Silent Ponyville: Reunion
Quiet surroundings.
Part 27
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"...What?" she responded incredulously, looking around at the surrounding buildings. "That can't be...Cloudsdale uses cloud construction. None of these buildings are made from clouds at all," she continued, looking at the wood, brick, and mortar constructed buildings lined up along both sides of the street.
"But look, it's the appliance store we bought our dryer from, and that's the medical supply store that was right across the street from it," Lance replied, pointing a hoof at both buildings in turn as he mentioned them.
Posey followed his hoof, offering each building a discerning squint before bringing her gaze back down to Lance, briefly looking away with a thoughtfully furrowed brow. "Yeah...I do remember it...but can we really say this entire place is Cloudsdale just from two buildings?"
"Fair point," Lance admitted while looking down the street both ways, trying to recall as much of the layout as he could remember. He had spent the majority of his time at the hospital or at home, having never been the 'out and about' sort of pony save for the nights he and Posey had been able to find some spare time to go out on the town together. Something came back to him though, causing him to fix his eyes on the fog shrouded street to his left. "We should go that way and see if that furniture outlet isn't six stores down on the right."
"Good idea," she said with a nod as she fell into step beside him. They proceeded along the street, counting the barricaded doors off until they hit the aforementioned sixth. Their eyes moved upward to see the torn up remnants of a sign that was now displaying roughly one third of a sofa. "That's a bit more convincing...mind if I try one?"
"Go for it," Lance replied with a nod.
Posey took only a moment to think before starting off at a slow trot. "Toy store, three buildings past the intersection, on the left. The one where we bought Fluttershy's doll."
Her husband spent a brief, unnoticed moment looking a bit crestfallen before dutifully following after her. They soon reached the end of that particular array of barricaded doors, getting a bit of a respite before finding the start of another at the other side of the intersection. Posey veered to the left to take a diagonal route across the street, and soon the building she had predicted would be there loomed into view as the fog gave way. There was no sign there to make it immediately apparent that she had been correct, but as they grew closer the trio of doll sitting there in the barred over display window made it obvious.
All three faced away toward the inside of the store, each curiously missing their manes and tails as though the doll maker had stopped partway through and decided to just throw a little dress on each of them. One of the dolls was partially scorched black, another was moth eaten and mildewy, and the third had red spattered bandages going across its head. Neither of them really felt the need to comment on it, as though mentioning it would somehow enable the grim looking dolls to 'win' in some way.
"Alright...I still don't think this is Cloudsdale but so far it's a good replica," she relented as she turned away from the window toward Lance. "There's still the whole 'brick and mortar cloud buildings' thing, and since when was Cloudsdale right over Ponyville? We only traveled up...right?" she asked, her concluding statement quickly becoming less assured until it turned into another question.
"I'm not even sure about that anymore," he replied with a shake of his head even though he too remembered nothing but a elevator going up. "But think about it, we can't touch the fog here even though we're pegasi." He reached down and passed his hoof ineffectually through the fog covering the ground. "And fog is basically just low clouds, so the clouds here probably can't support us, let alone make entire buildings. This might be the only way Cloudsdale can even exist here."
"Let's just go with that for now I guess," she said with a nod before looking thoughtfully down both sides of the street. "On the bright side, if this place has the same layout as Cloudsdale, we know how to get home." She had already started off in the general direction of their house at the same brisk trot as before, maternal instincts tugging at her even though she knew the photograph from the sewing book may well have been just another lie.
"Sorry we can't just fly there," Lance said with a melancholy glance at his still very wingless back.
"It's not your fault...even if we could, I doubt the fog would let us," Posey replied with a smile as she looked back at him over her shoulder.
------
"Shouldn't we have seen or...heard...something by now?" she asked quietly for little other reason than to at least put a tiny dent in the oppressive silence as they continued walking along the street that had formerly consisted of clouds. The intended path was impossible to miss, as the surrounding doors and alleys had all been cut off from access by various combinations of boards, bars, cracked concrete, and metal slabs.
"Is it a bad thing that we haven't?" Lance replied rather sensibly, though replying or even speaking in the first place at all back on the ground would not have struck him as sensible in the least.
"I suppose not but...it feels like it's going to happen you know? I kind of wish we could get it out of the way already," she explained while maintaining her vigilant watch of the fog around them.
"Yeah...crazy as it is I know the feeling," he reluctantly agreed as he continued maintaining his pace behind her. They had started out at a bit of a quicker clip, but the lengthy walk had taken its toll on both their nerves and his body and now they were at a normal walking speed.
...
...
...
"What do you think is holding this place up?" she asked again as another topic of conversation she could use to stave off the silence crossed her mind.
"Hrm?"
"This Cloudsdale isn't made of clouds, and the clouds themselves don't even work, right? And it sure feels like this place is much higher judging from how cold it is, so what's keeping it up here?" she clarified, sparing him another backward glance.
"Good question." Lance's brow furrowed, his gaze wandering down and to the side as he gave the topic some thought, trusting Posey to continue keeping an eye out for the both of them.
...
"What about that huge pillar we saw?" he said after a few moments, bringing his eyes back up.
"What pillar?"
"It was before we went into the hospital out in the field, remember?"
She spent an idle moment trying to recall what he was talking about. "Oh, yeah...just the one pillar holding this whole place up though?" she asked a bit a skeptically.
"With all the fog it'd be a bit silly to not think there could be a lot more of them out of sight," he pointed out.
"That's true...well, truth is I don't really care what's holding us up as long as this place doesn't collapse from under..." she stopped, her ear twitching briefly. "Wait."
Lance stopped just shy of running into her dress clad rump. "What is i-"
"Shh," she cut him off, looking ahead of them and to the left very intently.
...
Off in the distance they both heard a quiet mix of gagging and whimpers, then a brief moment of silence before a prompt 'thunk' and a nauseating slurping noise. Whatever it was, it was off to the side of the path they needed to continue along to reach their home...and possibly Fluttershy. Posey looked back at him as the distant slurping was accompanied by a pathetic whine, and he nodded in silent agreement that regardless of what was ahead they needed to stay the course.
The veered off to the right a bit to gain some distance and forced themselves ahead. It wasn't three more steps before Lance's watch started to softly buzz, confirming the presence of another monster. He gulped softly, hoping that the fog would be sufficiently thick to keep married couple and monster unseen by one another as they passed, but it was not to be. Even with the small buffer zone they'd put between them, a somewhat familiar shape loomed in the fog to their left as they kept their eyes glued to the source of the noise.
It was a scavenger...only...it wasn't. It still had the basic shape of one, feral, divided in two, only half a mouth to speak of...but it was unlike any of them they had encountered before. The mare half now looked emaciated and weak, skin even paler than before, the jagged teeth that had once filled its mouth absent leaving nothing but discolored, diseased looking bare gums in their wake. Its mouth was held forced open by dark red growths from the stallion side tipped with curved barbs that hooked into the sickly looking gums. The fearsome, vaguely feminine growling from before was now reduced to the pathetic whimpers and whines they had been hearing.
Whatever had happened to this creature, the dark red stallion side had fared much better. It was now covered in a familiar pattern of black veins, and looked to be much more than the glaring weak point it had previously been. Not only was it not withered like the other half, it looked a tad more well muscled than before, and as the ear of the mare half gave a twitch, the double sided head paused and then rose to look at the two ponies on the side of the street. The stallion half still didn't have a proper mouth, but it now had a hole at the end of its half snout from which an angry red proboscis like tongue emerged and currently looked to be attached to something lying concealed below the layer of fog.
The scavenger remained like that, staring suspiciously at the two of them as the mare half gave another pained whine. At last the stallion half made a move, the scavenger's head jerking to the side as it dislodged the proboscis with a painful sounding tearing of flesh, another, much sharper, blood covered barb revealing itself as the tongue's tip was lifted above the fog. They didn't get a very good look at it before it was promptly jammed down the mare half's throat, eliciting more of the gagging and whimpering sounds heard earlier as it struggled fruitlessly while being force fed the blood that had been sucked from what must have been a fog shrouded corpse.
As the two of them looked on wide eyed in shock, the barbed tongue was finally withdrawn, leaving the mare half to gasp for breath while it darted beneath the fog, lodging back into the scavenger's current carrion of choice with a meaty crunch. The scavenger hastily moved around the hidden cadaver, repositioning itself so that the stallion half concealed and shielded the mare half before it pulled back and started dragging away it's meal. Neither Lance or Pony moved a muscle. If the newly altered scavenger wanted to leave, they weren't about stop it. As it retreated further, it became a silhouette in the fog, and then disappeared from sight entirely, leaving the two ponies to wait another moment for Lance's watch to quiet down before letting out the breath they had been subconsciously holding.
"That was different from the last one, right? It's not just me?" Posey asked, still wary of her own senses.
"No, you're right, they didn't look like that before," Lance confirmed for her. "It wouldn't have retreated like that either...they used to either attack or stand their ground. That one looked like it wanted to run away and hide," he pondered as he looked at the ever present wall of fog into which it had retreated.
"That was a poor choice of direction then, everything's blocked off that way, you saw it," she added before turning to continue their trip. "Come on, I want to get home so we can get off the str-EEP!" she cried out in shock as her hoof failed to find anything beneath it, sending her falling forward into the fog and downward.
"POSEY!!!" he shouted in alarm as he dashed forward in hopes that she had grabbed onto something and could hold on long enough for him to pull her u-
"What?" she asked as she casually popped up from the clouds, held aloft by the flapping wings Lance had apparently failed to consider in his moment of panic.
"Uh...nothing," he said, sheepishly backing up a couple steps whilst once again feeling like a complete moron for a few moments.
"Okay," she replied with a nod before turning her attention to the sudden lack of ground she'd just encountered. "Stay here, I'm going to see how big this gap is."
"Be careful," Lance urged, the earlier shock still sifting out of his system.
Posey proceeded to start repeatedly dipping under the clouds in different places, continually wearing a disappointed but determined look as she time and again found nothing but thin air beneath. Her search grew more distant, eventually carrying her beyond the visual range the fog permitted and leaving Lance to gaze into the mist while his worry gathered into a tense knot in his gut. Finally he was relieved to hear a definite sign of life.
"Lance?!" she called out, apparently having become disoriented in the mass of indecipherable white mist around her.
"Over here!" he shouted in reply. It only took her a few moments to fly back into sight and land next to him before refolding her wings.
"Bad news, it's not a 'gap', it's more of an 'endless chasm'. There's nothing out there, the 'ground' just stops," she explained while catching her breath a bit.
"So we can't go any further?"
"Not unless we could both fly, and I'm not sure that'd be wise even if we could. I would've stayed completely lost out there until my wings cramped up if I hadn't had your voice to follow."
He sighed, the news suddenly making him feel even more tired than before. "...okay, but that picture was definitely leading us here right? So there has to be something," he thought aloud before starting to look about at the area around them. Nothing seemed to catch the attention of either of them at first, but a few steps forward parted the mists just enough to make a mark on a nearby wall visible. It was directly next to the spot where the scavenger had been sucking its quarry dry.
"What's...oh," Posey started, losing a bit of enthusiasm after she trotted closer and recognized the mark as just another streak of blood on a wall. "Nevermind."
"What is it?" Lance asked as he caught up and stood next to her.
"I thought that might have been something but...blood on the wall isn't exactly anything special here," she pointed out, that familiar feeling of something completely insane making perfect sense briefly passing over her.
"Not really," he replied with a nod. Then he paused, squinting his eyes at the sanguine marking on the wall. It wasn't just a random spatter like they were familiar with. The shape was round...and of a rather familiar size. Out of curiosity he stepped closer, lifting a foreleg and placing his hoof against the wall just adjacent of it. The two profiles matched with a rather unsettling perfection. "This is a hoof...maybe it was from the pony that split thing was...eating?" he pondered, feeling that simply saying 'eating' might be a nice alternative to actually describing what they had seen.
"As in a struggle?"
"Perhaps."
"If it was a struggle, it was a very neat struggle...I don't see another speck of it anywhere, it's just this one hoof mark," Posey said as she looked around at the surrounding area. "I...I suppose there could be some on the ground...but still, what pony fighting for their life just leaves one neat hoof mark?"
"Yeah, you're right," Lance agreed. "So if it wasn't accidental, maybe it's...pointing at something?" he continued, blurting out the first thing that crossed his mind, for lack of anything better to go on.
They both looked up in near unison. There was a sizable crack in the cement wall of the building, out of which stuck a haphazardly folded piece of paper. Lance couldn't help but groan at the sight. He was getting so sick of notes. Posey on the other hoof had a bit more of a useful reaction, taking to the air with a quick couple of wing flaps and tugging the note free before landing and unfolding it for the two of them to read.
"Heaven Ascends, Into Kingdom United."
"..."
"..."
"...what the hay is that supposed to mean?" Posey asked quite understandably.
"I have no clue," Lance answered as he closed his eyes and rubbed his increasingly sore forehead. "It's probably some ridiculously impossible riddle, and we'll have to be driven to the point of insanity before we make enough crazy assumptions to solve it."
"Sounds like you've...done it before," she observed, looking at the note with a bit more worry in her eyes.
"I did. Let's just hope that's the only one we have to find." He found himself staring off into the fog toward where they now knew the ground came to an end. Of all the things that had happened to him down there, he was now being irritated by the shadow of the blasted notes. Compared to everything else, that bit of improbable mental gymnastics had practically been him getting a break to catch his breath, yet here he was complaining about it after the fact.
Maybe it was just a way to avoid having to think of the other things that had happened down there.
"There's still a way we can walk back to our house, right?" Lance finally said after taking a last moment to try and remember any alternate overcloud routes and coming up blank.
"Mhmm, I remember one other way," Posey said before stashing the note away and heading back the way they had come, looking extra wary since the scavenger had already retreated in the same direction. "It's a good bit longer though, so if you need to rest just tell me."
"I'll be fine," Lance said despite the fact that the walk thus far already had him feeling a bit sore.
"Okay, cheer up a bit though hrm? We're going right past the amusement park," she said in jest as she once again looked back at him over her shoulder.
------
"I can't believe they got rid of the park," she quietly lamented with a soft pout on her face as they made their way down the lane after the lengthy trip.
"Yeah...Cloudside Park opened on the other end of town...and everyone went there instead...so Nimbusland eventually had to close down," Lance explained, panting from the long walk. Despite his fatigue he would still have to admit the trip there had been easier than their trek from the apartments to the hospital had been back on the ground. It hadn't been entirely free of monsters; they had run into a few more of the altered scavengers and even two nurses that Lance hadn't counted on seeing out and about. Fortunately the scavengers still seemed more interested in getting away from them, and the combination of preemptive warning from his watch and the ample room to move about had let them avoid the much slower nurses.
"Dad used to take me there all the time when I was a filly," she replied, still keeping her eyes ahead in case anything new decided to emerge from the fog. It didn't help that said fog was also making it impossible to tell where exactly they were along their home lane. She'd resorted to simply looking at houses as they passed to see if any looked familiar. "At least we got to take Fluttershy there a couple times before it closed," she continued with a bittersweet sigh before something else occurred to her. "Did the two of you ever go to Cloudside after...?" she asked, stopping and turning so she wouldn't have to give him yet another sidelong look over her shoulder.
"Um...no," he replied, diverting his eyes briefly as he let that overly simple but still technically truthful answer stand.
...
"That's too bad...maybe we could all go together after we get out of here," she suggested as she resumed the trip, still abiding by her promise to let him open up about whatever had happened to their daughter in his own good time.
"Maybe...wait, I recognize this house," he said as his glance off to the left for a distraction proved fruitful.
Posey looked back and followed his gaze upward, raising an eyebrow as she failed to see anything familiar about it. "You do?"
"Yeah, I fly over it every time I go to work." He had caught his breath from the brief pause and moved past Posey, now the more well oriented of the two of them.
"I...I can't remember ever seeing this house," Posey said while still scrutinizing the profile of the house against the fog. She didn't get a reply from Lance, but she couldn't help but notice the sudden absence of his hoof falls on the fog shrouded grating. She turned to look at him again, hoping nothing had silently carried him off during her brief distraction.
"Um...they only built it about ten years ago," he explained after the proper words finally came to him.
"Oh...so it was...alright. How much farther do we have to go?" she asked, making another quick topic shift as she caught up and assumed her position ahead of him.
"Not far now, that's the seventh house on the right as you're coming out our front door."
The last short leg of the trip was made in silence. Their latest reminder that Posey was walking around post mortem certainly hadn't helped morale, but the sudden rise in tension came more from the anticipation of what had become of the house they had worked so hard to make into a home together, or whether it would be there at all. He could even hear Posey counting off the houses as they passed, like it was yet another monster about to emerge from the fog before them, and he couldn't really blame her. Lance couldn't even imagine what it would be like to enter someplace so personal that had been without him for nearly two decades.
...
Or maybe he'd been there already.
"One," she muttered before their house finally came into view.
It was just as abandoned looking, boarded up, and barricaded as the rest of the houses with one addition the others lacked. Surrounding the house was a high chain linked perimeter fence topped with more gnarled than average barbed wire, the metallic barrier sporting the expected layer of rust, no doubt having been helped along by the water vapor constantly hanging heavy in the air. The only way a non flying pony would ever get past such an obstacle unscarred was a padlocked gate facing the street.
Posey stopped. As Lance watched with curiosity and a bit of worry, she did nothing but look onwards at the home from which she had been missing for such a long time. He heard her breath catch before she sullenly took a seat right there where the sidewalk was supposed to be located. After another moment her body shivered with a soft sob. Her husband could think of little more to do than just move next to her and-
"No no no I'm fine," she urged him as she placed a hoof on his chest before he could take a seat next to her. "We need to keep going, she might still be in there," she continued even as she wiped her eyes.
"I'm...sorry, for what it's worth," he replied.
"What? Why? It's not your fault I've been gone so long...or that it looks as bad as everything else does here."
He didn't say anything in answer, only looked at her, then up at the house morosely before turning his attention on the gate. Unlike the rest of the fence, the padlock that kept him out was free of rust, tarnishes, or anything else that might suggest it was anything other than completely structurally sound. It would take something far heavier wielded by somepony far stronger than he to break it off. He raised his hoof to take hold of it and gave it a look, finding another of the number combination locks that that place seemed so fond of using. It was a three number combination, each one between zero and nine.
"One thousand possible answers," he muttered.
"Doesn't seem productive to count how many straws of hay there are before trying to find the needle you know," she commented as he once again engaged in a bit of needlessly discouraging math.
"Right um...let's see that note again I guess. At least I won't have to figure it out alone this time," he said, seemingly trying to add a positive note to make up for the demoralizing probability he'd just gone and said out loud.
"No you won't." She managed a smile for him before pulling the note from her pack for the two of them to look over.
...
"I still have no idea what this means," she said, inadvertently speaking for the both of them.
"Heaven ascends into kingdom united...how are we even supposed to get a number from that?" he asked quite unproductively.
"Um...ascends...maybe the highest possible number? But what would the rest of it be there for then if that was the only word that mattered? And why the hay did they bother using a comma and period if they were just going to capitalize every word?"
"At least this one doesn't detail a murd-...wait." He took another look at the note.
"Doesn't detail a what?" she asked with a slight amount of concern.
"...There's no way it's that simple," he said, seemingly oblivious to her question as he took hold of the lock again and started dialing in a combination. Posey opened her mouth to press the whole 'murd-' issue further but thought better than to interrupt him since he seemed to be on to something.
After dialing in the combination, a last tug undid the padlock, allowing Lance to then push the gate open.
"What was it?" she asked before flinching at both note and padlock burning to ash in their hooves while once again leaving not a single burn mark on them.
"Five, seven, five." He stepped into their front yard, taking another cautionary look around.
She furrowed her brow in thought, going over the single sentence that had been on the note, but still failing to link it with that particular sequence of numbers. "How did you get that?"
"The words were nonsense, I realized it when you mentioned the capitalized letters," he explained as he pulled the gate open further, inviting her in. "And those letters were H, A, I, K, U."
"So five, seven, five, makes sense." She gave a nod of understanding as she accepted his invitation before closing and re-latching the gate behind her. As usual, anything that really wanted through the gate would have no trouble but closing it behind them still gave them some false scrap of security. "Speaking of which, remember that weird tree with the key to the hospital in it back on the ground? Where we only had the word 'why' for a hint?"
Lance nodded.
"Don't you think it would've been simpler to just say the word 'why' sounds like the letter Y instead of that stuff about autopsies?"
"Oh...yeah, I kind of over-thought that one," he admitted. Since the front door was barricaded, no discussion was necessary before they both started heading around to the back.
"Ever so slight...ly...oh come on," she practically growled at the sight that greeted them upon rounding the corner. There was little other than flower beds braced with rotted wood planks and containing what resembled barren, lifeless sand more than fertile soil. Despite this, the flowers she had spent hours tending were still there, only now they were dried, faded, withered husks. She stepped closer, curiously touching one with her hoof only to have it snap and fall, silently breaking into a small scattering of plant dust and eliciting a mournful whine from the cream colored mare.
Lance was about to ask what she had been expecting exactly but immediately thought better of it.
"It's not like I was expecting them to be just fine or anything, but they should've been rotted away entirely by now, you know?" she started in a spontaneous fit of mind reading. "I didn't have to see this. Everything else is bad enough already."
"No offense, but I'll take the dead flowers over the everything else if I had a choice," he replied honestly if not tactfully.
"Yeah," she reluctantly agreed with a sigh. "Just such a shame to see them like this after you insisted on buying the cloud enchanted soil for me."
"...what?"
"Hrm? Don't you remember? I was too worried for Fluttershy to spend the money on it after we moved up here, but you insisted because you knew how much I loved gardening."
"..."
"Lance?"
"Yeah, I...remember that."
"Good," she said with a soft smile.
Their point of entry into the house was fairly clear; the back door leading into the dining room was unbarricaded, though what lay beyond was obscured thanks to the boards covering the large windows that had given them many a lovely view with their dinner. Posey, still taking point, opened the door, and her snout immediately scrunched a bit as a waft of stale air, smelling of old paper with a slight touch of mildew, struck her. Had her house smelled like that in any other circumstance she would have been mortified, but after the suffocating mess that the transformed hospital had been it was almost pleasant in comparison. She took a step in, the source of the odor immediately obvious as she laid eyes on a room stuffed with boxes of old newspapers stacked to the ceiling, to the point there the only visible floor was a small path from the back door to another door across from her that she knew would lead into the living room.
"Did we-" she was interrupted by a cough, "-did we have a door there? I could've sworn you could just walk into the living room from the dining room."
"I didn't add one later...that's new for both of us," he replied, likewise noticing the smell and just how relatively bad it wasn't.
Unsure of what to think, but sure that standing there thinking wouldn't get them any closer to finding her daughter, Posey trotted over to the door. Following a pause to check that Lance was still right behind her, she brought her hoof up to the knob and pulled it open...immediately regretting it.
She was there. She was lying right there in their living room. Surrounding her on the floor was an assortment of bloody yet neatly cut restraints that had once been around her neck. Now all that remained on her was a line of puncture wounds where the bolts had previously secured the bracings to her neck, save for one remaining segment that a dirty, beige colored, grey maned pony in a painful looking set of straps and visors was currently gripping in her bloody, bolt cutter like mouth.
The grinning stalker looked over at Posey, then gave a distorted, screechy squeak of terror before letting go of the last bit of the sovereign's restraints and fleeing into the nearby hallway. Once the shot of icy terror had passed through her spine, Posey was about to strongly suggest that she and Lance get back out into the yard but that plan changed quickly once they realized the huge stacks of heavy boxes had lost balance and were teetering on the edge of falling over towards them. If they tried for the back door they would just get themselves trapped beneath the hoarded papers, leaving Posey with no other choice but to grab Lance's hoof and pull, sending them falling into the living room just as the avalanche of junk slammed the door shut.
"We have to get the door open, right now," Posey said in rising panic as she jumped back up and started trying to force the door open to no avail. Lance just as hurriedly scrambled to his hooves and gave her what assistance he could, but even with both of them pushing, the door budged open perhaps half an inch at best. There was simply too much collapsed weight blocking it now, and it was the only escape route they had that didn't lead right past the sadistic beast.
An irritated, unnatural snarl focused them back upon the reason they were so frantically trying to escape. The sovereign was looking toward the hallway down which the stalker had fled, clearly rather angry at having been abandoned before the job was properly done. She did not dwell on it for long though, soon rising to her hooves with an uncharacteristic malaise instead of taking wing and lunging for them. Her black tendril emerged from her unusually gravity laden mane, wrapping around the last segment of restraints still bolted to her neck and pulling. Her body shivered, and an odd combination of a growl and a distorted whine emerged from her metallic muzzle as she seemed to make the first expression of pain Lance had ever seen from her. After a steady few moments of effort the bolt finally wrenched free of her neck, a fresh gout of blood streaming down from the newly opened wound and dripping onto the floor to join the rest of the crimson fluid pooled there.
With that bit of unpleasantness out of the way she started uneasily advancing toward them, having to stop several times to avoid losing her balance. Were this any other monster they might have taken her apparent weakness as an invitation to try and get past her, but there was no doubt in either of their minds that even at death's door this mare was capable of tearing them limb from limb. It was all they could do to stay quiet and just hope to Celestia that she lost interest...somehow...like she'd never done before prior to doing something horrendous. She finally stopped, just in front of them as they stood hopelessly backed against the door they couldn't open as Lance's watch screeched at them. Her head was hanging low, and her breathing was labored, but it was not from eager anticipation so much as having to catch her breath. Each second passed with all the ease of a knife being pushed into their gut, their eyes briefly glancing toward one another as they just waited for the sovereign to do anything.
Her head rose about an inch and they both flinched. It rose another foot in Posey's direction and Lance had placed himself between the two mares before he'd even registered that he was moving. The sovereign's head made another curious tilt as her exhausted yet penetrating eyeless gaze bore a hole into him again. He didn't move. He didn't even break eye contact. His was the terrified face of a pony trying to do something when there really was nothing to be done, a stare that would frighten nopony, ever. Lance's eyes weren't commanding...they were begging.
The metal visor remained transfixed upon him as though its owner doubted what she was seeing. But eventually she heaved a tired, growling sigh of acceptance that sounded disappointed more than anything. Lance thought nothing of it though, all he was was the sovereign turning and leaving, finally stumbling once and leaning on a wall a moment before getting her balance back and retreating down the same hallway as had the stalker. She was gone, and Posey was still in one piece as his watch fell quiet again.
"What the hay did you do that for?" Posey scolded, furious but still keeping her voice low as he turned back towards her. She was glaring at him with watery eyes.
"I...I didn't want what I saw back in the hospital to actually happen," he said, only now realizing that he too had a few tears to blink away.
"And you think I'd be fine with watching you get cut in half again?!" she replied in an even harsher whisper.
...
"I wasn't thinking, okay?"
Their ears twitched, both of them catching a sound through the wall and falling silent to try and track it. It was the sound of heavy hoof steps on their stairs slowly ascending. Once they reached the second floor they moved overhead, Lance and Posey looking up at the ceiling to track their path until they came to a stop. Then they heard the sound of a large body all but collapsing to the ground and remaining there.
"She's on the balcony," Posey muttered.
"Come on, there's got to be another way out." Lance didn't even need to mention that they had to locate said way out before somepony started feeling better. Their living rooom was now bare save for a single chair in the middle of the room facing a large rusted over safe and the practical lake of blood the sovereign had left behind.
"Did all this come from her? How is she still alive?" Posey wondered as she made certain not to accidentally step in it. For all she knew it was poisonous to the touch.
"I don't know, but you'd be surprised how much blood can come out of a small hole in a pony's neck...or several," Lance explained as he scrutinized the safe. There was no dial combination lock, just three triangular indentations and the words "Schedule Departures" scratched into the rust directly above them. He made a mental note of it and then moved along to the next part of the house since the living room didn't have anything else of interest.
The only other way out of the living room that wasn't currently blocked by about twenty years worth of hoarded news copy was the same escape route the stalker and sovereign had both taken. Thus they approached it with caution even though Lance's watch was still silent. Before they would reach the first floor hallway, they would pass by the entryway and front door on their right, and the entrance to the kitchen on their left. As their objective was currently just to escape the building, both sets of eyes naturally veered to the right.
Door 303 was waiting for them instead of their front door. It was not the version that would trap Lance in a memory and then disappear either. A single lock holding together a last few chains made it clear that this was the nightmare provoking, actual door he'd been slowly unlocking bit by bit much to a certain somepony's chagrin. The significance of finding it right off the bat was lost upon Posey, but the amber coated surgeon who had twice been forced through horror upon horror just to locate it was left standing there, blinking in confusion at how impossibly easy it had been.
"We're going to have to take off another lock just to get out of here," Posey observed with dread.
"Yeah," Lance answered simply as the sensation of being blindsided continued to linger.
Posey gave a soft shiver at the idea of descending into another nightmare. "The first one was bad enough...I can't even imagine what it'll be like in our own house Lance."
Her husband had little words of comfort at that moment. They hadn't been attacked on the way over there. The sovereign was suffering from severe anemia and letting them be. The door was right there out in the open. All of this was going to cost them dearly, and the possibilities left him absolutely petrified.
"Maybe there's a...health drink or something in the kitchen," she continued, hoping to distract herself from thinking of the matter at hoof any further in the face of his complete lack of a response. Lance nodded in agreement and turned to follow her as she walked into their now thoroughly dust covered, slightly moldy kitchen. Just as he was about to step in however, another sound from their balcony pulled his eyes upward. It was four hooves clumsily planting themselves on the floor, then a moment of silence before he heard another large body collapsing, followed by a half-hearted clang. As far as he could tell she had just tried to stand, failed, and then lashed out at the metal railing. He let out a nervous sigh. There was a huge price to pay, and a sadistic ticking clock over their heads.
And then he looked forward again to see that the kitchen entrance was gone. The wall now continued where just seconds before it had opened to allow passage, now bearing a note with familiar black writing nailed to the wall.
"Welcome home."