Fluttershy's way home.

by PsychopathOfTheYear

Chapter seven.

Alone.

Fluttershy knew again what it felt like to be fully alone. Her only protection and friend just died one of the most horrible deaths that she could have possibly conceived. Her yellow coat and pink mane were stained to such a strong discoloration that you couldn’t tell what they had used to look like.

She lost count of how many days that she had been wandering Hell. A day? A week? A year? She had no clue. She just wandered about, searching everywhere.

Yet, she didn’t know what she was searching for. Every once in a while she saw dragons fly by and she wouldn’t duck or even flinch. She’d just stare at them, waiting until they disappeared in the distance. The small shred of sanity that still remained refused to let her wonder about the consequences of if she were spotted.

Due to whatever morbid Stockholm syndrome had gripped her during her tenure, she actually started to like this place. She found some of the new styles of caves she found to be quite comforting.

There weren’t any more monsters in them, either, just an occasional bat which she paid no mind to. She couldn’t tell how she felt; she wasn’t afraid anymore, yet she wasn’t brave enough to walk around fearlessly.

Suddenly, she heard a loud metal pop followed by an intense searing pain. She dropped like a stone to the floor. She looked at her foreleg to see that she stepped on a bear trap... yet not a normal run-of-the-mill bear trap. It was laced with jagged spikes and barbs that pierced her foreleg, and on the pressure plate a morbid amount of spikes that latched through to the outside of her hoof from inside it.

She let out a blood curdling scream, smashing through the eerie silence of Hell. With tears pouring down her face, she attempted fruitlessly to open the morbid trap, but to no avail.

She then noticed the chain attached to the trap...

that was dragging her to a hole in the cave walls.

---

Twilight trudged along the complex cave systems of Hell.

She refused to admit it just yet, but she was lost.

She aimlessly eyed the carvings in the bedrock and marble walls. She didn’t really know what they said; they just piqued her interest.

"This place isn’t really that bad," Twilight thought to herself. She hadn’t been burned or impaled since she got there. Was this just an off day?
Then she realized: She had no clue how long she’d been there. She hadn’t slept at all, but could stay up for a long time without even letting out a yawn.

She noticed the tunnel extended to a cave.

“When did this tunnel become a giant cave?” she mused out loud, using her horn to give her a little light.

“Scratch that, giant is an understatement,” she added, seeing the monstrosity of a cave before her. She couldn’t even see the top of it.

Then she bumped into something, something big. The room dazzled her with a blinding light, showing the entirety of the cave, including the large spikes at the top of it.

What she had hit with her muzzle was a switch, and said switch activated an explosive.

Narrowly dodging the giant bedrock spike hurdling at her, Twilight realized the rock below her hooves was thin, her face being burnt from the extreme heat of the lava below it. She knew what this room was—a death trap. More and more spikes started falling to the ground, giving her less and less ground to walk on. Her coat was soaked with pieces of rock and sweat. She ran to the tunnel, just barely escaping the lava that the next fallen spike would have plunged her into, along with the rest of the collapsing platform.
It seemed the roof was caving in around Twilight, its sole purpose to take her down with it. She had no clue how to get out. All she could do now was sit and wait for death. She locked her eyes shut as she heard the spikes fall and take out the ground, her only chance of survival being whittled away while she lay helplessly on the ground.

*crush*

*crush*

*crush*

Suddenly, the crashing and splashing ceased. Looking up, she realized that there was one spike that hadn’t fallen onto her: the one right above her. It was extremely damaged, but it wasn’t going to fall by the looks of it.

"Of all the luck...." She let out an immense sigh of extreme relief and fell to her back, shocked that she had just survived one of Hell’s traps.
She told herself in a shaky voice, “Well, now to find a way out.”