30 - Canary in the Coal Mine
We left Ponyville behind, as Pinkie waved us goodbye from the gate. I couldn’t help but keep looking back at her over my shoulder for as long as I could; no matter how far, she just kept watching and waving her hoof. I wondered if she’d still be there in that exact same spot when we got back, ready to hug every one of us all over again. I could only dream of a welcoming nearly as pleasant after the past few expeditions I’d been on.
To my surprise, we didn’t follow the road; we actually started off by following the wall around the northeast side of Ponyville. By the time we heard them lock the gate back up tight, we were already a good distance out into the fog, and it wasn’t more than a distant rumble. I almost mistook it for thunder at first; there was a distant storm rolling in from the east, and I could feel the air shifting over my wings as it approached.
Raindrops confirmed it as well, out loud for everypony’s benefit. “Storm moving in from the Celestial Sea. It’s probably hitting Baltimare now, funnily enough.”
Roma looked up into the fog. “Are we gonna be searching the city in a rainstorm?”
Raindrops shrugged, and fluttered her wings to flex her muscles. “Hard to know. It could push over the mountain range, or slide back out to sea, or down the coast to the swamps. We might even miss it entirely while we’re in the tunnel.”
“Let’s hope,” Roma spat. “The fog’s bad enough as it is.”
“Speak for yourself; I like the rain.”
“You would,” Roma muttered, with a roll of her eyes. Raindrops gave her a sour look, but didn’t respond, and we moved onwards in silence.
We passed by a couple of farms as we searched for the remains of the rail line. We didn’t stop to loot any of the crumbling buildings, mostly because there wasn’t much left to loot; the Ashen Wallowers had long been here, cleaned it out, and left their own graffiti. Curiously, it seemed as though they'd found some glowing chalk of their own, and used it to deface the more-intact buildings. I couldn’t understand any of their language, despite how infuriatingly close it was to Equuish, but I suspected the glowing words translated to nothing nice.
The rail line itself ran between two farms as it left the town, and was reinforced by a raised strip of gravel that kept the track level over the uneven terrain. The steel of the rails was ruined and rusted, and a few pieces had been stolen, while craters had ruined some other sections of the track. The land here was scarred from fighting, or perhaps sabotage. Either way, it was done too long ago to find any clues as to what truly happened.
The Ponyville barricade loomed above us, and I noticed that they’d not even left a gap for the train. Instead, they’d built the wall right over the track, so that it ran into a dead end made of steel, bricks, and wood logs. If this track was ever to be repaired and trains to be run again, the wall would need to come down first, or at least this section. The other end of the track ran deep into the fog until it became impossible to pierce, and that line was what we started to follow away from Ponyville.
Most of us walked along the rails directly, but I noticed Posey preferred to traverse the plain terrain to our right, while Rivet did the same on the left. I preferred it up here, closer to the sky, even if only by a few leg-lengths. It also let me look around us in all directions, or at least allowed me to peer helplessly into the mist in search of movement. Raindrops had taken point, perhaps the most eager of all of us to reach our destination and get this done with. Maud walked roughly in the center of the herd at all times, a living boulder tromping along the metal path, an anchor to all of us.
After a few minutes of silence, aside from the crunching of our hooves across the gravel, Merry May looked down the slope to Rivet. “S-so, um, you said you rode the t-train through this tunnel before?”
“Oh, yeah.” Rivet chuckled as he looked up the hill towards the nervous pegasus. “All the time—when I was younger, I actually used to ride the trains with the construction materials, so I could get jobs in construction on-site. Went all across the country like that, following where the construction was happening. I settled down eventually in Ponyville though, just in time for the crystal castle to pop up. Lots of work in town after that, supporting the castle—and the school, when that needed to be built a few years later.”
“The t-trains haven’t run...r-recently, though?” Merry asked sadly. Rivet glanced up at her in confusion, and she explained, “I w-was hoping I could ask somepony why they s-stopped running...I was g-going to Manehattan, but they stopped the t-train in Ponyville and sh-shut down the lines.”
“Oh! I…” Posey spoke up, and those of us who were listening to the conversation turned to look at her. “I can actually answer that. The demons started to attack trains all over Equestria, which lasted for about a week, until they shut down the passenger lines. I saw it firsthoof, even.”
“They attacked t-trains? While they were m-moving?” Merry squeaked in fear.
Posey shivered as she started chewing her lip. “Yeah. I was going from Fillydelphia to Salt Lick City—I have, or maybe had, a brother out there—when the train car suddenly rocked to one side. We looked outside, and this flying demon with huge claws had grabbed the roof. It actually pulled the car off the tracks, and derailed the whole thing.”
“H-how did you s-survive?” Merry asked, with shock in her voice.
“I didn’t,” Posey said sadly. “Everypony in the car got smashed to pieces, but we all started to wake up around a week later. By then they’d hauled all of us off to Ponyville, so I woke up there. Apparently the military killed that demon, but the train and the track were both wrecked.”
“Damn, I heard about that. Did you ever actually get to Salt Lick?” Rivet asked sympathetically.
Posey snorted at the question. “Nah, I've been stuck in Ponyville since before the walls went up. My luggage didn’t come with me, so for all I know, it’s still rotting out in the wilds somewhere, with all of my bits and the rest of my belongings.”
After a few moments, Raindrops spoke up. “I’m sorry to hear about that, Posey. When we get back to Ponyville, I’ll go out and look along that line, to see if I can find anything. I can carry you with me, if you want.”
“Well, not much point now,” Posey said, with a sad chuckle. “But I do appreciate it. Maybe Celestia can give me a ride out to Salt Lick, instead of being knighted.”
The conversation didn’t really go anywhere past that. Talking about the demons had reminded all of us that they were still a threat, that they still stalked the fog outside Ponyville, and we didn’t want to risk attracting them. For the most part, everypony clutched their weapons a little tighter as we followed the tracks through the fog, and warily watched the grey mist all around us.
* * *
The mountain range sloped upwards gently at first, so that we didn't realize we'd been walking up the slope until we had to dig our hooves in with each step, and those steps kicked gravel back down the slope in tiny cascades. Very quickly, we found ourselves on a narrow plateau of stone, which had been carefully cut and quarried from the mountain.
Decades, or maybe centuries ago, this had been the outside of the coal mine. We could still tell; pile of weathered stones had been left in great, ugly heaps off to the sides of the track, after they'd been pulled from the mine and the valuable coal separated out. Streaks of black still stained the rocks, thin remnants of ore that had been too thin to be extracted.
As we moved further in, we found ourselves before a small railroad station, and beyond, the black maw of the tunnel entrance. The station held nothing useful for us, just an emergency telegraph and a bunch of faded pamphlets about the former mine. The general message seemed to be that the tunnel was safe, but the side tunnels of the mine itself had never been sealed, though they were barricaded off and blatantly signposted. So long as we followed the tracks, we didn't need to be concerned about those side tunnels.
As we all moved as a group towards the entrance, the pegasi—myself included—found it hard to force ourselves forward. While we could feel wind rushing out of the tunnel towards us, it was still impossibly dark within. I was particularly nervous about the black expanse of nothingness before us; I'd only just barely survived the black lake, and I felt a disturbing familiarity with the abyss before us.
Maud had no such compunction. She didn't even look terribly worried; she was practically about to walk into the pitch-black tunnel, when she paused, and turned back to us. "You should all have lights. I can navigate without them, but we will be a lot slower."
I couldn't pull out my little lightgem fast enough, and it rattled against my breastplate now that it was exposed. Several other ponies had lights of their own; Rivet had a large, bright lightgem with a grip that he clenched between his teeth, which looked like it had been crafted for industrial work. Raindrops had a necklace of her own with a more finely-cut gem, while Roma had a magic-powered electric flashlight, which she hooked into a loop of her armor. Maud pulled out a mining headlamp, while Star Bright, of course, merely used his horn to shine a beam of magic light into the tunnel. Only Posey and Merry May had no lights of their own, and they stuck close by, in between me and Rivet.
Reluctantly, we started to walk down the tracks into the dark tunnel. Our lights did a good job piercing the lightless veil, but the fog persisted in here as well, and we could only see maybe thirty leg-lengths forward, at the absolute most.
Before we left it totally behind, I spared one last glance at the entrance. Already, it was a pinprick of light in the dark length of the endless tunnel, as we left the comforting embrace of sunlight far behind ourselves.
I could have sworn I saw the light flicker, just for a second. As though something entered the tunnel behind us, or moved across the light. But soon, the ember of light winked out entirely, as we moved deeper under the mountain, and it didn't matter any more.
* * *
We paused a short while later, at the entrance to one of the side tunnels. Though we'd passed by a few already, they had been short little passages, and when Roma shined her electric flashlight over the barricade, we could clearly see the end. But now they were starting to get deeper, and they curled away through the stone. We could only see up to the first bend, and the shadow of the curve within.
Maud opened up a bit as we looked around the stone, or, at least, as much as she seemed capable of opening up. There was just the faintest hint of liveliness added to her voice. She reminded me more of a tour guide, as she led a group of foals on a field trip. "We're half a mile deep inside the mountain. This is where the Royal Equestrian Blasting Company found the main vein of coal ore. Then they started to widen the tunnel so they could lay down tracks for their minecarts, to haul the ore to the surface—"
Rivet coughed to interrupt her, and she looked at him. "That wasn't a real cough." The edge in her tone was subtle. Knowing Maud, the metaphorical knife may have even been completely blunted, more of a club. The implicit dissatisfaction was no less biting.
"Uh. No.” He grinned sheepishly at her. “But we should keep moving, you can tell us more about coal as we walk."
Maud simply shrugged in agreement, and we started to move again, bringing the chorus of clopping hooves echoing through the tunnels once more.
* * *
"...Most of this mountain range is formed out of metamorphic granite and marble. This is speculated to be because continents are actually large rocks, called tectonic plates, which move around the planet over the course of millenia. A very long time ago, the continent on which Gryphonstone is located pushed against the continent where Equestria is now, which forced the stone upwards to form a mountain range on the leading edge of both continents—"
"W-wait, hang on," Merry May suddenly said, as she interrupted Maud's lecture. She looked twitchy; she constantly glanced back and forth down the tunnel. I followed her embered eyes, but there was nothing there, and she clearly didn't see anything either. "Do you hear that?"
We were all silent for a few moments, as we stood still in the tunnel. The echoes of our hoofsteps faded quickly; soon, the only thing we could hear was the sound of our own breathing. Mostly my own—though practice had made the anatomical process mostly automatic, my throat and lungs were both still damaged, so my breathing was ragged and punctuated by long, slow wheezes.
After a few moments, Roma shot Merry May a glare. "Do we hear...what, exactly?"
The Hollow pegasus looked even more nervous than usual. "I heard...or...I th-thought I heard...um…" She glanced around the group, then shook her head. "N-nevermind. Just my im-imagination."
"...Okay?" Roma muttered, before she shook her head and started to trot down the tunnel again. "Whatever. Keep talking about rocks, Maud."
"Okay. The Himallama mountains are speculated to be another example of this kind of geological interaction, with two plates being forced against each other over the period of millions of years…"
* * *
Our positions drifted slightly as we moved down the tunnel. Mostly Merry May stayed a lot closer to Rivet and Raindrops, while Roma wanted to put distance between herself and the nervous Hollow. I ended up trotting beside Star Bright, who pointed his light mostly at the tracks under our hooves while we moved.
After a bit, I glanced at him, and noticed his lips were moving. Short words, under his breath, and I had to really strain to hear him over the sounds of horseshoes on metal and the quiet murmur of conversation around us. He seemed to be counting, as he pointed his light forward.
Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me. I gently poked him in the shoulder, and that got his attention. I asked quietly, "Are you...c-counting?"
"Oh!" His eyes brightened behind his glasses, as he really focused on me. "Yes, actually, as we move. Though that's been making it hard to keep track, admittedly; it'd be easier if we stayed still for a few minutes."
He turned back towards the tunnel, and his lips started to move again as he resumed his counting. I blinked at him for a moment in confusion, before I gently poked his shoulder a second time.
"Hm? Yes, what is it?"
"W-what are you counting?" I put a bit of emphasis on the question this time, in hopes of earning a full explanation.
He looked at me, confused, for a few moments. Then, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world, he tapped one of the wooden beams of the track under our hooves. "The track crossties."
He turned back to face the tunnel, and I tapped his shoulder again. This time, he looked annoyed at the continued interruptions, but before he could say anything, I asked, "W-why are you counting the t-track crossties?"
"Oh!" Realization flickered across his face. "Well, that depends, actually. Is the space between crossties consistently equidistant?"
I blinked at him in confusion. "Huh?"
He tapped the wooden beam under his hoof again. "Is the distance between track crossties the same, all the way down the length of the track?"
I looked down the tunnel one way, then the other. "I g-guess so? They l-look like they are, or at least c-close enough I'd need to m-measure them."
The stallion's face brightened. "I thought so too! So I started counting them properly, up to the edge of our lights. There's less crossties visible, so that means either there's more space between them, or our lights are dimming."
All conversation in the tunnel came to a sudden end, as everypony froze where they were. Silence reigned, aside from the echoes of our hooves.
"Run that last sentence by me again," Raindrops said quietly, from behind us. "I want to make sure I heard you properly."
He shrugged. "We can see less crossties in front of us, so that means either there's more space between them—which we're reasonably sure there isn't—or our lights are getting more dim. Or less bright, I suppose."
The tunnel was silent for several long seconds, as we all looked at each other, then down the tunnels, and finally at each of our respective light sources. There was no doubt about it; we definitely couldn't see as far down the tunnel as used to, in either direction. What had been thirty leg-lengths was now twenty-five, and it must have happened slowly enough that nopony had noticed. Nopony, that is, save for the spaced-out Hollowed astronomer.
He looked back at us a moment later. "I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear you. Could you repeat your question, but louder this time?"
We all looked at each other again. Rivet tilted his head in confusion at Star Bright. "Uh. Nopony said anything."
Star Bright blinked dumbly at the larger stallion. "Are you sure? I thought I heard somepony whisper a question."
Slowly, we all shook our heads...except for Merry May, whose eyes were wide. "You hear them too?"
Star Bright looked around the tunnel, and his ears flicked in different directions. "I hear...something…? But I'm not sure what, it sounded like a pony’s voice before…"
The tunnel was silent, except for the distant echoes of our hoofsteps. Except...nopony had moved in a minute or two. Why could I still hear that?
I swallowed, and looked at them. "D-does anypony else hear hoofsteps, o-or echoes of…" I trailed off, as Rivet, Posey, Raindrops, Roma, and Maud slowly and silently shook their heads.
Posey in particular moved closer to Rivet, as ancient herd instincts compelled all of us to huddle closely around the largest member of the herd for safety. "Okay…" she nickered nervously. "Getting creeped out now…"
Roma glanced at me, Star Bright, and Merry May. "It's just the Hollows hearing whatever it is, maybe they're losing it? Down too long in the midnight sea, and all that?"
"Let's not jump to conclusions," Raindrops declared. "I don't like this tunnel any more than they do, so let's keep moving. Maud, how deep are we?"
"I...think we're about three miles down the tunnel." For once, a flicker of emotion crossed Maud's face. A flash of uncertainty, as she made her educated guess.
"Then we're past the halfway point." Raindrops pointed out. "It's faster to keep pushing forward, all the way through. If we turn back now, then it'll be longer, and we'll need to find an overland route to Baltimare."
Rivet nodded, as he peered down the tunnel. "Yeah...yeah, that makes sense. Let's get moving again, everypony."
We started to move down the tunnel again, with a little more urgency in our step. The sounds of our hoofsteps drowned out the phantom echoes I’d been hearing...at least for the moment.
* * *
Now that I was aware of it, I couldn’t help but watch the edge of my little pool of light as we broke into a gallop down the train tunnel. It was like watching paint dry, or a shadow crawl across a wall: the change was just too slow to see when you were watching it constantly, but if you looked away, and then looked back a moment later, it had undeniably changed.
It wasn’t the only thing that had changed. I peered into the black abyss of the tunnel, and I swore I saw things. But that was impossible, because there was no light down there, nothing to reflect light or illuminate the endless tunnel before me, until we moved our pool of light further along. I saw it in the side tunnels too, as we passed by, but only in the brief moments before our light flooded the tunnel, and the brief moment after we moved on.
There was movement in the shadows. Black on black, things darting and slithering in the dark. I couldn't see them specifically, but I could see the movement, or I saw where they had been only seconds before. The void where something should have been, but when the light was shined on it, there had never been anything there at all. It was like trying to see something just at the edge of your vision, but it always hid as you turned your head.
Everypony else saw them too. I knew they did, but nopony said anything. Nopony wanted to be the first, because we were seeing impossible things. The first pony who admitted to seeing them, they’d be called crazy. I knew it. We all knew it, and we didn’t need to agree that we knew the things we couldn’t admit to knowing.
Right?
But Merry May, she was very happy to admit that she was hearing things, even if she wouldn’t admit to seeing them. She was very loudly talking about how she could hear them as we galloped quickly down the tunnel.
“How can you not hear that?” She cried, head twisting wildly to look all around herself. “That’s so loud, where is it coming from? Where are they?”
“What are you talking about?” Roma screeched. “I don’t hear anything, you crazy rutting Hollow!”
“The voices!” Merry May howled. “So many voices, coming-coming from everywhere at once! They’re all talking and laughing and crying and screaming-”
“I can’t-” Star Bright gasped as his hoof caught on a railroad crosstie. He’d been moving too fast, and couldn’t watch where he was putting his hooves. He stumbled, and tipped forward in an ungainly mess with a terrified yelp.
Our frantic gallop came to a sudden, screeching stop as we kicked up gravel, and Rivet spun on his hoof. Star was just at the edge of the pool of light, but Rivet grabbed the nape of his armor in his teeth, and started galloping back while he held the stallion.
“Everypony stop!” Raindrops shouted, and almost everypony staggered and slowed. “We’re not leaving anypony behind, and I don’t hear anything! You three, explain what the hay is—”
“We can’t stop!” Merry May whinnied in blind terror, as she nervously drummed her hooves on the gravel floor of the tunnel. “If we stop, they’ll catch up to us! We have to keep moving!”
“What will catch up to us?!” Raindrops barked, but Merry May had already bolted in wild panic. It took everything I had not to follow her, as she galloped down the tunnel into the darkness, and disappeared from our sight.
I could hear them too. Whispers in languages I couldn’t understand, that had never been spoken by ponies. Voices of a hundred thousand dead, all around us, crushing our pathetic little light, waiting to snuff it out for good and draw us in with them. I couldn’t let them catch us, but I couldn’t run off on my own but I couldn’t let them catch us but I couldn’t stay I had to run I had to run I HAD TO RUN
We could hear Merry May’s hooves as they kicked up gravel and she bolted, unseen, down the tunnel and away from us. We all stayed put, panting quietly as Star Bright and I shook in terrified panic. It took everything I had to stay exactly where I was, with panic overwhelming me. I could see how much Star Bright wanted to run, as he struggled against Rivet’s strength.
And then suddenly everything stopped.
Merry May’s hoofsteps just ended, very suddenly. As if she came to a dead stop, except there was no skidding of gravel, no rattle from down the corridor, no other steps. At the same time, the whispers were just gone. They had been getting louder the longer we stayed here, and had only reached the level of normal conversation when suddenly they stopped altogether.
There was only the sound of our panting, as we all recovered from our brief gallop down the abandoned train tunnel.
I trembled uncontrollably as I looked at Roma and Raindrops. “Th-the whispers. They were-they’re gone. S-Silent, now.”
They glanced at Star Bright, who nodded quickly, but I still saw his eyes darting amongst the darkness. Behind them, Posey looked incredibly nervous; had she only just started to hear them, before they were cut off? She was the next-most Hollowed among us.
Maud only glared down the corridor, back the way we’d come, and she watched for any movement with her massive stone club at the ready. But there was none to be found. There were just seven ponies sitting in a tunnel, shining their lights out through the darkness.
Raindrops took a step forward down the tunnel, but only a step. She stayed well within the light. “Merry?” She called quietly, then a bit louder. “Merry May? It’s okay. Follow my voice, come back to us.”
There was no response.
“Merry May!” Raindrops said again, with worried agitation in her voice. “It’s alright, I’m not mad at you, just come back! It’s safe here!”
There was no movement. No noise from further down the tunnel. No hoofsteps, no panting, not even a scream. Not even echoes of a noise. The dark tunnel was silent.
“I don’t-I don’t like this.” Raindrops growled. “I really don’t like this.”
“W-we should keep moving,” Maud declared, but her voice trembled.
If Raindrops noticed, she didn’t comment on it. “Yeah. Yeah, let’s start moving again. Slowly. Roma, follow her hoofprints. If she ran down a side tunnel, we can lead her back out.”
For once, Roma’s only response was a silent nod.
We started to carefully move down the train tunnel again. My hooves trembled, but as more time passed, they began to shake less. Star Bright didn’t seem to recover like I had; he was still shaking across his body, and his eyes and the light from his horn kept darting wildly around the tunnel. It was distracting, but twitchy magelight was better than no magelight at all.
Roma was careful not to disturb the indentations in the gravel where Merry May had kicked up the loose stones, and we all stayed on the other side of the tunnel to her path, just to make sure. Eventually, Roma held up her hoof. “Wait, the trail…”
She looked back down the path, and followed it again with her eyes. She peered down the tunnel past us, but the gravel down there was undisturbed, so far as we could tell.
“Raindrops, the trail just...ends here. There’s no side tunnel, there’s no hole, there’s nowhere she could have gone.”
Raindrops shook her head. “She had to have gone somewhere. Ponies don’t just disappear.”
“Look for yourself!” Roma shook her hoof at the end of the path. “Step, step, step, nothing. It just ends there, like she just...ceased to exist, mid-stride!”
“What the hay is going on?” Posey whimpered.
Maud stepped forward. “Gravel doesn’t eat ponies. It’s too small. And there’s no such thing as quick-gravel.” Roma looked like she was going to argue, but Maud glared at her. “I know rocks. I know tunnels. Something is wrong here. But I don’t know what.”
Rivet looked down at the stallion still shivering at his hooves, then back up at her. “Knight Maud. What’s your call?”
Maud didn’t respond for a moment, but Raindrops used that moment to glare at Rivet. Raindrops had settled into a leadership role, but Maud was officially in charge, even if the reminder from Rivet was unnecessary.
When Maud spoke, she was back to her usual monotone; clear and concise, and seemingly without emotion. “We should keep following the tunnel. Roma, take the lead. Look for any more hoofsteps. If we find Merry May, then we can continue as a full group.”
“And what if we don’t?” Raindrops asked icily.
“We can’t stay here.” Maud declared simply. “Something is wrong here. If Merry May is gone, then she’s gone.”
“So we’re leaving her?” Raindrops lowered her head, and spat on the clean steel rail underhoof.
Maud was impassive as ever. “Do you know where she is?”
“No, but—what kind of question is that?”
“An important one. Let’s go.” Maud started walking along the tracks, and after a moment, Roma moved with her. Rivet grabbed Star Bright’s collar in his teeth again and dropped in behind them.
As sure as the wind, I didn’t want to stay. I went with them, but turned to look at Raindrops and Posey behind me, in an ever-shrinking pool of light. After a moment, Raindrops snarled “Stars-dammit.” Then she turned and started to trot to catch up to us, with Posey in tow.
* * *
Nopony spoke, not even Maud. We were too busy listening for any movement besides our own, and we warily watched the darkness with trepidation, waiting for something to leap out and attack us. But nothing ever did, and that was worse.
This wasn’t like the demons. They were terrifying because they were big, and strong, and had teeth and claws and would rip a pony limb from limb if given the chance. But the demons were, at the most basic level, wild animals. They had a presence, and if you knew where they were, then you could avoid them, or run from them.
Even being hunted by ponies, pigs, or skeletons, wasn’t too different. They still had to occupy space, and they had to cross the distance to get close to you. They might be able to ambush you, or you could ambush them. No matter what, we all still had to play by the same rules, and you still had to actually be present to hurt the other, even with guns and bows and cannons.
This darkness was absolutely nothing like that.
There was nothing. There was absolutely nothing in the darkness. I know what I had seen, or maybe what I hadn’t seen, except it hadn’t really been there. Now that I wasn’t seeing it anymore, I wasn’t sure they had ever been there, just like the shape that followed me out of the lake. It was only there in my mind, and maybe not in reality, but it was just as dangerous as if it had been a physical creature.
I had heard the whispers too. They had come from absolutely everywhere, but what were they? There had been screaming, and panting. Voices of ponies being chased, or trying to escape things. But they spoke no language that I knew, and their languages used vowels and noises I couldn’t replicate, even if my throat was undamaged. Voices that could only be made with alien throats and mouths, and they had been screaming too. Had they disappeared into the dark, just like Merry May had?
Where did it come from, this consuming abyss? Had it always been here, and the coal mine had unearthed it? But there hadn’t been any hints of that. Surely, they would’ve blocked it off if this had been happening when the mine was dug out. Instead, they kept digging, and ran a train through the extended tunnel. So this couldn’t have always been happening.
What was the dark? I’d been encountering pockets of whatever this was all throughout my journey, even from the moment I first awoke. My cutie marks had been consumed by it, and when I had bled after my first dozen deaths, even my blood had been black. It had been present in abandoned buildings in Ponyville, and Dinky had dragged us through it in her frantic teleport. The bottomless bags were filled with the abyss as well, and Trixie had kicked me into a lake of darkness, which I had only just barely escaped.
One thing was consistent; the sun’s light burned away the darkness. In the sunlight, I felt purified, like a pony again, and the pockets of darkness could not exist in direct sunlight. Even on the shores of the black lake, the water could only lap at the sun-lit shore, and it had kept me safe once I emerged into the light. The cold mud that had stained me then had boiled away, repelled by the warmth of Celestia’s sun.
Even now, our inferior sources of light burned away the darkness that filled the tunnel, but they were slowly failing us. Even as I watched, I saw once again that our pool of safety was shrinking. The dark was intensifying, dimming our lights. It sought to swallow us whole, like it had Merry May. We weren’t safe here. We would never be safe in this tunnel. The only place we would be safe was outside, in the sunlight. We had to reach the end of the tunnel, we had to see the sun again.
Behind me, Star Bright suddenly stiffened in Rivet’s grip, and I knew he could hear the whispers again. He started to squirm, to try and escape, but he was being held too tightly, and the older unicorn was too weak to wriggle free of Rivet’s grip. Merry May had been the first to hear them, even when the rest of us couldn’t; she had been our canary in the coal mine, and now that she was gone, we had no warning until the darkness was already upon us.
Raindrops took notice of his wriggling, Rivet’s grunts as he kept the stallion restrained, and how nervous I must have looked. She whinnied to get everypony’s attention. “The Hollows are getting agitated—It’s happening again!”
We couldn’t stop trotting, so we had to talk while moving, even though Rivet was slowed by how he had to fight Star Bright. Posey started to hyperventilate as she muttered to herself, “What do we do, what do we do, what do we do, we can’t stay here—”
“Shut up!” Roma snarled. “Shut up, and don’t run off like Merry May did, you know what happened to her!”
“No we don’t!” Posey shouted. “We don’t know what happened to her, nopony knows what happened to her! She’s just gone! I don’t want that to happen to me!”
“Everypony, clam up!” Raindrops shouted, and her voice echoed down the tunnel into the darkness. “Maud, how far are we from the end of this tunnel? You said it was six miles long!”
Maud still looked unsure, and her hoof caressed the grip of her stone club nervously. “We can’t be far. We should see the end soon. Less than a mile.”
“Then we push.” Raindrops declared. “We all gallop, together, with the lights. Merry May ran off by herself into the dark with nothing, but we all have our own, and we can stay together. Six dim lights is almost as good as one bright light. We just need to get out of this tunnel!”
The lights had dimmed enough that they no longer illuminated the ceiling of the tunnel, and I saw something dart through the gloom directly above us. My breath caught in my throat, and Posey glanced at me, then followed my eyes, as we peered through the gloom together.
Raindrops stamped her hoof on the steel railroad, and the sound of her horseshoe echoed again. “On three, we all start galloping! Stay together, and the ponies who can direct their lights, point them forward! We can’t afford to trip over anything in the tunnel, but we can’t stay here!”
We all nodded nervously, and Raindrops shouted, “One, two, three!”
And then we all broke into a panicked gallop. That we ran together, as a herd, kept us sane in the darkness. We knew to break away from that herd was death, that the unseen predators would start to pick us off one by one, as they prowled the edges of our light. We couldn’t afford to stop, we couldn’t afford to stumble, we couldn’t leave anypony behind.
Rivet, in the back, was the slowest. He was a burly earth pony, and a strong stallion, but he carried a struggling unicorn in his teeth. He could have easily outpaced us all, if he dropped Star Bright and left him to fend for himself against the dark. But he kept his grip tight, even as the darkness lapped at his flanks at the back of our little pool of safety. For a moment, he looked as though he might fall behind entirely, but he grunted through his muzzle and snorted steam through his nose as the touch of the cold darkness behind him gave the stallion a second wind.
Posey and I galloped together, and I could see her ears twitch wildly as she heard the whispers, just like I could, even though they were faint. But they were growing louder, over the sound of our hoofsteps in the tunnel, and soon we could hear words and screaming and terrible song once more. Posey in particular seemed to be getting even more agitated than I was; tears flowed from her embered eyes as she whimpered, between breaths, “I can—I can hear her! Merry May’s back there, behind us! She’s calling for help!”
“No, she’s not!” Roma spat back at us. “You can go back and join her if you want, but I’m getting the hay out of here!”
“Everypony stay together!” Raindrops shouted. “I see it! I see light!”
I could see it too; a pinprick of light in the far distance, the light of a candle in the endless abyss. Just like a candle, it bobbed and shook and flickered, and I couldn’t tell if there was something between us and the light, or if the light itself were moving, or if that was just because of our wild galloping and our traitorous imaginations. Was it getting further away?
No. No, we had to be getting closer. We couldn’t lose it now. We would be lost without the light. As one, our panicked herd poured on the speed, and our breaths grew ragged in the dark. I could hear so many pants and gasps and wheezes, and they seemed to be coming from everywhere; was that just from our group, or was I hearing the last gasps of the dead as they failed to outrun this darkness for themselves?
The light grew brighter, and came into clarity. It wasn’t the end of the tunnel, though I could see that further on—it was yellow and flickered, a torch held in a grasping claw. A figure stood in the dark tunnel before us—tall, feathered and quadruped, and their eyes went wide as we galloped straight towards them.
“Hey! Whoa, slow down, what are you—”
“RUN!” We all shouted at once, and the figure turned, spread her wings, and took flight down the tunnel. I saw claws and a beak; a gryphon! She held her torch before her as we followed behind the gryphon, into the light at the far end of the tunnel.
We exploded into the light, and we were blinded as one. Hooves stumbled over railroad crossties, and ponies yelped as they sprawled into gravel, against the rails, or over each other. We all came to a stumbling stop just outside the tunnel, and shook our heads to clear our vision, even as we dragged ourselves further from the whispers following behind us.
I ended up staring up at the cloudy sky, and the mountainside above the tunnel, but the sun lit up everything in a loving orange glow. We were safe. We had survived. Nopony else had been lost to the darkness.
The whispers didn’t stop, so much as they slowly subsided. They grew more and more quiet as the sunlight warmed our fur, and there was never a point where I couldn’t hear them, only when they grew inaudible. I could still feel them playing over my ears, pulling me in with their siren song, even if they were just silent vibrations.
A moment later, the gryphon fluttered down into view, and waved her torch at us. “Hey! Crazy ponies! What the hay was with all the galloping and noise, what was chasing you?”
Nopony spoke for a few moments, because we didn’t have an answer to give her. Eventually, I heard Raindrops pull herself to her hooves. “Something...inside the tunnel. Something bad. Don’t go in there. Don’t ever go in there.”
“Fine, whatever.” The gryphon growled, “Made me jump, with all that shouting and galloping echoing from inside. How big is the big nasty that had you so scared?”
I sat up to look around. Of all ponies, Star Bright spoke, with his voice trembling. “Too big. Too big. It can’t be measured. It’s the space between stars, ever expanding, ever consuming.”
The gryphon rolled her eyes. “Great, that’s really helpful. Was he Hollow before you guys walked through the tunnel, or is this a new development?”
Raindrops shook her head. “He—look, it’s not important. Whatever that was...it won’t follow us out of the tunnel. I think.” She shivered as she looked back into the tunnel entrance. “...I hope.”
Posey stood next, and shuddered as she staggered a little bit further away, then collapsed again by the side of the tracks. “D-did you see...was there anypony else, b-before us? From the t-tunnel?”
The gryphon hen shrugged, as she landed in the gravel. “You’re the first ponies I’ve seen since I left Fillydelphia, and the only ones I’ve seen come out of this tunnel. You're chasing after somepony, then?”
“No, there was another pony, she...she ran ahead.” Raindrops sighed, and I could hear how exhausted the mare was. Not just physically, but emotionally as well. She looked just a bit paler, more Hollowed, from all this. “You’ve been camped out here, then?”
The gryphon nodded, and pointed a thumb-claw over to a tiny little campsite beside the tunnel entrance. A broken tent had been patched into a lean-to, which kept the rain off a small campfire. An old fire poker had been stabbed into the middle of it, and it looked like she had been tending to the flames before we’d gotten her attention. “Been camped out here for a bit, was considering whether to move through the tunnel or go around the mountains. You say it’s not safe in there?”
“It’ll never be safe.” Raindrops whinnied quietly, as she stared at the tunnel entrance. After a moment, she shook herself. “I’m—sorry. We just…I’m Raindrops.”
“Gilda,” the gryphon said, as she held out a claw.
Raindrops shook it eagerly, then looked around at all of us. “Is it alright if we catch our breath at your camp? We’ve been running for a while in there, we’re exhausted.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever. Was getting lonely anyways. Did you guys bring any food? Game’s been ruttin’ scarce since I crossed the strait...”
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I'm super interested to find out exactly what the abyss is at some point. It's clearly related to the curse and I'll be interested to learn where it came from and what it's trying to do exactly.
Damn this was a fantastic chapter and just because Gilda showed up in it either.
The creepy monster in the tunnel was awesome and the fact that they didn't notice it before they realized that the light was getting dimmer was great.
...? What an odd story.
Now this distinctly reminds me of My Little Metro. Where it's not something in the dark, it is the dark! Which I'm honestly surprised DS never did in the games unless I've missed it. Seriously well written!
10466701
Odd how?
"The Equestrians delved too greedily and too deep. You know what they woke in the darkness of the mines: a bunch of grumpy diamond dogs having a kip shadow and flame"
Meanwhile, the many-angled horror skittering on the tunnel roof above them cleans its mandibles with Merry's bones and chuckles quietly "Silly ponies; never bother to look up."
AAAAAH!!!! MY FAVORITE CHARACTER APPEARED!!!!!
GILDA IS BEST GRIFF!!!
*HUGS THE EVER LOVING FLOOF OUT OF THE AUTHOR!!!*