//------------------------------// // Chapter 10 // Story: Ghost Lights // by Winston //------------------------------// Ghost Lights Chapter 10 It was in the afternoon on the fifth day of our journey that we came to the end of the old unicorn road we were using. I'm sure that at one point it led to something significant, maybe a town or a military outpost, but whatever that was, it had long ago been lost to the sands of time and now the road just sort of fades out. The paving stones become less and less frequent over a stretch of about a hundred meters and finally they simply disappear altogether, and the pathless wilderness takes over completely. When I say wilderness, I really mean that, too. Where we were by now was far outside the bounds of Equestria. Those bounds are fuzzy and by no means always official or well-defined, exactly, but if a guess had to made I'd have said they were maybe about two days of travel behind us. We were very much alone and clearly no ponies lived here. Untamed tall grasslands and forests blanketed all the earth. There were no more of the calm, verdant meadows and clear fields of shorter grasses. To the west, stretching both north and south, the silhouettes of the mountains that edge this continent could be seen now on the horizon. They loomed like mysterious distant watchers, sometimes clearly and sometimes with their upper peaks veiled by blanketing clouds. The first time I became really aware of them, the sight sent a tingling chill down my spine, partly of anticipation. We'd be getting a much closer look at those mountains in good time, I knew. For now, though, there was the more immediate landscape at hoof that we'd have to negotiate. The tall grasses, scrubgrowth, and scatterings of forest made for slow going. There's something frustrating about traveling like this, being a pegasus. I can hop in the air and fly whenever I want, and that would make the terrain irrelevant. I could go as fast as I felt like. Unfortunately, that's not an option with a ground-bound unicorn to bring along through this mess. I did spend a fair amount of time flying, but mostly only to look ahead and scout out the easiest paths to walk through. Azure wasn't helpless either, though. On the contrary, she was able to skip the worst parts and speed things up considerably by simply teleporting herself past many obstructions that would have taken some time to find safe ways around. By projecting telekinetic force around herself while she walked, too, she prevented herself from getting tangled up in brush and thorns that would have deterred many other ponies. All things considered, we still made fast progress. By the time the sun had almost set on day five and it was finally too dark to travel any further, we found ourselves in lowland woods bordering on swampy marshes. They caught the runoff drainage from rain on the rugged rolling hills nearby and spread it out into vast sprawling still pools under the fallen leaf litter and dead plant matter of the forest. We walked along in the open spaces between the trees. The trunks were ancient and gnarled, with thick heavily figured bark and twisted limbs. Many of them looked half dead, with patches of bare branches that curled into claws and big knotholes that gaped like predatory mouths filled with jagged teeth of dryrotting wood splinters. The occasional sound of birds, mostly the inelegant and rough caws of crows, could be heard from overhead, but they were always just far enough away that I could never quite see where they were. It made them feel menacing in some indistinct way I couldn't put my hoof on. This might not have been the most comforting of places to spend the night, but there wasn't much choice at that late hour. In the last fading blue light of the twilight, while we could still see somewhat reasonably, we looked for a suitable campsite. Somewhere relatively dry was desirable, and someplace that didn't smell of decay even more so. We kept catching momentary nauseating hints of the rotten egg scent of hydrogen sulfide that swampy areas are prone to emitting. We were at a clearing that edged on a wide patch of soggy marsh filled with cat-tails and reeds, when motion caught my eye in the distance from far across the water, something partially obscured by the rotting trunks of fallen trees. What I saw made me freeze in place, and quickly unfurl a wing to silently signal Azure to stop as well. She followed my gaze, and just watched wordlessly once she saw it too. We both stood completely still. A glowing shape made of pale blue-green luminescence, a little indistinct but for the most part approximately spherical, moved in the distance. It floated through the air slowly, in haphazard fashion, often changing directions. Another emerged after a few seconds, and the two of them followed roughly the same course. The first faded away into nothingness after a short time, as if it had never existed, but the newer one kept moving. It was soon joined by another, and as we watched a series of these distant glowing objects formed and faded. All of them drifted around slowly, meandering their way through the woods and plant life. As we watched, I could see their light glimmering on the water. They didn't move or disturb any of the plants they drifted near, and they made no sounds. There was nothing to show they were there but the coldly pale blue colored glow they gave off. Some part of me wanted to see them more closely. I took a step or two forward, closer to the edge of the water. A few more seconds went by. I began to unfold my wings, getting ready to take a quick flight over the marsh to get a closer look at the phenomenon. I suspected I already knew what it was, but it was interesting, something I'd heard was very rare and that I'd never seen before. "No!" Azure whispered harshly, and suddenly stood in front of me, blocking the way. "I don't... we just shouldn't get close, not to these." "Why? It's just a little bit of will-o-the-wisp," I said quietly. "Is there something wrong? Is it something else?" "No," Azure shook her head. "It's not... wrong... I mean, I don't feel anything magical or out of place... it just makes me uncomfortable, is all. I don't feel good about it." I could understand her hesitation. Cold rationality aside, these dancing blue swamp-lights did have an eerie, ghostly character to them, like they were spirits or spectres out there in the distance - like wraiths, that we were watching but that hadn't yet seen us. Maybe we didn't want them to, either. "Alright," I agreed with Azure. I folded my wings back up. "Yeah. We'll just leave it alone." We walked away to drier parts of the forest, and kept hunting for a suitable camping site until we managed to find one that didn't seem too terrible. We gathered some sticks and cleared a patch of ground to build a fire. Azure started it using her magic, and we quickly had a comforting warm little blaze going. We were quiet for a while as we both sat close to the fire. It was a hungry night, too, since there wasn't very much that seemed good to eat growing in this forest. Neither of us trusted the swamp vegetation. Azure sat motionless for a long time, staring deep into the fire with eyes that seemed hypnotized. Her ears were picked up, moving almost constantly, and instantly snapping themselves toward any faint sound that came from the dark forest. At very occasional intervals she scuffed at the dirt slightly with one forehoof, nervously. Her whole being was on edge. "Hey," I finally said to her, quietly, "are you alright?" "Yeah," she said. "I'm just... I don't know." "Don't need any ghost stories after what we saw, do we?" I asked, trying to inject some humor in things. It failed completely. Azure didn't look any different. "Gas from the swamp, burning itself off," Azure mumbled. "That's all. I know that." "Yep. Seems simple enough." I nodded. "I was always taught to be careful about stuff like that, though. I've heard stories that they can be dangerous, for a pegasus flying over marshes or wetlands at night, especially if it's foggy. The lights can make you think you're seeing starlight or moonlight diffusing off clouds. You'll think you're still at a safe height up in the air when you're really way too low, and then all of a sudden out of nowhere you'll fly face first into a tree or hillside or something." "Unicorns also have stories about the will-o-the-wisp," Azure said. "Especially the old stories. They called them the ghost lights. That's what superstitious ponies thought they really were. Now we know better. Still, though, those traditional ideas... Those stories still get told. Unicorns also thought the lights were misleading. They thought that the lights were spirits trying to lure away anypony traveling at night and trick them until they were hopelessly lost. The story was that they would stay lost forever. Once the ghost lights had a pony following them, that pony would never be seen again." "I've heard that before," I agreed. "They're the ghosts of unicorns who were lost in life, so now they're lost in death, too," Azure continued. "The ones who did bad things or just didn't know their real purpose. The ones who didn't follow their cutie mark, I guess. That's how they thought a pony becomes one of the ghost lights in the wilderness." "They are kind of creepy," I said. "It's the first time I've ever seen them. If they're fire, how do they form round balls instead of flames and how do they last so long and float around like that?" "Who knows?" Azure shrugged. "They're too rare to be easily researched. We basically don't know anything for sure." "Hmm. Maybe I'll do some investigating on it someday," I said. "It is sort of cool." "If you want to spend your time hanging out in creepy swamps getting lost chasing ghost lights, be my guest," Azure replied. "Well, when you put it that way..." We both slept uneasily that night. We were happy to be up early and move on from this forest as soon as the dawn brought enough light to travel again.