//------------------------------// // The Hair (and the Plot) Thickens... // Story: Whipstitch // by Pennington Inkwell //------------------------------// Thunder Runner was having a good day. When he had come in for guard duty in the morning, his armor was clean and polished to a golden shine, he had gotten a good night's sleep, and even gotten in a little quality time with his son the night before. The morning had been bright and cheerful, without a cloud in the sky, and everything seemed almost perfect in the castle, making his job of patrolling the halls that much easier. In all honesty, being a Day Guard wasn't too hard, since most scoundrels attacked at night. I just can't imagine where they keep finding all of those volunteers for the Night Guard... The greatest threats that Equestria had ever faced had normally attacked in broad daylight, but the more insidious enemies, those who wished to strike personally at Canterlot Royalty, had a modus operandi of attacking during the night, when the Princesses were asleep and guards' eyelids began to droop. Despite their nocturnal habits, however, Luna always chose her own sleepy guards over those designated to assist her during the day. "If there's any pony more at risk, it's really Princess Luna..." He muttered to himself as he continued to think. "Oh, is that true?" Thunder Runner froze, his wings pulling themselves tightly against his sides in nervousness at the familiar voice. He slowly turned himself around to face the source, and nearly died of fright at what was behind him: Nightmare Moon, with a wide, fanged grin, black fur and blue, misty mane rippling in the small breeze that had picked up in the hallway. She leaned down, fixing her catlike eyes on his and nearly touching his head with her horn. Her light blue armor caught the sunlight and refracted it across the walls. "W-W-W-Well..." He stuttered, blinking several times, unable to regain his composure. "At ease, soldier!" She chuckled, stepping back again. In a flash of white light, the armor disappeared, and Princess Luna returned to her "normal" form, not nearly so intimidating. "I was simply jesting with you..." "Princess... you scared me..." He whispered with a chuckle, releasing the breath that he had been holding. "Well, you seem to have enjoyed it..." Luna replied with a smile, giving him a small wink. "Now, what was it you were talking about, with my being at risk?" Thunder Lane blushed, and quietly prayed that his redness couldn't be seen under his dark grey coat. "Oh... It was nothing, your highness! I was simply thinking about the Night Guard and the fact that they, with insufficient sleep, face more threats than some members of the Day Guard..." Luna smiled, turning her nose up ever-so-slightly. "Every one of my guards endures weeks of special training, along with a magical adjustment of their bodies to be better-suited to the night... They could trounce any member of the Day Guard on level ground." Thunder Runner rolled his eyes, knowing that she was referring to the monthly competitions between the two factions of guards. "For the record, we'll even out the score next month..." Luna chuckled and nodded, walking past him and moving quickly on down the hallway. "By the way, would you be so kind as to deliver Whipstitch her morning coffee? Our seamstress extraordinaire seems to be fueled by caffeine..." Whipstitch... The name struck a distant bell in Thunder Runner's mind, though he couldn't quite identify it. "Yes, your highness! Right away..." Thunder Runner quietly carried the tray of coffee cups in his mouth, doing his best to ignore the smell filling his nostrils. The coffee wasn't for him after all. "Miss Whipstitch? I have your coffee!" He called as he knocked on the doors to the Grand Hall. The pony had been there for a few days, now, and a multitude of strange sounds had been rumored to be coming from the cordoned-off area. Now, though, everything was quiet, with not even a response from the pony working inside. Silent as the grave... Thunder shook his head, doing his best to shake the unbidden morbid thought from his mind. He knocked once again, harder this time. "Miss Whipstitch? Are you in there?" The silence continued. He looked up at the hastily-scribbled note taped to the door. "Do not disturb..." He blinked, considering the warning. Under a normal set of circumstances he would have simply taken a cup of coffee for himself and left the rest outside the door, but something seemed to be wrong. His first job had been to mark where lightning was likely to strike, and he had learned to follow his instincts, and right now he had a churning feeling in his gut telling him that something was wrong behind those doors. He stretched out a hoof to the door, paused for a moment, then finally pulled on the handle with a firm grip, praying that he was just being paranoid. The first thing that he noticed was that the door came out only with a massive amount of force, forcing him to flap his wings and pull on the handle with all of his strength. As he finally pried it open, he could see that the entire room inside was dark, with all of the windows somehow blocked out. As the door swung open on its hinges, a mysterious black substance spilled out, causing him to jump back in fright. The door was carried the rest of the way on its own weight, exposing the room to the sunlight. As he looked more closely from afar, he noticed the black substance seemed to splitting and revealing itself to be a mass of tiny black filaments. He slowly dropped to the ground, stepping forward and picking up a small hooffull of the unidentified matter. "It's... Hair!" He cried, looking back into the dark room. "Whipstitch! Are you alright in there?" "Help... Me..." The hoarse whisper slithered out from the darkness. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, Thunder was horrified to see the twisted form of a pony hanging among the follicles, her body twisted and contorted into a terrifying shape that one would expect to see in a circus. "D-don't worry! I'm coming!" He cried, taking a bold step into the hair-filled room. The moment that his hoof touched the ground, though, he realized that, much like a spider's web, these strands were taut. As his hoof pressed down onto them, the strands on the pink pony's body tightened and ground themselves into her chest, drawing a small trickle of blood. From deep inside the massive snarl of hair, he heard Whipstitch cry out in pain, a piercing cry that sent shudders running along his spine. We're going to need a lot more ponies than just me... "Hang in there, Whipstitch! I'm getting help!" He cried, stepping back out of the door and shoving it shut with all of his might, making sure that no other ponies would make his foolish mistake of stepping into the web. "Princess Luna! Princess Celestia! Something's wrong!" He cried as he took off down the hall in the same direction that he had seen Luna walking in earlier. "Please, I need your help!" Whipstitch was trapped in a nightmare. She knew fully well that she was unconscious or, at best, asleep. The last thing that she could remember was her eyelids drooping as she stitched together one of the last mends on the tapestries, and now she was someplace entirely different. She was back at her home: a city called Fairytrail. She wasn't in the city, though. She was in a crystal cave on its outskirts, away from every pony in the town, with several large boulders blocking the way out. She tried to turn her head and look around, despite knowing exactly was around her and why the exit was blocked, but her body didn't respond, instead acting on its own and turning back towards the rear of the cave, crawling up on top of a set of strands of hair near-invisible in the semi-darkness. She didn't feel her hooves touching the ground, and she was learning to look at herself out of the corners of her own eyes. Her body was tightly wrapped in her own extended hair, not only extending her own legs into long stabbing instruments, but creating four more legs made entirely from the hardened strands that moved in quick, spiderlike movements. She could feel a set of sharp fangs in her mouth dripping with venom as her tongue gently teased them with her own warm flesh. More than anything, though, Whipstitch felt the hunger that seemed to penetrate her entire body. Not only did her stomach growl and lash out for food, but her body ached with emptiness, the kind that could only be filled by feeding and consuming. The entire vision had a detached feeling to it, as if every sensation were being viewed through somepony else's eyes, or on a television screen that established every sensory input. No... NO! No, I was never supposed to remember this! I NEVER remember this... Whipstitch seemed more to be pleading with whatever deities that existed to be able to close her eyes, to not see what she prayed that what she was thinking came next wouldn't come next. That all would be quiet and this memory of herself would just go hungry. Her answer came in the sound of shuffling rocks near the entrance. Instantly, her body turned towards the source of the noise, a small unicorn forcing his way into the cave though a small hole in her blockade. He was a small, chubby yellow foal, hardly seven years old, with a brown-and-black mane that was always was arranged in some kind of matted mess on top of his head. Whipstitch's body let out a low hiss of pleasure and backed into the darkness, where both she and her web could pass unseen... RUN! GET OUT OF HERE! GO! Whipstitch screamed within her own mind, trying her best to stop what she knew was unavoidable... What had already happened. "Well, this is a fine mess..." The dark blue unicorn muttered as he slowly opened the door. "Any pony know what happened?" "Well, Thunder Runner found her this way this morning..." Luna explained, trying not to cringe at being able to see every detail of Whipstitch's situation with her night-vision. "He wasn't sure what to do, and Celestia and I have never seen anything like this before... You're the one who recommended her to Celestia..." "And it seemed as if the two of you were good friends..." Celestia continued her sister's statement, still trying to comprehend how her Grand Hall could possibly have come to such a state. "So I was the first one you sent a letter to in order to ask for help." Pennington finished their words for them with a solemn grimace. "I suppose you were right to do so... Though I've never seen her in this state before." He turned to the dark-grey pegasus pony who had introduced himself as "Thunder Runner." "You said that you might have some helpful information?" Thunder nodded, trying to overcome the intimidation of the situation. "Well, I think that I've actually heard about Whipstitch before, though we never actually met. She comes from a high-ranked family in a city called Fairytrail... My home, as well. It's really not our place to talk about it, but ponies in Fairytrail have... problems. Once a year, a wild magic awakens within them, transforming them physically and creating some kind of strange circumstance that they hide away from the rest of the world. This time is different for every pony, b-but this m-might be Whipstitch's-" He stuttered to a halt as Pennington shook his head in denial. "W-what?" "I've seen Whipstitch's 'time of the year.' This is much, much tamer..." He muttered, taking a small step into the doorway as his horn began to glow and radiate a white mist. "When I made the mistake of following her into Everfree, she nearly ate me alive... literally." This seemed to shock all of the ponies into silence, though the unusually somber pony shaped the mist into the shape of a cutthroat razor, with a large blade gleaming and casting reflections into the room. "Have you ever heard of the expression 'splitting hairs,' Luna?" "Of course..." Luna replied quietly. "Are you seriously implying..." "Just like getting through an ancient temple for Daring Do... It's just that it's somepony else's life on the line..." He whispered as he swung down the razor, slicing through one of the tensed threads of hair. "You have to disable every trap if you want to walk through..." "Miss Whipstitch, are you in here?" The small foal cried as he looked around, walking deeper into the cave. Run... Please, for Celestia's sake, just RUN! Whipstitch could feel every thread in the room, including the ones that he was walking over. She knew that just a few more steps and there would be no escape for him. "I saw you come in here, and I thought that you might get lonely camping on your own!" The tiny unicorn shouted, trying to see into the darkness. With a sudden strike, Whipstitch's legs pulled together dozens of strands of hair, trapping his legs in a tight loop and pulling him up into the air with a terrified yelp. Before the youngster could react, Whipstitch's legs of hair began to turn him back and forth, wrapping his body into a tight cocoon, leaving only his head and neck exposed. To stop him from screaming, she dexterously looped a generous amount of black hair through his mouth, as well, effectively gagging him. The child looked up at her, eyes wide with mortal terror as she moved in for the kill. In his eyes, Whipstitch could see her own face reflected: eyes black, greedy fangs dripping onto a pointed tongue, all covered in matted pink fur and draped in black hair. It was a face of nightmares, filled with the joy of a monster about to kill. What she did next was too disgusting and terrible for Whipstitch's mind to process, even in her dreamlike state, and she slowly caved in to a stupor of detached observation. Blood, screams (Some of her conscious mind, some of the tiny foal), and feeding were all that she knew for the next hour. The final vision to scroll across her vision was her prey's cutie mark: A bumblebee hovering over a yellow flower. And then she woke up. "BUZBY!" She cried as she sat bolt-upright in her hospital bed, taking deep breaths and struggling to establish what was real and what was the dream. "Take it easy..." A familiar voice crooned from the darkness. "I think that the lollipop may have sparked some of your latent Fairytrail magic... You've been through quite the ordeal." "E-Eclipse?" She asked quietly, doing her best to spot the draconequus in the nighttime darkness. "The one and only..." He replied, revealing himself by pulling aside the curtain next to her bed. He was laying on the cot next to hers, hands folded in quiet contemplation. "I'm sorry, Whips... I had no idea that could or would happen..." "Eclipse... Oh, Celestia, Eclipse, I killed him... All those years ago." "Whipstitch, you've been having nightmares. Bad ones, by the sound of your screaming..." He whispered, obviously taken aback by her comment, but doing his best to hide it. "But right now, there are two princesses, a royal guard, and a very good friend of yours waiting outside of those doors." He jutted towards the hospital wing's doors with a smile. "That's more reception than I've had in a thousand years, and I make poor company compared to them. I'll be here to visit you tomorrow, though, so that we can discuss the continuation of your lessons... if there is to be any." With that, he stood up and walked to the doors. "Whipstitch, this is my fault more than it is yours... And I am SO sorry. And whatever was in those nightmares... They're just nightmares. Who is real and who is here is what matters. So run from your nightmares... and run to your friends." With that, he quietly pulled the door open, disappearing behind it as it collided with the wall. For the rest of the night, neither Whipstitch, Pennington, Celestia, Luna, or Thunder Runner slept. The night was one filled with hugs, rejoicing, and laughter at her safety. And, in spite of her memories, Whipstitch found that she was still somehow able to enjoy herself. Two thoughts, however, lingered. Why did I see those memories? I've never remembered anything that happened after my transformations... And Did Eclipse say that he was going to stop my lessons?