//------------------------------//
// 8: The Dance 
// Story: Pony Pony Pony: The Thirty Minute Stories Collection 
// by -Jules 
//------------------------------//

        He didn’t know why they danced around the thing, he wasn’t sure anyone really did anymore. It was simply something they did during the festival. After the sun went down and the drink had been consumed they formed the circle and danced.
        He wasn’t sure how long the tribe had been performing the festival, but he knew they’d been doing it since before he was born. He wasn’t completely sure why they did it either, one of the oracles had told him it was to please the god the thing represented, but he wasn’t sure he believed that.
        He’d never been able to completely explain why, but he knew that what they were doing wasn’t to please the thing in the center of the circle, this was something else entirely.
        The circle continued dancing, as they would through the night, until the fire first appeared. Then the dance would change, become faster, more chaotic, and it continue until the fire died and the sun rose, as it did every year.
        Inside the circle, a second circle sat, closer to the thing. The drummers. They wore the dark paint just like the outer circle, but they wore different symbols. While the outer circle was painted in flowing, smooth patterns that evoked movement and differed from dancer to dancer the inner circle was painted with the same sharp and jagged pattern.
        The drummers also wore the skulls of long dead creatures, with hollow eyes and jagged horns. 
        The drummers continued to pound, louder and faster as they had every year. The pounding sound seemed to permeate everything, from the air and ground to the very bones of the dancers.
        But the thing never seemed to move, never shook with the occult rhythm like the ground and bodies and souls around it did.
        Still closer to the thing another circle danced. The three oracles, wearing pelts made from dragons and masks carved of ancient crystal they danced a different dance than the outer circle. They danced like ponies possessed, like the spirits of the dead would dance as the night went on.
        The drums kept pounding, and the circle kept dancing as they had every year before.
        But this was not like every year before, he knew it wasn’t but he didn’t know what was different.
        Finally, after what could have been an eternity or a heartbeat the fire began. It started without warning, as it did every year, bursting from the scorched earth beneath the thing and spinning around it, whipping at the air and dimming the stars as it did every year.
        The rhythm the drummers pounded changed, faster, angrier, and the dancers responded in kind. The shadows in the eyes of the skulls became darker and deeper, the horns shining in the new light, and the fanged grins were illuminated, grinning at each other, the outer circle, and the thing.
        He saw as the fires seared the edges of the thing in the circle and was amazed, as he was every year, that instead of blackening or warping the edges the fire seemed to rejuvenate it, defining the edges and illuminating the core of the thing.
        And like every year he felt cold when he saw the thing in the center clearly. None of the other ponies in any of the three circles ever seemed to react the same way. They became more and more frenzied as they saw it, the dance and rhythm speeding up as they looked clearly at the thing.
        And then, as they had every year before, the dancers in the circle averted their eyes as it began to glow. A blinding light shone from the thing until the entire clearing was illuminated.
        And then they came. The dead. Some were nothing more than shades, passing through the dancers and drummers to join the shamans. Others were only bones. Skeletal ponies with bottomless holes where their eyes should have been and shadows crawling along their from. 
        They too wore the deep red paint.
        As the fourth circle, the circle of bones, formed the light from the thing died. Leaving nothing but the drums and the beat of the drums.
        He stole a glance at the sky, as he always did, and saw that once again the stars were growing dimmer, some blinking out of the sky entirely, and he knew that it would continue until the star was black as the void.
        The drums continued to pound and the circles continued to turn, dancing with the dead. All to appease the thing.
        And then he broke the pattern. For the first time he looked up at the thing once more. And for the first time, he felt it look back.





Prompt 008: Write a story about ponies dancing
Time written: 31 minutes give or take
Editing: Just spellchecking and grammar fixes

Note: this is nothing like the original idea, which kept growing and growing until it turned into a completely new story that has nothing to do with dancing. So, yeah.
Wrote this on a plane ride from Phoenix to Seattle while the guy next to me kept looking over and reading some of it. Since he never said anything either he was real interested or just bored as hell.