The Rejuvenationverse 49 members · 25 stories
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Purple Patch
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Marsh Mudlark, Styhollow's first unofficial investigator was found torn to pieces in his asylum cell by Inspector Dusk Shine of EQUIS, the alias of Midnight Blade, Lord Commander of the Eternal Knights of Princess Luna.
So it was that two days afterwards, Dusk Shine left his office in the morning, announcing to his secretary he was ‘taking a walk’. According to staff at the time, he often said this before leaving for a contested zone. The last time he said this he was heading to Neo Hippomorphia. A day later, the dictatress of Neo Hippomorphia and her inner circle were ousted from power and killed in action.

Travelling incognito to Styhollow, he began investigating. He made no great effort to remain inconspicuous, in a way daring the Cult to reveal themselves. Yet it all seemed quiet. The ponies were distracted clearing the town for some form of celebration.
During the night, Midnight encountered a bizarre drunk who told him to leave the town with all haste as ‘the feast was about to begin’.

Dusk felt the need to find out who this pony was and where he’d come from. He looked different from the rest of the town.
Dusk Shine described him as a rust-red coated pony with sickly yellow eyes and sunken features but, by far, the most equine-looking of Styhollow’s denizens. He was dressed in a thick dark grey jacket and appeared to be bleeding from the mouth.
Trailing him into a dark alley, Dusk Shine recounts what he saw with equal horror and fascination.
He found a picture lying seemingly in the middle of nowhere. The picture was of a young mare with some features of the Styhollow porcines but less prominent.
He relates...

“Among ponies she would, undoubtedly, have been a target of ridicule. But honestly, even possessed of the ‘mark of the sow’, she seemed almost untouched by the Styhollow hideousness. Her snout was turned up but it made her smile all the more clear. Her teeth, while a little crooked, were clean and bright and her eyes were large and possessed of fluttering eyelashes. Her mane was a tumble of dark blonde locks and she had a couple of flowers tucked behind one ear. She had the look of a petite mare and was a little plump but otherwise, among her kind, she was enough to be pretty. Whoever had illustrated her she was looking at with clear adoration.”

It was after he’d picked up the picture that he heard an eerie sound, the groaning scraping of metal on hard stone, step by step. Slowly turning, he found himself approached by a towering yet twisted-looking stallion with some form of humongous metal helmet and a sword that was rivalling it in size.
He described the feeling of meeting the newcomer’s sword with his own as being told ‘You call that a knife? This is a knife!’
The stallion didn’t speak and only slowly trudged towards Dusk. Yet as he tried to run into the alleyway, he only got more and more lost in the maze and met this helmed fiend at every turn.
Eventually, Dusk made an assumption and took it, throwing the picture down in front of his pursuer. The mysterious stallion stopped, bent down and held it, placing it against his metal-encased head in a comforted manner.
No longer posing any threat, Dusk left the strange beast, finding himself back in the town square down the first alleyway he took. He mentions that he was not such a fool as to believe this a mere coincidence.

At the hour of his namesake, Dusk hid in the rooftops and beheld a procession.
The denizens of the city had placed upon themselves clay masks resembling pigs. Lumbering through the town square, they trailed along a great wicker and wax effigy of a flying pig with a set of demonic horns and burning coals for eyes. The whole figure was aflame as a result. Atop it, impaled on the beacon it was built into, was the drunk who’d warned him to leave. Though Dusk mentions he didn’t look dead.
Behind it was a trail of tethered young mares, some not even old enough to have found their cutie marks.

Following the procession, Dusk trailed them into a farm on the border of Styhollow. Hidden by mist, the farm was the only place Marsh Mudlark had not recorded visiting.
Yet there, mist clearing in the dusk, was a great temple with spires higher than the manse and wide enough to fit the whole town within. The effigy was hauled atop the roof of the temple as the congregation paraded in, the mares dragged along inside. Flying atop the roof, he found the body of the drunk had disappeared.
In his records, he believes the ritual was to birth a next generation of sons and daughters of Styhollow. Lord Swinian and the town’s elders had taken a bath in the lard of freshly slaughtered sows and were, Dusk can only assume, preparing to copulate with the captives.
According to collected data, the ponies of Styhollow, perhaps owing to their inbreeding or some other factor of their lifestyle, age a great deal quicker than normal ponies. Lord Swinian, at first glance, looked over seventy but was in fact thirty-six at the time. Styhollow’s population evidently required replacing. The mares would give birth in very much the same way the first cultists of the Great Sow had done and would be cannibalised by their own newborns.
Dusk Shine quotes...

‘However this feast concluded, I decided there and then that these townsfolk would go hungry’

He describes the ritual very minimally, the reason being, according to him, that actually describing it in detail would be physically nauseating to him and those who heard from him. Because he interrupted the ritual itself, he found documents around the Scrofer Manse that detail the various parts of the ritual. These documents are kept in a sealed vault in the House of the Rising Moon on Sunless Isle and I have not yet received permission to read them. Perhaps I should count myself lucky for a loosely translated part of their chant includes the words ‘Shall be baptised in scabs and sewage and sulphur’
Presiding over the ritual was an ancient-looking Styhollow mare that Lord Swinian referred to as grandmother. Evidently this was Lady Sowerberry. The measure of hysterical glee she showed in the terror and despair of the captured mares, Dusk Shine claims, was truly horrifying.

His exact details on how he saved the innocent mares from Styhollow are ambiguous. In his own words ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you’ but he mentions he was aided by several friends, likely White Wolf and Fletcher Fray among them. Lord Swinian Scrofer was personally slain by Dusk Shine but he states that upon his death, a coffin shuddered violently at the end of the podium Lady Sowerberry was screeching curses and damnations upon them from.
The doors broke open and the metal-helmed stallion from earlier slowly made his way forward. None dared stop him as he neared the podium. With a final screech, Lady Sowerberry threw herself at the intruder who seized her by the throat and tore her to bloody scraps then and there. He then approached the coffin, opened it and removed a fresh corpse.
It was of the mare in the picture. Her womb had been ripped open.
Dusk supposes this was the body of Jam-Bon, Lord Swinian’s mother. If so, the mysterious stallion trailing him could well have been Raleigh of Tuberly. By what means he’d returned was a mystery but all Dusk Shine recalls is the stallion sitting down and quietly cradling the body in contentment, not reacting to the stones of the temple giving way as Dusk Shine and his companions fled the scene. The temple collapsed, burying all within.
The bodies that could have been Raleigh and Jam-Bon were not found. Neither were Swinian’s and Sowerberry’s.
Dusk Shine concluded his findings by claiming he swore he saw the drunk from earlier sitting by the crossroads before the town, happily raising a drink to him before vanishing into the mist.

Styhollow is a ghost town now. Nopony has ever recorded venturing there since the Cult’s downfall. Yet the Cult presumably still exists, hidden in the shadows, carrying out their sick rituals in whatever way they can and pursuing their ambition to bring their goddess into this world and overthrow Equestria’s established order, turning the world of ponies into a sea of depravity and pain.
When dealing with their kind, one must pursue comprehension with zeal. The cult has known many kinds of follower. Some have been swayed into their ways by ignorance, fear or desperation. These kinds of ponies can be reasoned with. But to lead the cult is to partake in savagery and perversion normal ponies cannot dream of, to be possessed of truly sick minds and willingly doing harm upon all that innocent and cherished in Equestria.
These are the ones that must be hunted down and brought to justice.
And that is where the Eternal Knights come in.

Bronycommander
Group Contributor

6233782
Sounds like he has been through a lot. Nice reference with the Knife

Cherry-Lei
Group Contributor

Nice, you really know how to craft stories Purple. i love reading this historical document. I love how you bring Lovecraft into the Equestrian world. :)

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6234816
I'm surprised I haven't found any Pyramid Head 'You call that a knife' memes.

Bronycommander
Group Contributor

6235171
You and me both.

Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6235171

It was after he’d picked up the picture that he heard an eerie sound, the groaning scraping of metal on hard stone, step by step. Slowly turning, he found himself approached by a towering yet twisted-looking stallion with some form of humongous metal helmet and a sword that was rivalling it in size.

Well, I sure hope somebody picks up that phone. Because I FUCKING CALLED IT!

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6237003
Yes, Foxy, yes you did. :twilightsheepish:

Comment posted by Purple Patch deleted Dec 10th, 2017
Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6237186 :D

I wonder what Swinian's undergoing in Silent!Styhollow (in other words, Hell), given his being a bastard foal and all. (And since Silent!Styhollow's not gonna let his ass go anytime soon, even in the afterlife...)

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6237195
Well, the bodies of him and his grandmother were never found.
Make of that what you will.
And regardless, whatever his upbringing or motives, what he was doing to innocent ponies was unforgivable.

Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6237875 Hence why I couldn't help but ponder. (That, and Silent 2 has an abuse victim's... abuse manifest as monsters, so...)

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6238032
Well, consider Dusk/Midnight's theory that 'Pyramid Head' is Raleigh searching for Jam-Bon's resting place. It could, in a way, be that the otherworld almost materialised itself into Styhollow.
Kind of like how, in P.T, the Otherworld seemingly materialises itself in the player character's house or at least takes the exact shape of it.
Its kind of ambiguous.

Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6238089 Ja.

On that note, I am glad Raleigh found his happy ending. It's ludicrously unheard of for Pyrie Heads to have that happen to them.

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6238118
Only in Equestria. :twilightsmile:

Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6238153 Only question now: did any of the mares Dusk saved from Styhollow end up with foals? (I am beginning to suspect most, if not all of them came from Tuberly).

Purple Patch
Group Admin

6238161
Not from the ritual. Dusk prevented that from taking place, thankfully.
And yes, Tuberly and its neighbouring villages was where the Cult seized the mares.

Dragonborne Fox
Group Contributor

6238163 But hey, I think Silent!Styhollow consists of law-abiding ponies who stick to "magic and friendship" like glue.

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