• Published 31st Mar 2018
  • 10,328 Views, 2,116 Comments

Airship Mauled - Darkonshadows



We crash landed on a goddess. Welcome to Airship Mauled, where everything could possibly be worse.

  • ...
41
 2,116
 10,328

PreviousChapters Next
Chapter thirty eight, Shadows on The Range: The Tower.

-Rein, Deer Manor, Clause-

I walked into the mansion and heard my wife speak up almost immediately, I knew this was coming.

“So it’s been done…” Prancer stated calmly, she was still beautiful and her battered and bandaged head didn’t change that as I limped over to her.

“It has.” I stated coolly.

“Do you still hear his voice?” Prancer asked, looking quite worried for me.

“Santa’s voice disappeared as soon as I acquire and hoofed over the key to Velvet.” Now I decided to show emotion to the love of my life as I moved forward and pulled her close, all my thoughts were filled with sorrow.

“Then she’s going to perish… all the previous key keepers hardly ever come back from their journeys to seal away the shadow horde alive.” She gently placed her head against mine as she spoke, nuzzling me tenderly. “At least… at least she’ll be with those who will want her to be happy and will try to make her so until their journey ends.”

“Yet there may be a chance that they can survive where the others before them sometimes haven’t, but once Velvet leaves Rein… she’s likely to never come back.” I sat there holding my mate for life and turned to a nearby ice sprite that was staring at us sadly. I spoke to this sprite with respect, she has been with us for a long time and deserved as such. “Please do me a favor, tell me when my daughter is about to leave so we can watch her go.”

The ice sprite nodded, she would likely just do it for Velvet and not for them.

“At least we pushed her to be strong enough to survive on her own four hooves.” Yes Prancer, at least we did that much for her.

“Yes, we did. Now we must do what we can to stall Shocking Awe’s recovery and give our daughter some time.” I nuzzled my face against my wife’s luxuriant fluff. “I don’t know what GODLESS is, but I know that I already do not like it one bit. Anything with a clandestine name like that is never a good sign, especially when they are after the keys of sacrifice.”

Velvet may have had no love for us, but I believe that what we've done with her was entirely necessary now.

-Some months and a year later, somewhere on The Range at night, Arizona-

A lot of things have happened since Velvet kissed Paprika and was later given the key we were looking for by her… father… if he could be called that.

Her family didn’t have a hold on it, but Clause apparently pulled on some connections to get it from the reindeer council of Rein to give it to us or so Branches told us before we left.

I’m all kinds of confused about what to think of Velvet’s parents, especially when both of them showed up to see us off.

Prancer still didn’t like or understand our relationship judging by the look on her face, and yet she still saw us off with something approaching a weak smile.

I didn’t know what was going through Clause’s mind, but he certainly didn’t have that insufferable attitude of superiority as we left. Now that I thought of it, Clause seemed to look at us sadly. It could be my imagination or that I’m learning the alpaca method of reading body language quickly.

They didn’t say a word to Velvet, but they did silently watch us leave along with a number of ice sprites that gave us a happy send off. That’s around when Branches showed up and gave us some extra supplies for our journey.

Tinsel didn’t care where Velvet or we were going, he’d follow us anywhere and everywhere worshipping the ground Velvet trotted on. He’d even sent some praise to Paprika and me, even seemed willing to care for us in the same way he does for Velvet.

It had taken two weeks for Velvet to fully recover from her Tundra Tourney injures, I was okay after five days and numerous ice sprites working on my muscles to loosen them up. Paprika had been attentive and more focused than we had ever seen her while she was caring for us.

As for where we were now? We were somewhere in the middle of nowhere, while looking for the cows and we weren’t having much luck. Not with the constantly getting lost, the various monster attacks and a number of other things we had to deal with. Like the most common occurrence between Velvet and me, infighting.

Paprika mostly stayed out of our constant fighting. If we were starting to go too far in the things we said to each other and how we acted, then she’d balance things out by hugging the one that needs it the most.

Sometimes Paprika would just hug us both up against each other until we both stopped being so mad and kissed to show that there were no hard feelings.

“Seriously Arizona… don’t eat those marshmallows so close to me!” Yeah, Velvet still remembers the first time we met and fought each other to exhaustion. Those were good times, but I still scooted a good distance away from her to enjoy my chocolate, sugar crackers and melted gooey goodness. “Thank you, I do not need my floof getting covered in marshmallow again! It’s always so hard to clean out of fur and my floof is finally back to its fully pristine state after what happened last week… can’t say much the same for my face though.”

“Does it actually hurt or are you just whining some more about the scar?” I watched as Velvet rubbed gently at the scar running along the left side of her face. I thought it looked cool, if slightly painful.

“Of course it does, it constantly hurts me emotionally and is just about the only visible scar I have left. Also if we’d just ask for directions… then maybe we’d have found the cows by now.” Velvet had been going on about that scar forever.

I think the physical pain stopped after the first two weeks, but she just wouldn’t stop bringing it up. It was kind of getting on my nerves, but I had become surprised by how patient I was being with her.

“Come on Velvet, the scar will fade away under your fur given enough time, it’s not even that big anymore.” I let out a long drawn out sigh. “I’m sure we’ll find them eventually, I mean we’ve been seeing cow tracks everywhere. We just haven’t been seeing them personally, so we have to be close again.”

“Arizona, we’ve been looking for them for more than a year!” Not that that had made you leave our sides. “We could just not go to the cows, we could go look for the unicorns of light or head down south into longma territory. Though I’m more than a little reluctant to head to a place called, The Volcano. If we had to find that, then it couldn’t be as hard to miss as the cow settlement seems to be.”

“Okay, so we need to see some sign of life out here to get directions to where the cows are set up out here… which is going to be a bit difficult. We could always go back to Las Pegasus.” At my suggestion, both Velvet and Paprika cringed visibly. I could maybe understand Velvet cringing badly, but I didn’t understand why Paprika cringed as well. “Okay, so we just wander around until we see them or we go to Appleoosa and ask a cow there for directions.”

“That’s more workable than our current state of affairs. Though I have to wonder, why did you cringe like that our darling alpaca?” Velvet was giving Paprika a flat stare and our love just rubbed at the back of her head with a hoof nervously. “Is there something that we should know about? I know it certainly wasn’t about that sketchy thing that Gladmane character tried to pull with us. There was just something so off about him that I couldn’t quite place my hoof on and I didn’t like the way he looked at me as if I were a piece of meat for a predator.”

Paprika looked away tapping her hooves together and trying to look innocent, now we were both looking at her flatly. Paprika was good at keeping secrets, what she wasn’t good at was keeping things from us.

The alpaca started to motion something out, then she looked up and distractedly pointed at the moon…

“Yes Paprika, that’s the… wait… where’s the mare on the moon?” Velvet had started out condescendingly until she noticed something was off with the moon and I did too when I looked. The image of the mare was no longer on the moon. “That’s strange, her appearance has been there my entire life… wait, does that mean Luna is finally free? I recall Jade having talked about her when we met in Night Fright Grotto.”

Tinsel made a squeaking noise and moved closer to the fire while looking in a direction to our west, something was frightening the little guy and even Paprika seemed to be looking in the same direction now. They were good at detecting threats long before Velvet or sometimes even I could.

“Velvet… I think we’ve got dangerous company incoming and it doesn’t smell right.” I stood up and grabbed for my rope, Velvet dusted off her fluff and fur and stood up with her antlers lighting up slightly as we put our backs to the fire to look in the same direction as Tinsel.

Paprika moved forward to stand in front of us and her fur fluctuated, she looked agitated about something when normally she’d be happy to hug whatever was coming at us. I looked up and blinked… the moon seemed to be glowing black now.

“Girls something is up with the moon… and did everything just get darker or is it just me?” The light of the campfire seemed to shrink closer to us and I could hear something that sounded like raspy breathing beyond the encroaching darkness.

“It’s not you Arizona, something magical just swept over us and it is decidedly not pleasant.” Sure Velvet used primarily ice magic, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t sense other types of magic at play. Heck, she was even getting the hang of levitating small objects with wind magic recently. Tinsel certainly enjoyed being levitated by Velvet’s magic and said sprite was now being moved onto her back by that method. “Tinsel, boost my magic as much as you can, but pace yourself.”

Tinsel squeaked and nodded.

We waited for ten seconds, then I realized that things were far too silent. Even at night, The Range usually had some form of noise like a wolf howling.

That’s when we started to see a red glow… multiple red glows… a lot of them now. They all looked like hungry eyes glowing in the dark, and they wanted to eat us.

Whatever, we weren’t going to go down so easily!

We prepared to fight for our lives, we waited for them to show themselves. I heard a hissing noise, but it wasn’t coming from in front of us. In front of us was dead silence and the encroaching glowing dots.

“Get down, right this instant!” After a particularly feminine proper sounding voice screamed that, something red and cylindrical passed overhead. It kind of looked like a stick of… dynamite?!

“Paps cover us!” Paprika leapt over Velvet, while I dove under the reindeer. We were surrounded by a wall of fluff immediately

We felt the blast, heard the noise and even saw some light from the explosion going off. We also heard the sound of multiple creatures screaming out and dying in agony. Looking up from underneath Paprika we saw a lot less red eyes and they seemed to be moving every which way.

“Cover your eyes, I don’t want them gathering to make another push!” We didn’t have time to turn around to see who was shouting at us as, but I saw a brightly glowing jar being lobbed overhead. Paprika swallowed us up protectively in her fur again and wrapped her hooves around us protectively.

The shattering of the jar could be heard. Even under Paprika’s fur, a sudden bright constant eye searing light could be seen.

Said light slowly died down and we carefully poked our heads out from under Paprika to see the source of the bright light slowly dying down.

In said light we could see several melting creatures with pure black flesh and red eyes trying to claw helplessly at the air, they were all shaped vaguely like predatory animals.

“This night is unnatural, but it makes sense given what we’re seeing here… come on, I’ll get you three…” Tinsel squeaked loudly at the voice as we turned around. “Four then… to some place safe. Gather your things quickly, we must make haste! Dawn is not coming anytime soon today it seems, that’s going to be a big issue with shadow monsters starting to leak into our world.”

I came out from under Paprika and looked at the moon, it was no longer glowing darkly. I then looked down and saw who had helped us out with those… did she just say shadows and that they were now leaking into our world? I shook my head and felt Paprika slap something onto my back, probably some of our supplies. I was too busy staring at the cow that had helped us.

She was large, had solid black fur on the upper half of her body and white on her lower half. She was wearing a purple hat with a teal stripe, two bandoliers loaded with dynamite and saddle bags loaded full of faintly glowing jars.

“Stop staring at me, we need to get moving!" The cow didn’t need to tell us twice. "I can introduce myself properly later when we’re not in danger.”

I started pulling rope out from under my bandana, while I was doing this Velvet was hastily making an ice sleigh.

“Which direction should we be pointed in?” Velvet asked, as she glanced at some of the blobs of darkness slowly trying to snuff out the light despite melting into pools of liquid with a consistency similar to ink.

“That way!” The cow pointed slightly to the northeast, Velvet nodded and turned her construction slightly and began working on finishing it.

Paprika threw some blankets on the sleigh so we wouldn’t get frozen butts and I prepared to throw my rope around her neck. However when I tossed my rope out and tried to snag Paprika, the cow pushed her out the way and took it.

“You, get on the sleigh, I’ll pull!” At the cow's command Paprika looked confused, but she hopped on it all the same as I tied off the rope to the slightly spiky ice sleigh. The cow mumbled out quietly. “I might not be anywhere near as strong as you were Margaret… but I’m quite determined to get us out of here and heavens help me if incredible danger isn’t an excellent motivator!”

The cow started forward. Despite our weight, she started picking up some impressive speed and it wasn’t too long after we left the area that the light behind us was snuffed out.

I shivered when I heard several unnatural guttural roars rising up from behind us.

PreviousChapters Next