Tenebras Equum

by Glimglam

VII: Respite

VII: Respite

Twilight thought it quite fortunate to have crossed paths with Octavia. The mare’s elegance and sophistication proved to be a somewhat refreshing experience, even if her slightly uptight attitude made her difficult to have an in-depth conversation with. But Twilight didn’t mind; at least she wasn’t alone again. Even better, Octavia was the one that was leading her to safety.

She knew better than to question providence, but Twilight couldn’t help but notice how… convenient this all seemed to be. What was this refined mare doing all the way down in the sewers? Surely, a pony of her class had better places to be than a soggy (and water monster-infested) tunnel? Twilight decided to pose this question to Octavia, and she shrugged.

“I was originally several floors higher than this,” she explained, “but any conventional means of escape by land were… unfeasible. The only exits I could locate were blocked.”

“Let me guess: that fleshy gunk?” Twilight supposed, and the gray mare slowly nodded.

“Gunk… What a repulsive word, but I suppose it would be appropriate. Nasty substance. It wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard I tried to scrape it away.” She shuddered as the memory came back to her. “Ugh... It actually started to burn me the longer I was in contact with it.”

Twilight bit her lower lip. The flesh-like matter that covered the Entrance Hall’s doorway… there was more of it elsewhere in the castle, according to Octavia. Finding a way out seemed less and less likely. And what was this about ‘burning’? The unicorn felt fortunate to not have foaled around with the stuff longer than necessary…

“It makes me wish I were a pegasus; I could just fly out,” the gray mare lamented. She sighed. “I know that most of the guests here that got away were pegasi, and a few unicorns escaped as well. Most of the earth ponies however, sans myself, were…” Octavia’s lip quivered, and her gaze fell to the floor. “…Pardon me… It’s very difficult to relive…”

Twilight’s expression turned into one that expressed concern. “W-what happened?” she inquired, her tone becoming quite gentle. “You can tell me…”

Octavia shook her head. “I-I can’t… Forgive me, but… I’d rather not have to recollect such horrid memories again,” she said, her voice cracking.

“Sorry… It… it must’ve been hard… t-to go through that, I mean…”

“Yes… it was, indeed… If I didn’t know any better, I would believe that the demons of Tartarus were loosed upon Canterlot…”

There was that name again, ‘Canterlot’. Twilight felt the name itself ring a few bells in the recesses of her mind. She had heard it several times that night, mainly from those journals and Octavia herself. But just what was it? Was it somepony’s name? Was it an object, or a treasure? Without thinking, Twilight asked, “Umm… what’s ‘Canterlot’?”

Octavia stopped and stared at the unicorn with a flummoxed gaze. “The… capital of Equestria? Home of the princesses? The sewers of which we are currently traversing through?” she answered, eying Twilight curiously. “Are you a sightseer from afar, or something of that regard? How would you not know that?”

“I…” Twilight stopped, and swallowed deeply. Was she a sightseer? No, that wouldn’t make any sense, would it? Twilight lived in Ponyville, from what she remembered, and that should be somewhere close by. But just how far away was Canterlot from Ponyville anyway? “I… I’m from Ponyville,” she said, wondering if that would be a satisfactory response.

“…Ah, so you are from the so-called ‘boonies’,” the mare commented rather icily. “I’ve heard tell that ‘Ponyville’ is a pleasant enough burg, but the average intelligence quotient leaves… something to be desired.”

The bluntness of the comment was almost like a slap in the muzzle to Twilight. Of course, it was like a pony of such upscale class to throw around remarks like that. It didn’t make the unicorn feel any less indignant, though. “H…hey! Are you calling me… stupid?!”

“I said no such thing,” Octavia replied, not even blinking at Twilight’s outburst. “If you recall, I said the ‘average intelligence’ is poor. But that does not mean that there are ponies from there that aren’t gifted in some cerebral degree, however few and far between those may be. Apologies if my viewpoint offended you, but that is how things are apparent to most Canterlot nobility.” She let a somewhat arrogant smile form. “And besides, you can’t blame me for coming to that conclusion anyway. You did almost let yourself get devoured by that… thing… before I showed up and saved your sorry flank.”

Twilight fell silent when that was brought up. In hindsight, it was a bit ridiculous of her to just stand there in the middle of the canal when something that wasn’t even visible started approaching her. Her curiosity had gotten the better of her, yet again. But at least now she had a new rule: Land good, water bad.

“So, as I was saying, yes, you are in Canterlot; or at least, the Cistern levels underneath Canterlot,” Octavia went on. “And seeing as how that petty confusion is out of the way… Please, indulge me with a question. How in Equestria did you end up here? I don’t seem to recall there being any other survivors still roaming the halls.”

The unicorn paused, and she frowned with uncertainty. Should she tell her? But what are the odds that a mare of such upper class and obvious intellect would believe such a tale; waking up with amnesia, and not a clue what was going on… although, to be fair, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that happened tonight. If anything, it was the least unusual thing.

So, with a soft sigh of weariness, Twilight began to recount her experience. It was surprisingly easy to recall what few memories she had both recovered and gained, and she found herself practically pouring out her tale to Octavia. No matter how strange, disturbing, or boring it got, the mare listened with a patient ear. Not once did she ask any questions; she simply let Twilight speak her mind.

After several minutes of generous exposition, Twilight had explained a bulk of her current situation, including her most troubling problem. The one she had since she had woken up.

“…Memory loss, you say?”

Twilight nodded. “Yeah… As far as I know, I can’t remember anything from before I woke up. I had no idea where I was, what I was supposed to do, or what had happened to this place.”

“I see. That would explain why you were confused as to where you were.” Octavia frowned. “I… feel that I must apologize again for my earlier remark.”

“That’s okay, I’m over it.”

“However, something does not make sense to me. How had you lost your memory? Surely you were not careless enough to let yourself get struck on the head, right?”

“N-no, it wasn’t like that. See, apparently my old self did this on purpose. She left—I mean, uh… I left a note… to myself. Apparently, it was a kind of flower petal that had amnesiac properties that wiped away my memories. I can’t understand why, though.”

“There must have been a reason, however ridiculous it may have been.”

“I suppose…”

“So, it’s true? You truly have no recollection of anything beyond what happened before you woke?”

“Well, I could remember that I lived in Ponyville, and I had to save my friends… That was it, though. I’d even forgotten my name. I-I’ve learned… or rather, I’d relearned a lot of things since then, though.”

“Surely you’d have at least remembered how to breathe, correct?”

“W-well, yeah! That’s like… I dunno… a hardwired instinct, or something!”

“You really must learn to take a joke.”

Twilight sighed. “Jokes aren’t exactly what I’m in the mood for…”

“Well, nor am I in the mood for such things. But what choice is there to be had? Humor is a proven stress release, and I find it helps maintain my composure in difficult situations.”

“Can’t argue with that…”

“Anyway, are you certain that you can remember nothing else? No other missed details?”

“Well…” The unicorn placed a hoof to her temple in recollection. “Occasionally, I get these really weird ‘visions’, of sorts… It’s… as if I’m remembering stuff, I think… I haven’t been able to make much sense of them, but from what I can recall, I think I arrived here at this ‘Gala’ with my friends…”

“You were invited to the Grand Galloping Gala? Hm… You don’t say. Who are these friends, if I may be so bold to ask?”

“Well, their names were… Rainbow Dash, Applejack, Pinkie Pie—” Octavia noticeably winced at this name. “—Rarity, and Fluttersh… huh? What’s wrong?”

The gray mare shook her head. “It’s nothing, really… but… I believe I might know a pony that goes by the name of ‘Pinkie Pie’…” She grimaced with distaste. “It was at last year’s Gala. That untamed mare somehow convinced me and my fellow bandmates to play a… folk song. The ‘Pony Pokey’, if I am not mistaken.”

“I… can’t seem to recall anything like that,” Twilight mused, looking at the ceiling in thought.

“You did just say you have amnesia, so it’s not surprising,” Octavia reminded her, rolling her eyes. “Why, this year, she tried to get us to play… goodness gracious… she wanted us to play ‘Yankee Doodle Donkey’. Let’s just say that… her request was kindly declined that time.”

Despite everything, Octavia and Twilight shared a short, good-natured chuckle.

“Even so,” she went on, “I must admit… Whenever I look back on those moments, I can’t help but feel… amused.” She laughed again. “Why is that? I have no idea. Perhaps right now, I’m just trying to find anything to laugh at. There’s certainly nothing to be laughing about now, after all…”

Twilight sighed, and trailed her eyes towards the floor. “You got that right…”

As the two mares trotted alongside each other down the Cistern, they continued to exchange loose banter about the circumstances of the night. Twilight learned, after a few questions, that Octavia was a ‘cellist’ for the Royal Canterlot Symphony Orchestra. She had been playing an instrument called the ‘cello’ (Twilight was intending on asking just what kind of positions and instruments these were, but decided that it wasn’t important) along with her band-mates for the Grand Galloping Gala, just as they had every year.

While Octavia was hesitant to shed light on what exactly happened during the Gala that went so wrong, Twilight was eventually able to coax out what she had been through. “All I know,” the mare explained, “was that this ‘Alack Zander’, or whatever name he called himself, had… done something. He called forth this odd magic… Well, it was like normal unicorn magic, only… it was colored almost pitch-black.”

“Pitch-black magic…?”

“If I had to choose the best word to describe its effects, I would only have to say… darkness. It was so… frightening. Never had I felt so cold, so… afraid… It was like a living nightmare. The crowd scattered, panicked… my friend Ivory Keys—the pianist—took me by the hoof and led me away from the ballroom before the… screaming… and crying… of stallions and mares alike…”

“…And where did you go?”

“To the Storage cellar, of course. I knew of the way just as much as he did. There was a passageway that led directly into the Cisterns. We encountered nopony else along the way, and everything appeared safe, so we both established a… shall we say, ‘hiding spot’. In my naïveté, onset by confusion and terror of what happened, I only assumed that we would wait until the princesses had everything under control.”

“But I suppose that didn’t end up happening, huh…”

Octavia sighed. “No, sadly. When we decided to venture back into the castle, there were these… things roaming the halls. They looked like ponies, but… dear Celestia, the smell… they clearly weren’t normal. We got chased once, by those things. I tripped, and fell… and it got me.”

“Wait…! But if it got you… then how are you here…?”

“That’s just it. The last thing I remember is fainting from the sheer horror of it all… and the next thing I knew, I was waking in some kind of filthy dungeon. Nopony else was there with me, and I dreaded of thought of what those creatures wanted, so… I tried escaping.”

“And… you did, right?”

“No. I ended up failing, quite miserably I might add.” She half-heartedly chuckled. “And I thought that was it for me. For my career, my passion, and my life. I remained there for almost a day… until he came for me.”

“…Who?”

Something of a mournful frown appeared on Octavia’s features. “Ivory. He’d been tracking me down apparently. When he eventually found my cell, all it took was a quick buck to demolish it. Nopony’s ever been thrown in the Canterlot dungeons in so long, I suppose the cell doors weren’t quite as strong as my captors had hoped. He broke down the door, we made a gallop for it… but for the longest while, we hadn’t been able to find a way out. Again, that horrid substance.”

“Right…”

“We decided to return here the Cisterns, hoping that there would be a way out of Canterlot via the maintenance tunnels. We’ve... I’ve… yet to actually find a way out, but it’s not my fault the tunnels are so maze-like…”

“Wait, if you were both trying to find a way out, then… where is this ‘Ivory Keys’? Is he somewhere close by?”

Octavia’s breath hitched in her throat, and her expression became pained for a moment. “Ah… he’s… close, in a sense… but… still very far away…”

“But, hang on, you mentioned a friend before too, right? It was when you said that your ‘friend thought the same’… which was about me thinking that the monster in the water was harmless… so…” Twilight’s brain was soon able to put two and two together. And as realization dawned upon the unicorn, Octavia’s frown was deepening into outright sorrow. “Wait, so your friend is…”

“…Dead.” A single tear slid down Octavia’s cheek, and she hastily wiped it clean as she sniffled. “We used to wade through the water, since we were hoping that by following the stream, we’d eventually lead to where it drains out… that is to say, the exit. But then we heard the splashes… and we both wondered what it was… and then it got close… and…” She sniffled again, and veiled her face with a raised foreleg as she slumped onto her haunches. “…it… completely tore him apart…”

Twilight knew that she should have felt something. Anything. Shock at hearing her friend was dead. Empathy for the poor, sniveling mare in front of her. Maybe even some anger towards the vicious creature that did this. But she felt none of these. Her emotions had become a blank slate, wiped clean by a damp cloth. The only comment that escaped her lips was, “That’s… terrible.”

Perhaps it was psychological shock. She’d been close to death only once before… and that was when she was looking after Raindrops. Back then, the thought of the pegasus dying at her hooves was too terrible to comprehend. Twilight would have blamed herself for letting her die if she did. But now… why did the news of another pony’s friend dying not seem to affect her?

Octavia didn’t seem to catch on to Twilight’s relatively emotionless statement, but that may have been simply because she was weighed down by her own emotion too much to notice. “I know… I-it was awful, simply awful… to watch, to hear, and to… smell…” The gray pony shivered, and the tears started to flow. “I ran… as fast as I could… t-there was naught I could do… I… I… left him…”

Twilight noticed that any shred of aristocratic dignity that Octavia held prior had truly gone with the wind. All that was left was a broken mare; a sobbing, blubbering wreck of a pony who had no purpose nor meaning in this world. The emotions that the cellist held… she had been trying to contain them, confident that her refined mannerisms would hold out against the pain of losing somepony she had worked with for so long. But the pain won out, and in its wake left Octavia broken and dejected, left to wade in a torrent of her emotions.

…For some reason, Twilight couldn’t feel pity at all. Sure, she was sad that somepony had died, and quite violently as well, but… she couldn’t ‘feel’ sad. Perhaps it was just shock? Maybe, since she had no contact or attachment to this pony being described, Twilight wasn’t in a position to feel much remorse for this?

However, if anything did get through to her compassion, it was the sight of the crying mare before her. “Hey… don’t cry…” she said softly, putting a hoof on Octavia’s shoulder reassuringly. “It’ll be… okay…” It may have been a half-flanked attempt on Twilight’s part, but it seemed to work nevertheless. At least, it mostly did.

“It’s… alright,” Octavia said, wiping away the tears and sniffling. “I… I should be better than this. Look at me; I’m an absolute wreck…” She shook her head vigorously. “No, I should not let my emotions get the better of me. Why should I? They’d… just slow me down. I can’t be weak; I need to be strong… Otherwise, all that Ivory ever did for me would have been in vain…”

Twilight felt bad for Octavia. The poor mare seemed like she had been through Tartarus and back… and didn’t have the good fortune of not remembering it. Twilight had never thought of it until now, but perhaps her not knowing what happened to herself was a good thing. Perhaps that is why her ‘past self’ induced her own amnesia; to protect herself from remembering the truth… likely because it would be too horrible to comprehend.

And for what? She already figured out that her friends had been taken and turned into twisted monstrosities, and that ponies had died this evening. What more could possibly be worse than that? Unless, there was a deeper and even more horrifying secret just waiting…

…ugh. There was no time to ponder such thoughts. Nothing good would come of it. She already knew the most important part of the arrangement: ‘kill Alack Zander.’ That’s what the note had said. Nothing more was written or needed, besides saving her friends (whom already seemed beyond help already). It seemed like a fairly cliché plan to undertake, but it always was the most basic, and therefore, the easiest.

If only it were so.

Twilight spent a moment comforting the depressed earth pony, when her vision started getting a little blurry for some reason. Before long, a sudden stab of pain shot through her skull, and the unicorn let out an abrupt and stifled cry. She rubbed her temples to massage the pain away, but it continued getting worse.

All at once, her vision was suddenly obscured by a familiar white void.

…But it didn’t remain that way for long. It was almost like being blinded for a moment by a camera flash. The light in her vision died down again rather quickly, and her sight was restored… however, everything seemed… different. Her view was still blurry, and there was a peculiar orange tint to everything she could see. And her hearing was abnormally distorted as well; like there was some kind of bizarre double echo or stereo effect going on in her head.

Twilight wasn’t sure what to make of this. She’d never experienced such an event before. Even her earlier ‘visions’ weren’t to this kind of level. She could see, not just hear.

And what she saw, on the walkway with her, was a small, pink-coated unicorn filly. Her mane was fluffy and yellow, and eyes a pale blue. A mark that bore resemblance to a tiny red heart graced her flank.

The unicorn stared at the filly with combined shock, curiosity, and distinct familiarity. Was she really seeing this? A filly had appeared basically out of the ether? This made absolutely no sense! Surely there could not be a real live foal, just standing there… and yet, here she was.

Curiously though, the filly’s face seemed to be contorted into one of abject terror. Even more, she was backing away nervously, while staring directly at Twilight with those big pink eyes.

“No… Get… get away from me! Leave me alone!”

The voice was tiny and shrill, and yet had a strange cave-like echo to it. It sounded so close, and yet, so far away. Twilight couldn’t understand why the filly seemed so scared. Without thinking, she began to walk towards her and held out her hoof in a (somewhat) gentle and beckoning manner. “Hey now… Don’t be scared, I… I won’t hurt you…”

“NO! Go away! I don’t wanna die!”

Twilight felt herself moving closer to her, phasing out the fact that this filly was experiencing terror. What was this filly yammering about, anyway? There was nothing to be afraid of. “Shh… Nothing is going to happen… You’re going to be safe… Just relax…”

“LEAVE ME ALONE!”

After letting out a terrified squeal of fright, the filly turned tail and galloped away on her tiny hooves, quickly vanishing beyond Twilight’s field of vision into the darkness beyond. Without thinking, the unicorn broke into a brisk run after her, the lantern still hanging from her mouth as it clattered about wildly. She could hear Octavia calling out to her from behind, but it meant nothing at the moment.

She just had to chase her.

Comments

[Wrynisimus]

Yeah, update!

[Akima01]

I must say, I was rather hesitant to fav this simply because it is so dark. However, It is well written so I'll give it credit.

[Elzipper7]

Well, this is interesting.

I just hope 'Tavi doesn't die. Keep going!

[Some Moron]

Oh man... looks like it's been a while since an update but I'd love to read more of this!
I also feel kinda stupid, not having realized until this last chapter that "Aleck Zander" is just a variant of Alexander. I guess these are the perils of those who read silently.

[Glimglam]

2225126 "Alack Zander"... Given a bit more forethought, I'd have come up with a much cooler (and more original) name. Well, too late for that now.

...Ah, which reminds me. I'm working on getting Chapter 8 published right as we speak; I literally noticed your comment right as I'm typing it up... Some coincidence... At least you (or everyone else following this story) needn't wait that long. I predict that, after proofreading, it'll be ready by the end of this week.

[Some Moron]

2225439 Really!? That's awesome! Can't wait to read the next chapter then.