To the swamps
It took some time, but Stelimus finally had his things prepared and placed in an inconspicuous carriage of plain wood and pulled by regular looking deer. So, now Stelimus just had to sit on his red couch and wait for the trip. It would be really boring, so, to pass the time, he started to think, and Copper Blossom came to mind. He started to scavenge at his memories. The older they got, the more open she became and the better he could help her.
"Just because they're dead doesn't mean you'll never see them again."
"Why? Because they're 'here' in my heart?" Copper struck her chest angrily. "Everypony says that. I'm tired of it!"
"Maybe, but, if you believe in things like souls, it just means that they lost their corporeal forms."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that they've become spirits and they're certainly watching you and protecting you to the best of their power."
"How would you know?"
"Because deer communicate and work with spirits all the time." Stelimus grinned. "I bet that I could find them in the future when I get better at using spirit essence and ask the spirits where they are. You might get to see them again."
"Really?"
Definitely."
She did seem to calm down since that day, and Stelimus reassured her doubts by performing feats only possible by using spirit essence. Shining did notice that she was unusually clamoring for Stelimus' attention since that day, often wearing dresses, changing her appearance, or crafting statues out of various materials to try and improve herself, and Stelimus somehow noticed EVERY. SINGLE. CHANGE. Shining was used to his wife doing those things and he'd been with her long enough to know, but Stelimus noticed all the subtle changes even with Cadance.
Shining went to check on his daughter in her enormous room. It had changed quite a bit since Stelimus first visited some time ago. It was now filled to the brim with sculptures detailing various characters and environments. Her cutie mark had become associated to sculpting and had the form of a genderless pony made from orange clay. The stallion trekked his way carefully through the valley of clay, his nose scrunching up from the odor of said material mixed with water. He approached his daughter with some concern.
"Hi, Blossom. How are you today?"
"I'm great, dad? Why?"
"Oh, I was just wondering. You just seem to stay cooped up in here for lengthy periods of time."
Blossom turned away from her sculpture briefly and looked at her father. "Well, duh? I like to sculpt. It's not really easy when this mud is being dried constantly by the sun."
"Hm. True. Still, I just wanted to know how you were."
"I'm fine."
There was a long moment of awkwards silence between the two, an occasional scraping of clay being the only sort of ambiance available.
"So..." Shining rubbed his foreleg. "What do you think about Stelimus?"
"I like him."
Shining's eye twitched a bit. "Like him...how?"
Copper giggled. "I like-like him?"
The stallion slowly slid out of the room using his magic and closed the door.
"Shining?"
"GAH!" The captain jumped back several...'hooves'. "You startled me, Cadance."
"I noticed. What's wrong?"
"I think she fell in love with Stelimus."
"That's great news!" Cadance cheered quietly.
"No it's not! What if he tries to hurt her? And I don't want the satisfaction of our daughter having fallen for the son of that douche across the tundra."
"Douche?"
"I dunno. I heard somepony say it after coming back from Prance."
Cadance shook her head and kissed Shining on his cheek. "You don't need to worry about a thing. We're both here and we'll help her out if anything bad happens, mkay?"
Shining took a deep swallow and nodded. "Okay. If you say so. You know about love better than I do."
The two started to walk away from Copper's door, but a thought went through Cadance's mind, a thought she needed to share. "She wasn't making sculptures of Stelimus, was she? You know, obsessively?"
Stelimus was dropped off in the swamps and onto one muddy pile. The driver told him that Grimliss had sent a guide and that he could be found further along the path through the swamp, provided he went towards the closest high tree. Stelimus was...quite leery and very hesitant on the whole thing.
"Welp, this is definitely swamp-like. Very dark, full of bugs, gross ground. Hell, there's even the creepy trees with their vein-roots and large amounts of weird, twisted plants I've never seen before." Some sort of weird screech that seemed to be a mix between an owl hoot and crow caw played behind the stag. "What is this, Scooby-Doo?" The stag looked up at the sky to see the clouds were shaped like vertically placed, rolling tubes of processed magenta and tyrian purple. "What's really concerning is that weird color and those clouds."
It was difficult walking through the mud as each step had Stelimus sink through a bit, similar in fashion to quick sand. He walked around bushes and thorny plants and even swore that he saw a pony-sized spider lurking around, but, strangely enough, nothing attacked him, not even the bugs.
"Finally. I'm at the tree."
"Stelimus?" a creepy voiced asked.
"Y-yes?"
A deer rose from the mud and stood up before him. She was similar to Grimliss in that she was just a skeleton, although a red, heart-shaped object could be seen beating in her chest, and her eyes were magenta-illuminated. Her body was surrounded by the black mist, though this mist had no proper form and simply coated the deer like a dress.
"Follow me."
Stelimus was far too creeped out to say anything, and the occasional rays of color that would shine down onto the swamp didn't help his problems at all. He was being escorted by an undead. When the deer finally stopped, Stelimus was standing in front of what looked like a large hut made from bones and held together by a plant growing below it and hugging it into a pentagonal form. The small patch of land in front of the hut was surrounded by many dead trees and and plants, giving it an abandoned appearance.
The guide turned around to face Stelimus. "Please be kind to our master," the deer said. "He has been very kind to us."
Her eyes faded briefly and an spirit ball with the identical color to her eyes flew out of the skeleton. The mist faded and the decayed body was slowly engulfed by the swamp. Stelimus started to shake despite himself and couldn't find the courage to move forward, but he didn't have to. A few more balls of light plunged into the ground below him and the swamp started to push Stelimus forward like a surfer on a wave. It was then that the young stag noticed that the area around the hut was densely filled with floating balls of light that varied between the color spectrums of blue, purple, and green. The wave slid Stelimus through the entrance right in front of an awaiting Grimliss.
"Stelimus! So glad you could join me!"
"Uuuhhhhh..."
"I see you met my subjects." Grimliss stepped besides his nephew and put a hoof on the entrance to better lean outside. "They often forget that they're now undead so they aren't very accommodating to the living when they meet them."
"Um...Why is there nothing here?"
"There's plenty of stuff in this hut. The problem is that you can't see them. They're phased into the spirit world."
Stelimus snapped out of his confusion."What?!"
Grimliss tapped his muzzle. "Hmmm. I knew he wasn't teaching any of you right."
"What are you talking about?"
"In the tundra, they teach you how to CONTROL spirits. That's not how it works."
"I'm getting real tired of saying 'what'." Stelimus glared at his uncle with a narrow gaze.
"Let me reiterate: My furniture is within the spirit world and, thusly, you cannot see or interact with them. As such, I've learned that the spirit teachings you've been receiving in the tundra are wrong. You should be capable of seeing them and my subjects, but you can't."
"But I learned directly from a wendigo."
Grimliss lift his shoulders and expressed extreme disbelief. "What?! Wendigo aren't good teachers! No wonder you don't know anything! Looks like I'll be teaching you about PROPER spirit essence and how to USE it, rather than control it."
"But...I didn't say anything about controlling it..."
Grimliss adotped a pseudo-snobby expression. "I figured it out on my own." He tapped Stelimus on his nubby antlers. "By the way, my subjects aren't just deer."
"What's that supposed to mean?" Stelimus asked.
A low-rumbling, deafening growl that shook the hut silenced Stelimus right away.
"What the hell was that?!"
Stats
Page generated in 0.032 seconds
Total duration
993 users online
1,620,938 hits today, 2,244,100 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
Steli... your uncle is super creepy. Like, seriously.
Don't worry Shiny, Stelimus thinks his dad is a Douche too. In fact, his siblings seem to think so too. So there's a pretty good consensus on that subject.
As for the sculpture issue... I can't help but worry about the day when blossom will start making sculptures of Stelimus. Detailed and specific sculptures.... Why brain? Why did you come up with that...
6931675 Yes. Why, brain? I'm afraid I must...take you to a nice 'farm' in the countryside.
6926319 With people reproducing songs and dialogue with no changes whatsoever, I'd say that they're justified in going after plagiarists. As this is a community of real writers (unlike that pathetic hugbox wattpad) I'd hope you agree.
6931808 Hmmm. I'm just trying to use wattpad to improve my novels before I send them to agents. Whether or not I become big there is inconsequential.
Also, Hamster_Master. The rival of the Gerbil_King.
6931817 So you're using wattpad to get critiques and improvement on your writing...are you trying to troll?
6931817 Also, fuck Gerbil King. That asshole tried to pass off the Void Serpents Chapter as his creation. If you know him in RL, tell him Hamster Master turned that Marty Stu self-insert of his into a Chaos Spawn after getting surprise buttseks from a Great Unclean One.
6931831 No. It's the only place I was introduced to that allowed me to keep my stories as my own, and since the literary agents never say anything, I decided to try it anyways. I like to experiment, and the larger group of different minded people I discover, the better I can adapt to various different situations.
That being said, it's very unfriendly to new users.
The part where the spirit left the skeletal remains of a deer, and it sunk into the swamp was just creepy, and awsome at the same time.
6931852 I tried Wattpad, but after seeing the hugbox that it was, I left. "Unfriendly to new users", yeah nice bait. I r8 2/8, nice try m8.
6931856 I was going for that.
6931875 Not sure if mocking me or agreeing with me.
6931890 Neither. I disagree. Sites like that and Deviantart give fan fiction a bad name. Sure there's a fair share of hugbox rings, self-inserts, and Stus here, but it's balanced by more people that actually know what they're doing. Shame really.
6931914 ...I meant real novels, not fanfiction.
Also, yes. I've borne witness to the horrors of which you speak. Sometimes, that experience is an unhealthy one.
So I guess the Lich King isn't the only one who gets to have an undead dragon around.
This story has honestly been an amazingly fun read so far and is my favourite new thing this year as of now. I've seen a lot of stories with this concept, but this has to be one of the best-done around. I've been enjoying the hell out of this and I'm really looking forward to the rest of it.
6933584 Right. Dragon.
6933958 Thanks a lot!
I'm liking the story so far, good job.
6934795 Spank you, Greenwall.
grimliss might be my favorite character thus far!
So Shining is jealous that Stelimus is a better hubby already than he is, even though he is still a kid and not married?
Copper obsessed with Stelimus? That's something I would like to see!
6941263 Same, he's the most down to earth, and has common sense.
here
Huh, I usually don't find Hamster_Master acting like this. Usually, they're overly harsh to the point where they call a story trash or a Marty Stu/Mary Sue self insert on stories, but here they're not.
Of course, I've turned into an overly harsh Grammar Nazi that has written over 700 words to the author I'm supposed to be editing for on why their character going at mach 10 is inane and would likely cause death to them, if not others nearby.
Now we are talking! The story really begins to start here