The Nightmare Night Collection

by TooShyShy

Feathers

Author's Note:

Story idea courtesy of Wise Cracker.

Dr. Stable looked up at the sky.

It had been a sunny day just a few minutes ago, but the weather had taken a drastic turn during his walk to work. It was now storming heavily, torrents of rain lashing the hospital windows. He was glad to be inside, the walls and windows between him and the aggressive downpour. The remaining weather ponies seemed to be working overtime to make the weather as gloomy as possible.

Nurse Redheart sidled up beside him. She was rather inexperienced compared to most of the other nurses and doctors, but she too had noticed the shift in the air. It wasn't just the weather. A strange heaviness had descended over the hospital. Given recent events, Redheart wasn't surprised.

“Really coming down out there, isn't it?” she said.

Dr. Stable nodded. He smiled, but it was obviously forced. He hadn't smiled—truly smiled—in several days. He seemed to have lost the ability to accurately express anything other than trepidation.

Redheart backed away, giving the doctor some much-needed space. He'd been a wreck all week and this weather wasn't making it any better. Redheart wished she could say something to make him feel better, but nothing came to mind. She turned and left him, deciding to focus on her duties and stop worrying about Dr. Stable. Dr. Stable was hardly unique in his reaction. They were all on edge that week.

She trotted down the hall and rounded the corner. Redheart paused in front of a closed door. She put on her best smile, the most sincere she could manage at the moment. How did the other nurses do it? For that matter, how did Dr. Stable do it? Was Redheart simply too inexperienced for this sort of thing?

She opened the door and went inside. Inexperienced or not, she had a job to do.

“Good afternoon,” she said.

Rainbow Dash raised her head. She'd been staring at her lap, her face completely empty of emotion. The pile of books Redheart had brought her was still on the bedside table, ignored and undisturbed. The tray of food was also untouched, despite Redheart having brought it an hour ago.

“How are you feeling?” said Redheart.

Rainbow Dash didn't respond. She seemed to have a habit of doing that. Dr. Stable claimed Rainbow was still in shock, but Redheart suspected this was a deliberate choice. Rainbow didn't seem to want to talk about herself, especially in regards to how she'd ended up there. Redheart wasn't surprised. The story wasn't pleasant.

Redheart slowly approached the bed.

“You should eat,” she said. “You need your strength.”

Rainbow Dash shot a disinterested glance at the tray, then turned towards the window. She'd had very little appetite over the past few days. At first it had seemed like childish defiance on her part, but now Redheart recognized it as a consequence. It wasn't that Rainbow was starving herself out of protest. She just couldn't bring herself to eat.

With a sigh of defeat, Redheart took the tray away. Maybe tomorrow.

It had been an entire week since the incident. Redheart supposed she should have gotten over it by then, but the images were trapped in her head. She relived the confusion and fear every time she caught a glimpse of Rainbow Dash's solemn face. Then her gaze would inevitably shift, even as she tried not to look. Redheart's eyes would always be drawn to where Rainbow Dash's wings had once been. No matter how many times she saw it, her heart ached in sympathy at the sight of the bandages.

A week ago, about fourteen pegasi were admitted to Ponyville's only hospital. They were all bleeding profusely, some clutching bloody implements in their mouths as they filed into the hospital. There was a strange calmness to this grim and bloody procession. Redheart recalled the trail of blood—long since mopped up by a traumatized janitor—leading from the double doors to the front desk. There'd been no screaming, no sobbing, no panic. Just a line of pegasi, patiently waiting to be noticed by the baffled nurse at the desk.

Redheart checked Rainbow's vitals. She hummed a cheerful tune as she worked, hoping to improve the overall mood in the room. But of course her forced cheerfulness did nothing. Rainbow merely stared at her, refusing to show the slightest hint of emotion as Redheart took her temperature.

“All done!” Redheart announced.

The false bliss in her voice was starting to grate on her, but Redheart kept it up. This had been a key aspect of her training. Keeping patients at ease was her number one priority.

Redheart managed to hide her relief as she exited the room.

“I'll be back in a few hours,” she said. “Please try to get some rest.”

Out in the hallway, Redheart allowed herself a sigh of relief as the door shut behind her. Although she was a nurse, she simply couldn't handle knowing the truth. It made no sense to her. Redheart didn't understand why fourteen pegasi would suddenly decide to grab whatever sharp objects they could find and cut their own wings off. Redheart imagined the agonizing process, what it must have felt like to saw through bone, to feel the feathers and flesh separating. Every second of it must have been agony, a blinding pain the likes of which would have sent an ordinary pony into shock. Yet they'd all done it, some using knives and others utilizing pieces of broken glass. One pegasus in particular had used a pair of rusty scissors to do the job.

Redheart started down the hallway. The best she could do was try not to think about it, but even that didn't seem to be enough. Every time she blinked, she saw that procession of bleeding pegasi filing into the hospital. She saw their calm faces, the bloody implements in their mouths, the complete absence of concern. She could handle blood, but that had been something she had no capacity to understand.

---

Rainbow Dash watched the door close.

What was that phrase Twilight had used? “Mass hysteria” or something like that? “Mass hallucination”? Some fancy egghead word meant to explain away what had happened. It was demeaning in a way, as if Twilight was trivializing what Rainbow had experienced. But she couldn't blame Twilight for relying on science. Some answers lived so far beyond the veil that even Twilight Sparkle couldn't find them.

But Twilight hadn't been there. She'd been spared, perhaps due to her wings having been given through magical means. Despite her ignorance and search for an explanation that didn't exist, Twilight was certainly blessed in some ways. She hadn't lived with those things for her entire life. She didn't have to experience the steady destruction of ignorance that had landed Rainbow Dash in that hospital.

Around two weeks ago, Rainbow's wings had started talking to her.

At first, she was able to ignore it. Even as those thick raspy voices cut through her thoughts, she went about her daily life as if nothing was wrong. Of course there was nothing wrong. Rainbow was simply overworked. She was experiencing what some pegasi called “flight burnout”: she'd been using her wings more than usual. Even athletic pegasi like Rainbow Dash weren't immune to it, or so she told herself.

But although the physical aspects could be explained away—her aching wings, the feeling of tension throughout her body—Rainbow found the voices harder to dismiss. They started out completely incoherent, like a dull muttering at the back of her head. But as time went on, Rainbow was able to better make out what they were saying.

However, the words made no sense to her. They were nonsensical patterns, the same mismatched phrases repeated over and over again. They were words, but without a cohesive meaning. It was as if these voices were simply shuffling around words they'd heard before, trying and failing to create some kind of narrative. Trying to figure it out made Rainbow's head hurt.

The tension steadily lifted from her body, but the ache in her wings never went away. She massaged them daily, carefully rubbing all kinds of scented creams into her feathers. But although they smelled nice afterwards, the ache would return within moments. Rainbow's solution was to increase the volume and frequency of these massages, dousing her wings in various scented creams until the smell almost made her pass out. She nearly rubbed her hooves raw every morning, just trying to make the ache go away. But even though it sometimes relented for minutes at a time, it was never gone long enough for Rainbow to feel comfortable.

She no longer felt like flying. The ache in her wings was the primary cause, but Rainbow also felt weighed down by the voices in her head. Every time she thought of taking flight, there would be a burst of static in her head, followed by a barrage of that familiar incomprehensible nonsense. She started to fear that it would never go away, that she'd never be able to tell her friends what was happening to her. They'd think she'd lost her mind. Although Rainbow tried to assure herself otherwise, a part of her believed that was exactly what had happened.

Eight days after she first started hearing the voices, Rainbow began to understand what they were saying. She'd been puzzling over them, kept up at night by their incessant chatter in her head. It was like trying to figure out some cryptic puzzle without Twilight's help. It was something inside Rainbow, some deep and almost primal realization that caused this unexpected shift.

The voices were telling her what they were. It was disconnected and nonsensical, the words making absolutely no sense to an outsider. But Rainbow was somehow able to translate them, to turn those random words and phrases into a story. She wasn't sure how or why she was able to do this, although she suspected the will to do so had been inside her all along. But she'd been too scared to tap into that part of her, too horrified of what she'd find if she opened that part of herself.

It almost broke her. It did break her, at least for a few days. It broke her again and again, the realization an unrelenting wave that crashed over her mind. The voices stopped, but Rainbow could never forget what they told her. The truth crawled into every nook and cranny of her brain. She could feel those things writhing and pulsating at her sides, aching and quivering. Rainbow couldn't touch them anymore, could hardly stand to look at them. She made excuses to stay indoors, told elaborate lies to convince her friends to leave her alone. Above all else, she couldn't let them know the truth.

How many real pegasi existed in Equestria? Fifty? Twenty? How many had yet to awaken those things? How long until the second wave hit?

Rainbow wrapped her wings in bandages, even though she knew it wouldn't do any good. She could still feel them, could still sense those things, even with them wrapped and pinned to her sides. It was like tying up a once faithful companion, except Rainbow's wings had always been more than a mere companion. They'd been her lifeline, her partner in crime throughout all of her adventures. But it had all been a lie. Rainbow Dash had never been a pegasus. There were very few real pegasi in Equestria. It had been this way for nearly one hundred years.

It was around one hundred years ago that the pegasus population had exploded. The amount of pegasus births in Equestria had rapidly increased over the course of a few years. This event was especially interesting due to the amount of pegasi being born to non-pegasus parents. Most Earth ponies or unicorns blamed this phenomena on strange genetics, perhaps an unknown relative somewhere far up the family tree. The more the pegasi race flourished through this odd population boom, the less ponykind as a whole questioned it.

But Rainbow knew the truth, the ugly and horrifying truth that had somehow escaped countless historians and scientists. How could they have known? Up until this point, those things had laid dormant, allowing their hosts to grow old and die in a completely normal fashion. They'd been passive for the last century, feeding without leaving a trace of their presence. But they'd grown stronger with every generation, much like the pegasi who unknowingly hosted them.

It was with this thought in her head that Rainbow had—in a rare moment of utter calm and rational thought—grabbed a pair of gardening shears. She'd had no use for them up to this point, despite having borrowed them from Applejack a month ago. When her plans to have her own garden had inevitably fallen through, Rainbow had tossed them onto her junk pile. At least she was finally going to get some use out of them.

It didn't hurt. It should have, but Rainbow found herself comfortably numb. The task was surprisingly easy on her both mentally and physically, her face remaining indifferent as she opened the shears wide and pressed the blades against the joints connecting those things to her body. She didn't scream when she felt the sharp metal blades dig into her fur and flesh. Rainbow didn't flinch as she was forced to do it again and again, each time driving the blades in a little deeper. She barely twitched as the blood began to drip, large droplets falling to the floor. Given the angle she was forced to use, it took a good twenty or so minutes of hacking to actually cut through.

When she was finished, Rainbow Dash tossed the gardening shears aside. She'd lost a significant amount of blood, but somehow she was fine. She was fine enough to walk, so that was exactly what she did. She walked all the way to Ponyville's only hospital, following the long procession of pegasi bleeding in much the same way she was.

Rainbow turned away from the window. She still didn't know how she'd survived, how the blood loss hadn't claimed her before she even arrived at the hospital. It should have claimed all of them, but miraculously they were all fine. Rainbow should have been thankful. She should have been grateful for the quick work of the doctors and nurses at the hospital, for everything and everypony that had kept her alive.

But somehow, Rainbow was far from grateful. She could still feel the empty spaces where her wings had once been. A part of her ached for the sky, as she'd once done as a young filly taking her first flying lesson. But unlike that young idealistic filly, Rainbow knew she'd never fly again. The sky was forever closed to her, her earthbound life inevitable. She'd never been a pegasus in the first place, but she certainly felt like one.

She turned to look at the closed door. She heard a commotion outside. Shouting in the hallway, hooves pounding against the floor, a few muffled screams. It sounded as if all the nurses and doctors were rushing to the front desk. It seemed another group of patients had arrived.

Rainbow's gaze shifted to the window. The storm was starting to pick up, the wind howling and the rain battering the windows. She should have been relieved to be indoors, but she actually wanted to be outside. She wanted to be out there, being lashed by the torrents of rain. She wanted to hear the agonized screams that seemed to have twisted themselves into the wind.

More sounds from down the hall. Nurses and doctors were screaming. Somepony—it sounded like Nurse Redheart—was suggesting they call Princess Twilight, but her voice was nearly drowned out by the wails. There was the sound of furniture being knocked over, galloping hooves through the hallways as ponies rushed back and forth. Screaming about restraints and calling the much bigger hospital in Canterlot for help. Glass breaking and guttural moans of pain.

The storm continued outside, battering the windows and walls with its increasing ferocity. The second wave had come. Equestria was about to be very afraid.

Comments

[Legioner8]

Gameloft was right all along!
derpicdn.net/img/view/2013/2/19/249320.jpeg

[josue]

So are the wings parasitic creatures that get stronger with every generation and are planning on taking over Equestria cuz that's the vibe I'm getting here or am I completely wrong or is this an It HP Lovecraft horror that can only be defeated by getting rid of it by cutting off the affected limbs