//------------------------------// // 3 // Story: Moonspire Run // by titanrising //------------------------------// “The Pinebone forest?” Rainbow Dash said when the sea of chalk-white, skeletal shapes loomed into view. “But that’s… that’s….” Her jaw worked up and down silently, trying to form the word. She eventually managed to whisper, “Forbidden!” Spitfire chuckled. “That’s just what they tell all the little colts and fillies to keep them from getting any big ideas. It’s really more… strongly cautioned against. ‘Enter at your own risk’, so to speak. Hey, if you don’t think you can handle it and want to chicken out….” Rainbow Dash swallowed hard and looked again at what until now she had only seen in pictures. An ancient forest of leafless, dead trees stretched far into the distance, ending where an ominous red glow began. She had the impression of an army of giant skeletons, all half-buried and clawing up toward the sky to escape the grave. Limbs thrust out at improbable angles, reaching like grasping claws from their twisted trunks. Even amongst the smaller trees at the edge of the forest, she didn’t see a single one under a hundred feet tall. It must have been a beautiful sight when they were alive and had foliage. Now, it looked like a massive briar patch, and she was a tiny field mouse about to enter. “Me?” she said. “Ch-chicken?” She tried to laugh, but it came out sounding more like a cough. “That’s a g-good one.” Spitfire gave her a comforting smack. “Hey, no worries! I was a little scared the first time I flew the Moonspire Run, too.” Rainbow Dash halted in midair as if she had hit a brick wall. “The… Moonspire… Run…?” Spitfire stopped and turned with her forelegs on her hips. “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of it.” Rainbow Dash gulped and nodded. “Of course I have.” Every sky pony had, not only for the hazards one had to navigate to reach the end, but also because of the nature of the finish line itself. The Moonspire Run ended at a mysterious relic left over from the conflict between Nightmare Moon and her sister, Princess Celestia, a thousand years ago. The Moonspire was by far the most enigmatic remnant from that time, as only the two sisters knew what dark forces still survived within the ten thousand foot high obsidian pinnacle. Several such artifacts remained throughout Equestria, but the Moonspire was the only one to still have very active, and very dangerous, magic surrounding it. Whispered rumors claimed the Moonspire was anything from a focal point for Nightmare Moon’s magic, to a prison once intended for Princess Celestia. While its true purpose may never be revealed, the dangers surrounding it were certainly well known. Flying the Moonspire Run meant racing through barriers Nightmare Moon erected around the spire specifically designed to keep all types of ponies out. Rainbow Dash squinted, staring through the heat-distorted air on the far side of the Pinebone forest. A thin, black needle rose high above the horizon as if it were trying to pierce the heavens. When she was little, she had often boasted that one day she would fly the Moonspire Run. She also claimed she would wrestle an Ursa Major to submission and then be the first pegasus to fly around the world without stopping. Spitfire laughed. “You should see the look on your face right now.” Rainbow Dash snapped her mouth shut with a loud click. “Hey, relax. I’ve been assured it’s safe enough as long as you don’t go inside the Spire. Apparently, Princess Luna’s having trouble shutting off some of her spells from her Nightmare Moon days.” “It’s not the Spire I’m worried about,” Rainbow Dash muttered. She gritted her teeth and gave her mane a quick shake. She puffed out her chest and flapped to catch up to Spitfire who was touching down at the edge of the Pinebone Forest. When they landed, she craned her head back to ogle at how much bigger the trees looked from ground level. “I have a bad feeling about this.” The silence was the eeriest part. There was no life in or amongst the trees like there was in The Everfree Forest. Not even birds or bugs seemed brave enough to enter. The air smelled strange, too. Dead. If she had to describe what a rock smelled like, that’s how she would describe these trees; like a big pile of ancient minerals. According to what few books she actually read in school (when she wasn’t busy carving Wonderbolt symbols into the clouds), Nightmare Moon created barriers specific to each type of pony. In her own dark, warped way she was actually protecting pony lives by keeping them out in this fashion. The Pinebone forest was made to deter earth ponies, who could easily get lost and never come out if they dared enter. It wasn’t much of a deterrent to any unicorn who could cast a simple locator spell or a pegasus who could easily fly over; their barriers came next. The third barrier, the sky pony barrier, was what made Rainbow Dash nervous. It was why only the best fliers ever attempted The Run. “You know the rules, right?” Spitfire asked. “If you have to be rescued, you forfeit. If you fly above the treetops, you forfeit. After the forest, the sky’s the limit. No pushing, no shoving, no crying. And the first pony to put a hoof on the Moonspire wins.” “Heh… no problem,” Rainbow Dash said. “Easy as p-pie.” She suddenly felt cold even though it was very warm out. “Okay then,” Spitfire said, grinning and bending her forelegs until her chin almost touched the ground. “Three-two-one-go!” A quick burst of wind tossed Rainbow Dash’s mane to the other side of her neck. Where Spitfire had been crouched a moment before, a vaguely pony-shaped mist of imploded air was drifting away. She blinked to try and clear the afterimage of Spitfire’s fiery contrail from her vision. “Whoa!” Rainbow Dash said. She sat down and stared in stupefied disbelief until Spitfire zoomed back out from the forest and bopped her on the nose with a hoof. “Hey, what part of ‘go’ didn’t you understand?” Rainbow Dash popped up to her hooves. “Oh! Right!” She crouched, flared her wings, and leaped into the air after Spitfire. As soon as the first tree whipped past, she went into racing mode. Head forward, hooves outstretched, eyes narrowed to dangerous slits. She rolled and banked around a scarred behemoth blocking her path, then angled to begin a drifting weave like she was taught on the Unusual Obstacle Course at Junior Speedster Flight Camp. She rounded another. Then another. Roll in, bank, roll out. She was thinking how easy it was going to be, how she could do this in her sleep, when she nearly slammed into three trees growing together in an uneven spiral. She yelped, twisted her wings into air brakes, stretched out her feet and left four hoof-shaped impressions in the trunk as she vectored off and around it. “Sheesh! Three seconds in and I almost crash! Keep it together, Rainbow.” She stayed on Spitfire’s trail, flying low and swinging wide around the massive trunks. The yellow and orange pony was easy to track among the sharp shadows and stark white trees of the forest, so Rainbow Dash decided to stick with her for as long as she could. Spitfire pulled up at a right angle, skimming vertically along a tree’s surface. Rainbow Dash cranked her wings hard, copying the maneuver and barely avoiding leaving her teeth embedded in its petrified bark. Spitfire banked right and cut back to a horizontal plane. Rainbow Dash followed, her wings groaning at the stress. Finger-bone branches whipped by, rattling against each other in the rush of Spitfire’s trailblazing. It was difficult enough dodging and weaving like an insane hummingbird through the smaller branches, so when Spitfire started rebounding off of the larger ones like a fiery pinball to set them swinging, Rainbow Dash yelled in frustration. “Hey, that’s not fair!” Spitfire looked back over her shoulder with a smirk. “Then stop following me!” “I don’t know which way to go!” “Finding the fastest route is part of the race! You’ll never win if you follow!” Each branch Spitfire bounced against swung back before snapping forward into an undulating dance. She zipped from branch to branch so fast that the entire forest in front of Rainbow Dash quickly turned into a gauntlet of thrashing needle teeth. A branch clipped her wing, nearly yanking out a pinion feather. She yelped and looked back. Her wing was intact, but that was too close; for a pegasus, losing main flight feathers was like pulling a muscle for an earth pony. She flapped erratically, darting forward to avoid one swinging branch, then back to escape another. She shot left, then was forced back to her right. Forward again. Two flaps backward. She was hemmed in. She flew a tight circle, locked in a repeating pattern by the bobbing branches. A pattern. She narrowed her eyes and stared in Spitfire’s direction. The branches swayed in a continuous wave; in the same order Spitfire had hit them. If she could time it just right, she might be able to use it to her advantage. Her ears pricked up as she saw her opening. The first branch in the sequence was bending backward again. She lunged forward and touched all four hooves to the nearest branch as it bent away. It swung forward again, propelling her toward the next in the sequence. She landed, shifted her weight, and leaped as it threw her to the next branch. Then the next one. And the next. Faster with each bounce. She added wing power between branches, and soon was speeding through the whirling maelstrom and out the other side. She let out a quick victory laugh and scanned the dappled shadows of the trees, searching for her yellow and orange lifeline. Nothing but shadows and stark, bare trees glowered back. Spitfire was gone. Somewhere racing toward the finish line without her. The sun was high overhead, so while it wasn’t pitch-black among the alabastrine trees, the encroaching tangle of naked limbs created sporadic patches of ominous darkness. She flapped a slow turn, taking in all of the dark hollows staring at her like empty eye sockets. She stifled a shriek when a branch moved, making it look as if a tree had just winked. Being in the Pinebone Forest at all was bad enough; being there alone was terrifying. For some reason, a pink and magenta face singing a silly song surfaced in her mind. However silly the song was, it made the icy lump inside her melt a little bit. She looked at one of the shadows, forced herself to smile, and said, “Ha… ha… ha.” The darkness didn’t go away, but it started to look less like a face and more like a plain, old, petrified tree. She took a deep breath and spun again, this time looking for any sign of which way to go. Shadows, tombstone trees, and more shadows. A hollow feeling in her chest blossomed and grew. She was lost. She sighed. “I guess that’s it, then.” Two options remained: fly aimlessly through the trees looking for Spitfire who was long gone by now, or fly up and out and forfeit. Her chin dropped to her chest. She flapped upward, beginning her ascent to failure. Her eyes burned. She wiped at them with the back of a hoof and sniffled. “Must be allergies,” she said, sniffling again. “Why did I think I could ever beat a Wonderbolt? She’s in a whole other league. I didn’t even last two minutes against her.” As she climbed, the branches thinned in size, but multiplied exponentially in number. She understood why Spitfire had been flying so low; trying to speed through this spiky tangle above would strip the hair and feathers from a pegasus in ten seconds flat. Her forelock rested only a few inches below the tops of the highest branches when she stopped ascending. She sighed and gave a weak smile. At least she kind of got to hang out with her hero for a little while. She squinted through the branches and frowned. Something wasn’t right; one of the branches looked a little too straight. And too vertical. And too black. She gasped. “The spire!” She slapped a hoof over her face. How could she have been so stupid? She wasn’t lost, she just had to slow down and take a look. A yelp of pain rolled through the trees to her left. A hundred yards away through the branches, she caught a brief flash of yellow and orange. “Horse apples!” Spitfire said sounding irritated. “Worked so hard on losing her… I’m too clever for my own good.” The hollow feeling in Rainbow Dash’s chest vanished. Spitfire raised a hoof to her forehead to block the sun. “Where is it?” Rainbow Dash’s mouth dropped open. “She’s lost, too?” she mumbled. “But she’s a Wonderbolt!” A huge grin claimed most of her face. “This race ain’t over.” She slowly sank back down into the shadows like a swamp-gator preparing an ambush. “Not by a long shot.” After dropping twenty feet to where the branches were less like needles and more like fingers, she halted to scout a path. As if in presentation, an errant shaft of sunlight lanced down across a pegasus-sized corridor through the trees. She tensed, gathered her strength, let the strain build in her wings, and exploded forward through the gap. When she passed under where she had seen Spitfire, she rolled to her back and yelled, “Get moving or I’ll have to call you ‘Quitfire’!” She rolled to her front again and giggled, briefly wondering if it was a good idea to taunt her hero. She shrugged and smiled; either way, it was done. Where the cold hollow had been in her chest a few minutes ago, a new fire burned. It felt like her usual confidence, but far more intense, like exhilaration mixed with anticipation. A comfortable rhythm set in: swing around a trunk, loop, roll, and scissor. Every move was executed at maximum speed, as usual. She looked back over her shoulder often, but Spitfire was nowhere in sight. The shadows ahead began to lighten, more gray instead of black. She slowed, squinting ahead cautiously. The gray turned to white. She sucked in a breath. A wall of branches so entangled it almost looked like a solid mass blocked her path. She flew close and tapped a hoof against it. It didn’t give in the slightest. Groaning in frustration, she sped to her left and stopped after a few hundred yards. It was no use; the wall continued, curving far away into the distance. Her teeth ground as she rushed back the way she came, only to be faced with more impenetrable wall stretching into the shadows. “Guess I go up,” she said and bolted skyward. Through the thin, needle branches above she could see where the wall ended, but it was higher than the treetops. She grunted her annoyance. It was easy to get past by going over, but if she did she would forfeit the race. She looked back over her shoulder. If Spitfire didn’t actually see her go over the wall it didn’t count, did it? She shook her head and clapped her front hooves to her face. “No! Applejack wouldn’t cheat, and neither will I!” She sped back toward the ground, searching the expanse of the wall for any kind of passage or imperfection to exploit. No matter where she looked, it was the same: tighter than the fence Fluttershy kept around her chicken pen. More like thousands of layers of that wire fencing. A strange, rhythmic, thumping noise echoed up from below. Spitfire erupted from the shadows, cantering along the ground in bounding strides propelled by powerful wing thrusts. She looked up at Rainbow Dash as she power-pranced past. “Super Speed Strut!” she said and stuck her tongue out to blow a raspberry. Rainbow Dash gasped when Spitfire didn’t slow down and simply vanished into the base of the wall. She stared in confusion for a moment before screwing her face up and shouting, “Hey! That’s my move!” She flailed her hooves in front of her. “How do you know my move?” She growled and angled down to where Spitfire disappeared. Her hooves thumped as one when she touched down in front of a manticore-sized break in the base of the wall. An unnatural tunnel stretched through to the other side where an angry, red glow like the inside of a blacksmith’s forge pulsed at the far end. Feeling like she was entering a dragon’s maw, she stepped in to the piece of untold history. The walls were a mass of uneven breaks and torn edges as if something very angry, and very strong had blasted their way through with magic. The display of power she was traversing dwarfed her. She ran quickly with her head down as if her presence would summon whatever monster had bored its way through. The far side dumped her out onto an open plain, but not one of grass, trees, or anything living. The first barrier was breached.