//------------------------------// // Chapter 13: Black Hooves // Story: At the Inn of the Prancing Pony // by McPoodle //------------------------------// At the Inn of the Prancing Pony Chapter 13: Black Hooves There was no choice, really. Firebelle, in her decreasing moments of lucidity, refused to let them go back, and she refused to take any kind of liquid, thinking them all to be healing potions. They had to make for Everhold. Or knock her out, which in her present condition also seemed rather hazardous. “We can do this, Hope. You’re a genius earth pony and I...well I can pull the cart,” Midnight said with a quivering smile and a forlorn sense of resignation. “Even if I can’t do much in a fight.” “No more fighting,” Celestia declared grimly. “Not unless our lives depend on it.” They proceeded deeper and deeper into the forest. Behind them, they left a thin trail of blood. Celestia began to castigate herself as she walked. Surely there was something I could have done to save my companions from being injured so badly, she thought, especially considering that I emerged with nothing worse than a mild case of fatigue. I must have held back. I will not accept the excuse of my current form—Hope Springs could have handled this, and would have, if I hadn’t hesitated. And why did I hesitate? Did I perhaps want Firebelle to be hurt, to teach her some sort of sick lesson? That’s what they say, don’t they, that I ‘teach’ too much, that I do nothing but plot and manipulate, that I make every moment serve two or more goals, some of them decades in the planning? Firebelle was guilty in my mind, guilty of thinking like an adventurer, of attacking a seemingly innocent creature, for fun, for loot, for experience. But what manner of being would consider this amount of pain, this amount of delirium, blood loss and perhaps even death, should be a proper punishment for such an easily correctable fault? I should have talked to her, not left her to die to a trap she was utterly unprepared for. For that was what our recent experience has surely been: a cruelty trap. An intelligent creature had deliberately acted dumb, acted helpless, bared its neck to us. A merciful being would have walked away, or at least offered to help. But Firebelle had attacked, and thus sprung the trap. Perhaps we would have been attacked regardless of how we reacted—there’s no way to know that now. # # # Three hours later, the sun was doing its best to warm up the forest around them. The best it could do was raise the humidity, however—it was still rather cool. Firebelle’s fever, though, was soaring. “I am the Queen of the Angels!” she cried from her makeshift bed. “All of the demons can just get in line for me to buck them back to Tartarus! My father’s waiting for me in Tartarus,” she confided to the imaginary pony to her right. “That’s what Mother told me. Seek out Uncle Bernie in Booth Number 9—he’s the one that looked like he’s dead.” She laughed uproariously for a few seconds, then suddenly cut herself off. “Nopony ever told me why that was supposed to be funny.” Celestia raised a forehoof, her ears pivoting wildly. “Firebelle...maybe you should speak to your minions more quietly,” Midnight pleaded in a whisper, her heat-stained and mottled dagger raising itself into the air once more. “No lousy minions tell me what to do!” Firebelle declared, punctuating her remark by punching the sky with her forehoof. “Oh,” she said quietly. “I appear to have torn something.” Midnight heard it now. It sounded like the rattle of a rattlesnake...only from a significantly larger creature. This time, Celestia knew exactly what they were about to encounter. “Close your eyes!” she ordered. Midnight wrapped her forehoof over the eyes of her former boss, as she closed her own tightly. “Be quiet, be still. Please, Firebelle, everything will be okay.” “Yes, yes, but somepony needs to refill this ketchup bottle—the stuff is simply everywhere!” Celestia risked opening an eye to check in Firebelle, and was utterly dismayed. She had somehow managed to re-open nearly all of her wounds, and was now bleeding uncontrollably. “Midnight,” she said with reluctance. “Let her look.” The unicorn whimpered, and slowly removed her hoof. “There...I’m not opening my eyes. I’m not...” She felt the warm and wet fur under her foreleg turn to stone. The unicorn began to cry, leaning heavily against the cart as she reached out with her magic, trying to “feel” her way around, trying to confirm what she was facing and where it was. The thing was slowly circling them, its location specified by the rattle from its tail and the scrape of its scales against the pebbles in the underbrush. Celestia waited until the creature was right behind her, and then bucked. There was a whooshing sound as something flew through the air. It landed hard, and then the creature could be heard retreating, its rattle silenced. “There,” she said, opening her eyes. “We’re safe now.” She quickly covered over the face of Firebelle with her blanket, to keep her permanently deranged expression from being seen. “She’s dead...” Midnight whispered, stumbling back. “I killed her...I let her die...” Hope reared up to put a hoof on either side of the unicorn’s withers. “Midnight, Midnight! Listen to me! She is not dead.” “But I’ve never been able to unpetrify...I’ve never even met somepony who could...only adventurers, and they...” She looked at the stone limbs sticking out. “There’s not enough...we don’t have enough bits for the cure...” “We’re taking her to the settlement. They have to have the cure, and...I know where we can get enough bits to pay for it.” The pony before Midnight seemed utterly confident of these two facts. “You don’t seed a pony-testing environment with cockatrices otherwise. They couldn’t call it fair otherwise. Deathtrap the Everfree might be, but the appearance of fairness must remain, or nopony would ever go to the Inn again.” “Okay...okay.” Midnight took a bunch of deep breaths, and looked around. “Cockatrice...I can’t believe you defeated one...N...not because of you’re an earth pony or any...just, anypony defeating one,” she clarified. Celestia thought it best not to mention that she used to have a cockatrice as a pet when she was a teenager. From the forest, the pair of ponies emerged into a small glen. After the last forest opening they had encountered, they were on high alert. It was therefore all the more stressful for them when absolutely nothing happened. The glen led into some low hills. After an hour of travel, this led in turn into some hilly forest. From the highest hill, they espied a large castle, which had obviously seen better times. Some of the roofs had collapsed, leaving the rooms open to the elements. Celestia stood and stared at the Castle of the Two Sisters for quite some time, lost in her memories. Midnight looked at the castle quietly, eyes narrowing and something occupying her thoughts. She then turned back to the cart and opened the small barrel to a small pop of compressed gas, checking something and adding more chemicals while ignoring a slowly rising cloud of yellowish smoke. Hope blinked a couple of times and looked over at what Midnight was doing. She waited patiently until she was done. “Follow me.” The two ponies walked through a partially collapsed doorway into the castle. A wide hallway led to a grand staircase, above which hung two banners, one with the moon and a blue winged unicorn, the other with the sun and a white winged unicorn. Wide arches on either side led to either more staircases or open rooms. The ceiling of the hallway was mostly missing, and the late afternoon sunlight poured into the building, nurturing the growth of small shrubs that broke up the stonework of the floor. Hope stretched forth a single hoof into the area of sunlight inside the castle, and abruptly changed direction, heading to the wall and hugging it tightly as she slinked along the wall. It was the eyes that Celestia had felt, not just of one god but of dozens, perhaps hundreds, all focusing their animosity upon her castle, as if they assumed that she would blithely walk right in in her native form. She didn’t bother to warn Midnight, as she had seen that she was apparently immune to the feeling of divine scrutiny... Except this time. The unicorn stopped in the middle of the sunlight, and looked around her with some confusion. “What? What?” she asked herself quietly. She slowly and cautiously turned her head upwards, and began to tremble, before suddenly dashing over to be beside Hope. “What was that?” she demanded. “Magic?” Hope suggested guilelessly. Midnight scowled. “The act’s getting old,” she said. “Why are we here?” “Haven’t you heard the stories? There’s always lost treasures hidden in ruins like this. Maybe we’ll get lucky.” Midnight narrowed her eyes in suspicion, but said nothing. # # # A few minutes later found them in the castle’s library. Hope was looking at one wall of books, while Midnight scanned another. An unnerving patch of sunlight separated them. “Try pulling on the books or something,” Hope suggested. Midnight rolled her eyes and poked a book, and then another one. Eventually, she started getting interested in the titles on the spines and started pulling a few out to get a better look. Celestia walked up to one specific spot on her side of the library, pulled two books out with her teeth, and put them back in each other’s places. This caused the bookcase in front of Midnight to pivot outwards, revealing itself as a door. “Ooh, good find!” Hope exclaimed. Behind the door were a set of rickety wooden shelves. Resting on one was a cloth sack filled to bulging with what seemed to be freshly minted bits. Midnight peeked inside the sack, to see that they were some sort of commemorative issue, with an image of the sun on one face and one of the moon on the other. Curiously, the moon image was missing its Mare, possessing instead a random speckling of craters. The next thing Midnight noticed was that the shelves were so poorly constructed that she could see through them to a boarded-over room behind it. She lit up her horn and leaned towards one of the knotholes to get a better look. The room was painted in a soft yellow pastel, with images of foals and baby animals painted along the top of the wall as a border. A sun with a pony’s face looked down kindly from the ceiling at the ruins of a crushed piece of furniture. “Is this...it couldn’t be...Princess Celestia’s personal spaces...?” She began to try and pry some of the boards off to get a better look. The inexplicable feeling from before came back in full force. Greater and greater the feeling grew. On the floor just inside the room, Midnight spied a small metallic object, set with gems. It looked like a foal’s charm bracelet. It was customary to engrave a child’s name on the bracelet once a name was bestowed, but as near as she could tell, the stones of this bracelet were blank. Midnight’s attempt to take the bracelet was blocked by an overwhelming pressure in her head. The word “blasphemer” seemed to repeat itself in her head, again and again, in a chorus of echoing voices. She dropped the bracelet, and the pressure abated, but only somewhat. She turned around to ask Hope for help, but found that the room was abandoned. Things only returned to normal in Midnight’s head when she left the castle. There, she found Hope waiting for her, turned so that she couldn’t look at her. “Do you have any idea what that place was?” she asked. “A most calamitous distraction,” Hope said bitterly. She refused to say anything else until they were away from the ruins. Behind the castle was a large flat area. Midnight speculated that it may have once been used for ceremonies, back when the castle itself was actually in use. But then something awful appeared to have happened to it. The remains of small buildings circling the area were just that—remains. Areas of the ground were blackened. Some ornamental trees looked like they had been turned to stone. There was even some kind of indescribable mass of granite conglomerate that may have once been a vast wave of water before being suddenly transformed into its present form by magic. Magic was the one thing that Midnight sensed more than anything else. So much concentrated yet chaotic magic that it nearly made it impossible for her to use any of her conventional senses. As a result, she stumbled about as if she were drunk. Hope, seeming to know instantly what was wrong, walked over and hooked one foreleg under Midnight’s, guiding her through the wasteland, and around the only unbroken statue in the entire area. Being unbroken, however, didn’t provide any clue to Midnight as to the strange bipedal creature’s identity. Perhaps he was a nonsense character out of a filly’s play—after all, he appeared to be caught in the act of singing some sort of song. “I hurt...” Midnight muttered, looking up at the statue. Something in her twisted, and she quickly looked away. “What...?” She looked confused as though struck with an odd impulse. “What were your parents like?” “Not here!” Hope replied, quivering with fear. “I swear I’ll answer any question, but not here!” Her ears perked up as she heard the sounds of pony voices not too far away. “Everhold!” “Yes...everything will be okay...” Midnight muttered. “Why...all these questions I want to ask but don’t...they’re growing quieter.” A few steps more, and the spell was broken. The statue seemed a bit disappointed, but He bided His time, as He had for so long and would for so much longer. “Wow,” Hope said quietly, looking over the packed tent village of Everhold. “What a wretched, wretched place.” It reminded her of a hive, but out of respect for the Bees, she decided not to say this out loud. “Let’s see...healer’s tent, healer’s tent…” “Wait, Hope...” Midnight had stopped and bit her lip, looking at the cart. “What if...we waited? Until we were near to the Inn? We could tell her that she was hallucinating, but fought her way through...” “That’s assuming the cure is a potion that we can give her at any time,” said Celestia. “My impression was that it was a bath. We can’t transport a bath, nor do I believe that we would be allowed to.” Midnight cringed. “Yes. Of course, sorry. Let’s go get her healed.” Something had definitely changed in her relationship with the mysterious earth pony since the battle with the lizard monsters. It was like Hope had partially dropped her veil...or Midnight had started figuring out how to see through it. She wondered who, precisely, the true Hope Springs actually was. Two ponies in white robes waited at the entrance to the village. To anypony willing to approach them, they handed out a necklace with a plain round disk attached. They looked to be constructed of repurposed scrap metal. Next to them was a banner hung from a rod. It seemed to be done in something between tempera and watercolor, and showed a tall white pony seen from the ground, ridiculously bloated by foreshortening. The coal black hooves were the most evident, but by the time of the pony’s barrel, it had become a hopelessly confused mess. It was hard to tell if the pony even had a head, much less what breed it was or anything about its mane. “And what is this, good sir?” Hope asked, allowing the pony to drape the chain around her neck. Midnight saw her looking at the black hooves on the poster with a sense of foreboding. The pony leaned forward, speaking just barely loud enough for her and Midnight to hear. “It is a memento of the Forsaken Goddess, for the Forsaken Village of Everhold.” “Do you mean Celes—?” Midnight tried to ask, before being silenced by the priest’s hoof. “The gods have ears,” the robed pony warned, “and certain names when spoken invoke their wrath.” One of Midnight’s ears flicked upwards, the only sign of the direction that she was then thinking of. “I’ll take one of your charms,” she said calmly. The pair made their way into the village. The buildings they passed were decorated with black bunting, and signs depicting the Mare in the Moon were set up outside each one. Midnight did some mental calculations. “Oh hay, it is Nightmare Night,” she concluded. “I had completely forgotten.” Hope seemed to slump. She walked down the middle of the street with the cart in tow, trying not to make eye contact with anypony or anything. Midnight followed, wondering. Around them, fillies and colts dressed up as some of the very monsters would-be adventurers would have to face the next day capered around them. The mares and stallions watched good-naturedly as they passed, then discreetly checked to make sure that none of the rapscallions had just succeeded in picking their saddlebags. Nopony spared even a glance at the stone pony poorly concealed beneath a small blue blanket in the cart. Soon, Hope and Midnight saw a sign with an arrow underneath a red cross symbol. Further signs with the same symbol led them to their destination, and a short line to get into the Healing Tent. “Let me handle the price negotiations,” said Midnight. “At least that’s something I know I’m good at. Besides, we did just gain a hefty bit of gold back...well...” She trailed off, suddenly unwilling to talk about the castle. “Alright,” said Hope. As space was getting rather crowded as the injured and their friends waited to be cured, she stepped back a bit to get out of everypony’s way. Slowly, each party made their way into the tent, then emerged. In cases where the injury was minor, a fully healed patient emerged with their companions. In more serious cases, the companion emerged alone, while ponies in white robes moved the ailing pony out of the back of the small tent on a stretcher and into one of the few permanent buildings in the encampment, there to be cared for until they were well enough to leave. Celestia strongly suspected that with the full extent of Firebelle’s injuries, she was almost certainly going to end up in one of those buildings, and so kept a close watch on the back of the tent after Midnight had asked one of the robed ponies to help her bring the petrified pony inside. Several minutes passed, significantly longer than had been taken by any pony so far. Celestia noticed that some ponies were now staring at her, with disapproving expressions. She looked carefully around her to see if there was any obvious cause to their displeasure, lightly stepping between the large rocks that littered the area where she was standing. Before her, the full moon was just then cresting the tops of the Everfree trees. It was a red sunset, and the moon was faintly tinted the color of blood. The face of the Mare stared down in judgment at Celestia, at her actions, and most importantly, at her inactions. Out of the corner of one eye, she saw some of the attendants taking Firebelle, still petrified, into the largest of the many buildings. Midnight emerged a moment later from the front entrance, her head bowed. Hope tried to step forward to join her. She was stopped by a foreign hoof jabbed in her chest. “What do you think you’re doing?!” a large orange unicorn stallion demanded. “Excuse me?” Hope asked. “Do you think this is some kind of joke, prancing around on sacred ground?” the offended pony said, getting up in her face. “I’m sorry,” Hope said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Look,” the stallion said, pointing down to the ground at her hooves. Hope looked, and then leapt out of the area straight towards Midnight. The unicorn backed up slightly, glancing over at where she came from with quite a bit of apathy. She then turned to the orange pony. “She did not know. Now we both know. Thank you for your assistance.” With that short statement, she then turned back toward the area they had parked the cart. “Come on,” she addressed her earth pony companion. “We have—why are you crying?” Hope was standing where she had landed, her back to the spot where she had been before, tears welling in her eyes. Over her shoulder, Midnight could still see the “forbidden ground”, or whatever it was. It was a small circular area, blackened with nearly a hoof’s width of debris, made up of equal parts charcoal and rock fragments. Numerous rough holes were bored into the rock, at various depths. Midnight looked curiously up at the sky. This was the site of a lightning strike—no, make that hundreds if not thousands of concentrated lightning strikes. Faintly visible in the uniform blackness of the circle were four light gray circles. “What...what happened here?” Midnight asked. “This is Traitor’s Rock, the place where Equestria’s enemies were brought in the old days to stand judgment,” the orange unicorn explained. “It is also the spot where the Forsaken Goddess was taken up to be judged by the gods. And anypony who says it happened in Redfern is a gods-forsaken liar!” Midnight looked back down at this small spot. In her fillyhood, she had imagined that a legendary heroine might be taken up to her divine reward by a single bolt of lightning, not the fierce barrage that must have taken place here. “No pony could have survived this!” she exclaimed. Hope looked at her, and shook her head, her eyes twin pools of nearly inexhaustible sadness. “Alicorns can’t die by their own magic,” she whispered.