“But whence come these monstrosities? You ask; from what fountain do they flow? In days of old, the dams of Canterlot were kept chaste by their humble fortunes. It was toil and brief slumbers that kept vice from polluting their modest homes; hooves scratched and hardened by the naked rock, Carnifex nearing the city, and stallions galloping to arms at the Abraxine Gate. We are now suffering the calamities of long peace. Luxury, more deadly than any foe, has laid her wings and hooves upon us, and avenges a conquered world. Since the day when Equestrian poverty perished, no deed of crime or lust has been wanting to us; from that moment gryphons, zebras and minotaurs have poured in upon our hills, with the beggar landed amidst drunken and unabashed shame. Filthy lucre first brought in amongst us foreign ways; wealth enervated and corrupted the ages with foul indulgences. What decency does Luna observe when she is drunken? When she knows not one member from another, eats huge carrots at midnight, pours foaming poisons into her unmixed Nectars, and drinks out of perfume-bowls, while the roof spins dizzily round, the table dances, and every light shows double!” - Juvenile, History, Satire and Politik, c.210 BN
The creature was far longer than even Twilight's febrile imagination had feared. There seemed to be no end to it. The muscles that were driving its terrifyingly fast advance across the plain toward the river were all knitted into a single, undifferentiated mass along its spine which, when the creature finally exposed its entire body to the light, burst from between its last pair of thundering legs and formed a wickedly sharp tail. It held the whip-like appendage nearly rigid, the bony serrations that jutted out of the skin flashing with a honed edge.
Despite its size, it moved with unreal speed. Like some tremendous steam train undergoing emergency braking, showers of sparks followed it in a long wake. The sound of it hammered at Twilight's ears. This was not the merry, shimmering tone it had produced before. It sounded as though a dresser full of bone china and loose cutlery was perpetually tumbling down a funhouse spiral slide, though thousands of times larger. In a stomach-clenching moment of heightened awareness, she saw that all of its hundred hooves had broken apart from single, flat surfaces to many extra claws, forged of the same metal but obscenely sharp-looking, as if it were galloping on knives.
This was, she thought, an all too common occurrence in her life. For when was it the case that some adventure did not, ultimately, conclude with a beastly freak or hideous mockery of life charging at her? Or, if it did not conclude that way, it would be true that the aforementioned nasty would be holding the secret to the conclusion; a special key, an ingredient, a sacred artefact, whatever it happened to be.
Instinctively, Twilight reached for her magic but, as though she were descending a staircase only to find a step missing halfway down, the threads of its power were absent. And I used it all on oats! She held the spell she intended to cast in her mind, a particularly vicious heat beam, but without the fuel to make it work, there it remained, in thought only. The creature loomed, its two fanged mandibles stretching extra wide. Time appeared to slow. She turned to Whom and said: “Fly!”
The collision happened. Twilight's image of Whom flashed into a pink blur. She was very aware of the sensation of her hooves leaving the ground. The weight of the impact was too much and too fast for her magic-deprived force to fight back against. Her desperate telekinetic flails were as effective as a feathery touch on the flank. The syrupy air flowed around her ears for a moment, then the pain and the river swallowed her more or less simultaneously. She felt a clamping, muscular tightness in her neck and chest, but found she could not move to see what it was, blithely knowing what it had to be. Then the river rolled up around her, and it would have been in vain in any case. The substance of it, whatever it was, let no light below its surface.
*
Two equine figures, one distinctly taller than the other, trotted down one of the Everfree's innumerable tracks. The low background rustling and chirping of animals and insects seemed to have gone into abeyance. Squirrels and jackalopes, popping their heads from the undergrowth for a moment, would turn tail and flee as if burned at the sight of the party coming through the dense greenery and graceful, ivy-laboured arcs of ancient trees. Even the occasional miraj or other fearsome beast turned away.
“And you're definitely sure we're invited?”
“Positive, old friend. When have I ever let you down? Anyway, relax, this is an open house. How are they going to stop us?”
“It's not very polite to turn up without a specific invite.”
There was a loud bang, like someone striking a giant timpani once. Lines of hard shadows briefly played across the forest floor, blinding light illuminating the hiding places of terrified woodland creatures. Suddenly, Satan was waving around a glimmering golden slip in a sheath of magic. “I borrowed the Big Man's!”
“Aw, shucks, Satan! That's stealing!”
“So it is, Death, so it is. I have a feeling he won't mind, though.” The timpani sound came again, though curiously the light seemed to peel back out of the distance where it had fled off to in a great hurry, photons arresting their courses and jumping toward their point of origin with all the same alacrity. “Hey, have you had a chance to look between your legs? Your back ones, I mean.”
“No...”
“I gotta say, I am hung like a horse!”
“Satan, that's lewd!”
“Good, strong set of testes right there, all firm and tense against the body, you know? Just waiting, nay, aching, to fill their purpose in life.”
Death dipped his head and, rather awkwardly, examined his undercarriage. He almost tripped, but managed to only stumble. “I don’t think mine came with those... I might be a mare.”
“You don’t smell like a mare.”
“I don’t know much about horses, Satan, I just walked into a farmyard and chose one at random to base the model on…”
“So, you wouldn’t know what a gelding was, then?”
“No.”
Satan laughed like a drain being unclogged, a smug grin on his taut features. “Hey, Death, when you find out...”
“Yeah, Satan?”
“Don't kill the party.”
“Ugh!”
*
“She's a whore, yes a whore,
A mare of myth and lore.
A Carnifex of oral sex.
You can ride her you till you're sore.
Yes, she's a whore, yes a whore.
She is dear to Crown and corps.
Her tail's arrayed, we'll all get laid
By the whore that we adore!”
The nottlygna had barely finished their latest bawdy tune by the time Luna coaxed Mytheme into the sky. Even laden down with all the supplies they could find, and a whole herd of batty ponies, the ancient yacht was a dream to handle. It was still a severe test of her willpower to avoid opening up the thaumic throttle and really seeing what it could do, but she kept the long, slender craft at just below the speed of sound. In her mind's eye the tortured rooftops and open plazas of the quarters surrounding the Palace turned into a blur of slate and granite. Moments later, Avalon's caldera rim passed below, revealing long slopes and wide plains that rolled off in all directions.
Wobbling threads of quick, slate smoke trailed up from the industrial districts and small conurbations that nested around the city proper. The blast zone caused by the liftgas facility's untimely demise was clearly visible. Obliterated stands of trees and the muddy, track-scored remains of parks, as well as the smashed rubble of unidentifiable buildings and collections of other structures, demarcated an area of destruction that was almost as big as the footprint of the city. Luna doubted that anyone not protected somewhat by the caldera wall would have been severely injured, deafened or blinded. Yet, even in all the madness below, there were signs of a properly organized evacuation. She could see winding, trailing lines of ponies trotting in single file or in small groups, heading in a rough easterly direction. Most were aiming for the coast, it seemed, or some parts in between.
Luna guided Mytheme on a single, surveying orbit of Avalon, taking in all that there was to see, then pointed the blunt nose of the yacht toward the south-west, following the same line of pegasus guide beacons that she had used to enter the city.
*
Whom scanned the surface of the rippling river with wide, fixed eyes, flapping her wings as hard as she could. Already the muscles along her belly that powered them were beginning to burn with fatigue, threatening to painfully seize up at any moment. Her heart hammered like a demonic drum solo in her chest. Sweat lathered up on her barrel and neck, and her breath came short and gasping. The monster-thing had collided with Twilight and kept on going as if she had been nothing but a dragonfly in the path of an avalanche. Then both had gone into the river, the metallic, goopy stuff that ran through it swallowing them up with ease. It was silent now, aggressively so. The quietness ate at her, eroding her mind. All Whom could hear were the sounds of her own struggle and fear, desperately small in all the cloying, invasive nothingness.
After what felt like simultaneously an eternity and a precious few moments, awful pain put paid to her flight, and she dropped like a pink, feathery stone onto the cold, unyielding floor. In her fear, she had failed to reserve any strength to break her descent, and something went pop in her stomach, exploding in hot needles of tension and pain. She bounced once, wings folding as they were painfully jarred this way and that, then landed again and came to a stop on her back, staring upwards into the darkness. Little red motes blotched her vision, and what small effort she had left she spent on whinnying. The broken parts of her ribs moved freely against one another, producing a gut-wrenching grating sensation as well as more lances of pain, so she tried to keep herself as still as possible.
“I've seen better landings!”
The voice was nearby, and its mere presence made Whom jerk her head toward it instinctively, an action she immediately regretted. Dozens of little wounds all along her stomach and back, all over her body in fact, suddenly made themselves known. Grazes, sprains and innumerable bruises fought for space in her attentions with the cuts and gashes. They stung atrociously, making her feel as though she'd just gone ten rounds with a back boxer made entirely of sandpaper.
“What happened to your friend?” the voice said, deep and mellow, a tutor's patient tones, yet it was only passingly interested, as if it belonged to a spectator at a boring sporting event. “Looks like the ekatopleton got her good.”
Some distance away, there had appeared a kind of long sofa, with four legs, extravagant purple upholstery, and a large number of baroque ornamentations and engravings. The legs ended in four different kinds of animal foot; a gryphon paw, a big flat hoof and a smaller, thinner one, curved beyond all realism, and some sort of tentacle arrangement like a ratty knot of feelers. With a strange rocking motion, they were gradually shuffling the whole piece of furniture forward. It moved with a slow, yet stately and perverse inevitability, like a glacier made of phalluses.
Draped over it was what at first looked like a pony shaped pile of dirty grey rags. Up where the face should have been was a wide, drunkard's smile, underlining a short and fuzzy nose and the merest hint of eyes, above which were a pair of heavily furred ears that bracketed a long, thin horn. The most tremendous beard that Whom had ever seen flowed seamlessly into his mane, a single roiling morass of hair that encompassed his entire body. To make matters even more confused, the beard itself was wrapped several times around the pony's barrel and flanks, eventually merging into the bundled weave of his tail.
As soon as Whom noticed that the creeping, slithering chaise lounge was actually making its way toward her, she decided that it was wise to try and get to her hooves. It hurt a lot worse than she was expecting. The broken rib chastised her grievously as she first rolled onto her belly then, as she shakily stood, it initiated a new phase of awful, burning misery, grinding and atrocious.
“Who are you?” she said, her voice a pathetic mockery of what it had been, like a dog which had been barking too much.
“Why, my dear little starling! Does all the hair not give the game away?” He threw his head and seemed to be posing for her. “I'm Starswirl the Unshorn.”
*
“I think I should handle this one, Satan,” Death said, as the pair of them drew to a halt outside the Cosy Tie-Up, a long, squat building of considerable age that now served as Ponyville's only real hostel. “We'll catch more breezies with honey than with vinegar.”
Satan only chuckled in a way that recalled the falling over of moss-choked tombstones. The beams of the Cosy Tie-Up's first story sagged under the weight of the second and third, as if they had been added at some unknown point in the building's evidently long history, against the advice of architects. A sign bearing the name, flapping and clanking on its chains in the breeze, dangled from a yardarm that extended from the side of the structure. Windows, portholes and other assorted apertures that filled the same purpose decorated the frontage in madcap fashion. An equal assemblage of blinds, drapes and curtains completed them, mostly preventing the warm, buttery golden light that spilled from the unblocked ones from assaulting the incessant rain. There was only a single door, a huge black thing made of ponyoak that had been honed to a fine sheen, especially around the plate at head-height that served to open it.
There was a tremendous thunderclap and associated flash of lightning as Death nosed through the entryway. The promised warmth of the light delivered on its end of the deal, radiating from a huge fireplace in the middle. It had apparently been a giant communal living space at some point, as it was arranged in a loosely circular drum shape set about the hearth. Soot-blackened iron griddles and other mechanisms of the fire nestled over a quintet of huge logs, which were well ablaze ensconced in the ashen remains of kindling and charcoal, and all buried in a sort of large pit. There was a brass kettle, decorated with enamel figures engaged in spring rituals, boiling on a hook hung just below the smooth hole where the chimney drew in smoke.
The peal of thunder had only just finished its rolling, echoing refrain when the screaming started in earnest.
*
It had been another quiet evening at the Cosy Tie-Up for Long Stay, owner and proprietor, though she liked to think of herself as more of a steward. Her dam had passed the place on to her, after all, and her dam before that, and so on, into the deep recesses of history that nobody talked about very much. There had been the usual traffic of guests, eager to get off the road and into the comfort of a warm bed, especially with the unseasonably heavy rain that had appeared in the early evening, without so much as a pegasus to explain why in the wide, wide world of Equestria it needed to be quite so boisterous. She had served the evening meal of vegetable stew to a merry, if somewhat travel-weary, herd of ponies, then everyone had drifted off to their separate rooms.
The Tie-Up never closed, technically speaking, as the idea of having some poor soul, fur soaked and hooves aching, turn up at the only real public house in town in the dead of night, cruel gales biting at his flanks, only to find himself faced with a bolted door, sent dread shivers down Long Stay's spine. However, there was a protracted period, beginning shortly before midnight, when the place settled down and went into a sedate slumber. She would take up a watchful position near the aforementioned door and keep the kettle hot, just in case. In her opinion, there was no better way to recover from bad weather than with a nice cup of mint tea. There was even the possibility of hot chocolate.
She had just been on her way back to her spot at the door from putting away the chickens for the day when the entrance had swung hesitantly open, faltering a little. Pride, glee and an attentiveness verging on motherly had first swelled in her chest, and she'd quickened her pace to help attend to the prospective guest's potential needs. She'd been so engrossed in her expectations, in fact, that she barely noticed the square and slender muzzle of the statuesque hooded figure that had entered her hostel. Except then she did, and all those positive emotions vanished.
Beady eyes, half the size of those on a normal pony, peered at her. They were set in either side of the creature's face, looking out to the left and right instead of directly forward. Two great nostrils flared and breathed hot air all over her. Its fur and mane were completely overgrown, and he would have looked like a tramp had it not all been immaculately groomed. It was huge, at least twice as high as she was, and Long Stay was no squat mare. She strutted with the best of them. It seemed to be regarding her with a predatory intent. That single thought was enough to set off an ancient string of fear responses in her brain. She began to scream.
*
Twilight struggled as hard as she could, but the creature had a fierce hold on her. She felt its many misshapen teeth cut into the skin and muscle along her back and flanks. They scythed into her belly. Her organs offered little better resistance to the mangling, and popped as they were ruined. She barely felt much of this. It hurt, certainly, but it was as though a kitten were nibbling her playfully. This mute, disconnected perception of the progressive destruction of her corporeal form was, in a way, more disconcerting that she imagined the true pain of it would be.
There was no apparent end to the depth of the river. Twilight expected to feel the thud of a bed of some kind at any moment, but it never came. They only sunk deeper and deeper. The weird liquid was more of a gel, and it slithered around her like wet sand, tasting of burnt toast, copper and almonds whenever it invaded her mouth. Half a minute passed before she realized the creature wasn't trying to eat her whole. If anything, it was only holding her in place, preventing her from coming loose. By now, even the minor chewing sensations had gone, structures of nerves simply absent or trashed beyond functioning. It was impossible to see anything in the mire, but she had the distinct impression that the creature had started to paddle, the faintest, half-imagined outlines of dozens of pairs of legs flailing rhythmically in the near distance.
Presently, some errant fang slipped and penetrated her skull. She felt it slide from its former position, bent off-angle against her neck, and up into the gap where her spine met the skull. As it had done in orbit, her stream of consciousness ended abruptly. The next thing that she became aware of was light and shape all around her, segued into being with a jarring suddenness. She was lying at a strange angle, inside what immediately reminded her of the grain halls in Canterlot. They were long, cavernous structures, underground to keep them cool and away from light, with domed ceilings, packed with supporting columns and numerous arches, passageways and alcoves. They were cursed with the scantiest of illumination for, besides grain, they also stored flour, gunpowder, paraffin and other combustibles, and so sources of ignition were heavily restricted.
Where this place deviated was the sheer dirt of it. Storage for comestible, potable and otherwise spoilable goods had to be reasonably clean. They could tolerate ingressing water or rotting food about as well as they could tolerate sparks and candles. The walls and ceilings around her dripped with a patina the colour of oxidized copper, green but with the faintest hint of sky blue. Fungus, dun and ochre fans, marked the lines of flow for what appeared to be some sort of sewer. The moment that she began to move to look around, crunching noises filled her ears. It was a grating, horrid sound, like dozens of twigs snapping all at once. Every one of her somewhat shaky motions to get back on her hooves resulted in a chain of them, setting off secondary and tertiary cascades.
She looked down, and saw only bones. Skulls of all races, many of which she didn't immediately recognize, blended with a profusion of ribs, tibia, fibula, femurs and a melange of the fiddly bones of the gryphon paw. Her scientific mind had carefully analyzed some of them before the emotional hit even arrived. But, then it did, and awful revulsion, a sick and desperate thing, began to crawl around in her belly. The entire floor of the hall was covered in them. It was the floor, for she saw nothing beneath it. They occupied the same sort of volume as grain might have done. The moment Twilight made it to a vertical posture again, she flapped her wings and jumped up above it, eyes scanning the expansive space for some safe perch.
Out across the plain of the hall, larger islands of bones, complete ribcages and spines of enormous creatures that might have been ancient snakes, dotted the greater sea of fragile and horrid remains. The air was still and cold as she flew through it, reminding her of midnight in winter. It stank of damp rot and dust, whole epochs of it. She alighted, barely suppressing the urge to panic and flee, upon a large, central section of the nearest gargantuan ribcage. It looked somewhat like a sternum, but was far wider and seemed to have been where many muscles had once been anchored. It was perhaps as broad as the viewing platform on top of Golden Oaks Library, and felt sturdy enough to take her weight. Despite this, there were little creaks and pops as she folded in her wings, echoing up from down below.
Twilight sat down carefully on her rump, assuming the position she so favored for complex tasks. The one before her now was particularly daunting. The vast hall didn't seem to have an end. Where she had assumed its bounds to be, she now saw further avenues of the same form and shape as the one she found herself in. They stretched off in all directions, following no scheme or pattern she could discern. If any process of construction familiar to mortals had been used to build this place, then it could be said that it had been thrown together at many different points in time, added to as more storage was required. Beyond this appearance of haphazard build quality, no architectural marks or flourishes were visible.
She had not read many books on architecture as such. Equestria was a place where changes to the schools of thought and artistic expression came very slowly indeed. It was also the case that new buildings weren't often needed and, if they were, were merely knocked down and rebuilt in exactly the same fashion. To confound things further, there were a number of structures that never needed repair or maintenance, as they were heavily magical, originating either in the mind of a Princess or in the distant past, the thaumic skills that put them together in the first place lost to the ages. Canterlot's central station was a good example of this, as was the Palace.
Twilight laid down flat and felt the cool, slightly clammy bone against her belly. With a thought, she unbuckled the panniers and slithered out from under them, then turned to examine their condition. Aside from a few new nicks, scratches and scuffs, they had survived the encounter with the monster intact. In the absolute quiet of the hall, her telekinesis made a low keening sound as she employed it to open the big leather things and rifle through them, checking that their precious cargo had not been damaged.
The nightshade flower was somewhat bruised and ruffled, and the squid eye had taken on a deflated, deformed appearance, but were otherwise intact. The disc of metal that was the first Nectar ingredient had a dent in it, apparently more ductile than she'd given it credit for. They were all taken out and inspected carefully, before being returned to whatever little cubby or safe spot. Then, Twilight came across the pinion feather sized scroll that bore the list of ingredients. She frowned and turned the thing over in her magic, wondering.
Sequential revelations. What were the triggers? Spatial location shifts were always a favorite. But, it really could be anything. Words, thoughts, specific spells, times and dates. I have come such a long way from the Moon, though...
Twilight unrolled it in one quick motion. The list's loose script hadn't changed or shifted. She applied the same thaumic exam to it that she had used in Whom's bedroom. There was nothing immediately obvious, just like before, but there had definitely been some kind of change. The impression of it was different now. Twilight furrowed her brow, then closed her eyes in concentration. These sorts of scrying techniques could often be quite vague, exactly as much as they could be highly specific. As far as she knew, it was a problem with equine minds. The spell knew what the score was, and the detailed properties of magic. However, translating those concepts and ideas into perception was another thing entirely. Twilight had experienced episodes of synesthesia. Enchantments would taste blue or sound like the number seven.
Alternatively, as it was in this case, they would just feel different, in an ineffable and peculiar way. Whether this was her mind's way of expressing a series of barely perceived micro shifts in particular properties about the material in question, or if it were merely hallucinatory, a mental fiction brought on by her desire to bring the Nectar into being, was up for debate. Happy to once again be back within a thaumically undepleted area of space at least, she fed a little more energy into the spell. This was a double-edged sword. More energy could result in a better resolution, but it always ran the risk of some spilling out and destroying the sample.
A minute passed, then two. Twilight could glean no further information from the scroll. It was the same ink and processed tree fibres as it had ever been. It was bound together by the same molecular bonds as before. Not one thing had changed. Yet, the sensation that something had mutated in it persisted. The feeling of difference remained. She pushed the energy envelope as far as she dared then, sighing and shaking her head, she dropped the spell. Her horn sizzled as it momentarily became hot enough to fry the strands of her tricolour mane that were draped too close around it. The stink of burned hair joined the unpleasant melange of mouldering miasma.
Her mind wandered on to thoughts of Whom as she carefully rolled the scroll back up. Little pangs of worry joined the mental chorus of continuing revulsion and frustration. Twilight's last words to her had been a command to fly, but she could not keep that up forever. Her original plan, built in the fractions of seconds that had been available to her, had been to keep the monster occupied with her immortal, regenerating form until the magic rolled back in, then blast it into submission. Whom might have witnessed some particularly unpleasant things in the process, limbs being torn asunder and guts spilled all over the place, but she could likely be consoled. After all, she had lived with Nightmare Moon, and who knew what mischiefs the fallen Princess had gotten herself into, only to reconstitute herself?
Then, the creature had run a coach and ponies through that plan, and there had been no time to come up with another. She had her magic back now, but the monster was nowhere to be seen. Had it gone back to finish the job? Twilight gulped at that idea. Whom was fragile, a normal pony. It seemed that the purpose of the many-legged monster was to kill and neatly deposit unwanted intruders in the vault of bones. The moon mare would not survive for a second if those threshing, serrated teeth got at her.
Twilight glanced around, trying to get her bearings. The worry pangs quickly inflated into full-blown knives of terror. It could already be too late. The monster might be, at this very moment, on its way back with a mouth full of warm, pink ichor. Her overworked imagination conjured up images of a squealing pony, torn to shreds and dragged beneath the surface of the silvery river. All that would be left on the bank was a pile of bloodied feathers the colour of sun-bleached roses.
She almost took off again without putting the panniers back on, her leap aborted halfway through in a flick of flailing limbs and awkwardly postured wings. The stumbling clatter of her hooves on the bone platform was very loud and obvious in the crypt-like atmosphere. She groaned in irritation at herself, then flung the panniers on with great and fumbling haste. For the umpteenth time, she wished that she’d had more time to get acquainted with flying. It seemed to take her an eternity to get the straps and latches done up around her belly but, at last, she had them on and securely fastened. She hopped up and beat her wings furiously, sending her arcing up into the sky. The air rushed around her, flattening her mane out behind her. Picking a direction at random, desperate to do something, she began to accelerate.