Hungry Shadows

My very will to live is being strained away as I’m writing these lines. It rapidly melts away in the face of my impending doom. My hope that somepony will find my records to be able to get out of this trap is waning. Like a drowning pony catching to a straw, I cling to writing to stave off the moment until I inevitably surrender to madness and to occupy myself with the fulfilment of the old dream of mine — to try to render an account of my adventures.

The story began when I decided to go on a vacation. I chose one of those arcadian towns that could fool a visitor into thinking of Equestria as of a millennial paradise of peace and friendship. It is that countryside where cosy, two-storey houses spread out in neat streets from a town hall dressed with streamers; where friendly neighbours greet each other every morning as they get to daily chores; where the most terrible calamity is foals stealing apples or a travelling salespony.

But even in a town so charming and quiet, a real expert engrossed with any sort of investigation can always find work to do as noted by a lot of fiction writers. That was exactly what happened this time: by chance I got to overhear some marketmare, who was anxiously talking to a customer about her son’s long overdue return. He and his wife had gone to visit one of their numerous relatives, but a respectful sojourn would have long ended by that moment, especially with three foals waiting for him at home. I wouldn’t have paid much attention to it, sincerely deeming the concern unnecessary, had it not been for the mention of the missing gentlecolt’s destination.

Hollow Shades.

As far as I knew, this settlement belonged to another type of the rustic Equestria. That of gloomy sequestered hamlets that remain largely unchanged since the first Hearth’s Warming day and whose locals preserve their tradition with utmost thoroughness, if not fanaticism.

Some of such locals found themselves so far from civilization that they believed Princess Celestia to be the patroness of all good things in their lives and prayed to her frequently and fervently. However, despite the guise of old traditions, it is in these backwater places that madcap magi scheme for power, poachers of dangerous animals stalk their prey, smugglers of alchemical ingredients make their hideouts, and hunters for magical antiquities acquire their most bizarre curiosities. In short, there are all those things that long-bearded academics in Canterlot happily dismiss as fairy tales for extreme rarity for a commoner’s eyes. Such nonsense has no place in the picture of their world.

My vacation was coming to an end, so I decided that even if I chose not to follow through on this unpromising case, I would at least seize the excuse to have a look at another monument of olden days. The first time I had heard of it was thanks to one of my colleagues who dabbled with a great deal of everything occult and was importunate enough to influence me. He had told me that when he was exploring one of those artefact shops whose owners fear their own goods, he came across a vase remarkable if only for its age.

Despite the declared absence of any unusual properties, the vase caused a more violent and hostile reaction from the shop-owner than any of the other, obviously sinister items the shelves held. Then, as my friend had said, there might be something in the half-deserted village — Hollow Shades — at the foot of Foal Mountain whence the thing had been found. Even the mysterious ponies in black, who had snatched away from us the case of the murderous pet of a Manehattan money-bag, should have scarcely suspected the existence of the village.

From a more thorough chat with the marketmare, I got a gut feeling that the story may prove to not be so simple: the village, considered abandoned, was situated near the railroad line running from the Manehattan General to the mines at Foal Mountain. This meant the search area narrowed to the outskirts of Hollow Shades and the Canterlot station where one would have to change trains to get to the hamlet.

I thanked the lady for the information about trains’ schedule and promised her to see the investigation through if possible but without giving any guarantees to find her missing relatives, for the case seemed to be a dead-end. And so I set off, even if my curiosity was roused by those who might have outlived Equestrian past. Nevertheless, my conscience of a lawpony demanded that something should be done.

My general assumption was that every passenger who stopped by should be like a Hearth’s Warming gift for the stationpony in a small village of a single resident. More so he should’ve remembered the one buying tickets for a return trip. And indeed, my expectations proved true thanks to the old stallion’s tenacious memory — trained, as I’d fancy, with various puzzles from mailed newspapers, which were likely his only distraction from solitude. The reason for the mysterious disappearance was likely to be the village or a misfortune that occurred on the way to it. Without hesitation I wrote a letter to Canterlot, where I’d had time to discuss the matter with a local officer while waiting for the train, then gave it to the stationpony and departed for my final destination, the road itself taking about an hour of hasty trot.

Nestled within a gloomy, morbid wood of thick gnarled trees, Hollow Shades cowered in a meagre clearing and was surrounded by a field of bare rocks that rose out of the ground like giant claws. One such rock towered over the whole site and shadowed the centre of it.

For a moment I thought the shadow to be much blacker than the rest, roiling in the air like a mist instead of lying on the ground as shadows were supposed to. The trees and bushes around me, if not yet dead, eked out a miserable existence, petrified in the state of perpetual autumn, as they yielded a sinister, festering odour that was vaguely familiar to me.

The sun was hidden from view by a boundless sea of clouds, the untamed ocean breezes probably driving them here and there from the plains between Fillydelphia and Manehattan. The whole thing looked wrong, and it was so depressing that I wondered who could have ever chosen such a place to live. Had I not better turn and go before that vista of a grey void robbed me of will to move? Evil visions had been tormenting me on the way here and now they invaded my mind again. You see, Hollow Shades had been half-deserted throughout all its history. Ponies came and left after a while, and then a new wave of settlers took their place. But the chain of life was never entirely broken as there always was somepony to retain a painful memory of the past revival. Tracing the story that had brought me here, my imagination conjured up a picture of an empty house, and a lonely old mare sitting at a covered table, talking to empty chairs, fancying friends and kin who had abandoned her. The idea was simply insane and intolerable to consider, even in imagination.

As I took on closer inspection I found that the houses quite clearly fell into two types. The first were thatched huts built of rough stone blocks, which crowded round a sort of central square, their irregular clusters gradually disappearing into the distance and behind the curve of a hill. The others were even more sullen and rectangular, resembling not actual dwellings but squat towers or columns which lurked in the hollows of the rocks or propped them up. Who would want to live in the shade with a climate like this?

Two towers jutted from the colossal rock that seemed to threaten to collapse onto the village. The ludicrous pilasters in their corners evoked in me an impression of grand palaces of the pre-colonial Dune Kingdom, though for the struggling settlers there was no point in building one in this wilderness. Of course unless it had been left by some unknown people that had disappeared for some unknown reason in times long before Equestria.

In the middle of the town square, a weird well was a nice addition to the scene. It had neither a crane, nor a winch, nor even sides, tempting a passer-by to fall down. I dared a look deep down and saw the same haze I thought I had seen as I approached the village. A swampy odour wafted unexpectedly from the murky depths, compelling me to guard my nose and continue walking.

Thoughts of paranormal occurences, too uncanny even for books, slowly gnawed at the barriers of my rational consciousness. I always tried to hold to reason, refraining from indulging in any things commonly reffered as ‘paranormal’. But, despite not possessing a heightened sensitivity like that of a unicorn which is believed to detect magical phenomena, I felt an vague presence of something intangible.

The stationpony had told me where to look for the last living inhabitant of this realm of oblivion. The farthest house, standing a little apart from the others on the distant hill, did indeed look inhabited. At least its roof was not as rotten as the others, and the door and all the windows were intact. Thrice I tried knocking, but no answer came. Obviously the owner was absent, so the question was where exactly he was now. Of course, it was only common courtesy to search the neighbourhood before breaking in and spying, especially as I was here more as a visitor and tourist. Oh! Had I had the prudence to stop the search in time, this spirit of eternal decadence alone would have been a worthy story to tell a curious colleague over tea.

On the other side of the hill was a sickly old garden, its crooked trees covered with fungi and lichen. Strange as it was to find such a backwater sheltering not some degenerate hermits, but members of a mighty farming clan whose forebears raised cities across the land, even they could not overcome the languid atmosphere of despair that hung over the place. Most of the trunks were dead, standing bare in the midst of the summer, littering the ground with bark and broken branches. From one end to the other, I walked down these dour paths of decay, but met nopony. The sturdy-looking barn was also empty, but the cellar door was open, surrounded by several large piles of earth mixed with rubbish. Below, in a patch of light coming through the doorway, I could make out a black hole in the ground and a shovel lying nearby.

Curious, I crept cautiously down the rickety wooden steps, pausing midway, the smoky darkness ahead of me, the same vaguely familiar stench filling my nostrils. It was as if something intelligent was stirring in the darkness, and I could even feel the hundreds of its disembodied tentacles on my skin. Irrational fear begged me to leave quickly and return to the hut, or the station, or the sweet village where nothing could bother me.

No doubt the cellar was worth exploring, but not until I had proper equipment for the descent. I needed to recover a little from the long walk and the strangeness of the place that had initially dispirited me.

I returned to the hut to find its door unlocked. The loose hinges had just held it tight in the doorframe, so you had to lift it up and pull. The bolt on the inside had simply fallen off the rotten wood long ago, and there was no point in trying to fix it when you lived all alone. I picked up my bags, which I’d left by the door, and tentatively stepped over the threshold.

The interior was no different from the general air of despondency and decrepitude. The furniture was as crude as the dwelling itself, and some of it seemed to be made of more or less intact parts of other things. It would have been ridiculous of me to assume the presence of an entire library — many other hovels stood empty, without even a semblance of furniture. This hut, however, contained a grand number of newspapers of all sorts, probably handed over by the kind-hearted stationpony and then gradually consigned to a fireplace as they were read, as well as books, old and new, mostly on agriculture. One of the latter had been left open on the table, and I couldn’t help but indulge in a little reading. It turned out to be a traveller’s notebook from the time of the first southern expansions. The passage that caught my eye was a vivid description of the customs of a savage tribe from the Badlands, specifically their foul rites of fertilising the fields with crushed bones and dried blood.

The very thought of such barbarity made my skin crawl; it seemed nothing less than a crime against the very foundation of our people — absurd, perverse, unreal in its atrocity. A vicious mixture of curiosity and dread followed the visions my mind was brooding over, and then came a vague sense of danger: what if the owner of the house, falling desperate to fight this accursed land, had decided to follow the story’s suggestion and was now crouching behind me?

Of course, nopony was there. Only the creaking of the floorboards under my hooves broke otherwise dead silence. If there really was a psychotic murderer, there would be no place for him to hide. A cautious glance around the corner of the room revealed the long absence of any life in the house. In the kitchen, which doubled as the dining room, were a pair of large saddlebags from which several jars of jam (presumably gifts from the missing guests) peeked out. Next to them was a canister labelled as containing fuel for lamps; modern sources of light were clearly in short supply here, and even fireflies, if not yet dead, would have a hard time shining through the dreariness of the place.

The dining table was a graveyard of cakes that had already begun to mould, emitting an aroma of decay that was faint but eerie. The large pie, only half-eaten, stood as the centrepiece of the collection of tombstones. Everything in the house showed signs of long-standing desolation, which disproved the most obvious clue to my gruesome speculations about an involuntary follower of a despicable cult going mad in his loneliness. All that remained for me to do was to search the other houses thoroughly and, finally, check up the hole in the cellar floor, the origin and purpose of which remained a complete mystery to me.

And so, after carefully examining the hut, I paced the room, stealing an occasional glance at the crumpled bed in the corner, my mind preoccupied with thoughts. Every few minutes I felt drowsy as soon as I stopped — damn the genius who designed these toy-like train carriages, incapable of offering enough room to lie down during an overnight journey. I was somehow used to insomnia, but it still made it difficult to think clearly, and there was still that blasted book, providing no evidence but refusing to escape my head, thwarting the flow of thought with rabid persistence.

I shook my head and turned to the window to take in the view of the mountains surrounding the village. Only rock farming could really thrive in such a place, I guessed. And if so, it meant that there might be either ancient underground passages or natural caves in the area, and just as the cellar was being cleared of debris to make room for the supply of jam jars the arriving guests would bring, a small collapse might have occurred.

Finally, I decided on my next move. With my well-proven knife tucked into my travelling jacket and the electric torch clenched between my teeth, I cautiously descended into the sunless dungeon where the abysmal spawn of darkness I knew lurked awaited me. Again it tried to wrap itself around me, as if groping blindly, but the light of the lantern dispersed its tentacles into nothingness, an illusion created by my tired brain.

I shuffled along the dirt floor under the barn, both trying to find some important detail and simply afraid of stumbling. The investigation was hampered by the lack of natural light and the growing stench, the source of which could hardly be attributed to rotten beams or even an ancient crypt, but as far as my limited knowledge could tell, the barn was not in no danger. The hole, however, was just big enough for a pony to squeeze through all the way down. That’s what had happened, judging by the tracks my careless hoofsteps had almost destroyed on the barely level ground. So both the host and the guests, driven by curiosity, had decided to explore the discovered heritage of past generations of settlers, and apparently disappeared into this realm of darkness, never to return. It was highly unlikely that I would have much chance of finding them alive after so many days. It was only the desire to make my story about this place more impressive, and to fathom the nature of the incomprehensible dread of its gloom and desolation, that motivated me to undertake a rather risky expedition as it seized me suddenly with tremendous strength, as if to counterbalance the terrifying feeling.

And here I was, in the middle of a narrow tunnel with bare earthen walls that seemed to be lead away from the village, with only the unnatural light of my torch to fight the equally unnatural murkiness. But the tunnel turned out to be surprisingly short, and even lacked the branches that mines are supposed to have. What I found at the end confused me at first; only now do I understand the real reasons for the miners’ decision. The corridor ended in a solid wall of uneven rocks, heaped up from floor to ceiling.

The mine had been brought down by the hooves of ponies, and it was unlikely to be because the diggers had chanced to find themselves under the farm. Had this been the case, the first step would have been to try and restore the support under the barn’s foundation. In fact, the passage looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, as there were no props at the point of the collapse. So I walked back the other direction, dimly foreseeing that at the other end I would find the terrible answer to this strange act. My common sense kept telling me to abandon the search, but it was too late. The excitement of the investigation had taken its place, and I moved steadily towards my goal, my mind wandering between possible clues.

The further I strayed from the only known path to the surface, the more the ominous shadows reached out to me, covetous. The breeze that carried that terrible stench also came from the remaining unexplored part of the dungeon, and the memory of its nature dawned upon me, along with the thought of an invisible hunter lurking in the dark. This breeze was like a breath of timber wolves, the living dead of the flora world, a breath given to them as if only to make a hunted victim more aware of their relentless pursuers. The whole village, as well as the surrounding wasteland, bore the sigil of the same unseen force that could animate the logs and twigs of a wild forest into these strange creatures.

Soon after crossing the crumbled section under the barn, I made another intriguing discovery: the other direction of the tunnel ended in a smashed stone wall leading to some sort of a catacomb. The masonry was as crude as that of the ancient towers that stood in the shadow of the towering rocks, and the contents of the room had long since turned to dust. Only shards of it remained, scattered here and there among the unidentified rotting debris — wood or cloth, I believe.

The opposite wall opened into a doorway, the remains of the door itself hanging on rusty hinges. It was not a single hidden room, but a network of dungeons that had nothing to do with what the stone farmers had dug. And it was because of this discovery that they had abandoned their work, burying the source of their distress so that nopony would even remember about its very existence. But at that moment, such conclusions were only vaguely brewing in my mind, and so I moved on to the stone womb of the sinister hamlet, its age alone making a veritable threat.

The rooms shifted one after the other as I walked down a long corridor that became more orderly the further I progressed. The outermost chambers were probably some sort of storerooms, the only difference from the one under the barn outside being that they needed extra reinforcement and ventilation due to the tonnes of earth above the ceiling. The others housed bulky stone tables and sometimes benches, equally uncomfortable; they might as well serve as beds and chairs for any madpony that might choose to live in such a dark, damp cell.

Every room I entered showed traces of burnt-out torches and candles, but the sources of light themselves were missing or had long since perished in the damp. Besides, I had nothing to light them with, and it would be certain death if I happened to be left without my electric torch. I had to calculate my time down here; luckily I remembered the battery's capabilities and always carried a pocket watch.

Gradually the catacombs began to branch out, the stygian labyrinth threatening to swallow me whole, but my tenacious memory and the chalk marks left on the walls, apparently by those I sought, gave me the confidence to continue my journey into the heart of supernatural darkness. It was unbelievable how ponies, brought up to tremble with fear or to grab a torch at the slightest hint of something strange, could have managed to get there.

Indeed, our curiosity is a supreme force, overcoming all caution and prudence. Or perhaps it was just the pathetic hope of discovering uncorrupt gold, a treasure hoarded by the unknown settlers of ancient times.

Eventually I found myself in a series of narrow rooms, most of the floor covered with round, rusty grids. Oubliettes! A hideous invention born of archaic notions of cruelty, a prison the name of which implies its meaning: 'to forget'. The surrounding stones had drawings and carvings in different tongues — none of my specialities.

I had recognised the ancient pony runes, the distinctive script of the distant lands of Arabia, and the Maretonic cuneiform, but I couldn’t read them. And the wells, surrounded as they were by these texts, were filled with a thick, smoky shadow like the one that had met me above ground. There was something alive and inexplicably malign here in the bowels of the earth, and the witchcraft patterns had better mean that they should imprison this force deep down in the abyss where it belonged. But even if they did, they couldn’t.

It was here that the true, gut-wrenching horror pierced my mind as I felt the creature grope my back for a moment, making my fur stand on end once more. Sacrifical altars! That’s what I'd found here, for a sacrifice more horrible than that described in the book from the hut. And it was easy as anything to perish in one of these terrific prison cells should the lattice drop under the hooves — of, say, a bulky village stallion. But the markings on the walls led further into the much darker depths of the godless tomb that the dungeon now clearly appeared to be. So further led my way, even though my common sense was screaming for me to return to the surface.

My watch told me that night was approaching when the narrow passageways suddenly gave way to a spacious chamber, barely illuminated by the young, cloudy moon through a hole in the ceiling. It was the well I had seen! The catacombs spanned the entire area beneath the village, and this place seemed to be the heart of the sinister labyrinth. I had doomed myself. My jaw dropped in amazement at the sheer size of the hall and the tenacity of whoever had built it.

Smooth rows of columns divided the room into equal parts, leaving the dark distance inaccessible to my torch, and the faint moonlight of the darkened sky breaking through the clouds was barely enough to mark the centre. I could only guess at the purpose of this work of ancient architecture, just as I could guess at the purpose of all the rooms I had passed before, but I did not have to guess for long. I moved along the wall from the only exit I knew, towards the place where the well might be, and as I was walking past a niche between the extreme columns, I found an image... a bas-relief... an icon.

It stared at me with eyes of black emptiness, dripping with the smoke of an ethereal mane. A single crooked horn on its forehead, half-folded wings and a massive necklace that encircled the eerie portrait from below were the last clues to finally fathom the meaning of the hall and all that surrounded it.

For the first time in my life, I was standing in a real temple, and it was dedicated not to our illustrious Princess, nor even to Nightmare Moon — but to something else, a creature far more terrible, who had taken this form as if to mock everything we hold dear. This darkness dwelt here, completely possessing the souls of the ponies and condemning them to serve it, as if there were no other way. I felt its grip again and ran in terror, not looking where I was going, trying to forget the piercing, stony eyes of the icon of despair.

Something slipped under my hoof and my flight ended with a painful thud on the stone floor. The electric torch went out treacherously, leaving me without the my last protection in the face of the nightmarish deity.

Time stretched until it seemed to slow to a halt as darkness surrounded me, denser and denser, serving its vision as much as light served mine. It displaced the air, creeping into my nostrils, mouth, lungs, my very brain in a malodour of all the sepulchres and quagmires of the world.

Oh, how I wish I'd suffocated then, if only I could have escaped when I saw its form! It appeared before me, blacker than black, swelling as its form repelled everything around it, plunging the world into a hellscape.

The horrifying, maddening spawn of outer worlds, repulsive to our own reality — not a creature of magic or flesh, but a living idea, an inevitable, ever-lasting end to all things. And the voice, that ghastly voice that was a chorus of tormented souls, seized the last of my senses. Myriad slaves from eras past, serfts eking out a miserable existence in windigos’ times, all of them who lost life’s meaning for good — they poured out their boundless pain in an excruciating cacophony that dragged me down the abyss. Mercifully as it might seem, I fainted.

I awoke to find the monstrosity still lingering around me. Echoes of the mournful choir, gusts of the stinking draught, a flash just outside my vision; in everything I felt its presence, real or delusional. I suppose it doesn't matter now. The torch came to life when I kicked it, fumbling for it in the dark, and now it glows half as brightly, dying out for a few moments now and then, as if to remind me of the terror of utter blackness that prowls nearby, a hungry beast waiting for a wounded prey to die at last. But it won't come for me. It won't pounce on me to tear apart in bloodthirsty triumph, for my agony would last mere seconds. I know it just as I know that my time is running out, or that the lantern's battery should have died long ago, or that an underground sanctum can't possibly hold three thousand rows of columns. I sought the lost ponies — only to be lost and trapped by the hollow shades that drain you of hope and sanity, the otherworldly nightmare still like a burden on the edge of my memory.

And only a terrible assumption of the doom that befell my poor predecessors can be more oppressive to my mind, for the object I'd stumbled over in my stampede was a brand-new oil lamp.

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