Into the Dark

by Corejo

XI - The End

Despite his wishes to remain asleep at Luna’s side forever, his eyes opened to the silent glow of the throne room. The stabbing hunger pains from last cycle had grown worse, and he allowed himself a sigh, as if to fill his stomach with resignation and hope that would satisfy. He stood and shook away the stiffness of sleep.

“Good morning,” Luna said. “At least, as the saying goes.”

A saying from another world. So distant yet so very near. Whatever “morning” meant, the gesture was not lost on him. He nodded, then gave her wings a smile.

She flitted them in acknowledgement. “Let us be off, Champion.”

He stared at her wings a moment longer before heading for the side door.

He travelled down the empty hall and through the treasury with its glinting mountains of gold. The grooves clawed into the floor by the brazier again led him into the back room, and there he found himself standing at the threshold of the enormous hole. Sunlight flickered along the tunnel wall, struggling against the darkness.

“Be on your guard,” Luna said, her flame attentive at the front of his chest.

His heart beat a racket against his ribs, but he took a deep breath. Luna’s wings held firm against his sides, like armor that would never fail him.

He stepped into the opening, keeping the left wall within sight and letting the right fall into shadow. Better to choose one than lose both. A draft swept up the tunnel, cold as death. It whispered in his ear like voices too soft to make out.

Far into the cavernous dark it led him for an immeasurable distance. It grew steeper with every passing step, to the point where he had to shuffle down it sideways. Eventually the slope leveled out, and the walls widened into what must have been a vast cave. Here and there, chunks of purple crystal jutted from the stony walls. They reflected Sunlight in a way that resembled eyes, just beyond the rim of light.

Luna let out a shaky breath between his ears. “It is as I feared. We are in the crystal caverns.”

The crystal caverns. She had mentioned them before, when they stood on the balcony overlooking the castle gates. All manner of monster lurked down here to hide away from the Moon, or so she surmised. The thought sent a shiver down his spine, and he lifted Sunlight higher to better illuminate the cavern.

“Careful.”

She needn’t say the words. Every step was a cautious one, every shift of his eyes and twitch of his ears to catch sight or sound of something ready to pounce. The silence made it all the more unnerving. He had learned long ago to never trust the sile—

He took a step, and his hoof found air. He stumbled forward over a ledge he couldn’t see and panickedly fought to push himself back up.

“Champion!” Luna cried, beating her wings. But her words barely registered as he focused solely on Sunlight as it slipped from his grasp. It plummeted into the darkness, dragging their hopes with it.

Fear had commanded he fight to push himself back up the cliff face, but a greater fear of infinite darkness gripped him by the hackles like the gangly, frozen claws of an unnamable monster. He dove.

The air whipped back his mane and tore at every inch of his coat it could manage like spears of ice. It roared in his ears, louder than whatever words Luna shouted in his head. Below, Sunlight clanged against the wall, spraying a shower of sparks and sending it into a mad tumble, its chain like a whip threatening him to stay away.

He reached out to catch it by the chain, but it cracked against his pastern. The pain jolted up his foreleg, and he cried out. Tears threatened at the corners of his eyes, but the wind tore them free before he could even blink them away.

His first attempt to catch it stopped its wild tumble, and now the chain danced teasingly before him, begging him to reach out and take it. Hoof outstretched, he grasped it and pulled it close, its warmth against his chest a momentary solace that never should have left him.

“Champion!” Reality snapped to, and he reared back against the deafening howl of the wind. Luna spread her wings wide, but there was no saving them. She hadn’t the strength to fly here. “I cannot hold us!”

But any word of warning she could give came too late. Something shimmered below, and they plunged deep into the thick of a viscous liquid.

It burned like fire against his coat, clawed at his eyes when he opened them in terror, boiled his tongue as he opened his mouth to scream. He flailed for the surface, muscle straining against its thickness.

From the back of his mind, images of the village bled into view. The silent gates, the crumbling walls, his sister waiting for him at the front door after a long cycle in the mill. The hundreds of broken, beaten faces who looked on in hope as the gates swung shut behind him, forever awaiting the Sun to break upon the sky so long after the Moon had whet their appetite for hope. Their silent screams rose up in his ears, in unison with Luna as she uselessly flailed her wings.

He broke the surface and heaved for air. Sunlight, illuminated the churning waters and the slick shimmer of rock ahead. He flailed his hooves in a mad scramble for land, every stroke barely keeping him afloat. Luna timed her wing beats with him, and together they made it ashore.

He threw himself upon the stone, heaving for air, every breath as much an unspoken thank you to Luna as it was a defiance of the darkness. Her wings lay spread to his sides, glistening with the water that with every passing second looked more like slime.

“You are a fool,” Luna said, far removed from her normal quietude. It struck a chord in his heart, a cold and shivering thing that shrunk into the corner. “You knew I had not the strength to carry us. You could have killed yourself. Us. And all our little ponies would be left forever in their unending nightmares.”

She fell silent, and with it went the roaring frostfire in his chest. The dark pressed in, far more absolute than ever before.

“But you didn’t,” she said. Strength returned to her voice, and a sense of consolation washed over him. “We are here and in one piece, and Sister’s light is still with us. We have your foolhardiness to thank for that.”

He sighed, letting her words soothe away the burning sensation lingering in his coat. What was left of it, anyway. The individual hairs of his fur curled in on themselves, shrivelled as if beneath a flame. Where he brushed at it, thick clumps pulled away, and his skin lay raw and red beneath it, sensitive to the touch.

“I… Avoid the water, Champion. We best begin our search.” She folded her wings, shining and unaffected by the water. “I did not see the markings of the brazier since leaving the treasury. We can only hope it is down here.”

A troubling but shared hope. He re-hooked Sunlight to his bandolier and gave the water another glance. It had gone placid far faster than water should, and despite its stillness, something seemed to churn beneath the surface.

He followed the water’s edge for what felt like half a cycle. The cavern continued on, unchanging and just as dark. It was as if this place had never known the touch of light, or even the concept of it. For how deep they must have been beneath the castle, it was probably true.

More unnervingly, there was no sign of a ceiling, and even stranger, no walls yet broke the ever expanding darkness. It was simply him and the water that burned like fire.

Its iridescence drew his eye. Indistinct forms seemed to rise up from the depths to skim the surface and sink back out of sight. The faintest sounds seemed to leach from it, and he looked more closely, ears pointed forward.

“Champion…” she said. She half spread her wings, reaching to shield his face.

He gently brushed her wing away so he could hear the sounds better, the whispers growing louder when he looked his reflection in the eye. The firewater smelled of bile, and the indistinct forms still churned below, like rice stirred up from a bowl of broth.

Was that a face?

Their whispers beckoned him closer, and hesitantly, he dipped his ear in for a better listen. Low and warped, a dozen sounds rolled over one another like exhalations of breath. A distinct tingle ran down his spine, and he pulled his head back, wanting nothing to do with it.

“You know where we are, don’t you?” Her voice was slow and quiet, one meant not to startle him.

He reached a shaky hoof back for the concrete, but she beat him to it. “We are no longer in the crystal caverns. We are within the Devourer itself.

“And I need not speak of the water, those whispers… I know them well. I recognized them the instant we plunged into its depths. And I would be a liar if I said I did not fear it consuming me again.

“I can hear them now, Champion. Louder than ever before. And if I but close my eyes... I can feel them.” She pressed herself against his heart, cold as ice. “I knew this to be a trap the moment we saw the brazier was stolen away. The Devourer sought to lure us in, and we allowed ourselves to be its hapless victims. We had no other choice.”

She gave his heart a little squeeze, and courage returned in the form of her blazing flame at the forefront of his chest. Perhaps it was merely a fool’s courage, but it was courage nonetheless. To squander it was to squander what little they had going for them.

“Forward, Champion. I feel the cries and torture of every pony devoured here. But among them I also feel Celestia’s. She calls to me.”

That was at least some good news. It meant her brazier was indeed down here in this forsaken darkness. He set off, and it wasn’t for another half cycle that Luna spoke again.

“Here,” she said.

He stopped, seeing nothing but the darkness ahead and the water beside him. Head lowered, ears back, he took a few tentative steps forward, and from the darkness emerged an enormous brass brazier, round as the village well but larger and taller than his hut, painted with long and curved depictions of prancing ponies beneath a radiant Sun.

He approached, and his hoof moved of its own accord to unhook Sunlight from his bandolier.

“Champion…”

His heart skipped a beat, and he froze in place. Slowly, he lowered his hoof and looked to the ground.

Luna took her place beside his heart, the one where she had often rested during the quieter moments of their journey. When she spoke, it was at a near whisper.

“It is a lot that I have asked of you in these long Moonlit cycles. I have asked everything of you, in fact. More than I had any right to. But you answered with more than I ever thought possible.

“When we became one in the cathedral, you gave me hope that we could light the braziers and free myself, free Sister and our subjects. You were a part of my dream, a tool I could use as a means to an end, and I saw you as nothing more than that.”

Her little flame floated close to his heart, near enough that she brushed against him every time it beat. “But then you started questioning the world, the whats and whys of everything that happened and your place amidst it all. Your determination to see the end of darkness though you knew not the consequences.

“More and more as we journeyed, I saw something grow within you. I do not understand it myself. You think, you exist, you dream. You showed me that you had life, that there was more to you than being some figment of my subconscious, somehow, someway, despite how much has been destroyed by the Devourer.”

She dropped down lower in his chest, facing away. She shrank in on herself to nothing more than the tiniest mote. “You have a soul, Champion. And I nearly asked—nay, commanded—you throw it away, that you take the fall for my hubris. And yet, when you learned the truth, you still sought justice, you forgave me my transgressions.

“You… You cared.” She trembled, both within and at his sides.

He raised a hoof to his chest, pressed it closest to where she rested, and she nestled up against it. Long moments of shaking breath passed by.

“And I care, too…” she whispered, breathless. She sounded on the verge of tears. “I know you do not understand what that means, but… Perhaps it is better that way.”

She drew in a long shaky breath, and a hollow chill seized him from head to hoof. It was a terrifying sensation, one he both understood and one he feared in the deepest nethers of his heart.

This was her distancing herself. This was her preparing for what must come.

“This, here, is the end, Champion. Beyond this lies no light, no dreams of birdsong or Sunsets in the meadow. ’Twill be darkness for you. Nothing else awaits you beyond this threshold.”

She pressed herself against his heart, but couldn’t bear to wrap her flames about it. “If… If you were to change your mind now, I… I-I wouldn’t blame you.”

He stared long at the ground, Sunlight flickering silently off the brazier’s polished brass. He only had to toss the lantern in, and the world would be restored. The village would survive the darkness. The dreaming ponies would go home. Luna would be free.

And he…

He looked to his sides, where Luna held her wings tight against him, one last time. Tentatively, he reached back and touched her wing.

It felt nothing like it did in his dreams, no warmth or fetlock softness. It felt like nothing at all—simply air that wouldn’t allow his hoof to occupy its space. These wings of hers were no more than a dream. They weren’t the real her. The real her waited to open her eyes and see the world that should be and revel with her ponies in the freedom of the open skies and the warm Sun. And he held the power to make it so.

Before he could change his mind, or weakness overcame him, he unhooked Sunlight from his bandolier and tossed it in. He took a deep breath—felt another drawn inside—and waited for the flames to burst toward the sky.

But Sunlight never rose from the brazier to scour away the darkness, nor did the lantern clang against the inside. A faint plop was all he heard, like a hoof in mud. Darkness fell upon them in the absence of Sunlight, and in the tense moments of unease that followed, something bubbled thick as stew.

“Back away, Champion,” Luna commanded, half cloaking him with her wings.

He stumbled backward just as a greenish liquid slipped out from the brazier. It had an eerie luminescence to it, from the glow of Sunlight suspended inside, whose flames seemed as if they were trying to leap out and fend off the pustulent mass but were helplessly trapped.

Shadows twisted within the mass of slime—stretched and deformed faces raising soundless wails into the dark. It poured fully from the brazier, and before he found the wits to run, it lurched forward.

He had only a moment to dive out of the way when it came crashing down. It caught his hindleg, and it burned as if he had stuck it in boiling water. He screamed and turned to force it off him, but it only stuck to and burned his other hooves.

“Do not fight it, Champion!” she cried. Panic sharpened her voice to a knife’s edge. “Flee!”

The mass of faces dragged him closer, climbed further up his leg. The acidic slime peeled fur from skin, skin from muscle, muscle from bone.

He screamed, kicked instinctively with his buck knife, but his leg sank deep into the slime, and even the metal about his leg corroded at the edges. Panic overtook him.

This was no ordinary monster, no creature of the natural or even dream world. The wailing faces churning beneath the surface reared to face him, distinctly equine, reached out to him with long, gangly tendrils that climbed up his stomach to draw him further in.

Luna’s wings were a frenzy of feathers, slick with dripping slime trails that glistened a toxic green in the dying Sunlight. A final beat of her wings caught an advance of slime up his belly, and it trapped her uselessly against him. The slime crept around him, pinning her other wing to the ground.

He clawed, pulled, bit at the ground to drag himself free. The burning reached above his chest and shoulder blades, and he seized up at the pain. Screaming, he turned a fearful eye over his shoulder.

A predominant face swiveled into view on its bubbling surface, silhouetted by Sunlight deep within, and its mouth yawned open to crash down and swallow him up.

The world became fire. He shut his eyes to the burning liquid, clenched his teeth to deny it entrance into his throat. He couldn’t breathe, suspended as he was in this gelatinous mass, and his mind narrowed in on the singular fact that his body was dissolving away to nothing.

He could hear them now, the voices Luna spoke of—those of the dreaming, tormented ponies. Their voices filled his ears with the screams of nightmare and flooded his head with visions of the hell he would soon join.

But somewhere in the back of his mind, there was another voice. A quiet voice, one whose weeping sent a shiver down his spine and a tear from his eye.

“It cannot end like this, Champion. We cannot have come this far only to fail. Sister, Equestria, it cannot… I…

“No,” Luna said. Her cold flame ignited in his chest as if to freeze him solid from the inside.

He could see her in his mind’s eye, her nose tilted downward, eyes aglow in the face of the towering monstrosity, with her wings spread and horn wreathed in frostfire.

“I refuse.”

The pain ebbed, and it was hard to tell if the voice became softer or if the sudden distance was simply part of dying.

“This is not the end. Endure, Champion. Find your courage…”

The inferno rushed downward into the core of his being. It sucked away the flames that radiated from her, until every last ember had been stripped away.

She was like the smoke rising from a snuffed candle. A ghost of a smile graced her lips, and she wrapped her wispy strands around his heart.

“Live.”

The world whitewashed away, and somepony screamed.

He jerked up from where he lay on a stone floor. Sunlight pooled around him, pushing back a darkness that should not have been. He double checked the lantern strapped to his bandolier to convince himself that his eyes were not deceiving him. Sunlight indeed hung there as if he had never thrown it into the fire.

Around him, the darkness peered into his little world of stone and bewilderment. His ears rang in the silence. He breathed, and a million pinpricks ran up his legs and back.

He snapped his head around, eyes to every shadow of every corner. Fear forced him to his hooves, and he spun about to catch sight of a staircase just within Sunlight’s reach. His breathing grew harried as he took careful steps forward, eyes tracing a slow path up, up, up the jagged steps. At the rim of Sunlight, shadows danced across the base of the twin thrones.

He spun about to face the darkness, but when no sounds rolled out and no monsters shambled into view, he looked down at himself.

His body seemed rejuvenated, as if he had never left the village, the latent warmth of some unknown fire enkindled within. There were no scars on his legs his legs, and his once-dislocated shoulder felt stronger than ever. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t hungry. But the feelings of newfound health faded when he looked at his sides.

There were no wings.

“Luna?” he said.

A quiet shout-back rang hollow off the high ceiling beyond the edge of light. There was no Moon to peek down at him through the windows.

“Luna!”

“Luna!” the throne room shouted back. “Luna. Luna…”

His breathing quickened, and he spun around. “Luna!”

“Luna! Luna. Luna…” It sounded cold and afraid. His breaths became trembles, and despite the vigor in his legs, he collapsed.

He shut his eyes. This wasn’t happening. This wasn’t real. He pressed a hoof to his heart to better feel her hiding away somewhere inside. She was still there. She was still there…

But she never poked her head out from behind his heart, never pressed herself against his hoof to reassure him that all was well. The Moon was gone, all its distant stars with it, and it left only a faint chill as if to mock him for what was missing.

No. There was one last place she could be, one last hope this was all just a cruel joke. One last way he could prove he wasn’t alone.

He set Sunlight aside, curled up at the foot of the throne, and willed himself to sleep.

Author's Note:

Onward and Upward!

Comments

[Yami Vizzini]

Well... that got even trippier than it's been.

[Jman14102]

Darkness fell, and in the tense moments of unease that followed, something bubbled thick as stew.

“Back away, Champion,” Luna commanded, half cloaking him with her wings.

Cue the boss theme!

[Emperor]

Luna's speech felt a little manipulative. After all, when the alternative to throwing your life away so others can live again is to continue living in a dead, barren world that you know isn't even real, some might tremble with indecision, but nobody's going to actively back down, even the cowards. Of course, now that Luna's given herself up, that gives the protagonist one last burst of impetus to continue forward.

Now, who screamed in the middle there, I imagine? Luna or the protagonist.

[Scampy]

His body seemed rejuvenated, as if he had never left the village, the latent warmth of some unknown fire enkindled within.

H U M A N I T Y R E S T O R E D

Wow what a great chapter also YOU SICKO, YOU EVIL EVIL MAN, YOU LITERALLY PUT IN THE CUTEST AND MOST WHOLESOME SCENE IN THE LAST CHAPTER JUST SO YOU COULD STAB ME IN THE HEART WITH IT I HATE YOU.

Good chapter though \o/

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but I really like the monster designs in this. I've always imagined the Devourer looking like one of the sandworms from Dune, but with like centipede legs or something, which is suitably terrifying to think about. The Definitely-Not-Mass-Of-Souls goop monster is just... ick. Yuck. Blech. 10/10 horror creature, I hate it.

Anyway I guess everything sucks forever now and it's all your fault >:C