The Hole

by Unwhole Hole

Chapter 1

The season had grown late. The cold airs of late September had not yet arrived to the town of Ponyville, and the trees hung still and heavy with aging foliage, leafs that would never again be as green and verdant. Yet the scent of fall could still be smelled when the winds were right, when the wind blew from the north, rustling leaves and swaying trunks throughout the EverFree Forest.

It was on this late summers day that it began. It came without being detected by pony eyes or ears, something unseen and unfelt in the distant perimeter of their town. In the EverFree Forest, a place of swampy ground and long-buried things in ancient hillocks, surrounded by trees whose histories no pony could recall, or perhaps that no pony had ever known.

There were some places- -many, in fact- -within Equestria that could be considered dark. Those that had been so since the dawn of time, and some before, or those contaminated by curses or dark magic pushing through from distant an unspeakable places. This was not one of those places. It was an ordinary part of the forest, one that had never been differentiable from the rest. The only part of it that might now have alluded to what it had become, though, was the unusual and penetrating silence that had slowly come about in the past weeks. No cicada called, and no birds sang. Nothing rustled in the underbrush. Only the sound of the empty, lifeless wind through the trees could sometimes be heard- -and even that had come to sound strangely distant.

Then this silence was interrupted- -by the sound of children’s laughter.

“HA! You can’t catch me!”

“Yes I can!”

“Not without your scooter!”

“You have stubby legs!”

“I’ll make your HEAD stubby!”

“That doesn’t even make sense!”

One of the three young fillies burst through the underbrush. Her head was turned back, and she was about to shout that she WAS fast- -at least as fast as her beloved sister, or maybe even faster- -when she went over the edge into the gaping hole beyond.

Scootaloo screamed. Her tiny, useless, atrophied wings buzzed, but to no avail. She began to plummet- -only to be suddenly grasped in a field of pale green magic.

“Oop,” said Sweetie Belle. “We almost lost Scootaloo!”

“That’s the third time this week,” muttered Applebloom, carefully picking her way past an oddly diseased blackberry bush.

“I totally could have made it,” protested Scootaloo.

“Sure you could,” said Sweetie Belle, lifting her and setting her back on the ground. “And I could sprout wings and barf cupcakes.”

“Eew!”

“Isn’t that actually a unicorn medical condition? I’m pretty sure I read that it is,” suggested Applebloom. Not even ironically.

Sweetie Belle was about to protest, when her eyes were suddenly drawn to the hole that Scootaloo had nearly fallen into. She immediately gasped, her breath seeming to cease as all thoughts except for the hole left her minds.

And what a hole it was. It was wide- -not exceptionally, but far wider than would be considered ordinary or reasonable- -and had perfectly straight walls. It might have been a well at one point, except that there was no sign that the walls were made of stone or rock. They were just dirt, descending down far into the blackness where the bottom could not be seen.

Applebloom looked into the hole, as did Scootaloo. Each of them stepped to the very edge, and none spoke for several minutes as they stared into the mysterious blackness.

“Whoa,” said Applebloom, finally. And that was all that could be said.

Comments

[Sense of Humor]

Already a bit tense.

[StubobNumbers]

"The Color Out Of Space".

[LeylaQuartz]

I really thought we were gonna lose Scootaloo that fast.