20 - Through the Fog
“S-so, I’ve been, um, been th-thinking about your offer, T-Trixie.”
“Mm-hm.” She wasn’t listening. From her horn, she had projected an illusion of Applejack’s map from earlier, and her focus was entirely on the geography thereof. As I watched, the symbols on the illusory parchment drifted and shifted—apparently Trixie was having trouble remembering exactly what went where, and where the charcoal markings had been exactly.
“Ab-about becoming your ap-apprentice-”
“Assistant.” Trixie flicked her head, and the map dissipated from existence. “Come on, over this field. Look for a road, we’ll follow that until it meets up with—and follows—a river.”
I blinked in confusion, as we both started to climb over an old wooden fence. It creaked and groaned, and I feared it would snap under my weight, but it held. “W-what do you m-mean-”
“Assistant, not apprentice.” Trixie turned her head as we trotted across a field that had been last plowed long ago, where the furrows dug into the ground remained out of spite. “An apprentice would imply you are a student, and could replace me in the future should I be unable to perform what I’ve taught you. An assistant learns, but the main goal is to assist me while learning.”
That was a...very formal, very business-like way of looking at the relationship. While Dinky had been a friend, and Zecora had been a teacher who wished to teach again, I was reminded that Trixie was neither. She seemed to see me as little more than a hired sword, at best. The best response I could muster was a quiet, “O-oh.”
Trixie raised an eyebrow and flashed a smirk. “So! You said you were thinking about it?”
Slowly, I nodded. “St-still am. Haven’t d-decided anything.”
Trixie shook her head and nickered in annoyance as we reached the other side of the field, marked by another moldy wooden fence. A hard-packed dirt road stretched beyond, extending into the fog in both directions. “You brought it up.”
“S-sorry.” While Trixie climbed over, I chose to slide between the crossbars. A loose bit of my armor caught on a rusted nail, but I tugged it free a moment later, and we were standing on the road.
Trixie’s horn lit, and the map shimmered into existence before her once more. “Whatever. This should be it—watch for any road signs, and the river should be on our left.”
I nodded, and we started down the road. For some reason, I couldn’t shake a growing sense of familiarity.
* * *
The reason for my familiarity became apparent a mile or two down the road. With the babbling stream on our left, a large shape began to loom out of the fog. I stared at it as it came into focus, and Trixie had to put up a hoof to stop me. “Wait, shape on the road. Hollow, maybe.”
I nodded, and we continued forward, much more slowly. I hadn’t seen the shape before, but it came into clarity as we closed the distance in the mist. I blinked when I could see it clearly; it was a Hollow soldier, and a familiar one at that. He was the first “living” pony I had ever seen, which meant we had stumbled back across the bookstore where I had woken up so long ago.
He looked to have recovered from our battles, but another—more recent— set of injuries had given him a shaking limp. His horn had healed, and his old rusty sword dragged through the surface of the road, since he seemed to lack the strength required to lift it. His jaw hung loosely from his skull, broken at least in two from a blow to his head, and his left hind dragged limply. Whenever he took a step with it, he stumbled slightly, as he didn’t seem to quite have feeling all the way down to his hoof. If he’d been anything more than an empty shell of a Hollow, I had no doubt he would have been in unimaginable pain.
Trixie was bluntly unimpressed. “Yeah, he’s not a problem. Let’s keep going.”
“W-wait.” Maybe it was cruel, but I wanted to fight him. It wouldn’t even the score—there was no score to keep track of, really—but I was curious how much I had improved since then. I’d been swinging my sword and fighting for a while now, and surely I could handle a single Hollow? “I’ll t-take care of him. I w-want to look ins-inside the b-bookstore.”
“The what?” Trixie glanced over at the ruined cloud-building, where it lay in the stream. “Oh, you- ugh, you bookworms are all the same. You know the books will have all been long ruined by damp?”
I shrugged as I stepped around her and drew my sword. “D-don’t care. M-maybe I missed s-something last t-time.”
“Last time?” Trixie mumbled in confusion, more to herself than me. “Whatever. Explain after you kill him.”
The Hollow soldier let out a weak groan as he finally saw us, and he staggered in our direction as his head lolled slightly on his shoulders. It seemed like he barely knew how to hold it up straight, and he only seemed dimly aware that his leg was damaged. As I flexed my hoof and flicked my sword to limber up, I wondered what had happened to him. Even if he wasn’t clearly wounded from a recent fight, would he be just as much a threat? Or had I improved so drastically, in the time between?
Even now, his first strike was that wide horizontal slash, and I easily dodged it by stepping back when he swung. His sword dragged in the dirt as he fought to raise it once more, but I never let him get the chance. I stepped back in to close the distance, and swung my sword down in an arc that terminated in the side of his neck.
There was a wet thwack as the blade sliced through his flesh and dug into his spine. His legs went limp in an instant, but his head continued to snarl as black blood foamed from between his lips. The glow of his horn intensified, and I ducked as his sword careened wildly over my head, and buried itself, tip-down, into the road. The stallion slumped to the ground, and I yanked the sword from his neck, where more black blood welled out and crept down his neck.
Now that he was immobile, and what little attention he had was split between biting wildly at me with a broken jaw and tugging his sword free, I could easily finish him off. I considered leaving him as he was, but with his blood already so coagulated, the blow I’d struck might not have been fatal. Instead, I leaned back, grabbed his horn with my off-hoof, and lined up my blade with his limp jaw. Then, I stabbed upwards quickly, and pierced the roof of his mouth with the tip of my blade. The embers in his eyes winked out, and the undead stallion went still once more.
Trixie approached from behind, stomping her hooves as she walked. “Bravo, you killed some wandering chump. I doubt he’s even got a few dregs left to take, but they’re yours. Can we move on now?”
I nodded, in sudden worried anticipation. Right. Trixie was right. I should drain him. He was long since feral, and there was nothing left of the stallion’s mind. Even now, he seemed content to stand on this road, and attack passers-by. But the thought of stealing whatever scraps of a soul he had remaining...I didn’t like how casually we spoke about it now.
I kept my grip steady around his horn as I closed my eyes, and grasped for his fire. The stallion was dead, but his fire remained, even though it was little more than embers. Now that I'd done it once with Apple Bloom, it was easier to embrace his flame, but it still took me a few long moments to pull it in. I grit my teeth as I felt his fire join mine-
Tired
Chase
EYES
Fear
Run
Fight
Pain
pain
why
I trembled, as I drew in a slow breath. Trixie's description of 'flashes' was accurate, but they weren't just visual. Even though none of them had lasted for more than a moment, I had been the stallion for each of those moments. I had worn his armor, and I had been running in his hooves. I saw the silhouette again, and those burning crimson eyes.
After a moment, I shook my head to try and clear my mind. The stallion's fire wasn't entirely gone; a single dull ember remained that I couldn't take. Just enough for him to heal eventually, and begin wandering once more. That thought brought me no comfort.
Trixie was already crossing the river by the time I stood, and I had to slide down the muddy river bank to cross the stream. I followed her into the darkened building, and we both stood in the doorway for a few moments, blinking owlishly as our eyes adjusted.
While the bookstore had changed little since I had left, somepony—or perhaps something—had clearly been inside recently. A trail of smoking hoofprints led from the door to the back of the building, pressed directly into the old, moldy wood floor. There, they paced around seemingly at random, before they finally returned to the door and ended where they had begun. Trixie's horn lit with a pink glow as she swept the room with a projected light for any surprises, and while the light lingered on the other Hollow soldier, still motionless on the floor where I had left her last, she seemed satisfied that the room was safe.
"What is...what's with these hoofprints? They feel magical, but they're no illusion. Like some sort of imprint left on the aether field…?" Trixie muttered quietly to herself, while she moved to drain the Hollow mare. As she did that, I walked alongside the tracks, careful not to disturb them, and followed the path to the back.
A small pile of debris, an ancient bloodstain, and a hole stabbed into a stubbornly dense cloud wall. This had been my resting place for untold ages, but it barely looked like anything. I glanced around, but there was simply nothing else to see, and it looked like whatever had left the hoofsteps had been as frustrated as I was. They paced around the debris, and I found my own hooves tracing their steps as I looked around. It was difficult, however, as they had a much longer stride than I.
However, the conspicuous lack of certain things was just as interesting. There were absolutely no vermin anywhere in the store; while I was sure I'd heard rats when I had first awoken, now there was nothing, and I wasn't sure they had ever been rats to begin with. That didn't make much sense now, with what I knew about the Everchaos, but I supposed if any creature was likely to stubbornly survive, it might have been the rodents. Even the dead vermin were gone, with no trace that they had ever been there to begin with.
Also absent was the dark sword. I paced and paced, but the black blade that I had pushed from my belly when I first awoke was nowhere to be found. Somepony had taken it, and I was beginning to suspect the black knight had finally returned to retrieve his weapon, now that it was no longer being used to pin me to the wall.
How long ago had he been here? The Hollow outside had been recently injured, but his wounds were far from fatal, so maybe he had never been killed by the knight. He had undoubtedly seen him—there was no mistaking those eyes, even if I had only seen them for a flash—but I had no idea if that had been minutes ago, or decades. The hoofsteps were still smoking, but I had no idea how long they would last, and Trixie seemed just as baffled by them as I.
I couldn't shake the unsettling feeling that we had only just missed him. If we'd been just a little bit faster, we might have encountered each other here, and I had no idea what I would do then. Could I manage to fight him? Whenever I even thought of those eyes, my breath caught in my throat, and I froze in fear. I was sure that I couldn't do it, no matter how scared I was. I would freeze up again, and I would die once more when he ran me through with his blade.
What if this was a trap?
What if the black knight had watched us through the fog, and followed us here, knowing that I would want to investigate? He could be lurking just outside now, standing atop the hill, as he waited for us to emerge from the bookstore. Or would he enter after us now, to fight us here in the dark and cramped interior? Would I be pinned to the wall once again, in the same spot as before, as if I had never left?
I trembled in terror as I stared at the door, and waited for his shadow to fill the frame. But that never happened, no matter how long I stared.
Behind me, Trixie rummaged through the building for a short while. I heard as she peeled books apart, peered at the covers, and then discarded them carelessly. "Not about magic. Not about magic...one about rats, but not about magic." Eventually, she moved to check the registers, and found a small measure of success once she managed to pull the rusted drawer free. I heard the rattle of bits, which Trixie stashed in her armor, even though I was sure they were worthless now. Eventually, she approached me from behind, and cleared her throat. "Hey. Hollow. Wake up!"
I started. Why had I just been staring at the door like that? Had I wanted the black knight to appear so badly? "S-sorry! All-all good. We can g-go."
Trixie eyed me suspiciously, but shrugged a moment later, as she moved towards the door. "So what's up with this place? You said you'd been here before."
"A w-while back. I w-woke up here at f-first. There w-was a sword, b-but it's gone n-now. I th-think something t-took it."
I followed Trixie through the doorway, as she rolled her eyes. "A sword, right. These two Hollows friends of yours, then?"
We dropped into the creek, and crossed it once more to make our way back up to the road. Streamers of black, like faint trails of ink, wove around our hooves as we moved through the water. The river we had fought Apple Bloom beside had been much more clean than this one. "N-no, at least...I d-don't think s-so. Did the m-mare tell you an-anything?"
"Nothing except the usual." Trixie put on a mocking voice as she rolled her eyes. "Bored, something happened, afraid, then lonely. Think she got trapped under a shelf and then gave up. Boring all the way through."
What a way to describe the entirety of a pony's soul. But then, the stallion hadn't given me much information either. Would it be preferable to be like Apple Bloom when you were drained, so that you still had memories from the time before, or was it better to have already been so Hollowed that there was nothing left but base instincts? When I was to be drained, would I want to be aware, and remembered? Or did I want to persist until I was long maddened, so I never felt the pain of having my very being stolen from me?
I didn't want either. I wanted to survive, so that I never had to make that choice, so that I never had to feel it either way. But after everything I'd seen, survival seemed increasingly unlikely with every passing moment.
We left the bookstore, and I was confident I wouldn't need to return here, even with Dinky. We had gleaned all that we could, and all that remained now was two Hollows and an empty building. I was merely satisfied that it had not become three.
* * *
The road followed the river, and we followed the road. As we pushed uphill, we noticed the fog had begun to thicken around us, and visibility seemed to shrink by a hoofstep with every twenty we took. We pressed closer together as the mist pressed in on us both, and tall, dark shapes loomed upwards on the periphery of our sight.
They didn't move, which barely helped our nerves, and we eventually forced ourselves to approach one by the side of the road—where we found only a long-dead pine, light of needles and colored brown from an eternity of death without decay. We had entered a forest without realizing it, and the knowledge that we were surrounded only by trees was at least a small comfort.
We pressed onwards. I was beginning to have trouble pushing through in particular, while Trixie was unimpeded; we worked out a moment later that the clouds were much more real to me, as a pegasus, than they were to Trixie. For her, they were little more than cold air that our vision was unable to pierce. For me, it felt as though I were underwater, and I had to struggle to push forward as their density increased. I had long since given up on breathing exercises, and felt a bit light-headed, but I suspected that a living pegasus would have been suffocated within this fog bank. Or perhaps they would drown, since it felt as though we moved through more water than air along our way.
“St-stop,” I groaned, and Trixie did so as she turned to face me. “Wh-what about the r-r-iver? The mist sh-should be absorbed by the w-water, so it’ll be easier g-going.”
“So now you want to trudge uphill while hock-deep in a freezing creek? Fantastic.” Trixie whined, but she moved to the river and slid down into the water. I struggled to follow, and when I finally joined Trixie, I found her standing in the water already. She let out a litany of groans and pained hisses as she tried to get used to the cold water, and I joined her with my own as my hooves splashed under the surface.
At the very least, I was right; the river was where the mist became too heavy and coalesced into liquid, and that left a few leg-lengths of open air above the surface. I could see a good deal further upriver, and so long as I kept my head low, I could move at almost a normal walking pace, aside from the minor struggle of wading upstream.
But there was one other problem; the water itself. Both Trixie and I found our eyes drawn to the flowing stream, where large inky blobs flowed over stones that had long been dyed black. They were some form of heavy fluid, and they dragged against the stones at the bottom of the river, while the clean water flowed quickly over them. There, they broke apart into smaller and smaller lumps, and eventually, they became little more than the thin streamers we’d seen downstream.
We both looked at each other, as we waited for the other to say something. I didn’t want to have to slog my way through the thick fog, but would this be worse? Trixie was clearly just as repulsed by it as I, but would she be stubborn enough to bear it until I gave up and suggested that we move back to the road?
The decision was made for us when a black blob bumped against my hoof, and smeared the viscous bile across my leg. It felt like mucous, as though a giant had blown his nose into the river, but it was colored so dark that it seemed like pure black. Once more I was reminded of the interior of my bottomless bag, or our cutie marks. And all of this combined into a feeling of such intense revulsion that I wanted to puke again.
I dry-heaved as I struggled back out of the water, and Trixie followed me with a pained but self-satisfied smirk across her muzzle. Her own hooves were already dyed black, and she looked just as sick as I, but she’d stuck it out long enough for me to be affected. We both wiped our hooves on the dead grass, and left black smears wherever our hooves touched. We managed to wipe off most of the disgusting stuff, at least, but it stained our fur still. We’d need to wash them properly in clean water to remove whatever filth had contaminated this stream.
“L-let’s just-” I retched again. “Just t-take the road?”
Trixie nodded, and led the way as I continued to struggle forward through the fog.
* * *
It began to rain shortly after.
I was actually surprised that it hadn’t started earlier. There was clearly enough moisture in the air, as we headed up into the mountains, but for some reason it seemed content to linger as fog. Even when it did start raining, the fog only thinned slightly, and didn’t actually ever clear properly. Still, it allowed me to move forward at almost a slow canter again. The rain was also very pleasant to feel on our backs, and we were able to scrape away more of the black ink as the droplets soaked our fur.
As the fog thinned, we could see the trees around us a little bit more clearly, but found they looked no healthier. They might be evergreens, but that did not persist for so long after the forest had died. The road also cleared somewhat, and Trixie was the one who noticed a stone bridge, old and crumbling, which connected the road to a path that led up the hill. “Hollow, fog is low-hanging, right?”
“Y-yeah?”
“Well, then let’s go this way, and try to get above it. We have to be high enough now that we won’t have to go far. It’ll let us get a good look at where we are too, and I can check our map.” Trixie started across the bridge, and I followed her, though I couldn’t help but peer over the side at the river once more.
It was as though I was looking down into a great, sunless crevasse. I could see no detail, only blank, dark blackness at the bottom of the river. The only clue that told me that the river still had a bottom was how the water flowed over the top of it, as though the dark sludge that had twisted the riverbed was more solid than fluid. If the dark ink that had poisoned the river actually flowed this far upstream, it was impossible to tell.
I swallowed, as I continued to follow Trixie over the bridge and up the hill. I was very glad that we had chosen not to wade upstream, fog be damned.
While the road we had followed thus far was a gentle upwards slope that followed the river, this path up the side of the valley was much more steep. We both struggled slightly when the path required a step up, or when it turned thin around a rock that jutted out of the hill. Even Trixie seemed uncomfortable with how close we both were to the edge, where a slip could turn fatal, even if only temporarily. I had no desire to plunge downwards, and I especially had no desire to climb up and out of the dead thicket under us.
But Trixie was correct in her decision; the fog thinned quickly as we ascended, and soon my eyes began to wander. I saw the tops of the evergreens, and a great looming mass in the distance, which had to be the other side of the valley. Eventually, shapes and colors resolved themselves into rock formations and a dead forest, and we completely escaped the fog.
We were in the shadow of the sunset up here, but this was the clearest I had seen the world around me for a very long time. The mountains stretched for miles, as we were making our way into the Canterhorn range now, and the path to get here had been too curved to look back and see Ponyville. I could barely see the smoke from the Everchaos. I tried to see if I could spot Canterlot itself from here, but it was little more than a silhouette amongst the clouds.
The rain for which we had been thankful fell from a cloudbank above us, which was dyed red from the sunlight. We were sandwiched between the light rainstorm, and the thick fog below. As I peered down, I noticed that just like the river that followed the valley, the fog seemed to be flowing downhill very slowly. No wonder I had been having trouble pushing through it—it wasn’t just thick, but I had been actively moving against the flow.
My hoof slipped, and I gasped as I scrambled back from the edge. The rain was beginning to wash away the dirt of the path, and turn it into mud. As the mud slowly oozed downhill, it exposed bare rocks, and the wet rain made those slippery and treacherous.
Thankfully, we didn’t need to go much further. We passed around a rock at the corner of a hill, and we found ourselves on a large outcropping. An ancient rockslide had halted here, and time, trees, and more rain had turned it flat. That was perfect for us, and for many a pony, it seemed; there was already a small camp set up here.
For a moment, I had a hope that we had stumbled across somepony out in the wilds, but to my sadness, the fire was long dark, and the tent was ragged and full of holes. This place had been abandoned long ago, and we were easily the first travelers in a long time. Trixie continued onwards to the edge of the camp, where our path continued, but it seemed to turn downhill once again. Instead, she looked into the great valley as it spread out before us, and I was stunned into silence as I looked off into the foggy distance.
The valley was easily a mile long, hemmed in by steep mountain walls on either side, and maybe a quarter-mile wide. The fog was present, but it was spread thin over the expanse, and only compressed into the thick mist we had been fighting on the way here at the bottom end of the great gulch below us. The far end of the valley was blocked off by a large dam, made of stained concrete, and we could see the shimmer of water over the wall.
And across all of it—the ruins of Cloudsdale. Ravaged and destroyed buildings lay in haphazard arrangements everywhere, from clumps of disowned fluff, to entire neighborhoods, then fallen warehouses, skyscrapers, and finally, massive industrial buildings at the foot of the dam. The entire pegasus-built city had fallen into this single valley, and an unimaginable amount of construction had been crushed under its own weight here.
At the top of it all, looming over everything else, the great Weather Factory had fallen atop the dam. It had cracked the concrete when it impacted, and black water leaked down the massive wall in a thin rivulet, until it combined into a trailing stream, merged with the river that had been originally dammed up, and became a churning torrent of dark that wound all the way through the valley until it disappeared under the fogbank.
In that moment, I understood why there was so much fog across Equestria, and the sheer amount of death and destruction that this nation had seen since the sun stopped. It all hit me at once, and I reeled, and trembled as my jaw hung open. This had been a great pegasus city, the hub of weather engineering for a huge section of our world, and it had fallen here, where it seemed almost forgotten. It was almost too much, and I nearly pitched back in a coma from shock.
Eventually, Trixie turned to me. “What a mess. Let’s rest up here, and then we’ll go in and find Apple Bloom’s ‘source,’ whatever it is.”
I could only nod, and we began to scrounge up wood to re-light the campfire together.
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No doll? Or other form of key to a hidden area?
Bloody teenagers thinking they know better than everyone else.
Cloudsdale is Blight town isn't it? Causes it feels like it gonna be a blight town from the way it been described.
This has been a lot of fun, nice to just have a nice dark fantasy adventure to tuck into each week!
10355581
Awww, thankya! I'm actually really happy with how consistent my update schedule has been, and I plan to keep it that way. I'm very happy someone noticed!
10354497
I thought that to some extent from the way the valley is described.
We have already been given some idea of what to expect from the encounters that will be coming up, though, and that's evoking ideas of a different Dark Souls area.
I always enjoy the world building parts. Gives the characters time to rest and be a bit more relaxed.
Nicely done the world building is especially nice love the way it's described.
So...when Holly or Trixie drains a soul, do they get stronger? Like...is there a way for her to improve or "level up"??