Heir To Darkness

by Leafdoggy

Chapter 24: Diving Deeper

Fluttershy sighed as she rested against a wall.

How long had she been down there, wandering aimlessly through identical tunnels? It had been hours, at least, since the incident with the echo creature, and there was no end in sight. Her hooves were starting to ache, and her injured shoulder wasn’t helping. It felt like only a matter of time before she’d drop from exhaustion.

She wasn’t even sure anymore that she’d be able to make it back out. The tunnels had long since put a stop to their linear nature. This far in, she could hardly go a few steps without running into another intersection, and there wasn’t nearly enough uniformity to them for her to have memorized her path. At this point, even if she did find Pinkie in this citadel of earth, she felt like she’d starve to death on the way back out.

She pressed on, though. For Pinkie.

It took a moment of concentrated effort to push herself off the wall and stumble forward, but once the momentum was there she fell back into her usual pace. It wasn’t fast by any means, but she didn’t let herself slow down too much. She didn’t have that luxury.

It wasn’t long before she stopped again, but this time it wasn’t to rest. In front of her was a solid wall of stone. It would have been a dead end if not for the thin crack that ran down the middle of it, glowing strangely with light from the other side of the wall.

The crack had looked a lot bigger when she turned down this path. She thought it wouldn’t be a problem, but now that she’d reached it she saw that it was hardly big enough for her to fit through at all. She could spy more tunnels on the other side, but the idea of trying to push through the stone brought to mind images of herself trapped in stone, and that was enough to send her back the way she had come.

She backtracked to the nearest intersection, a group of five tunnels that stretched off in random directions, and picked another route.

She saw another wall cutting that tunnel off before it could go far, but again it looked like she should be able to get past without a problem. Instead of a crack, this one had a wide, flat hole stretching across the bottom of it, and it was big enough that she could see the other side of the tunnel from where she stood.

So, she made her way down that tunnel, this time keeping her eyes trained on the hole in the wall. Nothing changed. She made it halfway there, and it was still just a hole, nearly as tall as she was. She was sure of it. She knew there wouldn’t be any problem—

She blinked.

When her eyes opened again, she stopped in her tracks. The hole was the exact same size, she knew it was still the same size, but it wasn’t right. It was hardly half her height, maybe even less, and she doubted if she could fit through even if she got down onto her stomach. Even if she could get in, she couldn’t tell if it stayed the same size the entire way. It could easily squeeze in on her partway through.

She knew it was the same size, though. All she did was blink. She would have seen if it shrank while her eyes were closed. She must have just been wrong before, focused on intently on the opening itself that she lost track of everything around it.

She shook her head and turned around. There was nothing she could do about it now.

Back at the intersection, she looked down all the tunnels that were left to her. Only two were left to try, and at this point neither looked appealing. One clearly had a pit halfway through, and while it looked miniscule from where she was, she wasn’t going to trust herself on that a third time. The other path ended completely after a ways, the roof of the cave sloping down until it met a pool of water. It seemed the tunnel went underwater for some unknown distance.

She reached over to her side and gingerly felt her injured wing, then winced and recoiled as a sharp pain shot through her. It was clear she wouldn’t be doing any flying any time soon. She briefly considered the two cracks, but the thought of being trapped there, rock squeezing so tightly around her she couldn’t even call for help, was too terrible to risk.

She then looked back at the fifth tunnel, the one she had come from in the first place. She knew there were more intersections back there, but the idea of going back seemed futile. Running into all these roadblocks at once seemed far too unlikely to be a mere coincidence, and if it was deliberate, she doubted she could just find another path that wouldn’t try to stop her.

Reluctantly, she turned her attention to the final option and made her way down to the waterways.

To her relief, the pool didn’t seem to shrink at all, even as she walked right up to the edge of it. It filled the breadth of the tunnel, and while it was by no means large, there was more than enough room to maneuver in it. At least here, it didn’t seem like she was in danger of getting stuck.

The water was dark and murky. Silt swirled around on invisible currents and made strange, dancing patterns. Every so often a patch would clear up, and she’d be able to see deep into the water, but she never saw a bottom to it. For some reason, she felt that no matter how deep she swam, she never would see the bottom.

A light blinked somewhere in the depths for only a moment, barely long enough to notice, and too quick for Fluttershy to be certain it had even happened in the first place.

Gingerly, she reached out and dipped her hoof into the water. It was ice cold, and sent a shiver down her spine.

Fluttershy took a step back from the edge and looked back down the tunnel. She weighed her options again, and then a third time, searching desperately for any excuse to stay out of the water. None came to her.

She shook her head and took several deep breaths, trying to work herself up to jumping in. She hopped in place to warm up her muscles. She told herself a thousand times that she could do it.

“Okay, Fluttershy, just go,” she muttered under her breath. “Just… Jump in.”

She bit her lip. “Okay, on three. One… Two… Three!”

She didn’t move.

She groaned and walked back to the edge of the water to look down into it.

“Come on, Fluttershy, it’s just water. You can deal with the cold. Plus, you’re The Heiress! If anything is down there, you can just—”

There was a loud splash, and a set of razor sharp talons shot out of the water. They looked ancient and rotted, their dull gray scales covered in a mass of sickly green algae.

Fluttershy screamed and tried to jump back, but she was too slow. The claws wrapped around her leg and squeezed tight. The entire length of every claw was sharpened like a knife, and each one sliced into her with a sickening ease.

Then the creature tugged with tremendous force, and before she even had time to take a breath Fluttershy was underwater.

She opened her eyes and tried to search for her assailant, but the turmoil had kicked up so much dirt and dust that she couldn’t see a thing. All she got for her efforts was an eyeful of grime that stung horribly and made her clench her eyes tight.

With every second she wasted trying to reorient herself, the creature pulled her further into the brackish depths.

Fluttershy tried to tug her leg free, but that only served to slice the thing’s claws deeper still. The pain was sudden, and before she could stop herself she tried to scream, which lost her the precious little air she’d managed to capture before being dragged under.

Her lungs started to burn as she searched her mind for a solution.

Then, without warning, the creature stopped pulling her down and let go of her leg.

She didn’t understand, but she knew she didn’t have time to figure it out. She spun herself around so she was facing the opposite direction and started to swim.

She barely got through a single stroke before the creature returned for more. Its talons wrapped around the back of her neck and dug in with horrific force, so strong that it made her entire body seize up painfully.

Then it started to pull her again, but this time was different. It didn’t pull straight down. This time the creature stayed in place and pulled her in circles around itself, spinning her around constantly and completely destroying any sense of where she was.

Through the sound of rushing water, she heard something that almost seemed like laughter.

Eventually the creature let go of her, but it was far from finished. As Fluttershy floated there, disoriented, it started to dart around her in quick, random motions that left her completely unable to keep track of where it was.

Fluttershy was at a loss for what to do. Her entire body was starting to burn as it ached for air. It was getting harder and harder to keep her breath held, and she knew that any second she could lose that control and it would all be over, and she didn’t know if that was something she could come back from.

She knew she could at least stop that from happening, though. Just as she’d done before, she reached inside herself and found that part of her that controlled her lungs, and she shut it down.

Immediately, that cold, empty pain started to creep back in.

Then the creature made a move, darting close to her and scraping its claws down her side, then went back to circling its prey as she writhed in pain.

She tried to open her eyes again, but it was still completely impossible to see. She tried to Stare anyway, but it did nothing. She had to find another way out.

The creature dove in and took another swipe at her. A cloud of red poured out of the fresh wounds.

She tried to imagine what Dracula would do, but Dracula would just kill it, and that wasn’t an option. She couldn’t use the shadows as a weapon like Dracula did, it would be horrible. She had to be better, she—

The shadows.

It finally struck her. All this time, Dracula had been using the shadows for everything. Up until now Fluttershy had assumed it was just alicorn magic, but what if it wasn’t? Fluttershy had seen the shadows, she had felt them, so why wouldn’t she be able to use them?

She shut her eyes and started up the now-familiar process.

First she numbed her limbs, and they went cold.

She twitched as the creature sliced across her chest.

She shut down her hearing, and her sense of smell.

The creature drew close and slowly, agonizingly dragged a single talon across her cheek.

Then she shut down her sense of feeling, dulling herself to the outside world.

The last thing she felt as it dimmed was the creature gently wrapping its talons around her neck.

She then took all that power she’d pooled and used it to tug at the darkness she felt in the corners of her mind. It came to her with ease, like an old friend, and she kept pulling. She pulled and pulled until she had every bit of that darkness, and it was all there, ready to do as she willed it to.

She didn’t send it out against the creature, though. Instead, she took every bit of that darkness and pushed it inside herself.

It was a bizarre sensation, to let in the shadows, to become one with them. It was like getting into bed after a long day, but instead of warmth, it filled her with… Absence. The absence of light. The absence of heat. The absence of life. She filled herself with the calm, quiet comfort of complete emptiness.

Then, as it had fallen into her, she then fell into it. She let go and let the darkness swallow her whole.

From the outside, what happened was simple enough. Fluttershy was there, and then she wasn’t. One second she filled the space, and then she faded away, replaced by… Something else. It was shadow, dark and intangible, but a special kind of shadow. It could still be lit up, it did nothing to stop heat. It was the shadow made when a space should have held Fluttershy, but just… Didn’t. It was her absence.

To Fluttershy, things were much stranger. She opened her eyes just in time to see the shadows start to stream out of her and devour the world. The water boiled away, the creature crumbled to dust. The air itself was washed away, and then the nothingness below it was gone, too. Slowly, the shadows spread out and turned everything around her into darkness.

Strangely, though, she could still see. The shadows that should have been water were somehow different from the shadows that should have been stone. They weren’t lighter or darker, they weren’t some strange color, they were just missing something else, and she could see that.

This strange new place would have to wait, though, because Fluttershy was at the end of her rope. She released the stranglehold she held over herself, and everything flooded back. The rush of pain that came with it made her cry out and crumple to her knees, but she was glad to feel it again, to be able to feel it again. She was glad to push away the emptiness that was behind it all.

Finally, she took a deep breath and was relieved to find out that, somehow, she could breathe in this place.

She was so relieved, in fact, that she immediately lost consciousness and collapsed.