It took nearly three doses of the pain-killing brew, combined with nearly fifteen hours of sleep, but Fluttershy found the strength to accompany Zecora to Ponyville, her letter to Celestia tucked away safely in a brown knapsack Zecora had let lent her. She adjusted the strap on her shoulder. Her muscles and joints still ached, and her wings were still next to useless until they healed, but she was mobile, at the very least.
She checked the knapsack. The piece of the Amulet of Binding was still safe, in a small internal pocket next to the letter. The piece was the absolute priority for Fluttershy. She doubted that Zecora fully understood what exactly it was that she had retrieved from the forest, but then again, Zecora wasn’t a fool. Whatever suspicions she had as to what it was, she kept it to herself, though. For that, Fluttershy was silently grateful.
“Thank you for everything, Zecora,” Fluttershy said, sidestepping a large muddy puddle. “It is no problem, Fluttershy,” Zecora replied. As per the usual nowadays, the weather was chilly. A thick pea-soup fog had rolled in, again, enveloping Ponyville and the Everfree Forest in a thick greyness that didn’t seem to move. While it wasn’t cold enough for Fluttershy to see her breath, it was certainly cold enough to add a certain degree of discomfort to the task of walking. Whether it would rain or not was still open for debate, since the clouds had been hovering over the landscape for weeks and weeks, now.
Perhaps it was the elation at having a piece of the amulet, or perhaps it was the thought that Twilight could be freed from the influence of the Slender Pony, as shown through the events at the Castle of the Two Sisters, or perhaps it was simply the triple dose of painkillers coursing through the bloodstream, but Fluttershy was in a good mood as she walked alongside Zecora. The fog thickened as they approached Ponyville, which Fluttershy took note of. The fog just outside Ponyville had thickened to an opaque, white wall. It was, to Fluttershy at least, like walking through the world’s lightest drift of snow. Her hooves were completely obscured, and the usually welcoming buildings of Ponyville became ominous, ghostly silhouettes.
Fluttershy shivered. The feeling of elation she had felt walking through the forest with Zecora evaporated like a flame being blown out by a frigid wind. Something felt off about Ponyville, now. Fluttershy edged closer to Zecora as they entered the main square of Ponyville. Not surprisingly, the square was empty. The windows of the houses and shops were closed, and some were barricaded, oddly enough.
“Zecora,” Fluttershy, “W-What’s happened?” Zecora responded, “I do not know, Fluttershy.” Though disappointed with Zecora’s answer, Fluttershy was not surprised. She sighed. “I’ll check in at the Mayor’s Office, to see what’s going on,” Fluttershy said, stopping. Zecora stopped as well. The two embraced. “Thanks for everything again, Zecora,” Fluttershy said as she gave Zecora a squeeze. “It was nothing, Fluttershy,” Zecora replied, “Perhaps when this is over, you’ll stop on by.” Fluttershy smiled a little. That was a novel thought, wasn’t it? That this nightmare would have an ending, that it all would be forgotten.
Maybe Zecora and I could sit down, have some tea, talk about everyone that’s dead, and maybe pretend that I didn’t cause this Fluttershy mused in her head. For a moment, she considered telling all of it to Zecora, perhaps due to some momentary lapse of reason. “I’ll try,” was all that Fluttershy actually said. Zecora smiled and turned away. A sudden thought crossed Fluttershy’s mind, and she gasped eyes widening in horror. “Zecora!” she shouted. The zebra mare turned her head to face Fluttershy. What could I possibly say to her Fluttershy thought, “Hey, Zecora, watch out for a murderous pony with tentacles and no face, why don’t you? Oh, and he has an entire host of things lurking in the dark that will probably try and kill you too.
“Be careful out there,” was what she actually called. Zecora nodded, then walked on through the fog. Fluttershy turned to the Mayor’s Office. She trod through the fog, across the cold cobblestones, and, and up to the door. She could hear muffled voices on the other side. She recognized one, a female voice that sent waves of relief through her veins. She tore open the door and ran in. “-similar happened to the Captain of the Guard a few m-“ Celestia was saying to a group of guards wearing the elegant gilded armor that went along with Celestia’s royal guard. They were talking to Mayor Mare, whose white mane was messy and unkempt. Dark bags clung to the mayor’s eyes, though she appeared quite alert and awake, as she looked nervously from a guard to Celestia.
“Princess Celestia!” Fluttershy exclaimed as she took a step into the office. Even as the words left her mouth, she knew something was wrong. The nervous way the guard’s eyes flickered between Celestia and Fluttershy; Mayor Mare’s sharp intake of breath, combined with a sudden, violent shudder that ran down the length of the Mayor’s body; and of course, the heart-broken look on Celestia’s face. Yes, something was very wrong indeed. “P-Princess…” Fluttershy began again, markedly less confident and happy. Celestia’s face still bore that heartbroken expression, an alien expression on the Princess, and one that Fluttershy would gladly never see again. “F-Fluttershy,” The Princess said softly. Fluttershy’s eyes widened and her blood ran cold. Oh, yes. Something was very wrong indeed.
It’s probably wrong to assume that there is a limit to the amount of horror that the mind can handle. In truth, the feeling of horror grows exponentially as that precursor horror, that first nightmare, grows darker and darker before spawning yet another horror to coincide with that first horror, and so on and so forth. The mind will constantly absorb the horrors, the traumas, until the sufferer in question will either leave their sanity behind and collapse like a dam that has just burst, or the mind will seek to do what seems impossible to the sufferer; which is to say: It will try to save itself.
Fluttershy, through some grand cosmological roll of the dice, happened to be in the latter category. Her face was solemn, showing no emotion to the casual passerby, though upon closer inspection, her eyes were bloodshot and slightly puffy from crying several hours past. The light breeze gently tugged at her jacket, and the ground beneath her hooves was wet and sodden, but she didn’t care.
In one of those moments where her brain happened to remember a small tidbit of information, a little tidbit that she would not have, under any other set of circumstances, remembered. In some far off memory of a time before Fluttershy’s life had been thrust into chaos, she remembered sitting around one of Applejack’s apple trees. She could almost feel the cool, dry grass beneath her hooves, the sweet taste of an apple fritter on her tongue. With a sudden, painful feeling of longing, she remembered Rainbow Dash’s laughter, Pinkie Pie’s inane babbling, Rarity’s praise for Applejack’s cooking (particularly painful, that one), and Applejack’s bashful smile. She remembered Twilight stopping to tell them all about “a fascinating book from some doctor up in Manehatton” about grief.
She could almost see the stages play out in her has as she re-lived those moments in the Mayor’s Office, and the days to follow. Stage One of Grief: Denial. “What? No. No, no, Rarity… Rarity couldn’t-“ Fluttershy had said after Celestia had finished explaining, her voice infinitely more confident than she felt. Stage Two: Anger. “W-W-Why couldn’t y-y-y-you protect her?” Fluttershy had nearly screamed at Celestia as tears spilt down her cheeks, losing herself in a sea of sorrow. Stage Three: Bargaining. In the hours and days to come, when Fluttershy had long since exhausted her supply of tears, she looked to Celestia, on whose shoulder she had been crying, and begged, “There’s got to be a spell, right? Some spell, some potion, anything? T-The Amulet of Binding can wait, if I-it means Rarity…”
Stage four had been the longest, as depression usually is. Locking herself away in the room of one of the two inns in town, Fluttershy had shut herself out from the world. The trays of food Celestia always had brought up went uneaten, and after a time the maids started getting frustrated at Fluttershy’s adamant refusal to leave her bed. Days had passed before Celestia had finally managed to rouse Fluttershy, weak from lack of food. She had eaten small bites, staring listlessly into the fog.
And now, mares and gentlecolts, here we are at the last stage. Acceptance. Fluttershy thought bitterly, Or maybe it should be called “How to try and get over the death of a friend. Something I seem to be getting better at. She looked down at the mound of dirt that an hour ago had been Rarity’s casket. The casket had been closed, of course. No need to show her mutilated body to the world. Celestia had spared Fluttershy most of the grisly details, but word spread like wildfire throughout Ponyville, and Fluttershy knew everything. Everything, that is, except who killed her, though she had her suspicions. The fact that Sweetie Belle was still missing only solidified her suspicions.
The end of the service itself, presided over by both Luna and Celestia, had ended nearly three hours ago. Fluttershy remained, watching the dirt cover her friend in what would be her eternal tomb. A part of her, one that she wouldn’t have thought she even had several months ago, wondered if the worms were already burrowing towards the dark mahogany casket.
The day had turned to twilight when Celestia approached. The grass muffled her steps. She walked up alongside Fluttershy, trying desperately to think of what to say. She decided upon silence. Nothing could reach Fluttershy, not now. They both were silent for a time. With a voice raspy from days of not being used, Fluttershy said to nobody in particular, “Everyone that’s dead has died because I haven’t been able to stop it.” “Fluttershy, you didn-“ Celestia began. “Don’t even say it,” Fluttershy forced out each word through gritted teeth, “You know I did this as much as it did.” Celestia was taken aback, not used to being spoken that way. She looked down at Fluttershy, who placed a lovely bouquet of purple lilies on top of Rarity’s headstone.
Long ago, in a time that, to Fluttershy, seemed as distant as Twilight’s recounting of the stages of grief, a different Fluttershy would have broken down into tears. Her tears would have been a torrential river, the culmination of all her sorrows and hardships. Celestia would have joined in, comforting Fluttershy, and their grief would have been shared.
Fluttershy adjusted the flowers on Rarity’s grave, arranging the, to be aesthetically pleasing, as Rarity would have wanted. She knew who, or more rather what, was responsible. Fluttershy turned to Celestia. “What else to we need to do to bind that thing to the forest forever?’ she said, her voice steely.
Though It was out of earshot, It continued to watch the smell Pegasus talk with Celestia. Its tentacles writhed anxiously in the dirt. It watched as they left, and long after they had gone, It walked to the fresh grave the yellow pegasus had been standing over. For the first time in a very, very, very long time, it began to second-guess Itself.
With shaking legs and a heart pounding so hard that she thought it would burst from her chest, Scootaloo followed Applebloom up the stairs. Through yet another twist of fate, this inn was not the inn in which Fluttershy had lost herself in grief. That inn was smaller, and only had two floors. This inn, where Applebloom and Scootaloo were (they still didn’t know why Sweetie Belle hadn’t joined) was an old, large relic of a by-gone age in Ponyville.
The floorboards creaked with each step they took. Scootaloo winced each time it creaked, giving her a mini heart attack each time. She shook, though from fright or excitement, she could not tell. To fly… to actually fly… Oh, it was everything she had wanted. It was her first step to getting her cutie mark, to ending the bullying, to actually being something,
She still had lingering doubts, of course, but they had since faded to the back of her mind. Widemouth wouldn’t lie to her, obviously, and neither would Applebloom. There were her friends; or at least Widemouth would be soon enough. She pictured herself launching into the air, finding her wings, and triumphantly flying back up to applause from Applebloom and praise from Widemouth. The giddiness of it all sent a shiver down her spine.
The stairs leveled out, opening up to a long, poorly lit hallway. Old lanterns, while not riddled with cobwebs, hung unused on the wall. Perhaps one in five were lit, fueled by a small reserve of oil that would probably be used up before the next morning. The musty smell of the hallway assaulted Scootaloo’s nose. She grimaced slightly, wrinkling her nose.
‘Come on, Scootaloo, this way,” Applebloom said in a hushed tone, leading Scootaloo by the hoof. They passed what felt like hundreds of doors, in varying states of upkeep. Scootaloo, her heart pounding harder and harder, thought for a crazed moment that the hallway would go on forever. When Applebloom stopped them in front of a door, Scootaloo simultaneously felt terror-filled regret and exuberance. The numbers on the door were gone, though she could read the outlines of the number 537.
“Here we go, room 537, just like Mr. Widemouth said,” Applebloom whispered as she gingerly opened the wooden door. The creaking caused Scootaloo and Applebloom both to wince. The room was dark and seemed to be abandoned. A tall dresser cast a long, ominous shadow across the room as moonlight from a nearby window poured in. The window was open, so instead of the usual musty smell Scootaloo had grown accustomed to, the room smelled of the earth just after a rain. The fog that encompassed Ponyville ended about two stories down.
“Mr. Widemouth,” Applebloom whispered, “Y-You here?” For a moment that felt thunderous in the silence, there was no answer. “Of course,” Widemouth crooned from the dark, “Come in.” Scootaloo noted that there was a surprising lack of dust in the room. A thick woolen carpet masked her steps as she trailed slightly behind Applejack. Her heart was thundering.
“W-W-What do I need to do?” Scootaloo stammered, “You said you’d help me fly.” “And you will,” Widemouth said, “Just trust me.” His voice originated from somewhere behind the pair, and Scootaloo could her faint, rapid breathing. As he spoke, Scootaloo’s heart slowed. She breathed deeply. Everything was good; everything had to be good.
‘The window,” Widemouth said, “Go look out it.” Scootaloo did so, conscious of the feeling of being watched. She poker her head out, felt the cool night breeze ruffle her mane. “What now?” she asked. She stared down at the opaque wall of white fog. “I worked a bit of magic,” he said softly,” The fog is enchanted. Fall through it, and you’ll fly.”
Scootaloo played around with the idea in her mind for a bit. “So I have to-“ she began. “Jump. Yes, jump,” Widemouth finished. Scootaloo looked out the window again, taking in the cool air, the twinkling stars overhead. “It’s-It’s so high,” she stammered. “It has to be,” Widemouth countered, “Or else the magic wouldn’t work.”
Scootaloo hesitated, poised at the windowsill. Applebloom was silent, waiting from the center of the room with eyes that seemed as large as dinner plates. “You want to be friends, right?” Widemouth said softly, “Friends have to trust each other.” Scootaloo did want to be his friend. Right? Didn’t’ she? She pushed the doubts in her mind aside. Widemouth wanted to be her friend. Right?
His words seemed to again weave their way into her mind, casting away that small voice in her mind that was desperately screaming for her to stop. She climbed up onto the windowsill, her back hooves resting on the floor. Her heart had begun pounding again, and she dared not breathe. Every one of her nerves was on fire.
“One small leap of faith,” Widemouth said, “Just one leap, and then you’ll fly.” Scootaloo stared down at the fog. “Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted, to fly?” To fit in and belong, like every other pegasus?” Widemouth crooned. And that was it. Scootaloo wanted everything he had just said. She wanted it, so badly. She swallowed hard. “One small leap of faith,” she muttered. The room fell silent. The small voice in her head was screaming that there was no going back, but she didn’t care. Widemouth wouldn’t lie to her. They were friends. She just needed to trust him.
Scootaloo took a deep breath. Widemouth tittered from the back of the room. Scootaloo looked back, then out the window once more. She inhaled and exhaled deeply. “One small leap of faith,” she repeated. She pushed herself out the window.
For one moment, which felt like an eternity to Scootaloo, she flew. Just like Widemouth had said.
And then the ground rushed up to meet her as she fell.