Back and Forth

by adcoon

Foal Free Press

Her broken wing was being dragged along the floor behind her, leaving a wide trail of blood and feathers. The world was filled with youthful sobs, fearful and lost, dancing with echoes around her. Cadance cracked her eyes open an inch, staring at the roof of stone slowly sliding out of view behind her, replaced by gray clouds. She blinked once and felt her lips crack apart. A low moan slipped from her lips, and her head hit the ground as the world stopped moving.

Cadance clenched her eyes shut for a moment, then opened them again. She closed her mouth and focused on moving one leg at a time, trying to work out her muscles. A scream interrupted her. She was about to turn her head to see who had screamed and why, when the blur of a pony trampled right over her, leaving a pair of horseshoe-shaped marks around her eyes.

It took her a moment to recover from the surprise. Slowly, she scrambled back on her legs, falling twice before she managed to get up. She looked around herself, taking in the place. She was at the cave mouth. The gorge was empty and silent all around her.

What had happened to the wolves? Cadance rubbed the base of her horn and looked back at the cave. A faint light flickered behind all the darkness, far in the back of the cave. She turned slowly and approached it, following the thick trail of her own blood.

A rock came out of the darkness and smacked her in the nose. She had barely taken a step backwards when another rock strafed by her neck and a third struck the ground at her front left hoof. “Whhh—” her voice cracked, coming out as a raspy hiss instead.

“Stay back!” A mare galloped out of the darkness at the back of the cave, waving a torch wildly in Cadance’s face. “Leave this poor mare’s body, evil spirit!” In the flames and waving light she could barely recognize White Rose, the mother of the two fillies. Another rock hit her leg and drove her back another step.

“Y-eah!” a filly’s voice said from within the darkness as another rock struck her squarely between the eyes. “Y-you can’t have our brains! They’re ours, and we’re using them!”

Cadance was frantically trying to hold back the barrage of rocks and get her voice under control. She opened her mouth again, only to find herself biting down on a burning torch. The rocks had merely startled her, she couldn’t even feel it as they struck her. The fire was different. Cadance stumbled back, waving her hooves as flames engulfed her face.

Her struggle with the fire emboldened her attackers, who rained down on her with rocks and hooves, stomping and kicking. Cadance cried—or would have cried if she could—and held up her one good wing to try and hold off the assault. Her feathers crackled in the flames, which was the only reason her attackers seemed to back off.

A glow gathered around her horn as she seized the brief reprieve. Cadance focused all her strength into the spell, raising a shimmering shield all around herself. She didn’t even have time to check if the spell would hold; frantically, she rolled herself on the floor of the cave, trying to extinguish the flames searing her face and wing.

She collapsed on the cold floor, acrid smoke from her smoldering wings slowly filling the magical bubble and obscuring her view. Her ears slowly picked up the low sobbing from the back of the cave, and the fearful breaths of her attackers watching her still. The torch had gone out, no more than a black stump of wood at her hooves.

“I—” she croaked, coughed and tried to stand. She gave up after the third attempt and just lay there under her glowing bubble. “I’m not … going to hurt you,” she finally managed to say. She repeated it over and over again, but the only response she got was tense silence and quiet sobs from the back.

She lay there for a time, then slowly pulled herself up on her knees. Further she couldn’t manage. She picked up the torch and carefully lit it, making sure to levitate it at a safe distance from herself. She looked around, then gently drifted the torch through her shield towards the shadow of White Rose.

The mare took a step back, watching the floating light with suspicion. When nothing bad seemed to happen, she carefully took it in her mouth and held it up as she approached the shield. Her wide eyes studied Cadance, watching for any sudden movements. Their eyes met. “Y-you’re dead!” the mother stammered around her hold on the torch. “I checked myself! You were dead as a doornail! Gone for good! You c-can’t be talking to us!”

Cadance lowered her head and closed her eyes. She couldn’t deny what the mare was saying. She knew the truth in her still heart. She was dead, or rightfully should be still. “I don’t … I don’t know what happened to me,” she said, ears drooping. “But I swear to you on all that I hold dear that I am still me.” She looked up at the mother. “And I would never, ever, ever, ever, ever hurt you or your girls.”

“That’s four evers,” a tiny voice whispered in the back.

White Rose glanced over her shoulder at her girls, her tail flicking nervously.

“What … did happen?” Cadance asked, trying to recall the events leading up to this moment and hoping the conversation might calm the three ponies. A low crying sounded from the back, a new voice she hadn’t heard before. Cadance’s ears perked up, her eyes wandering the darkness for the source. “What … who is that?”

Their mother shifted uneasily. “You … had a foal.”

* * *

Cadance lifted a hoof to her eyes and shook her head. Had she passed out? “What …” She opened her eyes and saw the dark cave around her. Her magical shield had collapsed when she passed out, but nopony had dared come near her it seemed. The two fillies had retreated near the back of the cave. Their mother was still staring at her.

Cadance stared at the darkness behind White Rose, beyond the reach of the torch. It couldn’t be true. Believing that her heart had indeed stopped beating hours ago, and that her body had gained more holes in a day than Queen Chrysalis had in a lifetime were somehow easier to accept. Slowly, as if in a dream, she forced herself to her hooves and took a step towards the back of the cave.

The torch was in her face before she could set her hoof down. “I-I can’t let you go near!” White Rose warned her sharply. “You won’t come near me or my girls, no matter what you are.”

The crying resumed. Cadance took a step back, shocked and hurt. “I …” She didn’t know what to say. “You’re saying …” She slumped down on her haunches. “My foal?”

“A filly. She was born much too early, when you ...” she trailed off, still keeping her guard. “W-we don’t know if she will survive. She may be too weak to … to make it.”

Cadance barely heard any of it. She was back on her hooves, heedlessly pushing past the other mare. White Rose’s protests proved fruitless as she was hoisted into the air, dangling a few inches off the floor in a soft pink glow. Cadance stopped and stared at the tiny unicorn foal cradled in Silene’s hooves.

The two fillies gaped at her, frozen to the spot in their corner of the darkness. Cadance reached out a trembling hoof towards the foal. The miniscule filly opened her eyes a crack and let out a few half-hearted cries. Her eyes caught sight of Cadance, and her little mouth hung open as she stopped crying and stared at her mother with dull eyes.

Cadance stared back, transfixed by the face of her daughter, until Silene held the foal up for her and broke the spell. Cadance blinked and looked between her daughter and Silene, then she gently took the foal in her hooves and sat down. The foal let out a little lost cry before closing her eyes again and settling into her mother’s chest fur.

White Rose nervously circled Cadance to reach her girls as she was set back down on her hooves. She reached the two fillies and wrapped her hooves around them as she watched Cadance nuzzle the foal. “She … knows her mother, at least,” she conceded.

Cadance said nothing, but merely held the foal to her dead heart, crying without tears. Her horn glowed, surrounding her daughter in a warm blanket of light.

“W-will she live?” Silene looked at her mother with large, fearful eyes.

White Rose looked at the tiny foal for a long time. “She … must feed if there’s to be any hope,” she said and glanced at Cadance. Cadance felt a tightness around her heart and looked up at White Rose with despairing eyes. The mare looked down at the cold ground. “I … I haven’t had milk to give since Silene stopped nursing years ago.”

Cadance looked down at herself. The tiny foal wasn’t even trying to suckle from her, she just lay against her chest, too weak to open her eyes. She knew, in a way she couldn’t explain, that it would have been fruitless to try. The thought of a corpse nurturing her daughter filled her with revolt besides—even if that corpse happened to be herself.

None of them spoke until the silence struck her. Cadance lifted her head and looked around the cave, her ears turning to catch some elusive sound. She had been too distraught and confused to notice, but it should have been the first thing on her mind. “The wolves,” she said and looked at the mother and her two girls. “They’re not howling.”

“They were howling all over the gorge when you were foaling,” White Rose said quietly as she held her daughters close to her. “Then they drifted off, and we haven’t heard them since.”

Cadance looked around the cave, watching the pools and trails of dried blood. The tracks of dark red led out of the cave and into the gorge, no doubt leading all the way back to where she had fought the wolves. “Even if they all had been struck blind, they could have easily followed that trail right to us.” Her dead heart sank at the thought of how stupid she had been. Not only had she gotten all of those ponies killed, she could have led the wolves directly to the two girls and their mother as well. It was a miracle that they hadn’t been taken or killed while Cadance was unconscious.

“Why?” she asked of the darkness in the cave around her, expecting—and getting—no answer. “Why haven’t they come for us?”

“They’re afraid of you,” White Rose said finally, as if Cadance was blind and possibly stupid for not seeing it. “You stink of death to them, and you look no better from here. Not even wolves will follow the trail of something that bled as much as you and still crawled all the way here. I bet they didn’t get paid to deal with something like that, so they’re falling back, leaving the area.”

“That just means they’re coming back with all their friends,” Cadance said. “They’ll kill everything, probably burn the whole place down just to be sure. And we have nowhere to go.” She looked down at her daughter and nuzzled her tiny cheek, trying to gather her thoughts.

She looked at the mother again, her eyes begging for some hope. “My daughter can’t survive even a day in this cave. She needs help. Is there anypony in town who can nurse her?”

The mother looked troubled. “They might not even listen to us. And if the wolves find out—”

“They’ll kill us all regardless at this point,” Cadance said. “The ponies in your village must know that. We’re going to have to fight back, and we don’t have much time. Please, I need my daughter to live! Take her to the village, tell them what’s happening. Find somepony who will nurse her and keep her warm. I beg you.”

“I … I will try,” White Rose said and looked down, biting her lip. “But what will we do? We can’t fight the wolves. There are just too many, and … and …” She looked around at her two daughters, tears in her eyes. “How can we hope to survive?”

Silica and her sister hugged their mother tightly. “We’ll find a way, mom,” Silica said.

“We need to give the ponies here some hope. We need to help them conquer this fear,” Cadance said. “You two need to keep making letters, give them some color and light to believe in. I brought all the gems and wood I could carry,” she said and looked around, hoping she really had made it all the way with all the gems and wood she had so stupidly stolen. “Make all the glitter and paper you can,” she said to the girls, then looked at their mother, “and if there is any more in the village, bring it back here as well.”

It wasn’t enough, she knew, but she could never have told the girls that. How many ponies were in the village? A hundred, maybe two hundred if they were lucky, and none of them were soldiers she guessed. No amount of hope would make that into an army, but surely it was better that they fight and die than whatever fate awaited them if they didn’t.

“I’m not leaving my girls here,” their mother said, her voice trembling.

With me, Cadance thought with a stab of sadness. The mare would never trust her, no matter what happened; many ponies never would if they knew or suspected what she had become. In truth, her greatest fear was to be left alone in this cave, and she doubted the villagers would welcome her when they hadn’t before. She debated whether to think of another reason to tell their mother, but she couldn’t think of a good one. She looked down and closed her eyes. “I … cannot go with you, I cannot let the village see me like this,” she said and looked at the three of them. “Please don’t leave me here all alone.”

Silica put a hoof on her mother’s shoulder and looked up at her. “It’s okay, mom.”

White Rose looked like she was fighting with herself, clearly wanting to argue but at the same time not finding the heart to do so. She looked at her daughters sadly. “Just … be safe,” she said and scooped them up in a tight hug. “I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

“Don’t worry, mom,” Silene cried as she hugged her mom. “Cadance will keep us safe.”

White Rose looked at Cadance, pleading her not to prove her daughter wrong. Cadance met the gaze. “I won’t let any harm come to your daughters, I swear on all that I hold dear,” she swore and looked down, then held up her daughter, feeling the urge to burst into tears.

Their mother took the foal and cradled her gently against her chest with one leg.

Cadance stared at the tiny unicorn. “It still doesn’t make sense,” she said with a dry throat. “What magic could have given me this foal?”

“Not magic,” their mother said. A tiny hint of a warm smile crept up her lips. “A stallion. I do hope you know who it was, Your Highness.”

Cadance almost laughed at the absurdity. “Of course I know who it—But—” she flailed around for some way to make sense of it all and found none.

The mother looked her up and down for a moment. “You didn’t know, did you? All these months, and you didn’t know you were pregnant?”

Cadance stared at her. “I guess …” she finally said. “No, I guess I didn’t. I … I couldn’t have been.” Her voice got a little defensive, and a weak laugh escaped her. “I think I would have noticed,” she said.

White Rose reached out a hoof, hesitated, then finally rested it on her shoulder. “You did look a little round around the barrel when we met,” she said. “I didn’t think it was my place to comment on Your Highness’ figure, of course.”

Cadance felt a little shock of indignation, and an urge to protest. She swallowed it quickly. Could it be that no one had noticed? Or had they all just been too polite to say that she looked … a little round around the barrel. There had been signs, now that she thought back, but she had never truly made anything of it. Had no one else? Why should they, if she didn’t?

White Rose patted her shoulder. “You wouldn’t be the first mare to not realize she was with a foal until the little one was half-way out. Some mares just don’t show it. I on the other hoof was puffed up like a balloon both times. I almost want to smack you for being spared that.” She withdrew her hoof and looked at Cadance and the blood all over the floor. “But I wouldn’t trade.”

Cadance stared at her foal for several moments longer before tearing her gaze away and taking a step back. “Go,” she said. “Before I try to stop you. Find somepony who will care for her and see what you can learn about what the wolves are doing.”

“I will try,” White Rose said and backed away, holding the foal close to her. She looked around at her two fillies, who gave her one last tight hug, then she turned and galloped out of the cave. Cadance watched her until she had disappeared and for a long time after.

Comments

[DJPurple3]

Daaaaaaah. I don't understand why Cadence is undead but hey! It makes for a good story! And the last past was pretty touching. Nice job!

[Ice Star]

Undead Cadance is Best Cadance.