• Published 18th Dec 2015
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Awkward Conversations And Other Stories - No one is home



A series of disjointed, interconnected stories about people and ponies. There are many conversations. All are awkward.

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Beyond the Silver Sky: DON'T

The second night the nightmares were quite vivid. All of us had them with one exception, Sunrise Aurora. I dreamed I was a changeling, and that’s what those alien ponies were called. Another changeling, a changeling with no name had done something unspeakable. I don’t remember what now, but in the dream itself the shock of it was nearly unimaginable.

I was a drone in Old Canterlot, it was a vibrant city. I was a construction worker. The ponies paid me and fed me well. I was a psychic vampire, but most ponies didn’t seem to mind. I was happy. I never did anything to hurt anypony. One day there was a flash of light, and we stood beneath a glowing silver sky. At first everypony cheered, thinking it was some trick or show. And then the silver sky melted and rained down on us. There was screaming and panic and then the ponies realized that the melting sky simply passed harmlessly through almost everything. Everything except us. My body was wracked with pain and then I felt nothing at all. And then the ponies were all staring at me.

I could see other changelings, and they had been turned into crystal statues. And I realized that so had I. At first I was terrified. I wanted to call out to those changelings, I wanted them to call out to me! Days passed like that. The ponies I worked for came by every day and talked to me. They didn’t even know if I could hear them. I wanted to tell them that yes I could hear them, and I could taste their love and it gave me hope. But I was as mute as the stone that I was.

I awoke the next morning unrested, my orange fur soaked in sweat. I found that nearly all of my crewmates had fared no better. Only Sunrise seemed unaffected, in fact her mood seemed uncharacteristically cheerful. Judith found the unicorns sudden burst of giggles and snickers to be especially unsettling, and I had to admit it seemed strange coming from the normally brooding and taciturn mare.

Our second day at the grave site (after the previous night’s dreams I could think of it as nothing else) was a trial unto itself Judith and myself busied ourselves analysing the intact statues and making careful notes on their placing and facing. This was a previously unknown tribe of ponies, and these memorials, these “living tombstones” as Judith called them, were our only clues about them. Who were they? What was their place in Equestria?

Sunrise, for her part, ignored our efforts, much to my own annoyance, and instead worked obsessively to recover every single piece of the shattered statue. When pressed, she would insist that she could “fix him”. Sometimes I thought I caught her talking quietly to the fragment that held the ponies face, but I wrote it off as nerves.

The tremors didn’t start until we were set to leave. They were far more violent this time, and threatened to upset the safe operation of the rover. What was worse, they seemed to follow us back all the way to the landing site. As we approached we received a message from our captain. And quite an unsettling one, at that. We were indeed being followed by a seismic disturbance, as if some great beast were moving beneath the lunar surface at frightening speed.
We hastily loaded as much as we dared back into our lander and prepared to evacuate as the quake reached it’s crescendo. And then it just stopped. We all just sat there in a daze for what seemed like the longest time. Finally it was Shadow Snap who first stepped out to re-secure our base camp. After he gave his all clear signal, we each warily crept back outside to the surface of a moon that suddenly didn’t feel so safe or uninhabited.

The fissures crisscrossing out camp were at first alarming, until we realized that each was only a hoof span wide and a fetlock deep at most. We were nearly ready to write it all off as some unknown natural phenomenon, when Flitter Shade broke into hysterical gibberish. She had climbed to the top of the ship to inspect for damage, and was now pointing furiously at the fissures.

At first we couldn’t figure out what it was that had upset her, from our level they seemed quite random and harmless, but as Shadow Snap climbed the rigging to reassure the panicked Umbrum his voice broke through the comlink.

“Everypony back up,” the stern stallion intoned gravely, “Move towards the lander and look at the fissures from a distance.”

As we backed up slowly the patterns came in stark relief. Judith gasped in shock and quickly shuffled closely by my side. And that was when I saw it. It was unmistakable, hidden at first only by its sheer scale.

“DON’T”

Each letter easily 20 meters high, the message was scrawled as an unmistakable warning across the lunar landscape. We were being watched. Something entirely unknown and powerful beyond belief lay in wait beneath our hooves. It was not a beast. It was intelligent. It was watching us. And we had been warned.

Author's Note:

Slightly short chapter is slightly short. But yay, I broke the writer’s block! :pinkiehappy:

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