Chapter 5: ...And He Doesn't Go Far
CHAPTER FIVE:
…AND HE DOESN’T GO FAR
1
The night had been going splendidly. Or that’s what Cloud Nine kept telling himself, when the brief pauses in their conversation became less and less brief. Across from him sat Windy, the pegasus mare he had longed for since the very first day they had met. As per usual, it had started as a mere office friendship, and now Cloud Nine was occupied in the process of trying to take it one step further.
The dinner they had shared had been fine but it was the drinks that had helped considerably, especially in the loosening of tongues. Still, Cloud could not help but feel a little out of his element. The bar had been her idea, and when she suggested it he agreed to it without a second’s hesitation. Before they had even sat at a table, he had already made note never to return. Not unless it was with a certain mare, he rebuked.
Trying to forget the dingy surroundings he was now faced with, he leaned across the table to take one of Windy’s hooves in his own. When she did not pull away, the inside of his chest fluttered like wings. Windy added another hoof to the pair.
“I’m having a nice time,” she said, with a smile that was all genuine.
Cloud smiled back. “So am I. I’m glad we came.” And he was. Then.
And that was when some far away piece of his mind asked exactly what it was he feared. So he answered, without hesitation.
Near the center of the room, standing on a stage barely larger than a single cask, played a mare violinist. On her head she wore a black cowboy hat cocked cutely to the side. On her face she held a grin that seemed to say that absolutely nothing could get her down. And inside she barely held herself together.
Having left her usual band of travelers and free spirits some weeks ago—they could never handle a true solo act, she had discovered far too late—Silver Strings had made her way across nearly a quarter of Equestria. Bars, hotels, banquets, lunches, cafes, anything that would take her she was there. At some spots the pay was good, and each time it was offered she’d snatch it up greedily and almost wonder why it hadn’t been more. Did they not realize who’s music was just moments ago filling their ears?
Farther along the road her wages had decreased steadily, as well as the make of her clientele. Her classically trained hooves now had to play for the enjoyment of the common worker, which meant that time and time again she’d be forced to play something… far beneath her talents. At that moment she was in a bustling rendition of “The Hole in the Boat”—a song she had now gotten four requests for. And each time she was asked she would only smile back and say, “Sounds like a plan, partner!” She only hoped the tips here would see her to the next location.
And that was when someone from the crowd whispered, “And what do you fear?” And so she told them.
Across the room, near the doorway and far from the fire, sat six ponies at a bench. In one of each hoof was a mug of mead, while the other hoof sat pointing upwards as if continually in the midst of raising a point. One look at their soot covered faces could tell one enough. They were miner ponies, from deep in the mountains. Their job was a dangerous one and they drank as if they knew it all too well. At that table Cold Mug could name each and every pony sitting there, and although they might have acted gruff and a tad shrill upon occasion, he knew they were only looking for a place to relax once the hard day was done.
Boulder-Dash laughed loudest of all and took another deep pull from his cup. The day had been rough and now it had come to an end. In the morning he knew his back would ache and the joints in all four of his legs would beg to be put down, but at that moment he was happy. He was with his friends and his workers both. And he didn’t think many ponies could put themselves in quite that type of company.
Just as another pony was about to regale them all with a story, Boulder slapped another of his comrades on the back, making his nose dip deep into his cup. “Mead nose!” the other five shouted instinctively, before falling to laughter louder than anything in the room, including the lone violinist at its center.
Though through the wails of laughter cut a single clear question.
What do I fear? Boulder repeated. Well… Boulder-Dash then answered honestly.
The laughter from the other side of the room did little to distract Hay Seed from the reason he was there. At a circular table he sat with both of his sons, Pumpkin- and Apple Seed, both nearing that scary age known as adulthood. It had been a hard week on their farm—make that a hard year—and the hooves that gripped their cups were still covered in the dirt from their trek over. (Hay Seed had thought a trip to the mountains would help goad him to tell what needed to be told to his sons—now he only wished the trip had proved better than it had been.) From one son to the other Hay Seed hesitated, unable to say what he had practiced all that morning: that their farm would be sold next month and they would be out on the road thereafter. For Hay Seed it was a tough pill to swallow, but his pride could only take him so far. He only hoped he could look them in the eyes when he said it. He also hoped they wouldn’t blame themselves when it was all over… as they were accustom to do when the season’s pickings weren’t as bountiful as expected.
Hay Seed hoped and then he listened, to a singular voice that seemed to float in the air. Fear, it said, show it to me. And then he knew he would.
Safely behind his bar, Cold Mug watched the many acts of this unexpected play and could do little else otherwise. Even later, when the laughter would come to a stop and the screaming would begin, he would only stand by to wipe his bar, and smile that same winning smile all the while.
2
In that short moment when Cloud Nine and Windy held hooves, a vision had come to him. On that very day, just before heading for home, Windy had seen their boss in his office. With the door closed and the blinds shut, not a single pony could see in. And yet somehow Cloud did. From every angle and view, he watched what they did. And it was all so vivid. And it was all so wrong. And how was it that she could—
“Ow! You’re hurting me!”
Cloud came back from his shocking revelation to find his hoof pressing deeply into Windy’s own. He pulled his forelegs back and for a second watched as they shook with anger.
“What’s gotten into you?” Windy asked, with a look of sudden alarm alive on her up-until-then cute face. “What’s wrong with…”
The words dried in her throat as Cloud brought his head back up. The boyish looks he had been sporting around work rapidly turning to gray wrath. “Why did you bother to bring me here?” he huffed. “If you were seeing him then why did you bother? You plan to make a fool out of me and then tell everyone tomorrow?”
Windy didn’t know what to say to any of that, so she didn’t.
“Answer me you whore!”
Windy’s answer came in the form of her drink leveled in his face. Cloud’s rebuttal was when he smashed his own cup onto the table, prying a jagged piece of wood from what remained with his teeth. He moved forward as she moved back, her eyes now the size of dinner plates.
To Silver Strings, the sound of a shattered cup sounded nothing like it should have. In fact, instead of a sound, it came as a word. A single word. And that word was boo. And yet Silver Strings, being the professional she knew in her heart she was, ignored the noise and continued on with the song she was currently in the midst of. It was even one she didn’t mind so much—up tempo with some melodic bits. It was a tune she could really—
Boo! You suck!
No, she tried to tell herself. It couldn’t be.
Boo! Stop while you’re ahead!
Although her largest fear had always been being shunned by her audience, at over a hundred shows she had never been booed—not even heckled. Until then it had only remained as a persistent thought in her mind. And in her mind it had solidly remained an impossibility. Until that night.
Just the same she played on, a single tear wanting desperately to escape and file down her cheek. Thankfully that was the side of her face she kept pressed to her violin, so the odds of someone seeing were—
You crying now music girl? Don’t cry cause you’re bad, just stop playing!
Silver Strings had found she had had enough and lowered her instrument and bow. Whatever mongoloid that had derailed her beautiful act could answer to her. Once she picked him out from the crowd she could turn the tables on him. But it was only when she finally faced the audience again that she realized just what a silly idea that had been. Every eye in the house was on her. Each eye filled with either contempt or sheer boredom. One pony in the back stood up and began to boo at the top of his lungs and quickly he was joined in with the others. Silver Strings could only shrink away from it all; try and find a corner where it would all just go away.
By the time Boulder-Dash had brought the cup to his lips and back down he had discovered what they were planning to do. The five of them—his comrades, his friends—were planning on burying him in the mine come the next morning. An old abandoned tunnel had already been selected and each role had been dived out between them. One would lure him there with the promise of a rare find. Another would bash his head in with a pickaxe as he entered, and would continue to do so until he became limp. Then, as a team, they would drag him to a corner to begin filling up the lonesome tunnel with the body of Boulder-Dash inside.
To a clear mind the reasoning’s made no sense at all. But the vision Boulder-Dash had been presented with had somehow filled him in on each grim and tiny detail—each note and act and plan. Inside, he knew it to be true. And when finally facing his workers again, each face held that same look of solemn understanding. Boulder-Dash had figured it out and they knew it. Now he thought maybe they’d step up the date and complete their dirty work tonight. Because honestly, with this type of knowledge now learned, what were the odds of him reporting for work tomorrow?
Boulder-Dash hastily made himself a promise: if they wanted him they’d have to drag his lifeless body there.
He stood and angled his head to the left and to the right, cracking both times.
“Let’s get on with it then, you bastards,” he spat, glaring at each of the five in turn.
One of the five smirked and whispered into the ear of another. The recipient of the message laughed in return. That was all it took to start the roe.
“You find death funny, do you?” Boulder-Dash asked, lifting two hooves up in a brawling-type manner. “Remind me to hold my giggles while I bash your skull in with these hooves.”
In the real bar, each of the five seated ponies exchanged a glance of worry and concern between them. In the cloudy head of Boulder-Dash’s, he saw each rise with a well-hidden weapon in tow. So it’s going to be like that? he thought, before lunging forward.
A few minutes prior to this act of wayward violence, Hay Seed sat and watched, fidgeting with the barely touched drink in front of him. Oddly, his focus was not on the small table of miners across the room, but instead on a group of four travelers sitting close by the fire. Stallions all, they each wore tattered garments and came with the same bruised appearance of ponies that didn’t get along with many. The biggest of the lot—a pony mostly clad in browns and blacks—spit onto the floor before throwing his empty cup onto the fire. Although no one reacted as he thought they might, Hay Seed was sure he knew what he saw.
Didn’t he?
And yet it wasn’t those minor social graces that had originally caused him to stare. He knew who they were. All four of them, actually. He had seen them before and now the memories came back like some monster unleashed from a cellar. They were the reason his family’s farm had failed that year. And he could remember the night they had come, hollering and screaming, torch in hoof, ready to hurt and maul and burn whatever got in their way. Instead of instigating a fight as he might have done in his younger days, Hay Seed had held his sons inside until the worst was over. What was left of their fields was scorched earth and nothing more. Their harvest had been destroyed and with it the hopes of his entire family.
So what was there to lose, then? When they were already near the end of their rope?
Hay Seed took a furtive glance at each of his sons, pausing just long enough to remember how hard they had struggled that year, all of them. Without a word passed between them, each son nodded in turn and focused their attention to the table of four by the fire. In each eye of the Seed family, flames flickered brightly, reminding them exactly what had been taken from them. Tonight they would find retribution.
Hay Seed took the lead and exited from the table. Accompanied by his sons, he went to the four and stood by their table until the larger pony took notice.
“What do you want?” the pony asked bluntly.
“What you took from us,” Hay Seed answered, in a tone which was close to melancholy.
The pony at the table smiled at that. “Oh. And what exactly did I take from you?”
“Everything.”
And that was when everything went very bad very fast.
3
A ways away at his bar, Cold Mug watched what would transpire over the next six-minutes with rapt attention. If truth could be told, and if much of his body were his to control, his first choice of action would have been to hide and cower behind the heavy planks of his workstation, before stealthily making his way towards an exit. But since that option had long since passed, he instead watched, and then hoped, that maybe when things were over and the mess had been cleaned, he might return to the droll life of bartender once more. Yet at the end of those six minutes, he didn’t think that would be possible.
4
In that first minute, Cloud Nine slashed at the air in front of Windy’s face, causing her to back away towards the bar area and the kitchen. In that first minute, Silver Strings first collapsed off her small perch that doubled as a stage, and then began to retreat to the nearest wall, her violin emitting the most horrible of noises as it dragged against the floor. In that first minute, Boulder-Dash leapt into the very thick of his co-workers, every limb flying wild as each of the others tried to subdue him the quickest way they could. In that first minute, Hay Seed first told the table of four just what is was they had done to his family, before hastily grabbing a bit of coal from the fire to then whip in their general direction.
In that second and third minute, Windy armed herself with a kitchen knife she had miraculously found embedded in a butchers block (alongside a good-sized puddle of blood and fur). As Cloud slashed forward, she slashed back, and soon their weapons clashed nervously in the silence of the kitchen. In that second and third minute, Silver Strings found the corner she had been looking for all along and proceeded to tighten each string on her violin until it snapped, telling herself that her last performance had come that very night. In that second and third minute, the group of five pinning down Boulder-Dash lost hold of him once again, only for him to come swinging back with everything he had. Hoof connected with eye and teeth and suddenly their drunken friend had become something else entirely. Out of his mouth a friend even heard “…buried alive…” but would never be completely sure. In that second and third minute, the Seed brothers made it their single duty to make the other three at that table of delinquents suffer just as much as their family had. Given their many years on the farm and the long twelve hour days they found themselves working time and again, the fight of three on two was still closely matched.
In those final minutes, Windy slashed down with her newly acquired knife, letting lose a torrent of blood from Cloud’s extended foreleg. Barely feeling that pain; Cloud continued forward as he leaked onto the floor. No one from the rest of the bar heard Windy’s cries for help. In those final minutes, Boulder-Dash had come away bloodied and bruised, one of his forelegs bent and most definitely broken. But he had done well, he told himself, as he viewed the unconscious few on the floor. Now there were only a few more conspirators to go. In those final minutes, Silver Strings set her troubles aside as she discovered the booing pony from before. She told herself it was him. Somehow it was him, and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that this pony had not only ruined her show but her entire life. So with all that in mind she made it her mission to forcibly feed that pony what remained of her broken instrument, perhaps in some desperate ploy for him to digest the finer arts. In those final minutes, Hay Seed’s nostrils flared wildly as his senses finally caught up with the rest of him, and the smell of burning flesh took over. In his hooves he held that table of four’s leader; his head shoved much too far into one of the fire pits. Although the original struggle had ended over a minute ago, he held on, as though perhaps the pony with no head was simply playing possum for him. Once he released his grip he turned to his sons, now bloodied and weary in the midst of their very serious fight, and he had truly never felt more proud.
Now the six minutes were up.
5
When that dark stallion materialized at the foot of the bar again, Cold Mug wanted to scream and just keep screaming. Too bad he could only smile and wipe down the bar in that same area he had already been doing for an hour.
“This place has become more lively since I’d arrived,” the pony said, giving the rest of the bar the lightest of glances. Although Mug saw no smile on that dark, cold face he could tell one was hidden just beneath the surface. In his heightened state of fright, Mug didn’t even realize the pony had adopted both a cape and a crown. Maybe he would have taken mind if he didn’t have other things presently worrying him. “Are you listening, barkeep? Or is your attention elsewhere?”
When Mug didn’t respond and only viewed him with his oh-so-very wide eyes, the dark pony laughed and took a step back. “Oh, I almost forgot.” He then waved a hoof near his face and suddenly Mug felt life return to his head. (The rest of his body he could not say the same for.) Still chuckling lightly, the dark creature said, “It has been many years since I’ve done such tricks. A few things are bound to slip my mind.”
Mug found he couldn’t hold the flood of words back any longer. “Oh please oh please oh please oh please stop this I don’t want this I just want to go and oh please look at my bar and all those ponies they need help and oh please—”
With a quiet shush his guest silenced him once more.
He said, “One question, pony, and then I shall depart. Do you know of a pony with eyes of yellow and red, neither eye ever matching the other?”
Mug thought desperately for any pony of note—some passerby he might have seen weeks or even months ago. But he came up with nothing. He shook his head from side to side in spastic motions.
“Are you sure?”
Mug repeated the motions, now a little harder.
“You look nervous, barkeep. Let me help set your mind at ease. Does that sound good?”
Mug thought for a moment, then nodded timidly.
“No. That’s not the way one talks to Kings. You’re supposed to use words. Let’s try that again… and remember, I’m here to help, peasant.”
And suddenly Mug knew it all to be true. Every word this dark pony spoke were the words of the just, and he truly had been sent there to help. So why had he doubted him before? How could he have wronged someone so carelessly?
Mug nodded slowly, and said: “Ok, that sounds nice.”
The pony before him stared down at the floors, a few small puddles of blood creating an abstract painting along the carpets. “You have quite the mess to clean, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
The stallion then viewed the rest of the bar—the destruction, the still bodies of a handful of lifeless ponies, the jarring movements of the rest that were still fighting and killing. “And now you have a lot to explain for, don’t you?”
“I guess I do.”
“You know what would help clear this all away, peasant?”
“No.”
“That’s all right. I do. You have oil in the back, yes? To work your ovens and the like.”
“Yes.”
“Good. With that, I want you to splash it all around and not miss a single corner. Think you can handle that?”
“Yes.”
“Good. And then you’re going to burn this place to the ground. Remember, I’m here to help.”
“Yes.”
“And what cleans better than fire?”
Mug didn’t have a programmed answer, so his mouth hung open limply.
“Just say yes.”
“Yes.”
“Good. And you know what else? I think you’d better stay inside to make sure the fire gets at everything. You don’t want to botch something as important as that, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Excellent. Then I’ll bid you goodnight.”
For the briefest of seconds Cold Mug shuttered with relief upon seeing the dark figure vanish from view. Then the horror of it all came back in a wave as he could do no more than watch as his body moved toward the kitchen, and to the oil.
At least no filly of mine will ever need to run this place, he thought solemnly, as he picked up the can.
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Ah, new chapters! I shall partake when I get home from work.
Love it
Man, I love Sombra being sadistic. More chapters, pleasssse.
Wow.
I don't think Discord knows what he's unleashed. Well, if you play with fire...
4727725 I'm glad. Thanks for reading!
4727765 I always thought Sombra deserved some menace...
I'm really enjoying this story.
At first, I was going to question your choice of using underlined words, but now I see it was used in the sense to convey the magical manipulation of Sombra. Keep up the good work.
This is amazing. Just... Amazing.
You invoked the name of the HBO earlier, I think, and given some of their quality titles I thought that was pretty ambitious. But this really is shaping up to be really solid. Great work on Sombra, and efficiently and rather chillingly dispensing with any sympathy for the devil. Thanks for writing.
1) this chapter is just a straight up Sandman rip-off, is it not?
2) fillies are specifically female. Foal is the word you're looking for.
I'm enjoying it so far though, thanks.
Whose music
Nuclear fire, obviously. Cleans things on a subatomic level. Good stuff.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WD15sxT9nS0 What I though of the second Sombra’s chaos started