canterlot.”

That was...fatalistic. It worried me that Gilda had clearly been planning for the worst, and expecting the worst-case scenario…but then, maybe it was a good thing that somebody was. I looked at the gryphon hen again, and changed the subject. “Y-you’ve been trying to get into Canterlot?”

Gilda nodded, and started to preen her wings. Maybe she was just double-checking one last time before she started her flight to the other group, or maybe she was remembering one of her former attempts to enter the capital. “Yeah, for a long while now. They’ve got the works, in terms of security. Interdiction fields, anti-flyer weapon emplacements, and good old-fashioned barricades on the main gates. Pretty impressive pile of trash and rubble blocking the main road and the train lines in, and it looked like they collapsed part of the mountain below that. They don’t want anything getting in, and the only way they could have made that more clear is if they dropped a dead dragon on top, as a warning.”

Gilda extended her wing fully, and now that I had the chance to examine it, I noticed a distinctive pattern of burn marks across the feathers—lightning scarring, likely magically-generated. “I did work out that there are flight paths into the city through the interdiction fields, but they change them all the time, and I learned real quick that trying to figure those flight paths out through trial and error would be a bad idea. I might duck the fields, but they’d spot me flying in and gun me down regardless.”

And yet, access to Canterlot was our prize. Obviously it was a test, but if they just needed more soldiers, then surely they could recruit ponies normally from across the country? What did they really need us for? Were they testing our motives, to see how precisely we solved problems like this?

Speaking of motives, I looked back at Gilda, who was almost finished preening her wings. "W-why do you want g-get into Canterlot so badly, anyway?"

Gilda clicked her beak. "I told you, I'll tell you later, if I trust you. It's all part of the same big ball of dogscat."

It frustrated me that she was so secretive. It made sense, but everypony—everybody, that was—was so damned secretive. Dinky, Trixie, Opal, Red, even the Princess. Sometimes, I'd give the wind and the sky for a nice, direct answer to my questions. At least Dinky had opened up eventually, and that was part of why I trusted her still.

The thought did give me pause. Gilda was not unlike Trixie in several ways, and yet again, I'd been trying to get close to her despite that. I hadn't even realized I was doing it, and to be fair, Gilda seemed to be the one with an interest in my affairs. But that was a two-way street, and I'd certainly told her plenty. I needed to start being more careful about that, I needed to start consciously...what, closing up? Not offering vital information?

I didn't want to start talking to ponies and creatures through multiple layers of conversation, just to think about what I could and couldn't say. If I had to start, then I'd just clam up again—I could tell I had neither the focus nor foresight to even lie well, as Hollowed as I was. It was just too much to ask of me.

Thankfully, Gilda had begun to fluff her wings in preparation to leave, which meant I at least wouldn't need to start now. "Alright, let's do this. Start moving, I'll count to a hundred, then make a real racket up here to get their attention. When you hear me make this sound—" Gilda let out an ear-splitting eagle cry that made me clap my hooves over the sides of my helmet. "—get moving, because that'll be when most of them are watching me. Got it?"

"G-got it…" I whimpered. Gilda nodded, and turned to the edge of the building. I gave myself a shake, then made for the stairwell back down into the library, and shakily took the steps two at time on the way down, to make sure I was in place when Gilda gave the signal.

Maud seemed fine, when I checked on her and Ocellus on the way down. She was reading a water-damaged visual dictionary to the disguised changeling in her usual monotone, presumably in an effort to jog her memory and help Ocellus speak more clearly. For that, I was thankful; she'd been difficult to understand before, and any miscommunication when we brought the rest of the group here, or ventured into the changeling nest, could cost us more lives. Maybe even my own, yet again.

So far, I had narrowly avoided the cold embrace of death on this leg of my journey. Hopefully I could keep it that way, whether my deaths were another inconvenience, or the end of my travels. My fire could only be snuffed out so many times, before it could burn no longer.


*	*	*


By the time I reached the side door, I didn't have to wait long. I was starting to see the ghostly figures outside in slightly more clarity, enough to tell that the closest one was nearby. The shape of the pony was foggy and wispy around the edges, but I could see that, just like me, her eyes seemed to be two little burning embers of magic, which flickered occasionally as she blinked, or at least, made the unconscious action of a blink. Only sometimes did her head turn towards the door, which helpfully already hung askew by a single hinge. A heavy blow during some ancient fight had occurred to this door, but now it was the only evidence that the fight had ever happened.

Gilda's cry echoed between the buildings, and through the distortion of the fog, it nearly sounded as alien as that distant, mournful singing. The ghost's head turned to look, and that was when I made my move, to escape the spectral blockade beyond the protective wards.

I knew their field of vision was just as limited as when they were ponies. If they could look through the backs of their heads, then they wouldn't have been nearly so focused on us when we were up on the roof. And I also knew they could hear; the ghostsong seemed to coordinate them somehow, for when it intensified, the ghosts had probed the wards of the library with worrying ferocity. They had also jumped when Gilda let out her avian cries, as if startled, which confirmed that they could hear more than just their own ghoulish murmurs.

So, I tried to keep my hooves quiet as I slipped out of the door. Maud and Ocellus had agreed that rolling one's hooves over the concrete would be more quiet than the loud clop that occured when they struck the surface normally, and had even demonstrated on the marble floors of the library. That was enough for me to move relatively quickly to a lawn of dead grass, which would have crunched were it not soaked from the rain.

I'd made it to the street, and around behind the ghost, by the time she looked back at the door. I ducked behind a cart—it looked as though ponies had been interrupted suddenly, midway through unloading its cargo—just in case she swept the street looking for ponies who had done exactly what I had just done, and then paused there to calm myself.

That was one step. Next, I needed to get off this street and into the alleys. The more distance I could safely put between myself and the crazed specters here, the better. I waited for a few moments, until I was ready, and started for the space between two buildings across the street—only to immediately knock over a ponnequin that had been standing beside the cart.

A wooden clatter echoed around the street, and for a second, I froze. The ghost must have heard that. At best, I had seconds—the ghosts were only about as fast as any normal pony, maybe even a little slower, but if I ran, then she could follow the sound of my hoofbeats. She could summon the others. I had to hide. But where?

The cart's presence was luck, both bad and good, because it must have belonged to a seamstress like Rarity. Several other ponnequins, like the one I had clumsily knocked over, stood in an orderly line beside a pile of faded bolts of cloth. Half a dozen others lay in a haphazard pile, as if carelessly dropped from the cart. That was my only chance; I flopped onto the pile of ponnequins as though I were one of them, and forced myself to end my almost-instinctual breath once more.

This was stupid. I was wearing armor. My eyes were still glowing embers. I stuck out like a sore thumb amongst the discarded cargo, and when the ghost took one look at this terrible hiding place, she was going to spot me in an instant. I was going to die here.

And yet, when the ghostly mare, an earth pony with a flower-shaped mane clip, rounded the corner, she glanced across the pile of cargo...and seemed to look right past me. While her eyes lingered on the ponnequins at first, she seemed to realize what they were after a moment, and then she barely spared the rest of the pony-shaped dress mares a glance, including me.

I remained frozen, too terrified for my life to even think to move, as I watched the phantom approach on silent hooves. I waited for any sudden movement, any hint that she saw through my basic ruse, but it never came.

Instead, she seemed utterly focused on the bolts of cloth. She sat next to one, and a trembling, transparent hoof extended out towards them. When her hoof touched it, her fire seemed to ripple, like water disturbed by a stone. Instead of passing through the solid object, her hoof dissipated and spread outwards, like mist rolling through a valley. She realized what had happened a moment later, and held up her hoof to inspect it. She watched as her foreleg coalesced back together from the fog around us, and she shivered, then tried to touch the bolt of cloth again, more gently this time.

The ghostly mare shivered again, as she ran her hoof over the faded, discarded cloth. She traced the fibers, but not the pattern dyed into the cloth, which she either ignored, or didn't see at all. Once more, her form rippled, and she pulled her hoof back, to press it against her own chest. 

The edges of her body...shifted. In a way that was difficult to describe, the mare seemed to slowly diminish, and become less real than she had before. Her features became harder to distinguish, and her misty form grew thin. The ghost faded, just a little bit, as she clutched her hoof to her own breast. It was near-impossible to tell...but I thought I could hear her crying.

Eventually, she let her hoof drop silently back to the sidewalk. She still seemed thin, and ethereal—for some reason, seeing the cloth and ponnequins had done something to her. She didn't recover, but she did start to move again, and silently began to trudge back to the door of the library.

I waited until she had been gone for what felt like a few minutes, then slowly pulled myself to my hooves. I was careful to keep the cart between myself and the spectral mare as I crossed the street to the alley, and quietly fled into the safety of the foggy city. I didn't have time to stay and ponder what I'd seen; I needed to get that knife.


*	*	*


Once I’d escaped the immediate area surrounding the library, I quickly stopped seeing the patrolling ghosts. Presumably, the sounds of our battle, and Gilda’s distraction, had lured all of them to that single location and cleared the rest of the city. While I suspected that was only true for maybe a mile before the sounds had failed to carry so far, it was still useful, and I allowed myself to pick up the pace a little bit. I was still cautious of course, and tried to keep my hooves quiet, but the longer I went without seeing any specters, the sillier I felt for ducking between carts and abandoned auto-mobiles as if actively being hunted.

Without that to focus on, I quickly became unnerved once more by how empty the city was. It was even worse now that I knew we had been watched, and followed, on our way into the city; now that I was alone, I was more perceptive than ever for distant silhouettes in windows and down long streets, and I wasn’t even seeing those. Soon, I started to grow paranoid, worried that they might actually be there, but I simply couldn’t see them like GIlda could. But surely, if the ghosts had noticed me, then I would already be dead?

I moved downhill, towards the bay. The library was in an older part of the city, but several larger buildings had been built right in the middle of them. I skirted east around them, then south towards the waterfront, towards the low buildings that were all a historical landmark in their own way, near the waterfront. The museum was described as being close by the bay as well, to show off a fair few aquatic exhibits, but further east, where more modern construction had been forcefully isolated. The town had sprawled because of that, but it still wasn't more than a couple miles.

I could smell when I was close, more than anything else. Baltimare always smelled like ocean, of course, but it was only when I actually approached the water that I could smell the salt that caked the shoreline. The smoky, oppressive smog of burnt coal, and the heady stench of fish, combined into what could only be a harbor, scarred by industry. The fish especially caught my attention; while I was far removed from the concept of food now, it still tickled my avian palate, and made me yearn for their oily flavor.

Part of me knew there would be no fish left, and the smell had simply soaked the waterfront. After hundreds of years of nets being hauled into the harbor, heavy with their catch, the scent would never fade from this place. But it burrowed into my mind, and I forced that part of my mind down and howled for it to shut up. I'd never forgive myself if I walked right past a meal because I'd convinced myself it wasn't there.

The actual waterfront was much less rustic than I had been imagining. The buildings closest to the water were an odd mix of historical architecture, and modern housing and commercial structures, like restaurants and shipping offices. Hard concrete piers formed a wide walkway between the water of the bay and the buildings of Baltimare. Wide enough, in fact, that automobiles could drive on the walkway—which somepony had, judging from the wreck.

I approached it slowly; it seemed to be a cargo-hauler, at least as much as the experimental auto-cart could be. The seat sat high in the front, while a steel bed had been mounted in the back, covered by a tarpaulin. I could see scars in the wood that led to the wheels, as though they'd scraped across the surface while the machine skidded uncontrollably. Perhaps it had been too heavy, and turned too sharply? Or perhaps something had happened to the driver, which had caused them to lose control?

The wind shifted, and my breath caught in my throat. What was the cargo? I galloped around the crashed auto-mobile to the back, where the bed had been split on impact with a brick wall, and I couldn't believe my eyes. 

Fish. A great bounty of them, somehow preserved from the time that Baltimare was abandoned. Untouched, unclaimed. All for me.

I didn't hesitate for a second, as I leapt at the pile and began to gorge myself. My teeth were still looser than they should have been, but my pegasus foreteeth gripped at the scales and rent them apart, and delicious fish meat spilled into my maw, across my tongue, down my chin. Raw, delicious, oily fish slid down my throat in damp chunks as I chewed through the pile, and I only stopped when that first fish had been stripped to the spine. The smaller bones crunched at the back of my teeth, as I chewed them, and I flicked that first fish away as I moved to another.

I only stopped when I had filled my belly to near the point of bursting, and I felt sick from overindulgence. I laid on my side, atop the pile of fish that the wind had guided me to, and groaned in a satisfied mix of sated hunger and pain, from stuffing my stomach with the first food I had found since I had first awoken. I felt sick, but in a satisfied way, though perhaps in hindsight I should have considered cooking the fish instead of ripping into them raw.

Though, that line of thought gave me pause. As I began to preen my wings, using the oil that freshly coated my muzzle, I wondered how long the fish had been here. And yet, I didn't taste rot or decay; even when I picked at my teeth and ran my tongue around my mouth, I could taste only oil and fish blood, which admittedly, repulsed me slightly. I’d have to wash out my mouth, when I got the chance.

A drink, in general, would be extremely nice to have. The fish had been dry, strikingly so, and the oil on my lips dried far faster than it should have. Out of curiosity, I flipped over a half-eaten fish in front of me to inspect it more closely, now that I wasn't quite so mad with hunger.

The meat looked fine, at least to my untrained eyes. Again, no rot, decay, or parasites lay within the folds of flesh and muscle. But those insides were pale, and where I ripped bloody chunks free with my teeth, the blood that seeped from within was dark. Not unlike my own, ichorous blood. I also had a very hard time identifying the fish; what little knowledge of fish I could dredge from my mind seemed to mostly be fresh-water. A salt-water species, I could only guess at.

The most striking detail was a set of whiskers, which extended from just behind the jaw, but they seemed too short and bulky to be like whiskers of a catfish. What was more, they seemed jointed, with tiny, flexible bones, capped with a solid, blunt tip. The eyes also grabbed my attention; they were surprisingly large, and expressive despite belonging to a dead...haddock? Perhaps. Even the jaw seemed strange for a fish, which made it especially hard to identify; when I opened the mouth, I even found teeth—short, blunt teeth, designed for chewing.

What kind of fish was this? It didn't look like any fish I had ever seen. In fact, the face looked oddly...equine. And if I looked at it like that, and tilted my head slightly, the whiskers almost looked like...hooves…

All of a sudden, my belly, flush with fish meat, felt repulsively heavy.

Something in the pile under me shifted, and I leapt to my hooves as my half-preened wings flopped loosely against my sides. But nothing moved in the pile, so I drew my sword. I winced as I saw how it was still stained blue from the battle against the changelings, but I had no intentions of eating more fish—I'd quite suddenly lost any appetite I once had.

I slid the blade between the fish, and used it to sweep several of them aside. Slowly, I turned over the fish in the pile, and shoved them aside as I dug inwards, searching for whatever had moved at the bottom. The thought that I might have imagined it was just as worrying as the thought of finding something, and to my horror, I didn't have to search for long.

The deeper into the pile of fish I dug, the more transformed the dead fish seemed to be. Scales receded, replaced by fur, and the nascent hooves lengthened, while a second set appeared just before the tail, which narrowed and became long, thin, and separated.

Finally, it all came to a head. One last layer of fish slid away, and revealed a gasping, twitching body—a fish, undeniably, as twisted as the anatomy might have been—but a fish with the face of a pony.

The pony-fish's face sucked and gasped, drowning in the air, and the anemic hooves shuddered and squirmed as its body writhed. This creature wanted water to inhale and filter through the fur-covered lungs behind its jaws, but it had been trapped here. Trapped under thousands of other fish who were mutating, twisting in exactly the same way.

This wasn't like the demons—their transformations seemed chaotic, twisting them from moment to moment, as the fires of chaos burned away their flesh and replaced it with that of another animal. This was purposeful, all aligned towards the goal of "pony," and I had stumbled across the wretched creatures in some horrific liminal state. It was not a fish, not any more, but it wasn't a pony either. But it seemed it had gotten close enough for the Hollow curse to consider it as such.

It was not life, but something akin to it.

My hoof moved, as if on instinct, before I even knew what I was doing. In an instant, I ended the miserable creature's life with a sudden stab of my sword. I pinned the abomination's body to its kin below, and it went still in moments as I pierced something vital. I felt fire, weak and flickering, from the tiny body—from every one of the pony-fish I stood amongst. They were a bed of embers, but nothing more, and for once, I refused the fire. This, I would not take. I couldn't bring myself to do it, and I nearly emptied my stomach at the thought. Maybe I should have—I’d eaten these things, and the thought that their flesh sat in my gut made me want to rip myself apart to make sure it was purged.

All I could force myself to do, however, was stumble backwards, away from the pile of fish. How long until the curse brought that creature back? Would it Hollow, like ponies? Was it already Hollowed? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I never wanted to think about it again, or the weight in my gut.

Away. I had to go away. The museum wasn’t far now; I was along the waterfront, amongst the more recent constructions. I remembered how it had been drawn in the pamphlet, and it was a large building, easily identifiable. I’d find it soon.