They emerged in a pitch dark room, with no discernible signs of activity anywhere around them. Were it not for Twilight's coat pressed flush to Pinkie's, she would not have known she was there. "A-Applejack?" she squeaked as quietly as her nerves would let her.
She was met with a sharp jab to her left flank. "Quiet, Pinkie!" Twilight hissed.
"I don't think anypony's in here, Twilight," whispered Rainbow Dash.
"You're wrong."
"Uh, Twilight? Do you see something I don't?" Dash retorted.
"That wasn't me. What do you see, Pinkie?"
Pinkie turned around sharply, squinting against the darkness. "I didn't say anything, either!" An indistinguishable shade of grey flashed briefly against the imposing curtain of blackness ahead of her. "Wha-" It's nothing, Pinkie, she reassured herself, even as she instinctively backed away.
"Pinkie! Stay with us." Rainbow Dash cautioned.
"I'm... I'm right here, girls," she muttered as she backed into something that felt like an end table, setting it to wobble before something fragile crashed into the floor and shattered. Pinkie jumped with a shrill "EEK!" that rang off the unseen walls.
"Scared?" taunted the fourth voice.
"That's it!" Twilight declared as her horn lit, casting its glow dimly onto the dusty floor. The broken glass shards scattered at the penumbra's edge glinted like stars in the night sky. Mysteriously, the shadows receded before the light, seeming to ebb and flow across the splintery, wooden surfaces. Like water down a drain, the shadow disappeared through hitherto unseen fissures in its surface. It was most unlike any shadow Pinkie had ever seen.
"Who's there!?" Rainbow Dash shouted.
"Rainbow!" started Twilight, pointedly.
"What? This thing already knows we're here. Probably knew this whole time!"
"Help!" shouted somepony from beyond the wall. A shrill voice - feminine with shades of masculinity - drawling out the "e" in a most familiar way.
Jolting to her hooves, Pinkie dashed to the wall where the shadow had receded. "Applejack!?" she called back. There was no response.
Pinkie turned to her friends behind her, tapping her hoof at where the shadow had passed through. "Does anypony remember Applejack's house having a room in there?"
"There must be some kind of secret passage," Twilight began. "If we look around here long enough, I'm sure we'll fi-"
"-Out of my way!" Rainbow Dash suddenly charged full bore into the wall, cocking her head to the side and leaping into it with all of her strength. Pinkie had only just managed to dive off to the side in time to avoid the impact. In moments, a pattern of cracks spread from the point of Rainbow's attack, just before the wall crumbled to the ground with a thunderous racket.
The room beyond seemed too large to belong to the rest of the house. From the outside, there was no clue of its existence. The only light beyond the wall was provided by lit candles perched atop rusty, misshapen holders. With such little light, the walls seemed to extend infinitely into the shadows beyond. Before giving way to total darkness, the light bounced briefly from several silhouetted figures dangling lifelessly from the ceiling, mercifully shrouded in enough darkness that Pinkie could not see the horrors that had been done to them.
"It's... like some kind of pocket dimension." Twilight observed. "I've read about them, but I've never seen one before."
Pinkie looked up from where she had ducked to cover helf, and gulped. "I have." In fact, this place was all too familiar; she had once worked in a kill room exactly like it. She had never remembered building it - it was just always there.
The words "LIFE'S A PARTY" flashed in her memory, scrawled in blood across a patchwork of sewn pony hide. How long would it be until Applejack's projects could no longer be contained in this one room? Do you miss it? whispered the disembodied voice of the Other, this time from inside her own head. Its subtle intonations magnified a hundred times, feeling at once so familiar and yet so alien.
"NO!" she screamed, once again burrying her head beneath her hooves.
"You okay, Pinkie?" asked Rainbow Dash with a reassuring prod to the flank. Her concern was genuine, but her bravado failed to mask the fear in her voice.
"She's so at home, she's never been better," the Other answered on Pinkie's behalf. "Come ponies. Come see what I've been working on, just for you!" Just then, the room beyond brightened as the lit candles flared into harsh infernos that licked at the stale air above. Still more unlit candles perched upon unseen shelves seemed to will themselves to life, and the glow they cast pulled back the shadowy curtain on a grotesquerie of wrought iron cages - many of which berthed the lifeless form of somepony or another - and dangling carcasses relieved of their limbs, and their coats to varying degrees of fruition.
At the room's center was a drum-mounted table, laying flat. On it lay the pony from the yard, who Pinkie could now see was none other than Berryshine - a fun-loving pony whose company she'd only ever enjoyed. She suddenly found herself quagmired by an overwhelming soup of emotions: anger; sorrow; fear; and confusion.
In front of it all stood a stoic, unmoving Applejack, whose eyes were filled with a kind of hate that Pinkie had only ever seen in those worst of nightmares which the Other liked to occupy. She found herself frozen in place, not daring to move but a single inch any which way. Out of the periphery of her vision, she could see her friends similarly petrified.
"Applejack..." Rainbow Dash urged. "Put the knife down."
It was only then that Pinkie realized that Applejack stood over her brother, who laid before her weakly clutching the chains around his neck. Between the coils rested the sharp end of a large kitchen knife being held tightly between Applejack's bared teeth.
"Don'tcha take one step closer!" she snarled around its handle. "Or yer gonna have another pony's blood'n yer hooves!"
"Please! Please help us!" pleaded the pony who'd cried out earlier. In the dim light, Pinkie saw it was Applejack's sister, whose hooves clung to the bars of her cage with desperation.
"Shut up, Apple Bloom!" her sister sniped without moving a single inch. "This ain't about you!"
The Other let out an amused chuckle that reverberated from the walls of the kill room, and seemed to come from all directions at once. "I feel like we've been here before. Isn't that right?" Pinkie could not see where the voice had come from, but somehow she knew that it was speaking directly to her.
"Let go of my friend, monster!" Rainbow Dash cried.
"Monster? You wound me! I'm so disappointed that we never got to finish our game, Rainbow Dash. Perhaps I will get to make things up to you, and Applejack, here can finish what your other friend had started."
"We're going to stop you long before that happens!" Dash retorted.
"Sure ya can try," taunted Applejack. "But will ya get to me 'efore I get to my brother here? I know yer fast, RD... but are ya that fast?"
"Let! Her! Go!" Rainbow repeated, drawing Applejack's full attention.
It was a fraction of a second long enough for Twilight to teleport next to Applejack, horn charged with energy. The ensuing blast knocked both Big Macintosh, and the knife out of Applejack's grasp. Before the blade clattered to the ground, Rainbow Dash sprinted over to Big Macintosh and pulled him away to safety.
Pinkie was only just beginning to comprehend the scene around her when Applejack jumped to her hooves and reclaimed the knife with the cleft of her hoof. Its point thrust upward, tracing a line to Twilight's throat. Acting quickly, Pinkie closed the distance with a pair of quick leaps, crashing into Applejack with all of her momentum.
The gambit destabilized Applejack's aim, sparing Twilight by mere inches. "Why you!" Applejack snarled. Reversing her grip on the knife, she brought its blade down onto Pinkie's right haunch, embedding it deep in the soft flesh just inches above her cutie mark. With a cry of pure agony, Pinkie's body was seized by the overwhelming shock that pulsated from the hilt now protruding from her body.
"PINKIE!" Rainbow Dash called as she helped Big Macintosh sit against Apple Bloom's cage. She returned to her friends as quickly as she could, knocking Applejack harshly to the ground. She reached to the knife to remove it, only to be stopped by Twilight.
"Don't! It'll only hurt Pinkie even more."
Nodding, Rainbow Dash leapt onto Applejack, pinning her limbs to the ground as Twilight climbed to her hooves.
"T-Twilight. D-Do the memory spell..." Pinkie urged, weakly.
"Yes, Twilight. Do the memory spell!" mimicked the Other. "It's all you can do, isn't it?" Twilight skewed her face as she concentrated, carefully lowering her glowing horn to Applejack's forehead.
"Why the hesitation? Here... Let me HELP!" A spidery, black appendage burst from Applejack with lightning speed as five sharp, claw-like fingers closed themselves tightly around Twilight's horn. It yanked her head sharply forward as she let out a startled yelp.
Her horn's glow darkened from pink to putrid green, as the Other laughed its sickening, cackling laugh. Pinkie watched helplessly as Twilight's legs gave out, sending her collapsing to the ground next to the now motionless Applejack. There was only the briefest struggle to stand against the tightly wound fist that oppressed her. It was short-lived, however, as Twilight's eyes pressed to close. Then the kicking stopped, and she fell into what appeared to be a deeply tormented sleep.
"Let her go!" Rainbow Dash roared as she chomped down on the Other's wrist with what must have been all of her strength. Pinkie pulled herself by her forelegs to Rainbow's aid, seeking to jar Twilight from her trance by shaking her limp body side to side.
"Twilight..." Pinkie sobbed. "We need you! Please wake up!"
"She can't hear you," the Other answered "but I assure you she's quite alright, for now. In fact... I reason you should join her." Shadows lurking at the room's edge closed in on them like a tsunami from all directions. What little light there was left in the room dissolved before it as though swallowed by a swarm of locusts.
As it approached, the umbra split into a dozen of the same branch-like arms that claimed Twilight. The recently lit candles were either hidden behind the impenetrable curtain of the Other, or snuffed out by the unnatural, gusting wind that accompanied it as it closed in. "Now, now, my little ponies... Don't fight," it sang sweetly. "There is just no reason Twilight Sparkle here should be having all of the fun."
With a deep, guttural chuckle, the Other's arms bent down in unison, and reached out to clutch and grab manes, and tails, and limbs, and anything else they could get a hold of. Pinkie tried first to avoid them, but she and Rainbow Dash were soon overwhelmed by their assault. As her legs disappeared into the rising shadow, she felt as though she was being drowned in a pit of caustic, ice-cold mud.
Inch by inch, she was wrapped in a cocoon of tendrils that squeezed the air, and the life from her body. Groaning, and snarling as she struggled to get free, she realized that Rainbow Dash had already fallen to the creature. Knowing that there would be no escape, the fight drained from her body, and her consciousness was not far behind.
***
Pinkie awoke on a hard, damp, and cold surface; most likely stone, but she could not have known by its appearance, for she was surrounded by an impenetrable pitch blackness that masked everything around her. All she knew was that her flank burned, itched, and ached beneath what felt like a thick pad of bandages and gauze. Her legs wobbled uneasily as she rose to her hooves. "Where am I?" she wondered aloud.
She turned in place, scanning the room to no avail. With a probing hoof, she deduced that the room was barely wider than she was long. From what she could tell, no discernable features adorning the walls except for a small, metal door, flushed with the stone so tightly that it was only by its texture that she could distinguish it. Of course, no windows existed to admit any light into the small cell.
Am I in jail!? she wondered with a start. She'd seen jails before, in fiction mostly. Even the worst of those had bars, windows, even running water. This was a dungeon, and she could only think of one place that had dungeons...
The distant thud of metal door slamming open and shut reverberated through the walls and into the cell. It was followed immediately by the muffled clip, clop, clip of hoofsteps growing louder as they came closer. With a jarring, metallic clank the door unlocked and swung open, sighing as its rusty hinges creaked over one another. Where there had been absolutely no light before, the cell was now flooded with it.
Pinkie squinted into the doorway as a silhouette adorned in glimmering armor edged through. "Prisoner. Back up against the far wall," it growled.
"P-Prisoner?" Pinkie stammered. "I don't even know why I'm-"
"-Save it for the princess!" interrupted the guard.
"P-Princess!?" Finally, a good sign. "Who? Luna? Celestia!? Tell her I don't know why I'm here. Tell her whatever it is she thinks I did, I did-NGH!" She was silenced with a swift knock from the guard.
"She's on her way, but you have me to worry about now."
"Y-You?" Pinkie gasped. "I don't even know what I'm doing h-HNG" The guard hit her again, harder this time. Her jaw ached from where his armored hoof had struck her. The sickly taste of blood crept over her tongue as it probed the spot she'd been struck. "Please..." she whimpered, crouching to the ground.
The guard's eyes shone as he kicked her. "You will not speak unless spoken to. Is that understood?" Pinkie nodded and remained silent, but was nonetheless met with another kick to the jaw. A whimper escaped, for which she was struck again, then again, then again after that.
As she writhed away from her attacker, one of the blows fell on her wounded flank, blinding her with its white-hot, searing pain. Her ears rang as more blows fell on her swelling hide.
"That's enough!" Princess Celestia commanded, her billowing locks trailing behind her as she entered into the cramped space of Pinkie's cell.
Pinkie eyed the princess through a tentative gap she allowed herself to make between her forelegs. Satisfied that the abuse had stopped, she uncurled herself and rolled onto her stomach, managing as much of a bow as she could with all of the pain she was feeling. "P-Princess... I don't-"
"-Pinkamena Diane Pie," the princess interrupted, eying her subject with equal parts disappointment and apathy. "You stand accused of the willful murder of your friends Twilight Sparkle, Applejack, and Rainbow Dash. Princess Luna and I have convened to discuss what we will do with-"
"-What!?" Pinkie cried. "Princess! I never even-"
"-Do not speak!" she snapped, stomping her bejeweled hoof inches away from Pinkie's nose. "You did not just betray your friends. You betrayed me, and all Equestrians who depended on you to embody their spirit of laughter. You have irrevokably damaged the balance of harmony in this land, what could you possibly say to address this grievous action you have taken?"
"I don't remember..."
"I believed you the last time. I gave you the benefit of the doubt. I took you in, helped you recover, reunited you with your friends, and gave you the chance to redeem yourself. You have failed in every conceivable way."
"But-"
"-You're weak, Pinkie!" Celestia accused. "You let yourself be corrupted all those moons ago, and I was a fool to think you wouldn't let yourself fall to evil this time."
Those words hit harder than any physical blow could have. Now her spirit ached to match her body. "Princess, please! Tell me what happened. I swear to you, I don't know!"
Celestia grinned down at Pinkie. "You will know... In your worst nightmares, Pinkie. Come tonight, and tomorrow, and all of the days thereafter. You will never leave this cell. You will fall into madness, and nopony will ever help you through it!"
"N-Never?" She scraped at the ground with her hoof. "I don't even know what I did..." she whimpered, eyeing the walls. In the light she could see that their surfaces were stained slick with dried blood, and other substances she didn't want to contemplate. How long would it be before those walls walls were her only salvation? How hard would she have to run into them? Pinkie retched at the thought.
The princess made things worse when she lowered her muzzle to Pinkie's and growled sadistically, "You will have plenty of time to remember, you miserable little filly."
"Wh-Why are you being so cruel?"
"It's what you deserve, Pinkie."
Never had the princess acted with such cruelty before. Pinkie blinked away her tears, and saw the blatant malice in Celestia's eyes. "You're not the princess." She convinced herself.
Celestia smiled from ear to ear with a grin that bared sharp fangs instead of teeth. "My dear? Whatever do you mean?"
Pinkie tried to stand, but felt too weak to muster it. "Princess Celestia was never so needlessly cruel."
Celestia tossed her head back and burst into a fit of mad laughter. "Does that make the pain any less delicious!?" the Other cackled, as Celestia's coat dissolved into shadowy flesh. It turned its gaze back to Pinkie, and as their eyes met Pinkie could see that Celestia's brilliant eyes had been replaced with deep, soulless pits that glowed pale white against the Other's colorless form.
"I have enjoyed the suffering of fillies like you for an eternity, child." The guard, door, and cell all vanished behind the demon's imposing form as it grew along the walls, bristling with its many limbs. One of them brushed its long, blade-like claws lightly across Pinkie's neck. "For what it's worth, yours is the most satisfying..."
The arms gathered around her, pressing inward from all directions. "W-What are you?" Pinkie whimpered. Claws unfurled and pulled away the bandages around her flank, probing into the open wound and searching for the spot that caused the most pain. "OW! OW OW OW! H-Hey, st-stop that... It hurts!"
"Oh, my dear. We're just getting started!"
"THAT'S ENOUGH!" Twilight called from somewhere behind the darkness. A flash of pink light spread across the surface of the shadow like a spreading wildfire. The arms clutching at Pinkie burned away, and she fell to the ground.
"Twilight!" Pinkie cried. "Where did you-?"
"It's the Other," she explained, out of breath. "He somehow turned my own memory spell against me. I guess he pulled you and Rainbow Dash into this, uh, creation of his." Twilight gestured at the new surroundings.
They appeared to be in Twilight's library, but a library that had long been abandoned. Cobwebs and dust had gathered around the vacant cubbies that used to house so many books - now only twisted, moth-eaten husks. The dry stench of dust and stale paper saturated the dead air that clogged Pinkie's throat, as though she had swallowed a mouthful of dirt.
The structure itself creaked and groaned under its own weight. Much of the walls had been eaten away by time and termintes; the rafters flexed visibly downward, ringed in cracks about the midsection; the staircase spiralling up to Twilight's bedroom had long since collapsed into a chalky heap at the edge of the room.
Pinkie quietly absorbed the scene, distracting herself much as she could from the pain that saturated her from head to toe. Twilight, in contrast, paced uneasily around the chamber hastily coaching herself through the steps she needed to take. Pinkie heard the words, but in her distraction did not register their meaning: "...must find Rainbow Dash somewhere in this maze...", "...I'm lucky I managed to find you...", "...find Applejack. I think she's being held in here, somewhere..."
None of the words registered to Pinkie's heavily distracted mind. Instead, she was drawn to one of the library's few windows. Through it, Pinkie could see that the rest of Ponyville had not fared much better. Nearby buildings, long collapsed, had been grown over with invading plant life. Not a pony was to be seen in any direction.
"...Can't sense them anywhere, Pinkie..."
What struck Pinkie the most was the impossible sky that framed everything - Neither day, nor night. Everything from the sky down was tinted in a faintly shimmering blood-red hue, as though the entire world were burning just out of sight. It tore her heart to pieces seeing everything she loved so devastated. She pressed her nose lightly against the glass, sobbing quietly. All of the ponies she liked to see smile so much, gone without explanation.
"Pinkie," she half-heard Twilight say. "None of this is real! Whatever you are feeling right now - Whatever you are seeing - it's all in your head! The Other has no power over us here." Pinkie continued to stare blankly through the window at the alien landscape beyond. Twilight's voice only barely registered over the rapid beating of her own heart.
She was broken from her trance as Twilight shook her by the mane. "Pinkie!"
"I... I don't know," Pinkie finally answered. "It sure felt real..."
"Yeeeeeeesssssssssssssssss..." hissed the Other. "This is as real as life will ever get for you - A vision of things to come, when Equesssstria finally burnssssss at my hand." He spoke with a deliberate slowness that twisted each and every word into a threat as haunting and oppressive as the sky outside.
"Where's Rainbow Dash!? Show yourself!" Twilight demanded.
"She's reliving some of the fonder memories we've had together."
"Let her go!"
"Oh, but of course Master Twilight. Because you asked so nicely, I shall do exactly as you command. Oooh! Do you want to be my friend too? I'm really not that bad once you get to know me..."
Twilight responded with a blast of magic from her horn; a pink bolt that shot through the ceiling with a cataclysmic crash that sent a plume of wooden shrapnel and debris out into the sky. "Stop hiding!" she raged, her teeth gnashing at one another.
"Be careful what you wish for," he warned, as the library began to shake.
Pinkie's tail quivered as she looked up to see chunks of building crumble from the edges of the hole rended by Twilight's magic. A rush of adrenaline forced her to set aside her pain. "Twilight! Look out!" She knocked her friend away as one of the larger sections slammed into the ground where they'd just been standing.
The roof cracked and strained before buckling, sending the contents of Twilight's bedroom tumbling on top of them. "Get close to me!" Twilight urged as she cast a bubble-like shield around the two of them.
No sooner had it enclosed did the library collapse, in its entirety, over the top of them. Any light was blocked out by the avalanche of twisted furniture, shattered wooden sections, and the remains of the dead tree in which the library had been built.
Pinkie's eyes remained tightly shut as she felt a lifting sensation in her gut. The debris parted before them as the shield bubble rose through it, emerging into the light of day as a phoenix from the ashes.
The shield dissolved away as Pinkie and Twilight touched back down onto the small mountain of debris. Finally, Pinkie allowed herself to open her eyes. Ahead of them, the sun and moon mingled discordantly in the maroon sky - an eclipse that cast the world below in an eerie twilight.
Silhouetted against its glow was a slender, towering figure crowned with a ring of horns that grew at odd angles from its skull. Eleven arms bristled from its back, dangling at its side with fingers twitching and writhing to an unheard rhythm. Against the shadow, its pale, pupilless eyes narrowed as it studied the ponies before it with bemused disdain. Two unnaturally long arms extended down from its shoulders, effortlessly reaching the ground where their hands gently stroked the manes of Applejack, and Rainbow Dash.
Pinkie recognized them first. "Applejack! Dashie!" she called out.
They remained silent, staring blankly into the distance. "They're mine, now," the Other taunted. "Soon, you will all be mine."