Gildaville
• • • •
Gilda was home.
She wasn’t sure why that seemed so strange and exciting, but it was. A smile pulled at the edge of the young griffon's beak as she filled her lungs with crisp mountain air, basking in the open silence of the remote mining town she called home. No galloping hooves, no giggling fillies, no tooth-grinding musical numbers; just the empty quiet of the dawn. For the first time in what felt like ages, Gilda was happy.
With a satisfied crick of the neck, the roosting catbird brought her gaze to the well-worn sketchbook wrapped in her claws. She rose her feather quill to line in the next little detail, but found her pen slowing to a stop as ink touched paper. Gilda stared vacantly at the page for a long, baffled moment, turning the pad on its side, then upside-down, then rightside-up, trying to discern the image that stretched across its face. There was something there, certainly, but she couldn’t quite seem to grasp it. It had a shape that was no shape, lined with slippery detailing that drove the eye off the page. Gilda had the oddest sense that the drawing didn't know what it was any more than she did.
With a scowl, the young griffon glared over the top of her sketchbook, scanning the town below for whatever elusive whatsit she might have thought to put to paper. From her perch atop the crumbling temple bell tower, she could see the whole of her hometown of Tarsus — the yawning entrance to the gem mine, the half-collapsed jailhouse, the sun-bleached butchery, the picked-over general store — everything in its rightful place, same as always. Same as it would ever, forever be.
Gilda’s quill drooped as she rested her head on her claw, her gaze drifting steadily upward to follow the winding road from the base of the tower to the outskirts of town. The dusty street was lined with long-abandoned, weather-worn cottages, each growing darker and greener as brick became moss, and moss became thick, tangled overgrowth. A scant few years had passed since Gilda had flown the coop for Canterlot, and already the vast Knotwood wilds at town’s edge had grown into the streets with brazen impunity. Empty neighborhoods sank deep into the mossy forest floor, slowly splintering apart as Knotwood's strangling vines grew tighter and thicker by the day. Someday soon the whole town would be swallowed by those woods, and the only home she’d ever known would vanish into the green.
Gilda looked away, her beak clenching with impotent rage. There was a time when she used to cut those vines, and pull up those roots, and stomp out the little budding saplings that dug into the soil like ticks, but she wasn’t around to do that anymore. Gilda was someone's wife now. Gilda had responsibilities. Gilda von Godric was a duchess of the Grand Griffon Confederacy whether she liked it or not, and royalty wasn’t the sort of gig you could just quit. Those blathering, ancient buzzards on the elder council were watching her every move, and they’d been more than willing to shackle her to some dim-witted duke if it meant keeping her close.
Gilda’s claw tightened around the feather quill as she thought back to the arranged wedding, and all the infuriating, mind-numbing posturing she’d been forced to endure for the sake of ceremony. All that back-patting and fake-ass congratulatory BS, piled on by high-society suck-ups whose names she couldn’t pretend to recall. It made her want to gag. They kept saying how beautiful she looked and how proud they were and how happy she simply must be to marry him. The Godric. Oh, what wonderful father he’ll be!
OoooOOooo, you know what I heard from Rainbow? Grumpy Gilda thinks dukes are icky! She’d much rather marry a duchess!
Gilda’s eye twitched as the memory of Pinkie’s shrill voice bounced around her head. She couldn’t recall when or where the aggravating party pony had blared out those words, but they filled Gilda with an inexplicable shame and anger. She felt like a fool for caring what that pudgy dork had to say, but she cared all the same. Her words were stuck in Gilda’s brain like a wad of taffy, stretching further the more she tried to pry it loose. Why couldn’t that dweeb just mind her own damn beeswax?!
With a scowl, Gilda flicked her quill off the edge of the tower, rising from the stone to a stand on all fours. She moved to lob her sketch book aside, eager to take wing and work away the mounting frustration that boiled at her chest. She cast one final glance across the face of the drawing as the pad passed between her claws.
A row of glistening dragon teeth met her gaze.
Gilda’s eagle eyes widened in shock as she stared deep into the razor gaze of Princess Pinkie, the monstrous mare’s fangy grin stretching from one end of the page to the other. That heart-stopping moment in the Canterlot bazaar flashed across Gilda’s mind, so fresh it seemed like yesterday. In a flash, she was bundled tight in those tendrils once more, hopeless and helpless as that hungry, fangy abyss drew her in, inch by horrifying inch.
Gilda dropped the sketchpad like it was on fire, watching with shock as the paper flared against the wind to wind erratically down the side of the tower. She fled, digging her talons into the curved stone ledge and shoving off into the sky, pumping her wings hard and heavy until she’d left the tower far, far behind. She pulled in deep, shuddering breaths of brisk mountain air, feeling her anxiety settle a bit as she sailed over the stretch of writhing overgrowth below. She pushed that ugly moment out of her head with the familiar distraction of flight, losing herself to the sky. It was just a stupid memory. It wasn’t real.
Gilda’s wings locked into a steady glide as she scanned the vine-strangled streets of her town, searching for something — anything — to take her mind off that unholy thing. She wasn’t hungry, but she could eat. It was something to do. She could find something strange and savory from deep within those ancient woods and run it to the ground, gorging herself on self-satisfaction.
A gleam.
Gilda’s eye met another as she focused on a flicker of green light off the cornea of a distant elk. She dipped her wing, turning sharply and swiftly to line up a strike. The dull animal watched with unnatural interest before springing to life and barrelling into the waiting forest as fast as its hooves could carry it. Gilda’s mouth watered as two other elk bolted into view, following close.
Her claws twitched with excitement as she hurled herself toward the looming Knotwood entrance, flexing her wing to cut her speed by half as she neared the ground. The woods were far too thick for flight, but she was rather glad of the challenge. She’d grown soft in those cramped Canterlot streets, surrounded on all sides by safety and sugar-sweet smiles.
Her claws sank shallow into the spongy overgrowth as she hit the forest floor, hind legs pumping as she fought to keep up her speed. She had a good thirty seconds of solid sprint in her before the elk would pull ahead and away, built far better for the long distance than she. This was the moment to pick her mark, and make her play. Her head was clear, her heart was racing, and for the first time all day, she felt wholly and completely awake.
It’s just a dream, Sunny.
Gilda’s eyes darted swiftly between the three galloping beasts, weighing the condition of each by the definition of their muscle and the sheen of their fur. Almost immediately, she ruled out the beast on the far right; its coat battered and its build sickly. With a burst of energy, she closed upon the leader, feeling her tail flick wildly in anticipation.
Gilda had a thought.
Her speed dipped as the young griffon pulled sharply to the right, putting her inches from the gaunt, battered elk at the far end. It seemed to pick up considerable speed at her attention, weaving between branches and under downed trees with trained ability. Gilda grinned, pressing her wings tight against her side as she cleared an overturned log with a lunge, hitting the ground hard and moving with reckless momentum at her mark. Her shoulder landed square against the hard chitin flank of the elk, sending a wave of green flame across its body as the the changeling reared its head with a desperate hiss, revealed for what it was.
Gilda’s claw lashed out in reflex, grasping the bug’s lower jaw to pull it to the ground. The changeling stumbled, losing it footing and its rhythm as Gilda unfurled her wings to hover. She watched it skitter and fall, hard, sliding below her with a screech. The griffon’s paws and claws dropped heavy against the forest floor as she loomed over its barrel, grasping the creature by its side and swiftly rolling it onto its back so that she might look into its freakish compound eyes as she did the deed.
Teeth.
That fangy grin from the bazaar flashed across Gilda’s mind as the drone beamed a creepy, toothy smile in her direction. She stumbled backward, falling hard on her rear as instinct barked at her to turn and flee. Her talons clenched as she fought the memory away, picking herself up off the ground in time to see her prey scamper toward the vine-strangled doors of a mossy tavern. Frustration welled in Gilda's chest as the changeling shifted into a pudgy little lizard thing and squeaked under the doorframe with a cartoonish plock!
With a slash of the talon, Gilda severed the mass of overhanging foliage and shoved the door in with her shoulder. It moved, then stuck. She gritted her teeth as she hurled herself against the wood and roots again and again, breaking apart the entryway just enough to wind her bulk through the break and onto the hardwood floor beyond. Vines strained and snapped against her shoulders as she pulled herself to a stand, cursing to the gods in ways too venomous and blasphemous to recant. She was through, thank the pit.
She stood, breathing heavy as she scanned the sunlit room with hawklike intensity. A shadowy figure dropped from the ceiling with perfect silence, hugging low to the ground as braced for a shift. Gilda tensed, her breath catching as she braced her rear paws against the floor. This was it. The creature would swell into a minotaur or manticore or some gods-forsaken mass of muscle and teeth and it would strike, with desperate abandon.
The room lit green as flames coursed up the changeling’s body, higher and higher, until all that remained was a wide, cylindrical tube of metal. Gilda’s beak fell open in stunned surprise as her prey turned itself into a fricking cannon, its barrel dropping to point directly at her as its fuse burned swiftly into the base. A sound somewhere between a yelp and a squawk escaped Gilda’s beak as the metal buckled and the cannon fired, filling her view with pink.
“Surprise!!”
Light flooded the room with a blast of glitter and confetti, knocking the startled griffon flat on her back in stiff-legged shock. She stared straight ahead for several bewildered moments as her senses dribbled back into her head, blinking with surprise. Impossibly, incredibly, she wasn’t dead.
Gilda craned her neck swiftly downward to survey the damage. She half-expected there to be a gaping hole where her chest used to be, but found instead a thick, fluffy cloud of bubblegum-pink hair, tussling this way and that as its owner nuzzled against her plumage like some attention-starved puppy. Gilda balked, scarcely believing her eyes. There was no mistaking that mane. “P-Pinkie?!”
The hug tightened. “I-I just had to find you! I had to know for sure!!” Pinkie Pie wrapped all four of her legs around Gilda’s bulk, locking into an immovable death grip as she turned two wobbling, tear-stained, ultra-apologetic eyes up to meet Gilda’s. “I’m so sorry about before! I’m so so so so so so so so sorry!!”
Gilda moved her claws to the floor, pulling herself to a slouch. Her claws still shaking from the rush of adrenaline, the young griffon hesitantly wound her talons around Pinkie’s forelegs and pulled, trying to extricate herself the clinging party pony. Pinkie wouldn’t budge, holding tight her hooves with visible strain. “How did you…?” Gilda sighed, letting go as she placed her claws to the floor. She stared with baffled disbelief at the mare buried in her feathers, her gaze drifting from hair to hoof to pudgy little flank. No tendrils, no slitted eyes, no nothing, just regular, dweeby old Pinkie Pie. Only visible difference was a pair of bobbing bumblebee antennae poking out of her poofy mane on two wobbly springs.
Gilda ran her claw through her hair feathers as she tried to wrap her head around the sight. She briefly entertained the notion that this was some really, really top-notch changeling trickery, but that didn't feel true. This felt like Pinkie, and the only thing that felt like Pinkie was Pinkie.
Gilda slid her palm to her forehead in exasperation, each of her long hair feathers jutting at odd angles through her spread talons. “How could you possibly—”
“Oh! Oh oh, right right!!” Pinkie perked up, craning her head to glance about the sunlit tavern before turning back to the griffon in her hooves. “We’re in a dream! We’re in your dream! Grumpy Gilda’s Griffitastic Dreamatorium!!”
Gilda scoffed, folding her arms. “Chyeah, I dream about you aaaall the time, Pinks.”
Pinkie gasped with delight. “Me too!! We’re like sleep sisters, Gilda!“ Pinkie grinned, holding her smile on Gilda’s flat stare for a few moments before giggling. “Buuuuut I’m not part of your dream this time, silly, I’m just visiting!”
Gilda craned her head back with a confused frown. “So… so what, I’m the dream then?” She stared at her claw for a long, contemplative moment before clenching it shut and glaring back at Pinkie, her feathers puffing with embarassed irritation. “T-that’s stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”
Pinkie briefly held back a wide, trembling smile before erupting in genuine laughter, her grip loosening enough for the flustered griffon to stand against the wall and awkwardly step out of her hug like a pair of pants. She grasped the mare by the base of the tail, holding her off the ground with one claw while futilely attempting to brush away the glitter with the other. Pinkie grinned, her legs tucked against her body as she slowly rotated in Gilda’s hold. “Well, um, it’s a teeeeny bit complicated but basically I slipped out of the front door of my brain bakery when Snugglebug nodded off during our Super Special Snugtastic Slumber ‘Stravaganza!! I’m out of my mind right now, Gilda!”
Gilda gave a flat stare. “You don’t say.”
Pinkie giggled. “For realsies! My big dragony dragon-faced dragonbody is snuggled up in bed right now, but my mind-ghost is out here! Floating around!! Pinkie projectededed!!! I remembered exactly how to do it from what Snugglebug knew about what Luna knew about hopping around ponies’ dreams! Luna does it all the time! It’s like her super power.”
“Your queen… visits... your dreams?” Gilda leveled an incredulous look at the giddy pony. “You serious?”
“You betcha!! She shoos away all our nightmares and saves our hay-bacon when things get way too real!” She punctuated the last bit with a spooky waggle of her hooves.
Gilda briefly recalled a particularly odd dream she’d had during her first week in Canterlot where she got in a shouting match with Luna when the overbearing windbag apparently mistook her seedy dream about Rainbow for a nightmare that Rainbow was having about her. Gilda had blown the whole thing off as nonsense when she awoke, but it probably explained a thing or two about how poorly the two of them got along at work.
“That’s uh… creepy.” Gilda scratched her cheek with her talon, trying to hide a slight blush. “So we’re both asleep right now?”
“Mm-hm! Which is a big relief because I was maybe a liiittle tiny bit worried that Snugglebug wouldn’t ever go to sleep? Because I’m pretty sure moon ghosts don’t take nappies? But it turns out they do if you really give them the full Pinkie-party slumber funtime experience! We did each other’s hoooooves and told each other secreeeets and talked about our favorite dreeeeeams and Snugglebug said he’d never ever even ever had a dream before! He was so so sad about it!! So I tucked him right in and got him a nice tall glass of warm chocolate milk and read him one of Pound and Pumpkin’s favorite books which I totally knew by heart from the million jillion kerzillion times they wanted me to read it to them to put them to sleep so I knew it would totally work for Snuggles, which it did!! He started nodding off and then I started nodding off cause we both nod with the same noggin so when one of us nods off it actually nods—”
Gilda held her claw over Pinkie’s mouth as she continued her story, muffling her chirping long enough to glance away and mull over the dizzying tale. If this was a dream, and Pinkie was just some a random figment of Gilda’s imagination, there was no guarantee that any of this would make a lick of sense. Dreams were like that. But, if Pinkie was telling the truth, and she was somehow projecting herself into Gilda’s head with some ridiculous dreamwalking magic of Luna’s, then she supposed that was no less absurd than the moon falling from the sky to party down with a bunch of dweeby horses.
Gilda turned her gaze back at the muffled mare, watching her ramble unabated as she recanted the tale with ever-increasing excitement. With an annoyed scowl, Gilda shook the pink pony about by the tail in a doomed effort to shut her up, “Okay just… stop. Stop talking.” Pinkie froze mid-sentence, stiff as a board. Somehow, she stopped rotating as well. “Who the kalla is 'Snugglebug?' ”
“MphmrummphMMMphmr—” Gilda pulled away her hand with a roll of the eyes. “—uper huge and crazy scary with all these tentacles and teeth and crazy rainbow moon magic that makes everypony go party-craz—” Gilda put her hand back over Pinkie’s mouth with a frown.
“Okay, so, the demon.”
Pinkie’s rambling slowed, then came to a gradual muffled stop. Her eyes sank as she slowly and subtly looked away.
Gilda paused, a bit taken aback by the sombre turn. She carried Pinkie to the front of the tavern and placed her onto one of the bar stools, head-first, leaving her in a perfect headstand. The moody catbird took the stool just beside, reaching over the barfront to grasp a bottle, along with two glasses. With a pinch of the beak, she bit off the cork and poured two drinks. “A demon named 'Snugglebug.' ” She shook her head. “Why do I get the feeling that name was your idea?”
Pinkie looked away, still perfectly balanced atop her head. “Well… I don’t know if 'demon’ is the right word for him...”
Gilda’s feathers ruffled. “ 'Unholy pitspawn?' 'Cackling abomination?' ”
Pinkie frowned a frown that should’ve looked like a smile. “He’s… he’s my friend, Gilda.”
Gilda beak opened slightly in a sneer of disgust. She looked as if she was about to launch into a vitriolic tirade, but held her tongue, glancing subtly about the room. “Is that thing here, making you say that?”
Pinkie looked away. “He’s asleep. It’s just me. Really.”
Gilda turned her head a bit, glaring intensely into Pinkie’s eyes. “Then tell me this is a trick. Tell me you’re luring it in with all this lovey-dovey pony crap so you can—”
“—It’s not.” Pinkie gazed into Gilda’s eyes with a look that was at once sympathetic and strikingly serious. “He’s… well, he’s never had a real friend before, Gilda. He doesn’t get it. He doesn’t get why Luna tried to forget about him when we drove the Nightmare away.”
Gilda slammed her fist down on the countertop, jostling their glasses and sending the bottle toppling to the floor. “That thing imprisoned you in your own idiot head, Stinks!” She jutted her thumb over her shoulder, to the wall at her back where the terrifying sketch of Princess Pinkie inexplicably hung front and center. “That is a real, no-BS, soul-sucking demon, not one of your starry-eyed Ponyville simps! No amount of cupcakes and kisses is going to change the fact that we’re all dead the second that thing gets bored with us!”
Pinkie tucked her head against her chest, rolling slowly onto her back, then onto her rump as she pulled herself upright. She glanced at Gilda with a defeated look. “I know.” She reached for her glass and pulled it close, fiddling with the rim. Her mouth furrowed into a shaky line. “I did everything I could to stop him, back when he… I… had you wrapped up.” Her voice fell quiet. “It almost wasn’t enough.” She looked away. “That poor white pony he tossed into the sky, back in the castle… if it wasn’t for Joe… she would’ve...” Pinkie swallowed, her gaze rising slowly to meet Gilda’s glare. “I know we’ve been super lucky, and I know he might not listen, but I have to try this my way, Gilda.” She looked into her drink. “I’ll never forgive myself if I don’t.”
Gilda’s expression softened as she watched Pinkie deflate. There was something so purely, arrestingly wrong about a genuine frown on that face. She swallowed, lowering her gaze into her own drink. “...Whatever. Do what you want.” She looked to her claw, clenching shut her fist slowly and tightly. “We’re going to blast that gods-damned thing to dust, Pinks, and I’m going to drag you out of whatever’s left. If getting all buddy-buddy in there keeps you sane until that happens, go nuts.”
Pinkie gave Gilda a startled look.
“I mean, you know...” She flustered, looking into Pinkie’s eye with a tiny, shaky smirk. “...don’t go nuts go nuts, I just mean...”
Pinkie’s eyes widened a bit, her cheeks rising as her mouth closed into a straight line. It was decidedly better than a frown.
“...Stay as bonkers as you are right now, I guess.” Gilda turned visibly red, playing around with her glass with an uncharacteristic nervousness that did not escape Pinkie’s smiling eye. “I like you the way you are.”
Pinkie blinked, mouth slightly agape, before exploding into a wide, beaming smile. Her muzzle bumped against Gilda’s beak. “You like me?!”
Gilda reeled back, her feathery face growing redder and redder as she stammered for words. “A-as if! I don’t— with such a—” She stamped her hind paw, balling her claws into trembling fists. “You know exactly what I mean you dweeb!”
Pinkie pealed with laughter, rolling onto her back to rock about the tabletop as Gilda crossed her arms with a huff. The fuming catbird stole a sideways glance at the perky pony as she chittered with delight, fighting back a relieved smile at the sight. Gilda fixed her hair feathers with practiced disinterest. “So... how long’ve we got in here?”
Pinkie wiped a happy tear from her eye as she laid on the tabletop, staring at the vine-strangled ceiling above with a wide grin. “Um! I dunno! Time gets really wonky in dreams.” She grabbed her hind hooves with her forehooves and started rocking back and forth, eyes trained on a line of drawings that ran the length of the back wall. With one fluid motion, Pinkie rolled all the way into a headstand, facing away from Gilda as she inspected the sketches with perfect balance. “These are really, really good, Gilda!”
Gilda rounded the table and stood on her hind legs, putting her back to the wall as she folded her arms and surveyed the yellowing pages. “Chyeah, they’re pretty awesome, no question ‘bout that. Used to kill a lot of time scratching out these bad boys.” She nodded in the direction of one of the more intricate sketches, depicting a howling timberwolf as its eyes bled green with ephemeral light. “Sometimes I’d see something out there I couldn’t really, like,” She gestured against her forehead with a claw, “Get outta my head, you know? So I’d put it to paper.” Her eyes met the vacant green embers of the timberwolf’s gaze. “Makes you stare at every little detail, over and over, until there’s nothing left to scare you.”
Pinkie flopped her rear over her head, pulling herself upright and forward-facing with a twist. She leaned inward, squinting as she took in each snarling monster and screeching spirit. “Some of these I’ve never ever even ever heard of!” She thrust a hoof at a vaporous creature that fell somewhere between a dragonfly and a porcupine. “What’s that thing?”
Gilda glanced at the sketch, then shrugged. “The kall if I know. It shows up if you get too close to a certain swamp in the forest.” She picked at the tip of her talon with theatrical boredom. “Tried to kill it once, but you get all wrapped up in the mist like a spiderweb. Takes like twenty minutes to unw—”
“Whoa!!” Pinkie pressed her face against the next drawing over, eyes darting from one end of the page to the other before she pulled back with a gape. “Is that some kind of bird monster? Its face is all melty!”
Gilda’s feathers stood on end. “Wh— that’s my husband, you dink!”
Pinkie turned red, chuckling nervously as she looked back at the drawing. “Oh! Uhuhm! Eheh, whoopsie!!” She swallowed as her eyes drifted over the puckish grin of a griffon slightly older than Gilda. The left side of his face was wash with long, unsightly burn marks, wholly absent of feathers from his upper shoulder to his forehead. His skin and plumage ran far darker than Gilda’s, falling somewhere between orange-brown and grey, and his left eye was absent of all color but white. “H-he seems nice!” Pinkie’s shaky smile fell, ever-so-slowly, as her eyes drifted to a beak that seemed have been fused shut on the left side, and cut back open in an unnaturally straight line. “...Is he nice?”
Gilda scoffed. “He’s a frickin’ buffoon, is what he is.”
Pinkie glanced at Gilda with a worried look, her ears flat against her head.
The griffon glanced away. “He’s fine, Pinks. I sure as sin wouldn’t marry the guy if I had any choice in the matter, but he’s not, like...” She sighed, chancing a look at Pinkie. The pink pony didn’t seem particularly reassured. Gilda looked at the floor. “He pulled some strings to get me that job in Canterlot, right after the wedding. He didn’t have to do that.” She looked Pinkie dead in the eye. “It’s fine.”
Pinkie scratched the back of her head with her hoof. “What um… what happened with his...”
Gilda gave a bored gesture with her claw. “Some dragon melted off half his face in a botched rout on the Equestrian border, like waay back.”
Pinkie gaped in horror.
Gilda chuckled with a shrug. “I mean that I thought was kinda cool, actually.” She pointed at the sketch. “You ask me, that’s his good side.”
Pinkie let out a short and sudden laugh. She clearly wasn’t expecting it, holding her hooves over her mouth with mortified embarrassment. She looked up at Gilda’s gaze with a start, “Omigosh! I’m sorry! Sorry sorry!!”
“Dude, I don’t care. I barely know the guy.” Gilda folded her arms, glancing away.
Pinkie looked at the floor, then away through the open door, fidgeting in awkward silence. She trotted through the doorway, glancing about the vine-strangled buildings before turning back to the door. “Is this like the crazy dream-version of your hometown?”
Gilda followed through the doorway, taking an appraising look at the distant temple tower. “Nah. I mean, it’s different than it was when I left, but I guess this is more or less how I imagined it’d end up.” She flicked a butterfly away from her beak and casually stomped it into the dirt. Her eyes fell on the face of the tavern, and the tight knot of interweaving vines that threatened to bury it. “I am so not ready to see it go.”
Pinkie frowned, moving to stand beside the sizable griffon. “Where is everypony?”
Gilda's teeth ground in an odd mixture of irritation and resignation. “They got old.” She nodded in the direction of a collapsed cottage further down the road, its walls matted with moss. “Wasn’t anyone to take their place.”
Pinkie galloped onto the porch of the cottage and peered in through the window. “Did the mine run out?”
Gilda flapped onto the roof and sat on her haunches, leaning forward to watch as the mare poked about the yard. “No, Pinks, the mine didn’t run out.” Gilda glanced away as Pinkie turned her gaze to meet hers, leaning forward to lay on her stomach. “There’s a reason the elders flew all the way out to the bucking frontier to drag a chick like me back to the capital.” She rested her beak on her claw, absently flicking acorns to the ground. “You seriously have no idea?”
Pinkie gave a nervous smile. “Um! I’ve got a book on griffon history somewhere, honest! It’s on my reading list after The Herbivore’s Lemma and Twilight’s book on constellations!”
Gilda rolled her eyes. “Chyeah, take your time there, dweeb. No rush.”
“Yep! That’s what I said!” Pinkie chirped, bouncing in place with a rhythmic sproing! sproing! sproing! “I might even just wait for the next edition! You know, to keep up on all the new stuff?”
Gilda’s claws wrapped around the ledge of the roof, squeezing tight. Her eyes narrowed as she watched Pinkie jump about with oblivious delight. “Dude.” She hesitated as Pinkie met her stare. She considered stopping there. “There’s not... gonna be too many more of those.” She swallowed. “You get me?”
“...No?”
“We’re… like...” She gestured sharply to the barren town, her talons audibly scraping as they absently tore at the roofing. “...Running out.”
“You can’t run out of history, dummy! It happens every time somepony does anything!”
“No crap, Pinks!” Her feathers stood on end. “There ain’t gonna be somebody left!”
Pinkie gave Gilda baffled frown.
“Gods...” Gilda sighed. “Look, we don’t really talk about it, but people aren’t… you know... having kids, like they used to.” She gestured dismissively in the air. “Gets worse every year.”
Pinkie’s expression went from neutral to shakey. “W-well there’s… um… books for that...”
Gilda gave a pissed-off sneer. “Ha ha Stinks, you’re crackin’ me up!”
Pinkie’s mane deflated a bit as she leveled an apologetic look at the irritated griffon. “I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be mean.”
Gilda’s beak opened sharply, then closed without a sound. She glanced away with a shake of the head. “Nobody knows what’s causing it, or how to stop it, or how to fix it.” She sighed, her eyes trained on the distant temple bell tower. “All they know is how to test for it.” She looked at her claw. “And how to pair off the few that don’t have it.”
Pinkie was quiet. She watched with palpable pity as Gilda stood, stretched, and dropped to the ground. The griffon seemed to look everywhere but at her. Gilda started down the road leading into the sprawling Knotwood forest. Pinkie was quick to follow.
“Look, it is what it is, Pinks, and whatever it is, it sucks.” She stepped over a mossy log, gesturing for Pinkie to follow through a maze of vast, moss-covered roots. “Believe me, the last thing I want is to sit on my ass with a litter of screaming gremlins coughing up hairballs and crapping everywhere. That ain’t how I pictured my future.”
Pinkie frowned. “Can’t you just stay in Canterlot? At your job?”
Gilda stared forward, her wings shuffling with restless energy. She hadn’t talked about this with anyone. “Not to burst that little bubble of yours, but I am really frigging terrible at diplomacy. Assuming there’s still a Canterlot when this is over and done with, I ain’t gonna be able to hold down that gig for long. They’ll want me back with Godric.”
Pinkie stared at the ground, likely recalling Gilda’s venomous accusation in court the previous day.
Gilda stole a glance over her shoulder, feeling more than a little guilty at the sight of that frown creeping back. She cleared her throat as she held up a mass of vines, letting Pinkie’s pudgy flank squeeze through the narrow opening. “So yeah, look. If that’s the way it’s gotta be, there’s at least one thing I’d like to get off the bucket list while I can.”
Pinkie craned her neck upward with a smile as she shimmied on through to the other end of the gap. “Something fun?”
Gilda smirked, planting her hind paw on Pinkie’s cutie mark and pushing the mare the rest of the way through. “Yeah. Something I’ve wanted to do since I was a kitt.”
With a heavy flap of her wings, Gilda hovered over the opening and swooped to the ground at the end of the colossal root, standing before a vast overgrown valley dotted with towering, impossibly large trees. Pinkie trotted to a perch high above the forested enclave, just beside Gilda, gazing down at what looked to be a thick stream of black smoke pouring from the base of one of the oldest and largest such trees. It was not the first time she’d seen such a sight.
“No way!” She gasped, spinning to look at Gilda with giddy delight. “A dragon? Way out here?” She started vibrating in place, a wide grin growing across her muzzle.
Gilda chuckled, placing her left claw against her forehead feathers and waving her right talons at Pinkie. “Alright alright, sit tight for a sec. Gonna see if I can dream us down there.” She closed her eyes and fell still as the forest around them shifted and spun. The world pulled itself together as Gilda’s eyes came open, solidifying someplace dim and cool and distant. Before them lay the single largest dragon Pinkie had ever seen, its body rife with broken scales and scarred-over markings of ancient squabbles. Its tired eyes were lined with dark bags, as if hundreds of years of rest had not begun to smooth its exhaustion. The mare had the distinct sense Gilda had come here often, intimately familiar with every little knick and scratch as she scribbled its face across her sketchbook.
Gilda held a claw against the jaw of the snoring beast, watching as every breath painted the ground with black soot. “Been hearing ol' Smoke Stacks snore up a storm out here since I was a fledgling. Pretty sure he was around when they first built the town. Nobody has a clue how old he is.”
Pinkie’s eyes drifted over the titanic body of the dragon as it rose and fell with each heavy breath, its enormity splayed belly-down under the thick branching roots of the colossal tree above. Each plate-sized scale was a dim crimson, flanked by salmon-pink spines that ran from its head to its tail. The dirt and the leaves shuddered with every heavy snore it pulled in through its titanic snout.
Gilda leaned against the wall of scales with a self-satisfied smirk, her arms crossed as she stood on her paws. “First time seeing a real, live dragon, Stinks?”
Pinkie trounced into the air with a smile. “Nope! Twilight lives with one!”
Gilda gave the mare a flat look. “I mean a real dragon. A full-blown, like, incinerate-your-bones-in-one-breath monstrosity.”
Pinkie nodded vigorously. “Tons of times! One time Rainbow and Rarity and Twilight dressed up as one and liiived amongst their kind in a volcano!!” She gestured her hoof in a grandiose, far-away wave.
Gilda blurted out a laugh, holding her claw over her beak.
“For serious! Another time, we all climbed a mountain to face down a sleeping dragon and we got him to leave!!”
Gilda waved a mocking claw about the air. “So, what, you and your teen girl squad of like five mares took down a dragon? That what you’re saying?”
“You betcha!” She thrust her hoof directly at Gilda with a sudden intensity. “Although!! It was mostly Fluttershy.”
“Whattershy?”
“Fluttershy!”
Nothing.
“Remember? My friend from Ponyville? The one with the poor little ducklings?”
Gilda cleaned her ear with a talon, half paying attention. “Hrm?”
“The yellow pegasus you were super mean to!!”
Gilda scrunched her beak. “Yeah, doesn’t really narrow it down, Pinks.” She flicked away a bit of earwax with her talon. “She some kind of badass dragon hunter or something?”
Pinkie squealed with laughter.
“What?”
The pink pony clutched her sides, quaking as she giggled.
Gilda scowled. “You’re a weirdo, Pinks.”
Pinkie wiped away a tear, rolling back onto her hooves with a chuckle before casually bouncing her way atop the towering reptile’s snout. She glanced about for a moment before prodding at one of its eyes with the tip of her hoof. “Well, I’ve never seen a dragon this big before, so that’s a first.” She pulled up its thick eyelid, staring into her reflection with a smile. “Wonder what he’s dreaming about...”
Gilda grinned. “The kalla you think I dragged you here for? Let’s check it out!”
Pinkie closed the eyelid, holding a hoof to her mouth in thought. “I dunno… Luna never tried dream-hopping into a dragon, I don’t think...”
“Dude.” Gilda hovered beside the perky pink pony, sending her a semi-serious look. “It’ll be awesome. Trust me.”
Pinkie’s eyes glanced back to the dragon, then to Gilda, then back to the dragon. She smiled, looking back into Gilda’s eyes. “...It would be pretty funnn…”
“Damn right it would!” She gave Pinkie a shove on the shoulder. “C’mon! Let’s blow this joint!”
“Weeeeeell…” Pinkie turned away, seeming deep in thought as she mulled over the proposition. That ponderous state lasted all of three seconds before, “...lllllokay!” In a blur, Pinkie’s tail wrapped around Gilda’s claw, tethering the griffon to the spritely mare as she whipped open the dragon’s eye like a window blind and somehow leapt beyond its splitted iris. Gilda was soon dragged through as the mare’s tail pulled taut around her claw, and in a blink, the world around her fell like molasses. Shapes and colors drifted apart at the seams, as if the glue that held the world together had come unstuck.
Gilda knew it was coming, but there were some things you couldn’t prepare yourself for. The ground and the air and the sky sank into true and absolute nothingness; into the absence of an idea. It didn’t feel like she had a body. It didn’t feel like anything.
Then there was something.
The first thing Gilda noticed was the taste. Another creature’s dream tasted different than yours, in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with your tongue. It was a sense Gilda didn’t have a name for — one that was more similar to taste than smell or touch, but nothing really like any of them. It was as if reality itself could come in a whole host of different flavors, and she’d only known one her entire life.
Smokey the Dragon tasted like raw yams, kinda. Sorta. It was all dull and earthy and lumpy; the kind of taste you knew couldn’t or wouldn’t be spiced up, no matter how you tried. Simple and strong but stubborn. She didn’t dislike it, exactly, but there was nothing there to like.
Reality ran like wet paint around her paws, colors sliding into each other until every vibrant tone had mixed into an samey ugly brown. It was the color you got when you kept washing your brush clean in the same cup of water; all the good mixing with all the bad into this muck of undecided, unspectacular blah.
Her eyes squinted and her beak hung open, sliding into an expression that danced around distaste. Shapes started taking hold. They were in some kind staggeringly massive cave, its ceiling towering leagues above them. The corners were cut with unnatural form, at intentionally asymmetrical angles. The young griffon felt like a cockroach on a countertop, gazing up at the world of giants with dull, uncomprehending eyes.
The floor fell together with the consistency of an odd greenish wood, stretching for what seemed like a mile in every direction. Its grain was honeycombed, odd as that seemed, in a way that seemed both intentional and natural, like a bee’s nest. As if a changeling and a timberwolf got busy and birthed some sort of weird hybrid bug tree, then made it into a giant table.
Nearby she could see odd glassy structures vaguely similar to thin books, and blue-brass constructs akin to metal trees with vast lenses along each branch. Further along, she saw something slightly transparent and utterly alien floating above a wagon-sized gemstone. It wasn’t alive, nor was it a spirit or phantom or whatever, but it was certainly as ‘intentional’ as life. The construct reminded her of the images unicorns would sometimes project with their magic, only more… meaty. Hard.
Gilda brought her gaze to the equally dumbstruck mare at her side. Pinkie’s tongue was hanging out, like she’d tasted something dreadful. Gilda scratched her cheek with a talon. “You taste that too?”
Pinkie shook her head a bit. “Yeah.”
“Not gonna lie. It’s a bit unsettling.”
Pinkie gave a resigned, sideways nod. “Mmhmm… I’m still really not used to that.”
A rather unpleasant thought wormed its way through Gilda’s head. She looked into the mare's half-lidded eyes. “I don’t taste like that, do I?”
Pinkie’s eyebrows waggled. “Izzat an invitation?”
Gilda’s eyes widened with a restrained smirk, more than a little surprised. She held the look on Pinkie for a beat before gesturing at her head with her talons. “I mean like, are pony brains all sugary and griffon brains all salty or whatever?”
Pinkie smacked her tongue in absent thought, pondering the matter with great theatricality. “Umm! You taste weird, I guess.” She met Gilda’s falling expression with a beaming smile. “But in a good way! Like the kind of weird that makes you want to try it more, just to figure it out! Because you know there’s something really interesting and tasty there, you just don’t have a word for it yet!”
Gilda turned a deep, burning red.
“Aww! I mean it! It’s really co—” She pulled in an enormous, full-body gasp, literally lifting five feet into the air. “COOL! That’s what you taste like! Grumpy Gilda’s dreams taste really cool!”
Gilda folded her arms as she diligently waited for her blush to fade. “Yeesh, you take a class on schmoozing up to foreigners or something?”
“Nope!! It’s the truth!” She made a rather complicated gesture with her hooves. “Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my—” She promptly faceplanted onto the wooden floor as the ground shuddered with a low, rhythmic rumble. Her head plocked up from the ground as she glanced about the area with bewildered confusion, her face slowly reshaping from stump-snouted flatness. “—eye?”
Gilda quickly scanned the room for the source of the powerful vibration. She did not have to look far.
Smokey the Dragon thundered through the entrance of the cave on all fours, a large pile of blackened rocks curled within his claw. Gilda wasn’t great at reading reptiles, but his expression stuck her as one of profound boredom — his jaw locked into that sort of effortless flat semi-frown one takes on in absolute solitude. The face you wear when there's nobody around to waste a smile on.
Gilda grabbed Pinkie’s tail with her claw and swiftly dragged the awestruck mare behind the pile of towering glass books. She put up a single talon in a sign of silence before turning back to peek around the edge of the glass wall.
“Zu frickin' almighty that thing is huge.” She shook her head slightly in amazement, watching as the colossal reptile unceremoniously dumped the pile of black stones across what she now realized was a vast countertop. With a thundering screech, Smokey dragged an unseen work chair into place and plopped his enormity to rest a few hundred feet away, swivelling to inspect the rocks before him. Gilda’s eagle eyes narrowed, trying to make out the subtle movements of his claws as he determinedly futzed about with the rocks. “Didn’t think something that big could move like that.”
Pinkie bounced off of Gilda’s back with a subdued sproing! and silently landed atop of the first glass book, peeking around the corner of the second. She glanced down at the annoyed griffon. “What’s he doin’?!”
Gilda squinted, watching with baffled interested as Smokey scraped off a small pile of dust from the black rocks and slid the metal tree overhead, positioning himself to stare through one of the branching lenses. A thin rainbow glow appeared between each lens and he aligned each above the other with the tip of his claw.
Gilda gave Pinkie a shrug. “Microscope, I guess?”
“Whatcroscope?”
Gilda waved off the mare with a claw, not breaking her gaze. “It’s like a reverse-telescope. Pretty sure you magic types don’t use ‘em all that much.”
"What's it do?"
Gilda’s feathers ruffled as she snapped back a short answer. "I ain't explaining how a gods-damned microscope works, Stinks! It’d probably make your tiny little head explode!"
Pinkie fell quiet as Gilda continued to watch. The metal tree creaked loudly with each slight adjustment the lumbering beast made, its light growing brighter and more intense as each fell into alignment. Smokey put his thumb and his forefinger against his forehead, grumbling out a low, irritated growl as he narrowed his slitted eyes into the lens.
Gilda glanced back to Pinkie, her expression falling with a wash of guilt as she took in the mare’s wobbling, exaggerated frown. Gilda swallowed, glancing away. Freaking ponies. “Okay look… it’s like, you know how you see stars and planets and crap just by lining up a buncha curved glass a certain way? It’s the same thing, only you’re looking in. Like at really tiny things.”
Pinkie’s ears perked up. “Like bugs?”
Gilda threw back her head with a groan. “Like fricking germs!”
“What’s a germ?”
“You don’t know what g—” Gilda’s feathers stood on end. “They’re like bugs to bugs to bugs, Stinks!” She gestured sharply with her claw, her voice growing angrier and louder by the word. “Really crazy tiny little bugs!”
“Oh!” Pinkie mulled over the thought for a moment. “So when they look through a telescope, they see us looking back down at them!”
Gilda’s face went red with rage. “They don’t do jack! They just—” She pointed a talon at her palm, her wings fidgeting with building frustration,. “—They don’t even think at all! Okay?! They’re germs! There is nothing going on in their oblivious, dumbass little jelly-bean heamph—!” Gilda found her beak suddenly plugged by a pink hoof as Pinkie shot Gilda a terrified look, her free leg motioning swiftly above. Gilda’s eyes crept skyward to watch as a claw the size of her body curled around the top of the second book, gripping the edge. With a blur of motion, Pinkie bounded to the ground just beside Gilda and pressed the stunned griffon against the glass wall with her head. They flattened themselves against the side of the book, watching with morbid anticipation as Smokey’s colossal head drifted into view, intensely scanning the spot where they’d just been standing.
Absolute silence persisted for several long seconds before the creature pulled back with a dismissive grunt, the top book effortlessly lifting into the sky as Smokey lazily dragged it beside the metal tree. Gilda watched as he drew an odd design onto the cover with his claw, igniting the face of the tome with rainbow magic. He silently resumed to his observation, one claw absently tapping away at the shimmering symbols like a typewriter.
Gilda turned to Pinkie with a flustered frown. “I’m a dumbass. Thanks.”
Pinkie returned a flat, snunched-mussle nod that seemed to say, “yyyyep,” before moving quietly to peek over the top of the book. She watched the beast fritter about for a silent minute before giving a small sigh of disappointment. “Dragons have really weird dreams.”
Gilda shook her head a bit, still watching him plug away with one hand while adjusting the lenses with the other. “Who the kall does work while they’re asleep?” She glanced up at Pinkie’s dangling flank. “Maybe we’re in some kind of lame-ass nightmare.”
Pinkie peered over her shoulder. “We could be in a memory maybe! Sometimes ponies get bits of memories mixed into their dreams.” She turned to stare at Smokey as he tittered away on his glass tome. “He must work a lot!”
Gilda scoffed. “Gods. Talk about a disappointment.”
Pinkie dropped back to the ground with three short bounces, glancing about the room once more. In the distance, along the far wall of the cave, stretched a long, curved window to the outside. With a blink, her doe eyes went wide with wonder. “Whoa...”
Gilda followed the mare’s gaze to the wall, then squinted as she looked beyond the glass. It was the outside. Alien foliage stretched well into the distance, an otherworldly mixture of purples, blues, and oranges. The honeycomb design of the wood grain appeared often, with leaves and ferns growing in odd, curved six-point shapes. Gilda leaned forward with stunned interest. “Holy bucknuts.”
Pinkie turned to Gilda with a delighted, excited grin. “Now that is cool.”
“Shyeah...” The young griffon’s beak hung open a bit as she took a few more steps forward, trying to make out the far-off vista. “You seeing that glowy bit?”
Pinkie shook her head. “I can’t really see that far.” She took a quick glance at Smokey, then turned back to Gilda. “Luna could change other ponies’ dreams all she wanted, but I don’t really… um… get, how she did it, exactly. I just remember her doing it a few times.”
Gilda held her talon up to her head, closing one eye as she tried to envision the two of them appearing on the windowsill. She gave an annoyed sneer as the world remained as it was. “How come I can’t just dream us over there?”
Pinkie shrugged. “It’s really hard to do if it’s not your dream, I think.” She sat on her haunches, staring back at the window. “What’s it look like?”
“The glowy thing?” Gilda’s eagle eyes narrowed as she scanned the far distance. “Fire. Just a wall of white fire.”
“That’s a lotta fire...”
“Yeah.” Gilda’s head shook a bit as she watched the lapping flames stretch from one end of the horizon to the other. “Biggest gods-damned forest fire I’ve ever seen.” She turned to Pinkie. “Guess dreams are weird like that.”
Pinkie nodded with a wide grin. “Hehe, you betcha!” She waved her hoof in the direction of the glass book. “Maybe he reads a lot of sci-fi!”
“A dweeby dragon, huh?” Gilda chuckled, gesturing at the window with a circular motion. “This kinda feels like a dweeb’s dream, you know?”
Pinkie giggled. “I’ve never met a dweeby dragon before! Maybe they’re nicer!!”
“Oooh maybe!” Gilda fluttered her claws about with sarcastic excitement. “Wanna run over and ask him if he plays Oubliettes & Ogres?”
Pinkie put her snout in the air with faux haughtiness. “Some dragons are friendly! Twilight’s little brother is really really polite!” She made a little ‘tut tut’ gesture at the dubious griffon with her hoof. “He made us all pancakes last time I stopped by Twilight’s huge crystal library!”
Gilda rolled her eyes. “The little purple guy? Give him like ten years, you’ll see.” She picked at her talon for a moment before glancing back at Pinkie with narrowing eyes. “Didn’t he like… morph into a giant monster and terrorize Ponyville two years back?”
Pinkie looked upward with a smile. “Weeeeell yeahhhh, but he was really sorry about it! Sometimes puberty is awkward like that.”
Gilda blurted out a laugh. “They had to call in the Wonderbolts! It was a damn disaster!”
Pinkie giggled. “A little bit, yup!! It was really exciting!” She held a hoof to her chin, trying and failing to hold back her smile. “Some damn disasters are all a matter of perspective, you know?”
Gilda held her claw over her beak as she shared a laugh with with the grinning mare, shaking her head at the mental image. “You are so stupidly positive sometimes, Pinks.”
“All the time!”
Gilda took a moment to watch as Pinkie bounced about with oblivious delight before turning back to check on their big dweeby buddy. Or at least, she tried to; there was a wall there now. Gilda blinked, then craned her neck swiftly upward, looking for the top. Further and further and further she leaned, until she was staring at the sky, and the massive slitted eye that utterly filled it. The scaley skin of Smokey’s eyelid audibly crinkled as the unthinkable beast narrowed its gaze, staring straight back into her soul.
They’d been had.
• • • •
He must be going mad.
Lakagigari ik Thorin, scourge of the luminous hemisphere, champion-king of the great pan-continental everwar, was flat-out stupefied. There was something alive in his mind, and it wasn’t him. The thought alone was terrifying.
“Frigging ruuuun!”
The big, feathery bird-creature wrapped its arm around the small, marshmellowy equine and lifted her off the ground as it bolted for the cavern wall. Thorin’s eye tracked the creature with stunned surprise, trying to piece together what, exactly, the avian was. Little bastard could really move.
With one fluid motion, the hulking dragon slammed his claw in front of the scampering feline, curling his palm upward as the creature unfurled a pair of eagle wings and furiously flapped its way over his fingers. It was faster than Thorin expected, but he had size on his side. Size trumped speed.
With a flick of the wrist, Thorin caught both creatures in his claw, lifting them clear into the air to get a better look. The bird pushed and strained against his grip with admirable tenacity, spurring him to clench tighter. Their limbs fell to their sides as their prison closed in, leaving only their wide-eyed heads exposed. He narrowed his gaze at the avian. One of Discord’s monstrosities, no doubt.
“You can... talk.”
The strange beast shot him a panicked look. “Y-yeah dude! Just… figments of your imagination, yabbering away!” She glanced at the pink one. “Right Pinks?!”
The equine nodded vigorously.
Thorin held his finger against the side of the avian’s face, turning it to the side as he inspected her dyed hair feathers with baffled interest. “Since when can your kind talk?”
“The kall kinda question is that?! Of course I can talk!”
Thorin returned an annoyed grumble, tightening his grip a bit more. “You shouldn’t be here. You can’t be here.” He brought the creatures a few feet from his towering iris, staring deep. “Did he send you?”
The equine squeaked under the pressure. “W-w-w-w-we dream jumped, mister Smokey sir!! Gilda and I!”
“Why.”
“Just for fun!! Nothing bad! Promise! We’re just trying to take a break from the moonpocalypse!!”
His grip wavered for a beat. “...What?”
The bird struggled furiously to escape his hold, spitting from her beak as she yelled.“The moon, lizard breath! The gods-damned moon that fell from the sky!”
Thorin’s eyes widened, his mouth creeping open in a baffled sneer. “...The moon is dead.”
Her tiny arms trembled and she pushed against his palm with everything she had. Her face went red with strain. “Tell that to the living moon out there you ash-spewing freak!”
Thorin growled as he redoubled the pressure, eliciting a pained yelp from both. The pink one planted all four hooves on his index finger as she pushed against his palm with her back. “Gilda!! S-stop insulting him!”
“I wasn’t—” The avian assumed the reverse pose, with her back flat against his palm and her paws pressing into his finger. “—I-I’m just kinda freaking out here Pinks!” Her knees wobbled as their sides pressed together, his grip unwavering against their efforts. “W-what happens if we die in here, huh?! Anyone ever die in a dream?!”
Thorin smiled, watching their heads disappear into the black of his palm as he closed them in. “Let’s find out.”
• • • •
Gilda’s muscles burned as the wall of scales closed tighter and tighter, her knees bending and her elbows buckling against the unrelenting force. Her eyes darted to meet Pinkie’s as the last hint of light went out above, plunging them both into the dark. She felt Pinkie’s fur press tight against her own, and felt a sickening certainly that she was going to die here. They were going to die in a dream, side by side.
“I’m such an idiot, Pinks.”
Pinkie didn’t respond. She just kept saying something, over and over and over, almost under her breath. Their heads were forced together by the pressure, plastering Gilda’s ear just beside Pinkie’s mouth as their world grew smaller and tighter. Her breath caught as she focused, trying to make out the words.
Please wake up, please wake up, please please oh please oh please wake up...
Gilda clenched shut her eyes and screamed, throwing her shoulder against one wall and her hind paws against the other, pounding at the scales with desperate abandon. It was as futile as beating against a stone wall. She tried to break the scales with her claws, to dig deep enough to hurt him back, but she could do nothing. She could do absolutely nothing but wait in morbid anticipation for—
Gilda heard a sharp gasp to her side. Her heart froze dead.
“Pinkie?”
Nothing.
“Pinkie?!”
Pinkie stepped out.
The words bounded in her head, everywhere and nowhere at once. As if it had come from air itself. And the air didn’t sound like Pinkie.
A pair of brilliant white eyes flew open inches from Gilda’s face, bathing the cavity with light. Gilda stared into the shuddering pink rings around each razor iris, feeling a jolt of instinctive terror at the sight. She knew at once, beyond a shadow of a doubt, whose eyes those were. That thing was awake. That thing was here.
Pinkie’s hair split into eight thick tendrils with a sharp wave of red light, bolting in eight different directions to curl around the creature’s crushing digits like tentacles across the mast of a ship. A long, coursing, unending wave of curls poured from her mane as her hair grew longer and fuller with each pulse of red. The rules of the dream were meaningless to one who could bend reality into knots.
Gilda felt the surreal sensation of hair coiling around her waist and her wings, travelling up her body to bundle her body tight, just like that heart-stopping moment in the Canterlot bazaar. Memories of Princess Pinkie’s gaping maw flashed through her mind, screaming at her to fight and flee, but her body refused to budge.
Pinkie’s eyes stared deep into her own, never blinking or wavering for an instant. Gilda didn’t doubt the demon neither needed or understood eyes, capable of ‘seeing’ her in every way there was, every second it chose to do so. A wide smile of razor-sharp rock-candy teeth fast grew across her muzzle as she stroked her chin with a thin tendril of mane, plainly excited to speak to the young griffon once again.
“I had the weirdest dream about you, Grumpy Gilda...” The walls strained and pushed against the tightening bundles of her mane, already elastic enough to fully resist the force of Smokey’s grip. Light poured in through quivering gaps in Smokey’s fingers, forced open by surging waves of hair that coiled endlessly around each digit. The demon scarcely seemed to notice, its attention focused entirely on the terror-wracked catbird in her mane. “I dreamt you yelled at me, and ran far, far away...” The hair crept up to Gilda’s neck before slowing to a stop. She was utterly and completely helpless. “...And I just couldn’t find you, no matter how hard I looked.”
Gilda’s breathing swelled into a hyperventilated flurry of panic as her her limbs went limp with a creeping numbness. Her beak opened, but nothing came out. She could barely think through the fear.
“I guess dreams are weird like that, huh? I looked and I looked and I looked, all night long...” Pinkie’s body flickered with red as her fur and her mane began melting into an elastic texture Gilda could only assume was bubblegum. The mare’s body lost all form but for her head, which grew with the rest of her unimpeded. “...And you were right here all along!” Her eyes and her teeth held form as the mass of gum effortlessly pried open Smokey’s palm, coating his entire hand with bubblegum. “Just a hop, skip, and a dream-jump away, the whole time!”
• • • •
Thorin was well beyond words when the last of his feeling drained from his hand. It wasn’t numb, it just wasn’t his anymore. The wave of curling pink hair and surging, elastic growth crept up his forearm without slowing for a single moment. He wanted very much to believe this was some unseen spirit of the Equestrian wilds, or some absurd abstraction of the dream, but he couldn’t make himself believe it. He felt the truth.
His hand wasn’t his. Nothing would ever be his, so long as the One Within All was within all. For a dragon, there was something so unthinkably terrifying about being owned, and never owning.
“By Siris, you live.”
Oni’s head swivelled with perfect precision to meet his eyes with two unblinking pools of trembling magic. Its face swelled to tower over him like a bubble blown of gum, four ever-thickening tendrils whipping around his wings and along his chest with a cartoonish stretching sound. Its eyes widened in a moment of sickening recognition, its mouth shifting from an intrigued ‘o,’ to a wide, giddy smile. “Heyyy...” He felt the growth cross his elbow, losing all feeling from his forearm down. “I remember you!”
His heart stopped dead at the words. He had no doubt The One Within All spoke the truth. The eyes of a world were on him, and it could see everything he ever was.
“La la-la la-la la-Lakagigari ickie Thornybutt!” It… giggled, bobbing its rubbery head about. “I told you I’d find you, one day!! Took a liiiiittle longer than expected, but I sucked a buncha moon magic from Mr. Harbie and now I’m back! Better than ever!!” The growth wrapped around his shoulder at a sharp angle, meeting the tendrils along his chest to slowly swallow over his entire body. “Can’t wait to get back into that busy little noggin of yours! You always used to come up with the craziest spells!”
Thorin tore at the growth with his free claw, feeling his legs lose sensation as his lower torso was consumed by the Blight. His fingers became stuck in the elastic goop, pink creeping up his nails to surge across his claw. He fell hard against the stone floor, trapped tight in a living straight jacket.
Oni’s head grew out of his chest, staring down upon him as each tendril grew fuller and thicker by the second. It tapped its chin with a thin wisp of hair, its eyes glancing away in an overly-rehearsed gesture of thought. “What was that line Mr. Harbie said, right before the end?” Her face swelled into a perfect likeness of Discord, yellow eyes and all. It spoke with his voice, in exactly the same way he had over three thousand years ago. “There’s not enough world to go around, I’m afraid.”
Thorin tried to scream, but his mouth wasn’t his anymore.
• • • •
Gilda watched with wide-eye horror as bubblegum poured across the cavern floor, flowing right up the walls of Smokey’s mind without a thought for weight or gravity. She felt the gum spread over the top of her head and between her hair feathers, creeping down her forehead like hot rubber. Her eyes darted back to the entombed dragon, watching the outline of his vast body sink into the flood like sugar into water. It started with his feet, then his wings, then his neck, then… there was a tremor.
It went through reality with a wide, gaping crack; a fissure that hung there in the air, empty, through which there was only black. Piece by piece, the world around her broke and fell through the gum and the floor, into nothing. The ceiling collapsed, and there was nothing beyond it.
She felt it again; the sensation of the world falling around her like molasses. She was blinded as the gum fell over her eyes and across her beak, threatening to swallow her whole as it had the dragon. She fought against the bindings, she kicked and she tore and it would only stretch.
Gilda.
Her breathing was ragged as she struggled and jabbed with her paws, hind claws extended. She felt a tear. Her bundled forearms strained as she pushed out with her claws and her wings in tandem, giving it everything she could.
Gilda!
She felt her body fall into the black, somewhere infinite, without an end or a beginning. She felt something hard slap across her cheek, and somehow, as if flipping a switch, that abyss became everything again.
“You’re having a nightmare, kiddo!”
Gilda jolted awake with a sharp gasp, halting her struggle dead as she locked her panicked gaze to the worried eyes above. She blinked, frantically scanning the familiar face against the bright white-pink light of the moon. Joe.
It was just Joe.
The bed-headed stallion had his hoof on her shoulder, holding a concerned look as he undid her bundle of blankets with his free foreleg. “It’s alright. It wasn’t real. You’re right here with me, back at the Diner.”
Gilda felt the tension ease as Joe gripped the end of a tablecloth with his mouth and gently pulled it free, unbundling the young griffon from the blanket burrito she’d worked herself into. She let out the breath she’d been holding in, putting a claw against her forehead as relief washed over her. “...Gods.” She met Joe’s eyes with a small shake of the head. “I… is it morning?”
Joe nudged a towel at her side, then nodded toward the small window at the far end of the room. “Supposed to be, if the clocks are right.” He glanced at the tear in the fabric of the tablecloth, left from Gilda’s struggles. “That sounded like a bad one.”
Gilda sat up, staring at her claw as she absently opened and closed her fist. Sunny’s blue pendant was still wrapped around her wrist, glowing noticeably brighter than the night before. “Yeah. Yeah it was.” She plopped herself onto her side, staring through the window, and the distant Canterlot castle beyond. The rain had turned to a light flurry overnight, gently drifting from the clouds to powder the bustling city with sugary snow. “Really good before it went bad, though.”
Joe gave her a small smile. “Well at least there’s that.” He turned for the stairs, glancing over his shoulder as he stepped over Gilda’s tail. “There’s a tub in the storage basement, when you’re ready. I’ll have a cup ready for you in the Diner.”
Gilda said nothing, listening in silence as Joe’s hooves clunk-clunked down the staircase. Her talon lightly wove along the hardwood floor, drawing Pinkie’s face as it was in her mind: Wide, beaming smile. No fangs, no tendrils, no nothing.
Just regular, dweeby old Pinkie Pie.