//------------------------------//
// Chapter 9 
// Story: Sinister Lenses 
// by Osper 
//------------------------------//

	
Chapter 9


It was only ever so slowly that she realized she was alive. The throbbing pain in her head was proof of that, a sharp ache that went from her right temple towards her forehead.
Opening her eyes was a challenge. The left seemed fine but the right struggled as though it were held together with some kind of glue. She pushed her glasses up and gently prodded at the sticky eyelid and decided that it had to be blood. She carefully picked at it, peeling back the congealed bits until she could blink a few times and see.
Her head drifted up to the way she had come and the blue sky of day was still overhead. It had to have been a good fifty foot drop, wooden beams, stone blocks and part of the tower lodged in the sink hole that had been created.	Her head drifted up to the way she had come and the blue sky of day was still overhead. It had to have been a good fifty foot drop, wooden beams, stone blocks and part of the tower lodged in the sink hole that had been created.
That was when she realized her vision was split between it's normally pink hue and ordinary color.
What that meant was...!
She slowly removed the frames from her ears and looked at the glasses she'd worn for twenty years of her life.
The right lens was shattered and only shards still remained in the frame. Her breath caught in her throat at the sight and she immediately dropped down so her face was barely an inch from the cobblestone floor as she swept back and forth, combing over every inch of the area.
“Vhere are you, vhere!?”
Her father's satchel had landed next to her and spilled from it was his journal, the camera, AH!
She picked at the shards, scraping them into a pile and using the weather beaten journal to scoop them up.
The groan of sliding timbers froze her body. She darted her head around, slapping the book shut.
A second, louder groan and a trickle of dirt were all the warning she needed. She ran, opening her her eyes as wide as she could to catch any hint of a tunnel or hallway out.
Something slid overhead, stone grinding on stone that spurred her to look faster.
There!
She ducked into a dark tunnel barely a foot wide and braced herself against the wall, sliding deeper into the darkness. But no sound of the tunnel collapsing followed her. Looking back showed the only source of light and she sorely wanted to go back to it.
She'd rushed into the darkness to avoid the immediate danger but now she had a far greater concern and those dreadful words of her father came back to her again.
<Don't be afraid of the dark, Edelweiss.>
She refused to finish the rest, shaking her head to somehow lose the thought. But she couldn't move forward.
“It's okay Finish. Just because it's old doesn't mean dat dey'll be here. Ponies abandon bustling college campuses all de time for no reason at all. Nothing bad had to happen.”
She didn't believe that at all and her hooves became useless lumps at the ends of her legs.
Then she remembered.
She hadn't heard Scratch up above. There had been no yelling, no sounds coming from above except the debris shifting. Was she hurt? Had she been caught in the rain of blocks? Or was she coming to look for her? Had she gone back to town to get help? What was going on!?
She didn't want to believe it but if Scratch were hurt, she needed to get out. And that meant going blindly into the dark.
One step. Then another. Then another.
Dis is for Scratch. Move.
The pad of Finish' hooves was the only sound that accompanied her and she counted them. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. It didn't calm her much but it did keep her mind on moving forward.
She startled when she felt something flutter against her face, her heart racing again. A moment passed and she put her hoof forward. It was only a curtain. She swept it aside and felt the space around her open up from the small tunnel. Was it a room? If only she could see...
But she did have a light. She felt for the camera in the bag and held it up, setting it to flash. She set it back to automatic focus and bit the lens with her teeth to keep it from focusing, keeping the light on. A bright circle lit up the room when she pressed the capture button.
It was a standard room, ten feet by ten feet. Broken furniture littered the floor. A bed, a chair, a dresser. Nothing that gave the impression that anything but time had taken it's toll here.
There was a door set in the wall that stuck when she tugged on the rusted iron ring of a handle. A harder pull yielded better results and it swung open with the third.
Beyond was a long hallway lined with similar wooden doors. Some were closed but others were crushed in, splinters of the door lying about in a pattern that suggested force and not time had been the culprit. Her eyes wandered further down the corridor, not wanting any surprises to pop up under her feet.
What covered the floor made her blood run cold.
Bones and splinters of bone. Skulls and pieces were scattered everywhere, haphazardly thrown about as though whatever massacre, for that was the only explanation for such brutality, had been one of ripping and tearing with insane strength.
And she heard the voice.
Her body quaked in fear as the sob came closer. She turned towards the sound and through the broken lens over her right eye she saw the blue form of a phantom appear far down the hallway. It crawled slowly towards Finish, pulling itself an inch at a time, unable to stand on its back legs.
She backed away, down the opposite side of the hallway but couldn't run as her body locked up.
The ghost turned back, looking away from Finish and shielded it's face with one hoof as though trying to block out whatever horrible memory had claimed it in the first place.
It spoke, it's voice dissonant, as though two of the same recorded message were trying to play over one another.
“No! NO! Not...don't take me...I don't want to die!”
It crawled forward again, more frantic this time and Finish could see that it's back legs were a tangled mash of broken ethereal bone peeking through blue flesh.
Their eyes met as the ghost looked directly at her, or at whatever had stood in the exact spot Finish now occupied.
Tears flowed from it's empty sockets and Finish could feel terror coming off the being in waves of palpable energy.
“Help me!”
And the being exploded as though burst from the inside out. Each organ splattered on the wall, blue blood coating the wall and seeping down in a bloodfall. It slowly disappeared, the ghostly recording having completed it's message. But now Finish could see it. The walls were painted with deep, rust red stains and she screamed, the sound ringing off the tight walls, echoing throughout the entire building it seemed. The light went out without her mouth to hold the lens and she was plunged into total darkness.
She fled, her hooves tripping on the bones of the deceased and sending her sliding into the walls that left red smudges on her coat. Tears came to her eyes now, horror at what she'd stumbled into swelling inside her.
Was this what her father had been doing here? Another investigation? More of the dead rattling their chains in a hidden corner of the world where Celestia's gaze never wandered?
And if it had killed her father, who had done this for years, how could she escape?
Her hooves tripped over a new found set of stairs and she rocketed up, fleeing as though the very dead themselves were nipping at her heels, which her fevered mind had placed just behind her.
She had no idea where she was going as she ran int total darkness until a shaft of light pierced through the darkness ahead of her.
An exit!
She ran harder, huge leaps covering several feet at a time.
It was a door!
She burst through and found the ever blessed light of day careening through the destroyed front gate. The massive hole was just beyond and then the overgrown front gate.
She ran to it, laughing wildly as she yelled.
“Scratch! Scratch, I'm okay! Scratch!”
The sun beamed down on her as she stood in the archway and called out, searching the courtyard desperately.
Scratch wasn't there.
She turned her head this way and that, looking for any sign of her friend, a hint as to where she was or if she were around. The tower had mostly blocked off the courtyard and the hole in the middle could only be crossed by flight. Only a small path near the base of the wall the tower had fallen from would allow passage back to the other side.
But there wasn't a single clue about Scratch. She stepped out into the bright sunshine and looked again, calling out. The sun had barely moved in the sky from where it had been when they'd first entered the college ruin. Finish couldn't have been unconscious for more than twenty or thirty minutes.
Her tired smile fell away to a frown and she turned to look back at the gaping mouth of the school. Could Scratch have gone to look for her?
There was a small object on the ground just barely within the pool of sunlight allowed by the door. She trotted over and her heart skipped a beat when she saw what it was.
Scratch's head phones.
Her knees shook as she stared into the dark, right back through the door she had escaped through. Scratch had run down there to find her but there had been no sign of the DJ on the way up. Surely she would have called out to her if she'd heard Finish screaming and come to her rescue.
Come to her rescue?
It was always that way, wasn't it? Scratch was always coming to save her, to keep her company and to make her feel better at a moments notice. Hadn't she dropped everything to come with her on this trip? Why was it that Finish was hesitating now?
Finish took the first step towards the dark opening and took a deep breath to calm her racing heart. Of course Scratch was in there. Scratch wouldn't have wasted a thought on whether to go back to town to get help. She would've charged in immediately for the rescue.
Even with her heart pounding like a drum in her chest, she walked forward into the dark and prayed very hard she'd be walking back out.