//------------------------------// // The Blackened Spire // Story: Seeing Monsters // by Hopefullygoodgrammar //------------------------------// The teleportation was far more painful than the last one, and it deposited the trio several feet above the ground. Daring was, as per the norm, the first one to get to her hooves. They were surrounded on all sides by desert, with not a single sign of life to be seen. “Great, just great.” growled Daring, turning to Dr. Hoof, who was rubbing his head and looking at his surroundings with a face drawn up in confusion and pain. “Where are we?” he asked, staggering to his hooves and shaking his head, presumably to rid himself of the aftereffects of the teleportation spell. “I have no clue.” said Daring with an annoyed huff, she turned around and addressed the third member of their party, “Ahuizotl, do you know where we are?” Ahuizotl, who had been lying in the sand with his tail wrapped around his deflated stomach, sat up with a sharp gasp and his milky eyes bulged out. He pressed his scarred hands to his head and began to moan low in his throat. Daring went to him and crouched to his level, “What’s wrong now?” Ahuizotl looked at her and said, “We are close, Daring.” “Close to what?” asked Dr. Hoof, managing to sound both annoyed, curious and worried at the same time. “The ruins, you dummy.” snapped Daring. “Oh…” was all that the doctor could say as he pinned his ears. “Yes, the ruins.” said Ahuizotl, looking off into the horizon, which was slowly swallowing the sun. “It’s alright” said Daring, gently turning his head so that his eyes met hers, “we can leave once Dr. Hoof recovers.” Ahuizotl snorted and shook his head miserably, “It won’t let you leave now that you’re here.” Dr. Hoof let out a bark of derisive laughter that Daring silenced with a glare. She turned back and said, “You make it seem like these ruins are… alive somehow. But that’s impossible, ruins are nothing but collections of old and weathered stone, they can’t think or breath or anything that we ponies can do.” Ahuizotl looked at her, “But these ruins aren’t just ancient stone, Daring Do. They are not made from stone, they’re made from… something else, something that doesn’t belong here and its wrongness pollutes the sands. The ruins watch you, they breathe, they bleed, Daring, they bleed when you strike the stuff that it’s made of, bleed in yellow and in gray.” He shuddered and Daring frowned. She didn’t want to believe what her ex-foe had said, but the conviction in his voice gave her pause. “So what do we do?” asked Dr. Hoof, “If we can’t leave, then do we just accept our fate and go to these ruins? Can’t you fly us out?” Daring shook her head, “I could only carry one person and I’m not leaving Ahuizotl behind.” The doctor sighed, “I understand. But why can’t we just, y’know, walk the other way? Will something stop us? And, if so, what is it?” Ahuizotl bit his lip, then said, “It’s hard to explain, but the place sort of…. loops back.” Dr. Hoof cocked his head, “What?” The unicorn doctor looked around, then he wandered a few feet, looking at his surroundings intently. Finally he turned back to Ahuizotl and asked, “Will I get killed if I try to test your theory?” Ahuizotl shook his head, “No, but it will make your eyes and head hurt.” “Because the normal pony’s mind isn’t accustomed to seeing… the universe looping?” asked Dr. Hoof, sounding interested. Ahuizotl nodded and, without another word, Dr. Hoof turned and walked up and over a nearby sand dune, vanishing completely a second later. Daring watched the dune intently, hoping that Ahuizotl was just exaggerating or suffering from a very vivid delusion. She held her breath and prayed to any deity that would listen for Dr. Hoof to return and happily debunk what Ahuizotl had said. A minute passed, then two, then three. The minutes stretched on and Daring felt herself start to sweat. Why hasn’t he come back? she thought worriedly. The tan pegasus looked over to Ahuizotl and saw him gazing off into the distance with an uncertain look on his face. Oh, sweet Celestia, he isn’t certain himself. she realized. “Ahuizotl.” she began, drawing his attention with her now-cold tone, “You said that Dr. Hoof wouldn’t get hurt if he tested out what you said… were you lying?” Ahuizotl shook his head, “I don’t know.” “What d’you mean you don't know?!” she roared, fed up with his vagueness. “I don’t know because the Ruins could’ve changed things!” he bellowed, getting to his paws, “Whatever lurks inside doesn’t operate by our reality, it isn’t alive and it isn’t dead, it can control so much and it is so powerful that it could change the rules if it wanted to!” He stalked closer to Daring as tears leaked from his eyes, “You don’t know what it’s like to have that sort of knowledge burning your brain, Daring Do. If you escape this then you’ll only have some nightmares and some ideas for your next book, but I’ll never get the voices and the images and the knowledge out of my head!” He slumped down at her hooves, buried his head in his hands, and whispered, “I’ll only be free when I die.” Daring sat stunned for a moment before reaching down and yanking Ahuizotl to his paws, then she addressed him. “Listen to me very carefully. I may not know what you’re going through, and it must be utter Tartarus for you, and you are being so, so strong for me and Dr. Hoof and yourself. But Dr. Hoof might be in danger and you need to tell me how to get him back.” Ahuizotl whimpered, “I don’t know what these new rules are. I’m sorry.” Daring growled and pressed a hoof to her temples, “So what, we just give up and die?”, she noticed that Ahuizotl wasn’t looking at her anymore. She started to get angry, then she realized that, although he wasn’t looking at her, he wasn’t ignoring her: he was looking behind her. Daring whirled and saw, to her immense relief, Dr. Hoof coming towards them at a slow pace. He relief died when she saw his pale skin and his wide, terrified eyes.   Daring raced towards him and managed to catch him just as he fell forward. The tan pegasus turned him over and lifted his head up, “Doctor Hoof! Can you hear me?” The unicorn doctor nodded weakly, then said in a weak voice, “He was right: I went beyond the dune and got as far as a couple of yards before something happened, I cannot even begin to describe it, it was like-like time froze and the desert got very long and then it-it-just… looped back.” Daring started to speak, but Dr. Hoof cut her off. “But there was something else, Daring. I…. I saw it.” “You saw the ruins?” asked the adventurer. The doctor nodded, then shuddered. Daring placed a hoof to her chin, “So these ruins are just over that dune?” she asked. “Yes, of course” said Dr. Hoof, giving her a confused look, “I called out to you and told you, didn’t you hear me?” Daring shook her head, “No I didn’t, but, from what Ahuizotl’s told me, this place isn’t really into the whole ‘Laws of Reality’ stuff. So it’s very likely that this place just sort of…. carried away on the wind or something like that.” Dr. Hoof let out a pitiful moan, “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?” Daring shook her head fervently, “No we won’t, doc. We’re going to live, I promise you that.”,  then she sighed and said, in a more hesitant tone, “But we’re going to have to go back over the dune and see these ruins.” “Why?” asked Dr. Hoof, now rising back to his hooves with Daring’s aid. “Because” said Daring, gently releasing pressure on Dr. Hoof’s body to allow him to gain his hooves, “I think that these ruins might hold the key to getting out. Because if there’s one thing that I know about cursed temples and artifacts, it’s that they lose their power when their heart or their vital bits get destroyed.” Ahuizotl, who had remained silent up until this point, let out a braying laugh when she said these words. Daring turned towards him, “I’m serious, Ahuizotl, we have to go inside and end this.” “And if you fail?” asked Ahuizotl, switching emotions from hysterical to serious in a flash. Daring looked him in the eyes and said, with all of her confidence, “We will.” Then she turned to Dr. Hoof, who was gazing at her with slightly starry eyes, and said, “Take us to the ruins.” Daring Do looked at the ruins, and the desert that surrounded it, and felt her confidence take a nosedive. The sand, which lay around and blanketed the massive ruins, was as black as coal, like an infected scab on the earth. The sky had changed as well: the cloudless, evening sky had become dark and shrouded heavy clouds that grew thicker the closer they got to the ruins. Daring thought that she saw something retreat into one of the clouds: something large and spindly, like a spider’s limb.   The most unsettling, though, were the trees, at least, that’s what they resembled in silhouette with their spindly limbs and lengthy trunks, but upon closer inspection, their bark was revealed to be an oily, fleshy covering shot through with oozing cracks. “This place is like a festering wound.” said Dr. Hoof as he took all of the ghastly sights in. “More like a cancer.” said Ahuizotl, passing him by and approaching the ruins that jutted out of the blackened sand like shattered bones. Daring followed him and Dr. Hoof followed after. As they got closer they could see more of the ruins. Ahuizotl had been right, the materials that had been used to create the unnatural architecture weren’t like any mineral that she had ever seen: they seemed unbelievably smooth, yet they were rough to the touch, and they shone slightly with an inner phosphorescence that reminded her of some types of fungi. Yet nothing, save for the imitation-trees, grew in the blackened sands.   Daring pulled herself away from the odd stones and focused on the overall designs of the facades and half-buried turrets and battlements. The tan pegasus surmised that the ruins were those of an ancient castle, not unlike the one in Canterlot. No. she mentally corrected, It’s nothing like the castle of the princesses, this is the exact opposite. She heard a gasp and turned to find Dr. Hoof sitting on his rump with his jaw hanging slack and his eyes bulging. Daring followed his line of vision, wondering what could have made him react the way he did, the she saw It and understood. It jutted out from the center of the corruption like a pike tip exiting a corpse, it was tall enough to be lost in the swirling gray clouds that loomed high above and it was so utterly black that it seemed to pull all of the light and shadows in the area towards it, creating odd and unnerving patterns of light and darkness around its base. It’s shape was also unnatural. When Daring looked at it head on the spire seemed to be pointed and four-sided, but, when she looked at it sideways, it seemed to have two extra sides as well as a slight curve of the base. Daring blinked several times and tried to understand what she was seeing, but she failed to do so. “Don’t bother trying to see it right. You’ll only make your eyes bleed.” said Ahuizotl, who had come up to her. Daring was startled out of a revere that she didn’t even know that she had fallen into. She turned and tried to stammer her reply out, but Ahuizotl held a hand up to silence her. “Yes, Daring, this is the entrance to the place below.” he said, gesturing to the base. Daring looked there and saw a large, darkened opening in the unnameable material from which the spire was constructed. To Daring’s eyes it looked like the toothless maw of a hungry predator, waiting for her to enter. And, although fulfilling its unspoken wish was the last thing that she wanted to do, she knew in her heart that it was the only way to escape their predicament. So, knowing that every step that she took from thereon out would be one step closer to danger, she said, “Alright, gang. Let’s go stop a curse.” Then she and her companions began their descent into the dark ruins.