Though the journey home was short, only a few minutes of walking, it seemed a thousand times longer. I couldn't concentrate on anything except straining to hear anything, anything that came from beneath me. A snap, a bubbling, a gurgle that was not audible, anything that would signal another terrible encounter. It did not come. I was not relieved.
I went right to my room and closed the door and windows. I didn't know if that would help, but why take chances? My saddlebags had been jumbled, but everything was still there. I pulled out my math textbook and got to studying, trying anything to take my mind off the day. Maybe derivatives and cosines would be able to distract me.
The derivative of sin is cosine, and the integral of sin is negative cosine plus C. Just draw the little waveforms, they overlap, since the slope of one is the value of the other. Simple enough. I turned the page.
It slammed its leg down on my back, the black tar covering my body and immobilizing me completely. I couldn't run anymore, I was pinned to the ground by the incredible weight of the creature. It was heavier than steel and still somehow outran me, the pressure on my back was unbearable. I wanted to scream, but the thick black tar oozed over my head and engulfed me. It exerted pressure from every possible direction, I felt my spine snap and my ribs break, puncturing my lungs. Blood filled my throat, I started to drown as the creature crushed me entirely. Nopony would even find my body.
No Cadence, focus. It didn't happen. If you remember the integral of sin, you know the derivative of negative cosine since integrals and derivatives cancel out. I turned the page again.
Somepony was screaming. I had outpaced the creature, but another had been walking along the street and became the focus of its ire. He couldn't see what had hit him, but I could. It knocked him down, then picked him back up, melding its body over his legs and lifting him like a filly's doll. It slammed him down again. I looked away. I heard a popping sound, like a water balloon breaking, but it was filled with something thicker than water. We were nothing, nothing in the face of these things.
I closed the book, I couldn't concentrate. It was the afternoon but I felt tired, exhausted. The day's events sapped every bit of my energy, I didn't want to keep being awake if it meant thinking endlessly about my paranoid hallucinations, if they really were hallucinations. I slid into bed and was asleep before my head touched the pillow.
Images and words swirled around me, twisting infinitely in every direction. Memories I had, and some I didn't, whirled like a broken film reel before my eyes. They rewound, playing my life backwards, until they reached the end of the film and began to sputter. Another reel played, some other life ran backwards. Ponies I had never met, places I had never seen, memories I had never made, ran backwards until their starting point, and the reel sputtered again. Another one came to replace it, then another and another as the films ran back into the past. A thousand years, another, I could no longer track it. Finally the film settled, stopped playing backwards. The world in front of me became the real one, and I stepped into it.
We were arranged in a circle, about 150 ponies and myself. I stood at the center, they surrounded me, watching in every direction. We had been drilling for the past few days, doing everything we could to get ready. It wasn't enough, it never could be enough, but it was all we had.
These weren't soldiers, no, most of those were already gone. I could pick out a few veterans, their haunted eyes staring out at the fields around us. They were the lucky ones, or the unlucky ones, who had survived so far, along with me. There were only four of us with any experience, counting myself, everypony else had never even picked up a weapon except to transport it. Some had picked up pitchforks, one had what looked like a thick branch he had pruned the edges off of. Some had nothing to carry, for there was nothing to carry. They would fight with their bare hooves if they had to.
The soldiers wore dark blue armor with gold trim, and wielded the traditional pointed spear that every pony since the dawn of time had wielded. It was our weapon, we had invented it. I myself did not use one, I had taken up the art of sword-fighting that the Griffons had invented a few decades earlier. They wielded grand swords with both of their claws that had twice the reach of a spear in anypony's hands, but our anatomy made even holding one difficult. I had to stand on my rear legs, balancing as best I could with the weighted steel blade in my forehooves, but it was worth it, it allowed me to see over those around me and project an aura of confidence and awe in my followers. This was to be our last day, there was to be no rescue or escape. Confidence was a rare commodity, awe rarer still.
About 200 yards away was the edge of a scrub forest, it ran out of sight in both directions. Everywhere else was a grand flat plain with tall grass. This area had been farmland, but it had returned to the wilds when nopony was able to tend it. Nopony had been alive to tend it.
The Sun was waning, making way for the night as it slid slowly towards the horizon. As its corona cross the edge of the world and left our sight, the clouds above lit up in beautiful reds and golds. The bubbling came, it was not a whisper this time, it was an eruption.
The first one to spot it was a young mare whose name I did not know. She shouted something and pointed. We all turned. There, at the edge of the treeline, was a black ooze bubbling out of the ground. It spread over the earth like a pancake, until covering enough ground that it could form itself up. It formed four legs, then grew atop those legs a body until it stood the height of a pony. It reared up, transforming its legs into tentacle protrusions, spikes made of the same black tar as its body visibly protruding from the tentacles. There was no head, it didn't need one.
Other creatures begun to pool and form up around it, each one different and impossible, defying our ideas of life and making a cruel mockery of Nature's beautiful forms, twisting them and perverting them into disgusting beasts. The stone they were formed from continued to flow and bubble across their bodies, slowing as they finished assuming their shapes but never stopping. Green crystals could be seen within their forms, running in veins across their skin.
We advanced on them, slowly. I made my way to the head as we formed a line to meet them. They did not advance to us. There were only a dozen of them, we could take them 10 to 1, but I would not let confidence lead to recklessness. I raised a hoof, the other gripping my sword, and everypony saw it and stopped. Behind me, a unicorn lit her horn up and sent a flare flying a thousand meters into the sky.
Seeing the signal, the sun rose back up into the sky, turning dusk to day. The creatures hardened up, their skin stopped flowing. They were as weak as they'd ever get, this was our time to strike.
I leaped forward, swinging my blade at its full reach and slicing one of the appendages off the creature opposite me. The limb came off cleanly, falling to the ground and shattering like dried mud. The green material vanished as soon as I carved the piece off. We could injure these things, for what it mattered. The battle had begun.
We maintained our formation as the front line attacked, using our weapons to gash the nightmares. They advanced slowly, they felt no pain nor pressure. They would move up to us and swing whatever they had created to hurt us, sometimes clumsily, sometimes with lethal efficiency. A young stallion to my right caught a blow from what looked like a hoof. They looked slow, but their blows had incredible weight behind them. The stallion crumpled, and those behind him grabbed him and pulled him towards the center. Another took his place, this time a middle aged mare. She picked up the mace he had dropped, and brought it down on the thing's body, scattering the tar it was made of in every direction. She smiled, but her smile was not to last. Behind the first line, another line of the creatures was forming. They were pooling up all around us.
"Stay in formation!" somepony shouted. I kept watch on the ponies immediately next to me, keeping them from extending too far out. The circle was our rest area, the edge was a war zone. If a pony became tired or hurt, she would go to the center and have another come to take her place. Even as the battle raged around them, there would be a moment's respite, to catch their breath or make peace with themselves.
I needed no rest, I attacked again and again. The battle became louder, ponies were shouting now. Instructions went back and forth, calling for help, screaming, the sounds of metal clanging on stone. I blocked it out, focused on my immediate task. The mare to my right stepped too far out, I couldn't move in time to save her. A leg like a tree trunk came down on her head as she tried to step back. Her chin slammed into the ground, I heard a snap. Her eyes stopped focusing, her chest stopped rising and falling.
I stepped out and slashed the limb off, but it was far too late. I could see more and more of the creatures rising from the ground, we were surrounded and now, outnumbered. I couldn't begin to count how many their were, they surrounded us to a depth of five. They stood close together and walked or slithered towards us, implacable, unyielding. I backed up. No pony came to take the mare's place. I chanced a look behind me, but it was the same all around us. The outer lines were strained, nearly breaking. There was no shelter in the middle now.
"Regroup!" came a call from somewhere, part of our drilling. The ponies formed back into a circle, with me at the edge again. We now took up half as much space as before. The dead and dying left where they lie, before being overtaken by the advancing horde of black. We could do nothing for them, lest we meet the same fate.
One of the few remaining soldiers stood next to me, his spear covered in the black viscous goo. He took the respite to clean it off by rubbing it on the dirt, and no sooner did it contact the ground than it became brittle and broke off. He grunted, I said nothing. There was nothing left to say.
They came at us again, and again we tried to fend them off. I could see many, many more behind them, they formed a black wall that stretched all around, thousands, millions. Screaming, cries, crunching sounds. We regrouped, there were a dozen of us now. Again, they came, and again, we fell. It was just me and three others, then two, then one. He attacked, throwing himself into one and tearing it in half before being engulfed by the others. Incredible courage that would be forgotten like all the others here. Just me now, they circled around me.
The battle was over, they had won as they always did. I flared my wings and took to the sky, arcing over the beasts. They reached up to try to grab a hoof as I passed, but it was a useless gesture. I flew higher and higher. The creatures became small, blending together in a great mass that covered the earth. There was nowhere to land, I could not see the ground for all the things roiling over it, consuming it and everything that I had ever known.
I could not see the ground. There was no ground to see, only them.