Fluttershy's way home.

by PsychopathOfTheYear

Chapter five.

Twilight sat very still on the cliff, observing her surroundings and taking in every last detail. She immediately picked out some intricate marble carvings to the blood-stained rocks. If only she knew what they meant. She stood up on her hooves, noticing that some of her books had come through the portal as well.

She tried to levitate them. Nothing. She had no magic. She lost her horn again, not unlike when Discord took her horn when leading her and her friends through the Palace Labyrinth. She paced around the pentagram carved onto the floor, frantically trying to come up with a solution on how she'd get out of there in the first place.

After what she could have sworn was several hours of frantic whispering, pacing, and double-checking about five hundred times to see if her horn was there, she realized that she really wasn’t going to have magic in Hell.

"What am I going to do? Even if I find Fluttershy, how am I going to find a way out?" Twilight asked herself, half-expecting an answer.
She suddenly made a dash for her books that were there—A Brief History of Starswirl The Bearded, The History Of The Mare On The Moon...

"Thank Celestia," Twilight breathed in relief when she pulled out the book: Foreign Religions 101: How Other Species Worship. She flipped through, awkwardly using her hooves, successfully ripping some pages as well and wincing at the torturous sound, until she got to the section named “The Star In The Ring.” It is believed that anything that goes to Hell loses certain characteristics; the characteristics lost vary from species to species. This has been observed with gryphons, which will lose their wings, as well as dragons and certain races of ponies, which lose some magical aspects of their nature.

She really should have done more research before creating the portal. She just wanted to see Fluttershy so badly... that she didn’t read enough beforehoof. Now she was hoping to get lucky with the information she found in here.
She flipped through the book even further until she found another section titled “Hell: The Home of Demons and Creatures.“

Twilight started reading aloud, as if she were having Spike take a letter for Princess Celestia. "In the chaotic dimension known as Hell, there are many creatures believed to reside therein. Common creatures documented as living in Hell are: dragons (much more aggressive than normal), hydras, giant swarms of bats, and hellhounds (a breed of dog which closely resembles a pitbull). It is sai-"

That was it. The rest of the pages were burned to a black crisp, crumbling onto the hard bedrock below. Maybe the portal had burned it on the way through. She sighed in irritation, both at herself and at her unlucky situation.

"Well, at least I know a little bit about this place," she said to herself, trying to stay on the bright side of things. Something about this entire ordeal made her feel... down. Maybe it was just the atmosphere. Hell wasn't inherently bad, though... was it?

She sifted through her small pile of books again to make sure she hadn’t missed any potentially useful information. This wouldn’t have been a problem if she’d looked for them in the library. After coming up once again with nothing, she gazed at the walls around her and saw numerous tunnel entrances opening up, and, to her right and left, staircases. She took a deep breath and cantered into the tunnel marked "Η σήραγγα των νυχτερίδων."

If only she knew some Greek.

(hr)

Fluttershy was running. She had been running for so long. She was in Ponyville, but things weren't peaceful as usual. It was chaotic here, even worse than Discord could ever make it. The sky was red as blood, and there were patches of burned grass and broken arrows littering the ground. Fluttershy's wings had been torn right off, Canterlot Castle had crumbled, and changelings freely roamed the sky, taking out any ponies and quickly either murdering them or eating them alive.

She was running from her friends. They had no eyes, just darkness where their eyes should have been. Blood dripped down their coats.

They had the pentagram with the goat on their necks, screaming at Fluttershy with raspy, dark voices. The ground collapsed before her, a ring of dirt cascading down only to be replaced by fire. Serpents, dragons, bats, hellhounds... everything poured out from the ground and surrounded her.

She was defenseless.

She looked over and a feeling of pain washed through her, her veins turning purple as she was chained down where she stood. She tried to scream, but nothing came out. Her eyes started to disappear. She felt the pentagram symbol burning into her neck. The Overlord appeared, and all she could do was sit there and wait for the final blow. She felt the clawing of changelings, bats, and serpents...

She woke up. Tears and sweat flowed freely down her face, draining onto the coat of a solemn Abdukar.
He looked pointedly at her and spoke as gently as possible. “Nightmares are common here, Fluttershy. Get used to them.” His eyes cast downward, back to where he no longer gazed into her terrified eyes. “Hell changes for no creature.”

Comments

[UfUnNyF1r3nd]

Yay!i this poor flutters :(