Monster In The Snow

by Shady Steps

Chapter Six, Kindness

Sudden Spark was having a bad day. That was not to say that something bad had happened to her, she was home on leave from Celestia's School for gifted unicorns to visit her family so by all rights she should be enjoying herself. The problem was that she did not enjoy parties, she was social enough she felt, she had friends, they hung out daily back in Canterlot and even more on the weekends, she just hated crowds and music and dancing.

With a sigh she trudged through the empty fields, the entire city state was in the town square enjoying the Festival of Love, a festival that called for dancing, drinking and getting suddenly kissed to promote love and romance.

Sudden did not find the thought of ponies pulling her into a sudden and uncomfortable makeout session that she was distinctly unwilling to reciprocate fun but she had to attend the celebration because her father had asked for her to help, she hated letting him down and he could not run the food stand on his own this year due to a broken leg.

She approached the family farmstead, actually her family did not own any land besides the house and barns around the place, the fields belonged to the Princess, they just rented the fields for what was basically nothing.

When she spotted the barn she gasped and rushed inside looking around quickly, the floor had a rather large puddle of a clearish pale fluid that did not smell like much of anything and on the table where she had set out food for the festival some of it was clearly missing and some of it had been eaten, a half eaten cake, a bite had been taken out of virtually all the foods, pastries had been half eaten and then discarded like whoever had done this had lost interest.

With a huff Sudden shook her head and moved to collect food that had not been tempered with only to notice something that caused her blood to boil and her hooves to dig into the ground as she tensed furious. Someone had stolen her saddlebags.

With a shriek of rage she stormed around the table looking around for something to take her anger out upon, the logical part of her brain told her that whoever had done this was long gone by now and that there was nothing particularly valuable in the bag but the rest of her brain wanted to break something.

So with a swing of her head she sent a undirected blast of telekinetic power at a bale of hay, she was a potent unicorn and it did not shock her to see the bale break apart in a heap against the far wall. What did shock her was that something wheezed in pain and slumped down in the midst of the pile.

It was a dark brown thing that almost seemed to blend into the muddy floor and brown walls of the barn, it resembled a twisted dragon with no face, at the end of its arms it had many digits that ended in deadly looking claws and rather then scales it had a layered exoskeleton.

Without warning its face melted to reveal an actual face, it turned to its side and vomited. Sudden was conflicted at that point, and tapped into her magic, one of her specializations was biomancy, a school that among other things featured an impressive repertoire of medical spells including one to determine ailments of a sick pony or animal or in this case, monster.

Given that the monster had not attacked her or ran away and just sat against the wall blinking and groaning her thoughts went quickly from fear to concern, she was still mad however. As her eyes adjusted to the information the spell she had cast was showing her she let out a startled gasp and rushed to the no doubt deadly monsters side her horn lighting in concern.

Big game hunting was not a profession that many ponies would want but there were ponies in the world who destiny forged into proficient and deadly hunters. Ponies who did not have a cutie mark or decades of training in such hunting would not often survive long against the more dangerous creatures that necessitated such a pony in the first place but despite that fact many of the rich and powerful tried to make inroads into the profession often with disastrous results, for themselves and for the monsters they hunted.

In order to even the playing field such ponies often used dark hexes and spells that did the most cruel and horrific things to the monsters they hunted and often drove the caster insane in the process. The monster before Sudden had somehow had its innate magic ripped away, no doubt though some dark spell, and had survived, it had probably came here to scavenge food and then leave but without its magic the Arcane Microbes were busy killing it.

With a rush Sudden fed her own magic into the best and watched in fascination as its failing organs healed in seconds. only to gasp in dismay as its spirit used up the magic she had given it and the Microbes continued their work.

Gritting her teeth in determination the little mare dragged the monster onto her back and with the help of her magic dragged her into the farmhouse, she had converted the basement into her own lab a long time ago and while it was dimly lit and dusty in a way only a disused room could manage her equipment was still here and in top condition.

Grunting she pushed the delirious monster onto the slab in the middle of the room, normally she would use it as the focus of whatever she was studying but it would double as a grounding rock for the magic she had in mind.

Gripping a piece of chalk in her magic she quickly made a circle around the slab and drew five circles on the inside of the larger one, five focal points for a ritual was standard for a reason after all and dropped piles of charged mana crystals in each of the smaller circles. Again the mare fed her magic into the ill monster but this time she tapped into its, shockingly weak, spirit connecting it to the circle around it.

A ponies magic, indeed the magic of anything that lived was called a Wellspring, it was vital to life for a variety of reasons and would grow and change over the lifetime of a pony, to have one's Wellspring taken away was close to having a horn broken off or a wing shattered, but much, much worse. Thankfully the dark magic needed to strip a Wellspring had been outlawed even before Equestria had been founded and a cure for such a tragic event had been discovered so long ago that its origins where a mistery.

Sudden fed the magic of the crystals on the ground into the spirit of the monster letting it take and direct it on its own, watching in fascination as, after almost all the crystals were drained, a Wellspring formed. It was like a drop of water, small and hard to see, a slight thing that was dwarfed by her own considerable Wellspring but it was beautiful to the tired mare.

Sudden watched as the tiny Wellspring of the monster, with the aid of the charged magic in the circle made short work of the Arcane Microbes and the monster quickly fell asleep in relief. It then occurred to the student that she had performed a Wellspring summoning, something that had not been done in hundreds of years. With a squeal of excitement the little mare pulled a stack of papers from a chest of drawers and began to record everything she could about what she had just done.

With a thought she added a triangle with a door to the rune on the ground, with the circle already connected to the monsters spirit it would be unable to leave the circle until it was broken, Sudden did not want the monster to suddenly attack her as soon as it recovered after all. Soon the only sound in the room was the scratching of her quill as the little mare wrote.

Comments

[Fracturedheart]

Congrats on the feature !!!

[doctor_n]

The plot thickens!

[Bastille]

Another good chapter, but it wouldn't hurt to make the chapters longer.

[StormyVenture]

Arcane microbes... Seriously?! You shouldn't capitalize the word arcane here. I hope there's some explanation of all this forthcoming though, because if there are magic sucking microbes all over the place, shouldn't everyone be in danger?

[EyeCancer]

More when?

[ChronoMitsurugi]

...well, at least we finally have a halfway decent pony. Although that festival going on....oh god do I want to nuke that place now. Just one little tactical nuke to the Crystal Heart and then let Sombra and the frozen tundra deal with this place.
Oh man I need to go find a fic where they murder Cadence to cleanse my mind.

Note that this does not reflect your ability as an author. Your writing is actually really good. I just hate alot of things that this fic has brought to the table.

[HellBreaker]

With a sigh she trudged through the empty fields, the entire city state was in the town square enjoying the Festival of Love, a festival that called for dancing, drinking and getting suddenly kissed to promote love and romance.

i have to be honest, that sounds borderline like an orgy

[HellBreaker]

With a sigh she trudged through the empty fields, the entire city state was in the town square enjoying the Festival of Love, a festival that called for dancing, drinking and getting suddenly kissed to promote love and romance.

i have to be honest, that sounds borderline like an orgy