//------------------------------// // 7 // Story: Golden Prose // by Field //------------------------------// The dank cave floor was gone, replaced with a carpet of crispy, sun-parched grass. My body felt the same though. Beaten and broken. At least the nausea had faded. A sour, scummy taste in my mouth told me where that particular sensation had gone. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t managed to choke on my own vomit while I was out. That truly would have been a shameful end after surviving a fall from a tornado. I blinked and tried to get a sense of where I was. There was something covering the upper half of my body. A tent maybe? Ignoring a grinding pain in my shoulder I reached up and tapped the object only to have it quiver as if surprised. They were feathers! “You are awake then.” The voice from my dream was suddenly right next to me and I jumped slightly, grunting in pain as I did so. My body was responding to commands again, just not well. I only succeeded in thumping my head against a larger body beside me. The wing over my head retracted and tucked back against the body, revealing none other than the Ruler of the Night herself, Princess Luna. She looked down at me with a mixture of pity and concern that instantly filled me with shame over the fact that I’d been sick to my stomach in her presence. “You took so long returning from your dream that I was not certain if you would actually manage to do so.” Her voice calm and collected; it was reassuring even though she was essentially telling me that I had almost died. “I do apologize for intruding into such a painful memory, but we are not safe here. Do you feel well enough to stand?” “You… the tornado… you saved me?” My jaw felt heavy and swollen, it made every word a challenge. I looked down at my chest and gently tapped at the two burnt holes in my vest where the flares had gone off. My coat underneath was singed and the skin had turned an angry, blistered red. The fall through the trees had already torn the melted material free from my skin at least. Thank Celestia for small favors. Luna’s face turned sheepish for a split second before her regal demeanor returned. “It was… inelegant, but I did not see any other way. Now please, try your hooves. We cannot stay here.” Elegant or not I was damn grateful for it. The burns had been nothing compared to the drowning sensation I had felt in the darkness. Though if she had managed to use her magic to ignite the flares from wherever she had been, one would have thought that she could have caught me or at least softened my fall a bit. Finally heeding her request I tried to raise myself up from the dusty ground. I felt like I was one giant bruise under my coat and the wound on my flank oozed languidly, reopened by my activity. My chest felt like more than one of my ribs might be cracked, but when I tried to get up completely I found where the damage really lay. My right foreleg absolutely refused to bear weight without excruciating pain. Luna seemed to notice and nodded her head, unsurprised. “I suppose it was foolish of me to think as much.” Climbing to her hooves as well she levitated my saddlebags over to me, holding them in front of me rather than helping me put them on. “You may want bite on the strap.” I knew what she intended to do and I wasn’t happy about it. I doubled up two of the bags straps and gripped them between my teeth. Despite my time in the wilderness I hadn’t broken a bone since I was a little colt. I didn’t really remember the pain of resetting the bone from that time, but I was sure I was going to remember this. The same warm sensation I’d felt against my chest now wrapped around my foreleg, gently searching for the location of the fracture. I squeezed my eyes shut and held my breath. The magical hand on my leg tensed, but before I could ready myself it crunched the offending bone back into alignment. I groaned loudly and sank my teeth into the leather straps. Just chop it off; I didn’t need that leg anyway. “I will hold it in place until such time as we can properly treat you.” Her horn still glowed faintly, exerting just enough magical control to assist me in holding my immobilized leg against my body. The compression helped ease the pain a bit now that the bone was reset, but it still hurt more than I wanted to admit. “What about Golden Prose? We can’t leave without her!” The mare had slipped my mind while I was wallowing in my self-pity. Just before the tornado had gobbled me up I’d seen the very ground before me gobble her up. There had been some kind of cavern down there, maybe an old diamond dog tunnel. With Luna’s magic we could surely reopen it and go after her. The Princess disagreed. She shook her head and dropped my saddlebags onto my back. “Nothing can be done until morning. Do not worry, the author will survive. The Dark Presence needs her; its objective here tonight was merely to remove you from her influence.” Remove me from her influence? This had to have something to do with the manuscript pages we had found, but what was the Dark Presence? Was it what was controlling the shadow ponies? I had too many questions that needed answers; I had no idea where to begin. The trek out of the forest seemed to drag on forever. I hobbled along as fast as I could on my three good legs while the princess circled above. We didn’t encounter a single shadow pony. I didn’t know if that meant that the so-called Dark Presence truly had accomplished its goal for the night, or if like any sensible being it felt too threatened by the powerful alicorn. I could see the princess’ encampment long before we reached it. It was perched atop a small hill beyond the apple orchards. They must have set up in the time I had been unconscious because there was no way I had missed it earlier. The perimeter of the camp was spotted with strategically placed bonfires, each attended by one of Luna’s bat-winged royal guards. Within the perimeter were several tents and several smaller campfires being tended by more guards. I wondered why none of the guards had accompanied her into the woods to retrieve me. The guards saluted the princess and gave me suspicious looks as we entered the camp. I got the distinct impression that they were very unhappy about being left behind. Their eyes drilled holes in the back of my head as I passed by. I began to wonder if I was any safer here than I was in the woods with the shadow ponies. We finally settled in the largest canvas tent in the center of the camp. The interior was brightly lit with several propane lanterns similar to the one that had burnt my house down; it seemed to be more of a meeting room than a place to sleep. It also gave me my first real look at the alicorn that had brought my mind back from the brink. She was stunningly slender and moved with a kind of lithe ease that I had seldom seen in any mares in my life “Do not mind the guards.” The princess said quietly as she took a seat on an embroidered purple pillow beside a row of scrolls spread out on a bit of cloth. “I could not risk any other ponies being exposed to the Dark Presence, and they are… bitter about it. There is only so much information I can safely share with them. For now let us attend to your leg.” She gestured for me to take a seat on a far less elegant pillow opposite her. As if on cue one of the bat winged guards appeared in the entrance of the tent. His armor was identical to the rest aside from the addition of a red cross on the flank. It looked very out of place on the otherwise mysterious and brooding pony. Without a word he trotted up to me and examined for leg, then extracted a splint from his saddlebags. The princess released her magical grip on my leg so that the guard could go to work. He offered me a small bottle of pain relieving potion which I greedily drank down. He then set to work applying some kind of glowing salve to area around the break. It felt icy cold at first but then quickly numbed my leg to the point where I couldn’t feel it at all. Satisfied that the salve was working he then splinted my leg. “The splint will hold everything in place while the salve soaks in and mends the bone.” He explained, sounding disinterested. “You’ll need to stay off of it for at least six hours or it may re-break worse than before.” Luna dismissed the guard with a polite wave of her hoof and he backed out from the tent, closing the flap on his way out. I was beginning to feel pleasantly warm and fuzzy thanks to the potion but I refused to let it get the better of me in the presence of the princess. There were too many questions I wanted answered before I could let my mind turn to putty. “Your name is Mossy Hooves, is it not?” The princess turned her attention back to me, looking slightly dismayed as I wobbled my broken leg to see if I could feel any of it. “The Mossy Hooves from Equestrian Wilderness?” I nodded, grateful that she hadn’t just flat out said ‘The Mossy Hooves responsible for the death of the greatest naturalist of this generation’. It was a violating feeling knowing she had played observer while I had dreamed about that night. The only accounts of what had actually happened that night came from my own recollection after the search and rescue team found me clinging to life two days later, the surviving footage from Expo’s camera, and a journal from his production assistant. The journal had been the most damning thing for my reputation. I barely knew the assistant but he had apparently harbored a great deal of resentment towards me for prolonging the failed expedition. I hadn’t lied about any part of what happened when I spoke to authorities but I obviously downplayed my own blame. The fact that I had survived when the beloved naturalist had died was really all the evidence most needed to be angry with me, but the journal dumped every bit of blame for his death squarely in my lap. Only Atten Burro’s closest friends would even entertain the notion that it was purely an accident. “You have my word that I will not speak a thing of what I saw in your dreams tonight, Mossy. I know you must have already suffered greatly for this and there is no reason you should have to do so again.” “Thank you… but that’s not really important right now, is it?” I tried not to sound bitter, but even with the painkiller euphoria there would still never be a more painful subject in my life. “What is going on here, Princess? Who are those ponies in the woods?” Using her magic Luna unfurled one of the scrolls between us. “There is no true name for the ponies you have seen. My sister simply called them the Taken when last they were seen, for they are merely empty shells now. Everything that they once were has been taken from them.” The image on the scroll looked like a rubbing taken from a carving of some sort. It portrayed a group of primitive looking ponies dancing around a clearing in the middle of a forest. “The legends about the Everfree Forest go back much longer than most ponies realize. They were an ancient tale even when my sister and I were but foals.” She rolled the first scroll back up and then unfurled another. “The forest’s greatest power is obfuscating the truth of its own nature. Tempt the unwary, but cast just enough doubt to conceal yourself. That is how it has survived this long.” This scroll bore a more recognizable scene, the familiar stylized swirling image of the two princesses. It was something I had seen many times before in stained glass windows of important buildings across Equestria. Only this one was slightly different. In the center where the image of Discord should have been there was only a scroll and quill. “Truthfully my sister and I are partly responsible for this deception persisting into the modern age. They say history is written by the victor, but our version of history was only meant to protect Equestria and ourselves.” They were interesting pictures, sure. And in her own roundabout way Luna probably believed she was explaining things to me, but I really wasn’t following the things the princess said. Maybe it was just the painkillers. One didn’t simply tell one of the princesses of Equestria to hurry and start making sense, no matter how high you were. I thought the better of it and just kept my mouth shut. “I inadvertently availed myself of a deeply personal story of your life, and as such I will share with you one from mine. I would beseech you not to repeat it to another living soul, both for my sake and yours. There are those who would call it blasphemy, and I do not imagine you need to paint anymore of a bulls-eye on your back than you already have.” Princess Luna rose from her seat and trotted towards the tent entrance, listening to make sure none of her guards were lurking beyond the flaps. I suddenly wished I had a clearer head. Even if it didn’t answer any of my questions I was about to hear something that few ponies in Equestria knew of. I wanted to be able to remember every word of it. “I give you my word, Princess. Anything you say here tonight goes to grave with me.” Oh, that came out a bit morbid. The way things were going for the past two days that may have been a very easy promise to keep. The Princess turned from the entrance and smiled weakly at me as if she had heard my internal dialogue. “I believe you, Mossy Hooves. Let us hope it does not come to that.” Luna trotted back to the center of the tent, levitating her embroidered pillow and placing it next to me. I had already been embarrassed by her close presence before tonight and now she was going to subject me to it again. I knew it was only so that she could speak her tale in a hushed tone, but the only thing the pony in my head had to say about it was ‘Your breath still smells like vomit.’ “I am certain you know the tale of my imprisonment on the moon, do you not?” She took her seat next to me and flared her wings behind our heads, much like one might cover their mouth with a hoof to conspire. I nodded, looking at the scroll in front of me instead of meeting her eyes. “My dear sister felt that her retelling of such events best served Equestria, and given the current state of the nation I do not disagree. But it was not the truth. At least not the entirely. I will tell you what really happened.”