So it turns out windigos are real.
I’d always kind of assumed they were fictional creatures, like Breezies or the Tooth Flutterpony. The one on my tail seemed awfully real, and I promised myself if I made it out of this alive I’d at least pretend to have the Hearth’s Warming Spirit and give really great presents this year!
“Outside temperatures are dropping,” Destiny warned.
“Yes, thank you, I’ve noticed that!” I spat, my teeth chattering. It was getting harder and harder to outrun the windigo. Ice was building up on my wings and robbing them of lift and I was running out of good options. I could go slower or I could go lower and either way it was going to gain on me.
“We’ve got maybe a minute,” Destiny said. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any bright ideas?”
I struggled to remember anything about windigos. They hated the holidays, right? “We could try giving each other really thick wool socks and pretending to be grateful for the presents!”
“Great idea, Chamomile! If I had socks or hooves I’d be willing to try that. Maybe it wouldn’t be so upset if you hadn’t gotten it angry by trying to ‘establish dominance’!”
I looked at my right forehoof. It was coated in a thick layer of ice and I couldn’t move anything below the knee. I had to hope it couldn’t get frostbite since it was made out of exotic forms of carbon and silicon carbide.
“I’m used to solving my problems with violence, okay?! Do some kind of magic at it!” I yelled.
“You want a light spell? We tried a shield and it just went right through it!”
“Shoot it with a magic bullet!”
“I’m tapped out on magic bullets! It takes a while to build up that much mana and I used all I had back in that last fight! Unless you’ve forgotten, I’m dead! You’re lucky I can cast magic at all!”
“This day gets worse all the time,” I grumbled. I decided down was better than slow and started losing altitude. If something bad was going to happen it would be less dangerous if it happened near the ground.
“Something’s wrong,” Destiny said. Her voice echoed strangely for a moment, like a radio hitting interference.
“Is it a SIVA signal?” It was the first thing to come to mind that might kill me, but I’d feel it before she would, right?
“No. It’s some kind of magic, I think it's--” her voice faded entirely.
“Destiny? Destiny!?”
I was only distracted for a second or two but that was enough for the windigo to catch up. It didn’t have a real body. It wasn’t solid. That didn’t matter much, because a tornado isn’t solid either. It ran into me and the windshear knocked me right out of the air. I fought for control and my decision to dive turned a deadly crash landing into just an embarrassing one.
The snow caught me, and I rolled over until I hit a parked cart, the remains of an ambulance. I used the hull to pull myself to my hooves and looked up at the windigo. It was a huge shape, like somepony had started making a pony out of snowflakes and frost and given up halfway through and let it trail out into a smear behind it. It wasn’t looking at me. Its attention was focused somewhere else, and from what little I could tell from its hazy expression, it looked on-edge, like an animal hearing the cry of a predator.
That was my first sign that this was going to be more than the usual amount of trouble.
It howled mournfully and fled the other way, leaving me alone in the parking lot.
“Oh yeah, that’s a great sign,” I mumbled. “Something scaring a ghost away.”
I waited a minute for Destiny to come back with some sort of sarcasm or annoyance, but she was silent. Like the grave. That’s a ghost joke but also I was starting to get worried.
“Hey, are you okay?” I asked. “Destiny?”
“I don’t feel great,” Destiny groaned. “I’ll be okay. It just sucks.”
I turned around to look at our destination. The Stalliongrad Memorial Hospital. The place was big, with the distinctive look of a building that had been expanded and had wings and floors added to it over the years. There were places where materials didn’t quite match, boxy additions in steel and glass with a totally different design to the rest of the building, and the whole top level of the place didn’t quite fit with the rest, like somepony wearing a hat a few sizes too large.
“Does that mean it’s haunted, or sanctified?” I asked. “Because no offense, but you are sort of a wandering vengeful spirit.”
“It means we’re going to do this quickly,” Destiny said. “I can’t even explain what it feels like. Maybe vertigo? It’s like I’m standing on the edge of a dark pit…”
“Cool, cool. We’ll call it haunted, then.” I slammed my hoof into the steel frame of the ambulance, denting the metal and shattering the layer of ice. I flexed my wrist. It was too cold and numb to tell if I’d actually injured it.
I limped a little on purpose to avoid putting too much weight on it until I was sure nothing was broken and made my way to the front doors. And then I stopped before actually touching them.
“Destiny, did someone paint ominous-looking symbols on the front door of the haunted hospital?” I asked.
“That is what it looks like,” the ghost muttered. “Oh! DRACO found a translation. Let’s see… it says… some combination of Taboo, Darkness, Forbidden, and implies great evil.”
“I want to note for the record that if this wasn’t an emergency I’d turn around and go somewhere else.”
“The record?” Destiny asked, sounding half-asleep. “Was I supposed to be taking notes?”
DRACO beeped and helpfully displayed an almost-accurate transcript of the last few minutes of what we’d been saying.
“Thanks, DRACO,” I said. Then I braced myself and shoved the doors in. The paint used for the symbol flaked under my hooves and I resolved not to think about what it had been painted with.
“Let’s go over our objectives,” Destiny said. “We need whatever healing potions they’ve got, Med-X, Fixer, maybe some Mint-Als just to keep you from getting bad ideas. If we’re really lucky we might find a working AutoDoc.”
“Cool. Do we need skeletons for anything? Because there are a lot of bones.” I’d stopped in the doorway because the place was packed with the dead. There must have been a dozen bodies crammed into the small space. A lot of them still had clothing on. I guess nylon lasted longer than flesh.
“I don’t even know why they’d come here. This place was for veterans and POWs,” Destiny said.
“After the bombs fell they probably thought they could get help from somepony.” I prodded one of the skeletons like I was daring for it to jump at me. It stayed dead. I carefully stepped over it. “Gonna be honest, this is a lot more like what I expected the surface to be like. Dead ponies everywhere, ruins, scary monsters.”
“At least there’s no SIVA,” Destiny said.
“What’s this stuff, then?” I asked, touching the wall. Something had grown over a poster of a stern-looking nurse warning patients to get vaccinated. Half her face was covered with something that looked waxy and almost organic.
Destiny mentally shrugged hard enough for me to feel it. “I don’t know. Sort of reminds me of an insect hive. They always did say cockroaches would survive anything…” She didn’t sound up to speculating about anything. Whatever was wrong here was still affecting her pretty badly.
DRACO chirped an alert. The message popped up on my visor, too. There was in incoming transmission.
“Maybe Kulaas has something to say?” I guessed, tuning in.
There was a sharp burst of static. “No! No, please!” The voice dissolved into static before coming back. “--already took my--” Another burst cut off whatever he was going to say. “--not going to let you do that to me!”
“Somepony’s in trouble,” I said, and for once it wasn’t me. “Which direction…?”
I looked around, and even though the transmission had broken down to just more static and hints of words spoken in fear, it was obviously stronger in one direction. I didn’t have time to be nice to the skeletons, and I ran through them, scattering the bones and shoving open the next set of doors.
The next room had once been some kind of pleasant, calming waiting room, with skylights and planters and a cute little fountain. Now the plants were a tangle of weeds, and that waxy stuff covered the walls everywhere the sunlight didn’t reach.
A pony was standing in the middle of the room. He was in the heaviest looking barding I’d ever seen.
“A Steel Ranger?” Destiny asked.
There was a crackle of static, with a strange echo. “Don’t come any closer,” the voice said. I was sure I was hearing it from two different places. The Steel Ranger raised his head, and I saw the sunken cheeks and tattered flesh. Three glowing eyes shone through the gloom between us.
“The transmission is coming from his armor,” Destiny said.
“Maybe he’s friendly and just wants help?” I asked hopefully.
I half expected him to roar and try to eat my flesh. That might have been better, because instead he drew a long, rusty sword from a sheath on his back and stalked towards me, dragging that cleaver behind him. He didn’t look like a mindless beast. He looked like something driven by terrible purpose.
Two could play at that game.
I readied my hoofblade. “Sure, buddy. If you wanna settle this with a swordfight, I’m game.”
He stomped closer, and a wave of cold wind made the coat on the back of my neck prickle.
“Chamomile,” Destiny gasped. “Strong-- necro--” she sounded like she was having trouble just hanging on. I didn’t have time to ask what was wrong.
The skeletons sprang to unlife, lurching up from the ground and grabbing at me, bony hooves and teeth scraping against my barding. I kicked the ones trying to hold my legs away, then launched into the air before the Steel Ranger could get to me, that heavy blade slamming down in an inevitable arc that shattered the bones of the undead in its path.
I queued up a few rocks into the junk jet and fired, knocking more of the skeletons apart. Whatever was animating them wasn’t trying very hard to hold them together, and once the bones scattered they didn’t come back together.
“Neat trick,” I told the undead ranger. “I’d ask to learn it if it wasn’t morally repugnant!”
He kept moving at that steady, unhurried pace. I don’t think my taunts were having much effect. I landed and kicked two more skeletons away. They weren’t getting back up, but there were still a lot of them to begin with. The ranger swung his blade, and I met it with mine. A shower of green sparks erupted from where our weapons met, and I pushed him back.
“Funny,” I said. “I thought you’d be stronger!”
It swung again with that slow swipe. It didn’t come quickly but watching it was like watching the tide come in. There was a terrible sense of doom around it, and it chilled me to the bone more than the frost outside. I barely got my blade up in time to parry it, barely able to push it aside, the strength to stop it fleeing in the face of that fear.
I backed up, watching it. If nothing else, I was a lot faster than he was.
“What was that?” I murmured. My heart was pounding in my chest.
The cleaver came down in an overhead arc. It had gotten right in front of me in an instant, like he’d cut through the space between us. I blocked it, like holding back a collapsing roof. I pushed harder. I was afraid. That was the problem. Something about the ranger and his sword terrified me on that deep feral level where ponies were still animals. The darkness around him ate at my primal instincts in a way only the SIVA dragon had before.
I spread my wings, knocking an approaching skeleton back.
I had to choose between fight or flight. I bit down on the fear.
The edge of my short blade started glowing like it was freshly forged, and the sparks shifted from unnatural green to the orange-red of embers. I pushed him back. He wasn’t expecting the resistance and lost his balance.
My blade shoved his aside and I grabbed the metal collar of his armor with my other hoof, planting myself and twisting, throwing him overhead and into the wall. He slammed into it hard enough to go through the nurse’s station and into the exam room beyond it. I stalked after him, trailing steam. I felt hot and feverish already, and my stomach growled like an empty abyss in my chest.
He struggled to get up, the servos of his armor squealing like injured animals. I ripped the rusty blade from his hooves and stabbed it down through his spine, pinning him to the floor. There was a darkness inside that sword. It just looked like rusty metal lashed together with tape and string, but it was more than that. It was alive, somehow, and when I stabbed it through the ranger it drank his life down, and I felt a dark connection between us.
I gasped and let go of the sword, throwing myself back. The Steel Ranger went still, the light in his eyes dying.
“What the buck was that?!” I gasped.
“It’s an enchanted weapon,” Destiny said. “I felt it too. I think it’s a type of ritual weapon. The more it’s used to kill, the more the weight of those deaths become part of its power. Instead of dulling with every cut, the act of cutting makes it sharper.”
“...Should we take it with us?” I really didn’t want to, but if it was that important I’d feel stupid leaving it behind.
“Absolutely not. That thing is bad news,” Destiny said. “The last thing you need is some kind of freaking curse on top of everything else wrong with you.”
“Good point,” I said, feeling better about my decision already.
“Go back to the nurse’s station,” Destiny said. “I think I saw a terminal. DRACO might be able to pull up a map of this place to save us some time wandering around.”
I walked back through the hole in the wall and shoved the last of the skeletons aside. Alone, they were practically harmless. There was a flickering screen on the side of the station we hadn’t destroyed in the fight. I trotted over and tapped at the keys.
“I’ll just have DRACO download the whole database,” Destiny said. “I can’t focus enough to pick through it myself.”
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay? I don’t think it’s normal to be exhausted when you’re dead.” While she downloaded files, I looked through the drawers and found a bag of potato chips. It was still sealed, so I popped it open and munched on them to quiet my hunger for a little while. They tasted awful, like rancid oil and salt, but they probably wouldn’t kill me.
“I’ll be fine, which is more than I can say about you when you’re eating something you found in a rotting tomb full of undead.”
“That is sort of asking for trouble, isn’t it?” I finished off the last of the bag and tossed it aside.
“DRACO found a map and flagged a few recordings,” Destiny said. A small map of a few rooms and corridors appeared in my vision. “I’ll set the recordings to play while we travel.”
“This is the personal log of Doctor Toil Land. I am making these logs to have a personal record of the events here. To keep patient confidentiality, I am going to avoid referencing specific dates and the names of patients. I was recommended to come here along with several other colleagues to bolster the staff and assist with what seemed like an extreme outbreak of wartime stress disorder among a group of prisoners of war, but things are worse than I could have imagined.”
I walked slowly through the hospital corridors. There was more of that strangely-organic debris everywhere, and some of the skeletons were restless, but most of the dead were staying dead. Doctor Toil sounded hopeful and excited. He’d probably come to work thinking he was going to be helping ponies. It’s what we all really wanted in the end, right? To help each other?
“Personal log, second entry. I met with one of the prisoners today for an interview. In my experience as a clinical psychiatrist, I’ve rarely met anyone, pony or otherwise, that was as deeply disturbed. He was convinced he was dead, and that his body was rotting around him. This delusion seems to be common among this group of POWs. According to their charts, all of them developed this disorder after the Battle of Stalliongrad, and all of them had been mortally wounded before the prototype megaspell was deployed. After the interview, I’m unsure if this delusion related to the zebra’s beliefs about life, death, and the afterlife; if it’s a result of the simple trauma of being that badly injured and being left with no evidence of it; or if the megaspell itself had some kind of secondary effect we don’t understand.”
I stopped at an intersection and let the rest of the second recording play out.
“The POWs… the Ghost Bears were POWs too,” I said. “This sounds like…”
“Like the memory orb from my brother,” Destiny mumbled. “I know.”
“Personal log, fifth entry. We’ve had to restrain several prisoners and put them into solitary confinement. They were harming themselves and tried to attack staff members when we attempted to stop them. Before we got the drill away from them, one prisoner was killed and two more were seriously injured. Once they’re stable, they’ll be transferred to surgery to try and treat the cranial trauma.”
I walked past a door, then stopped and went back to it. It was Doctor Toil’s office.
“Hey, Destiny? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? A lot of the undead seem to have three eyes, and he’s talking about some kind of head wound and a drill.”
“It could be trepanation,” Destiny said. “I don’t know if it’s something the zebra do normally, but it’s not totally unknown even in pony prehistory. Maybe they were so damaged by the war they were willing to do anything to try and let the demons out, even drilling holes in their own head.”
I pushed the door open.
“Personal log, entry… I don’t know. I was wrong. I was so wrong. I should have had the bodies destroyed. I should have listened to the other prisoners. They tried to warn me and-- someone’s coming. Hello? Paladin Cross, thank goodness. Wait, what’s wrong with your forehead--”
The recording cut out with a scream and loud splattering sounds.
I knelt down over the partial skeleton. The doctor’s back legs were on the other side of the room. I hoped he’d died instantly. I knelt down, partly because I was still exhausted from fighting the undead Ranger and partly because… I don’t know. I guess it was strange hearing a voice from that long ago and knowing there wasn’t a happy ending for them.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Destiny said, her voice strained.
“Yeah?”
“That lab coat he’s wearing isn’t going to fool anypony into thinking you’re a doctor.”
That got me laughing, hard enough that I was practically crying. Maybe I did cry a little. If I did, it had been a pretty rough day so far and there wasn’t anything shameful about having emotions.
I left the Doctor where he’d fallen and got up. I had to do what I could for the living. I trotted down the hallway to the surgical unit. I found the doors right at the end of a hallway lined with inspirational posters about hanging in there, and cute kittens, and some vague metaphors about butterflies. They were dirty and faded but had a kind of desperate sincerity behind them somewhere. It reminded me of the drawings I’d made for my parents when I was a really little filly. I mean, these were better, they’d obviously had real artists do the work, but it had the same sense of facing something big head-on, no implications or talking around a problem, just facing it down.
I shoved the doors to the surgical unit open and--
“It’s not supposed to look like this, is it?” I asked.
“Where is… where is the everything?!” Destiny sputtered.
The place was empty. Like, really empty. Even most of the doors and cabinets had been either taken or smashed. There were spaces where the Auto-Doc pods were obviously supposed to be, but all that was left was the torn-out end of a wiring harness like the dead root of some electric plant.
“...Do you remember the unit that high priest guy had back in the monitoring station?” I said slowly.
“Unfortunately,” Destiny groaned. “You think he got it from right here?”
“That’d be my guess.” I stared poking through the wreckage. There was at least one bright spot - when I flipped over a door that had been knocked in, I found a dented first-aid kit with a couple healing potions and some distilled water inside. There wasn’t much else to even loot unless I really wanted to start collecting calipers and rusty old scalpels.
“I knew we shouldn’t have trusted that stallion. Comes out of nowhere promising a solution that just gets us far away and in a haunted hospital full of skeletons…”
DRACO beeped, and I glanced sideways at the screen.
“Another transmission?” I muttered.
“...ello? Is anypony receiving this?...” The voice was a mare’s, but almost totally lost in waves of static.
“It might be another Steel Ranger,” Destiny warned. “It’s local. I think it’s coming from somewhere deeper in the building.”
“Keep your eyes open,” I agreed.
“...anypony there? I thought I heard voices. Hello?”
This didn’t feel like the Ranger. “I’m not sure that’s just a recording.” I cleared my throat. “Hey! We’re reading you!”
“Thank the stars! I can barely hear you! I’m going to try moving to a better position.” A stronger wave of static buzzed with electrical insistence, cutting everything off.
“Definitely not a recording,” Destiny agreed. “It must be somepony who wandered in here just like we did.”
I nodded in agreement and kicked some of the debris out of my way as I walked out of the old surgical unit and into something close to what I imagined Tartarus must be like. The ICU was right outside, and it had been at the heart of whatever horrors had happened here. That growth was everywhere, but I could see bones embedded in it, and they weren’t just lying where ponies had happened to fall. They’d been arranged into patterns like the runes I’d seen painted here and there in the other rooms.
The biggest symbol was right in the middle of the floor, about as big as a pony lying down spread-eagle, with a skull right at the center and surrounded by an ivory ring. I could see marks on the bones. Like they’d been gnawed on.
I skirted around the circle, keeping my eyes on it while I made my way to the other side of the room. I wasn’t stupid enough to walk right into the middle of the most evil flutterpony circle I’d ever seen and get taken away to who knows where.
I bumped into what should have been thin air. A shock ran through me like I’d touched a live thundercloud.
“It’s a magical barrier!” Destiny warned. I glanced back at it. The barrier was over the door, right where I wanted to be. I bolted back the way I’d come, and slammed face-first into a second barrier that popped up in the doorway to the surgical unit. “The magic is--” her voice faded into echoes.
“I think we found a trap,” I said unnecessarily.
Purple and green light erupted along the circle, and the skull in the center of it opened its fleshless jaw and shrieked. The terrible sound was echoed by two more on the walls, the black oily growth melting away and releasing floating skulls with eyes of burning violet-green fire.
And then the shrieking things started spitting firebolts at me.
I dove for cover behind the…
Behind the…
I dove for cover and flopped down on the floor because there was nothing to take cover behind and I was going to die.
Purple flames splattered against me, the bolt hitting with the force of a water balloon. Filled with napalm. I let out a very cool warcry that just happened to sound like a panicked scream because I was having flashbacks to the time all the skin got burned off my hoof.
Destiny screamed too, and that sound is going to linger with me for a while. It wasn’t just a noise, the scream rattled through me and I could feel it resonate across my whole body, the armor shaking like a leaf and almost flying apart.
“Destiny?!” I gasped. “Talk to me!”
She didn’t say anything, just leaving an echoing quiet where her voice should have been.
Everything on my left side burned, from the base of my wing back to my cutie mark. I kicked at the ground and ran, limping and swearing at the world in general. My armor was so hot it felt like I was pressed up against a hot stove and the floating skulls were turning to follow me, spitting hot death in my wake. I was just barely faster than they were. I needed to do something stupid if I was going to survive.
I reared up and twisted to take a shot at one of the skulls with the Junk Jet. It was a good-sized rock, easily as big as a hoof-ball. A shimmering shield appeared around the skull when it hit, and the stone just skipped off and fell to the ground. The skull tracked it for a moment, then started firing at me again.
“Oh come on!” I snarled. “They’re invincible?!”
“The… circle…” Destiny whispered. Hearing her voice made me feel a little better. She sounded like she was in pain, and there was nothing I could do for her.
She had to mean the magic circle in the middle of the room. The really ominous one made out of glowing bones. I flapped up into the air to avoid another barrage of that hideous fire and made for the ring. I had to hope she didn’t want me to do anything more complicated than just smash stuff.
I flew into it and I could feel the spell wash over me. It had to be some kind of power source. It was like breaching a storm wall, a wave of force and pressure and tingling strangeness. The feeling wasn’t the same as the electric charge in a cloud, but instead it was the creeping sickly sensation of something dissolving, the feeling of an over-carbonated drink fizzing away on your tongue.
I stomped down on the skull in the middle of the circle, shattering the fragile bone.
The floating skulls screamed again, and the air fractured around them.
“Looks like that did the trick!” I yelled, firing another chunk of rock. This time it hit the skull I was aiming at, smacking it right on the end of the nose and cracking bone. The thing shrieked and vibrated in the air like a damaged engine coming apart before exploding in a shower of bone shrapnel and fire.
One down.
With only one of them left, it was easier to keep my distance from them in the enclosed space, making doging easier. I pulled the trigger on the Junk Jet and it let out a mighty puff of air that did absolutely nothing, because the hopper was empty.
Stupid mistake. I just had to pull something out of the vector trap and… and… and I didn’t actually know how to use any of the armor’s systems because I’d been making Destiny do all the technical stuff.
“Buck!” I swore, trying to think. That was made more difficult by my increasing exhaustion and the crawling, distracting feeling of burning all along my left flank. “DRACO, you must have something you can shoot!”
It beeped and a short message popped up.
“No, I don’t think a water purification tablet is going to help!”
I grabbed the first thing at hoof, which made me feel really dirty because it was a bunch of bones off the floor. I jammed them into the Junk Jet while hopping on two legs. If I stopped moving even for a second I’d end up in the same kind of shape as the ponies being used as spare parts in the little chamber of horrors.
“I hope this works,” I said, launching the bundle at the last skull. They weren’t as heavy as the rock, more like a shotgun blast than a solid slug. They plinked off the floating skull and for a second I didn’t think it did anything, but then the skull started vibrating in midair, purple-green sparks cracking off its surface.
Suddenly, it flared up, the bone cracking and twisting inwards like it was being compressed by an invisible vice on all sides.
The light faded, and then it exploded, a dull whomp of force that knocked me back into the wall. The barriers over the doorways faded, and some of the oppressive sense of death and decay had faded.
I picked myself off the ground and tried not to groan in pain. It wasn’t too bad as long as I didn’t think about it or move too much or breathe really deeply.
“Are you okay?” I asked quietly. “Destiny?”
“Tired…” she whispered. “I need to rest. Necromancy…”
“It’s okay,” I said.
“Just let me--” her voice wavered like a candle about to sputter out. I felt a wash of cold in my neck where the autoinjector pressed against me, and the hot pain down my left side faded until it was only an annoyance, like a sunburn.
“Thanks,” I said.
Destiny didn’t reply, but I could still feel her there. She wasn’t gone entirely. I looked at the runes and bones scattered across the room and wondered if it was better to just turn back. If those things were able to hurt her, would a pony caught by the unearthly fire suffer a fate worse than death?
The radio crackled to life right then and the surprise almost stopped my heart. “Hello? Unknown fireteam, are you still listening? This is Squiddle, do you copy?”
“I’m here!” I said quickly, standing up straight and looking around like a filly caught with a hoof in the cookie jar. “I was just dealing with a little problem on my end, uh, Squiddle.”
“Glad to hear you’re okay. Had some problems finding a safe place to transmit from. I don’t know how long it’s been since I got locked in down here!”
“Down here? Are you in the basement?”
“That’s a positive. I don’t suppose you’d be willing to bust me out of here? I’d be very appreciative.”
“I’m not going to leave another pony hanging,” I promised. She sounded exhausted and afraid, a little like Destiny had been. Something about the place had a weird negative emotional aura.
I could almost hear the smile. “See you soon.”