35 - The Museum
I was expecting a large building, but the Baltimare History Museum was almost comically so.
While I could see the original base structure clearly in the red light of the sunset, it was obvious that the building had been extensively modified since its original construction. The centuries-old brick had been aggressively reinforced with steel supports, which had been stabbed right through the bricks all the way down to the foundation. The museum's core still seemed to be the modest townhouse at the front, which looked as though it was still in use as the museum's lobby, but everything else had to have been more modern additions.
The back of the building was notably taller, more akin to a warehouse, though I couldn't see how far back it extended. The right-most expansion of the building was painted with faded murals of fish and whales and waves, and appeared to be some form of aquarium. Meanwhile, most of the steel reinforcements around the main building seemed designed to support the domed structure around the front left side of the building, which had been itself painted with murals of stars and planets. I recognized the dull red of Bucephalus and the rings of Lucidus, but the others were too faded, and I had never been very knowledgeable about the upper reaches of our firmament.
I was still lost in thought—contemplating whether I should stop to inspect that part of the museum, and maybe clarify that knowledge, to be specific—when a horrific chill overcame me. My skin crawled suddenly, and I gasped as I spun around. Not five paces from me, one of the ghosts stood, a stallion, who seemed just as confused as I was.
His glowing eyes flickered at me dumbly, and he looked down at his hoof, which solidified very slightly. Had he walked right through me, and I'd been too lost in thought to notice his approach? Had he been just as unaware of me, as I was of him?
Realization seemed to strike us both at the same time—I drew my sword, for all the good it would do me, and a ghostly knife appeared in his own hoof. As he waved his own weapon at me, I couldn't help but notice how the ethereal blade sliced through the thin fog between us. That blade was real enough to cut, I could see that, and I had no intention of being sliced to ribbons by a ghost.
So I turned and bolted into the museum's front doors. I paused only long enough to glance back and see if he was giving chase, but the ghost seemed almost relieved (though the wispy visage was no less sad and forlorn). As I fled, his own dagger dissipated, and he silently galloped away into the city.
For the moment, the spike of terror that had risen up in my mind eased back down to its prior neutrality; I had no way of fighting the ghosts, in any real sense. Neither blade, nor magic, nor Gilda's bow had done anything but to disrupt the mist they were made of, and only briefly at that. It would barely have been a fight, even against a single ghost. But as he bolted, I realized where he was going: in the direction of the library, to report my presence, or worse, fetch reinforcements.
All thoughts of lingering here in the museum fled along with the stallion. I needed to get that knife, and get the hay out of here, before more ghosts—maybe the Banshee herself—arrived to overwhelm me with their numbers. I returned my sword to its sheath, bucked the glass doors open in a panic, and leapt over the bouncing glass shards as I entered the museum properly.
I'd been right; this original building had been retrofitted as a lobby. I could still see the marks on the floor where old exhibits had stood, before they had been moved to another part of the building to allow for a wide information desk and crowd partitions. A grand staircase that led up to a second floor was roped off, with a sign labeled "Offices - Employees only." Thankfully, the rest of the building seemed to be just as well signposted. To my surprise, there were still lights on here and there, at varying levels of dimness.
I had been somewhat correct in my guess, about the right side of the structure. A large sign declared that wing to be the "Baltimare Oceanological display," and explained that if you were following the tour, that door was the exit, and instead recommended that visitors start in the planetarium. I eagerly agreed with the sign, as my too-full gut twinged again with nervous anxiety. Fish were the last thing I wanted to think about right now.
Instead, I struggled over an old turnstile that had rusted in place, and entered the planetarium wing. Most of it seemed familiar at a glance, though only at first: the museum seemed to display both major theories regarding our world, with the first being that of the Firmament, which I knew well. In fact, their display, which showed our dome-like world sitting upon the ocean with the sun and moon slowly rotating overhead, was perhaps one of the most detailed that I'd ever seen. It even had the other planets overhead, as they slowly spun on thin cables like our sun and moon in the far reaches of the void above, or rather, the dark recesses of the ceiling.
But several signs pointed out the flaws in this long-held belief, most notably the ocean around our dome. It presumed that our world bobbed on the surface of a great stellar ocean, like a buoy on the water, but our world was far too heavy for that. It would sink beneath the surface in seconds, and we would all drown in the ocean of the void. Ponies had yet to sail to the edge of our world, let alone transition onto the water of the star-ocean. It also pointed out that the other planets floated high above that water, seemingly so buoyant that they were like balloons, which only worked if those other planets were so light that air was like water to them, and that was the ocean upon which they floated.
The next room over was the other major theory, which was relatively new; the display was dedicated to an equine astronomer from nearly two centuries ago, who had been the first to work out the details of what she had apparently described as a "Celesticentric solar system." In that display, Celestia's sun was at the center of everything, and Equus was a sphere, just like every other celestial body above us. They all spun and spiraled around each other on thin cables above me, and it was hypnotizing to watch.
But if anything, this display had even more signs that pointed out flaws in this concept. How did the planets stay in their rotation? Why didn't they just fall into the sun, if it was the center of everything? If they were all spinning as fast as the display described, then why did everything not fly off, like water in a cyclone? What kept our world's air in place, if not its own weight? What kept our own sun stationary, in the great void above? And most importantly, this display implied that the Princess wasn't actually doing anything when she raised and lowered the sun.
Such beliefs and suggestions had never been heretical; the Princess had never persecuted ponies for their beliefs or disbeliefs, unless they were so opposed to the views of Equestria at large that it could result in war. But to suggest that Princess Celestia was a fraud…it had a certain stigma to it, and if nothing else, it was certainly disrespectful. Plus, the sun had been threatened too many times in the past for it to not be under the Princess' control. The pony who had made these signs at least tried to sidestep that insult, by suggesting that perhaps Princess Celestia actually moved Equus around her sun, as opposed to moving her sun around Equus. But that still implied there had been deception in the past.
Another display in the next room seemed to be about the sun itself; ponies had studied it for a very long time, but had very few answers. The actual brightness of the sun made it difficult to study, and there was a large sign warning against ponies from staring at the sun directly, even astronomers, because plenty of ponies had gone permanently blind that way throughout history. Some thought it was a giant ball of molten magma, while others thought it to be a massive comet that the Princess had snared long ago, and controlled to give everypony light and warmth. Another display suggested a familiar theory, that it was Princess Celestia's own Pyromancy flame, and that she externalised it to warm Equus.
None of this, of course, explained why the sun was now stationary. It didn’t even seem to be considered as a possibility that it wouldn’t move across the sky.
Princess Twilight Sparkle, to my surprise, had donated a display of her own creation. She had studied ancient star charts and noticed one that started small and was described as yellow, then a later star chart corrected the "error" by describing it as orange, while a third chart marked it as large and red, correcting them both. But she had noticed it was even larger now, and seemed closer to blue, before it had apparently faded entirely over the last two decades.
The planetarium ended with a long letter, preserved under glass, and apparently written by the former director of the Baltimare Astrological Society to Princess Celestia, as well as her reply. In it, the pony explained that they had been studying those subjects for their entire life, but the Princess had to know more than they did, and could surely assist them by answering some of their questions. They described several times where the Princess had visited the museum over the centuries, and had delighted in the displays and theories presented to her, often praising the detail and creativity present in the models...but apparently she had always dodged any questions as to their accuracy.
Princess Celestia's reply was surprisingly short, aside from her agreement that she quite enjoyed the models and theories of the museum. But in her own words, "If I told my little ponies how the heavens truly function, then they would not be your discoveries, but my own. To be told the answer would be as to ruin it, and devalue all of your hardest work. But the uncertainty of not knowing the answer motivates you to heights even I had not imagined possible, and seeing that hard work and creativity makes me more proud than you can ever know."
It was kind and warm, just like the Princess herself, but I could absolutely understand the director's frustration. Still, it got me to chuckle quietly, in the empty halls of the abandoned building, and that little bit of mirth warmed me for a moment before I returned to my search. I had lingered in this section for too long already, and I had to keep moving.
The next room was modeled after a cave, or quarry, and the walls were painted to represent the geological layers of stone in the ground below. Samples of each stone were placed around the room, as well as some raw ores under glass. While Maud might have been interested in this room—or thought it to be incredibly basic compared to her own deep knowledge of the world beneath our hooves—it was of little interest to me, and I passed through it with barely a glance around.
I hesitated at the threshold to the next room. It had no windows, nor any sources of artificial lighting. While the electric lights had been sparingly used so far to intentionally keep the planetarium dark, the geology hall had been decently well lit. But in the room ahead, it looked as though all of the light bulbs had burned out a long time ago, with nopony left to replace them. I still had my lightgem, though. I pulled it out from under my armor so it rested on my steel breastplate, and watched the darkness only barely recede.
This darkness was unnatural, and I wondered if it might have affected the light bulbs themselves in some way. But this was only the edge of the abyssal spread; here, it was weak, and I wouldn’t need to plumb the depths for long. Hopefully, before I started to hear the whispers again.
I moved slowly into the darkened hall of the museum, with my little pool of light, which only managed to extend a few leg-lengths around me, far more obscuring than the omnipresent fog outside. I couldn’t tell what the theme of this room was, without being able to see the displays, but it looked to be a large room. I swept the edges of my vision with quick glances just in case something emerged...which meant that I wasn’t as focused on where I was going, and my ragged breath caught in my throat as a sharpened speartip was suddenly thrust against it, out of the gloom.
“W-wait, wait!” I yelped as I froze, my voice tiny in the darkened room, but there was no response, and no movement from the spear. Was the owner inspecting me? Evaluating me?
After a moment, I swallowed, and leaned away from the spear. It failed to follow me, and I took a full step back, as I continued to watch the deadly tip of that weapon. “H-hello?”
Tentatively, I stepped to the side, and began to follow the wooden shaft of the weapon. I jumped again as the sharp beak of a gryphon lunged at me from the darkness, but when death failed to find me, I dared to breathe again, and moved forward once more. I found the gryphon again a moment later; stiff, unmoving. And as I inspected their fur and beak closer, and their glassy eyes, I realized I’d nearly impaled myself on a wax statue.
No, even that wasn’t accurate; I poked at the side of the blade and felt it flex. Maybe I would have poked myself in the eye, at worst, but this fake weapon on display would never break the skin. At that moment, I was very glad I was alone, so that nopony—or, including Gilda, no-one—was here to see me scare myself half to death over a historical display.
Said display seemed to be about ancient gryphon weapons and armor, and spoke of their ancient raids against Old Ponyland. Because only a single mountain range had been declared the border between it and Gryphonia, such raids were common occurrences, and had been one of the major factors that had led to the great westward exodus. I glanced at the chart that explained the meaning of each marking on the fake leather armor, but I didn’t have the time, and I suspected Gilda could tell me more about them in much greater detail, if I was curious.
I must have been in a section dedicated to history, then; while I couldn’t see any of the other displays, presumably they were also about Old Ponyland, Flutter Valley and the westward exodus, history so ancient that it had partially passed into old mare’s tales and legend. That meant, since I was here to look for an ancient knife, that I had to be on the right track. If only the lights worked, so that I could search the room properly!
Eventually, I moved towards a wall, or at least one of the wall displays. There, I found the legendary sunstone, placed with great reverence—but in the dark gloom of the hall and the pale light of my lightgem, the cloudy glass revealed itself to be nothing but a cheap replica. I kept the wall on my right as I paced the edge of the room, and passed by an exhibit that displayed a life-size bust of Tirek.
I jumped again when I saw him, and had a momentary flash of memory. I’d been flying with other pegasi, in a formation so loose that it barely merited the name, and then he’d been there. There’d been a horrendous feeling of draining, and then we all fell together. But there, the memory ended.
Tirek had hurt me, I remembered that clearly enough. He’d hurt all of us. Clearly I hadn’t been the only pony to remember that; this statue was part of a display about the old legend of Midnight Castle, but it had recently been defaced. Ponies stuck gum across his body, one of his forelegs had been kicked off, and somepony had dumped their drink over his head...but his face had escaped it all, and still leered at me from the dark. I shivered in the pitch-black room, and forced myself forward again.
A display about the Yak war-tribes of the cold north seemed to start a theme, and soon, I found myself in a section dedicated to artifacts from before, during and after the disappearance of the Crystal Empire. A replica of a crystal pony, with his limbs and head connected by thin wires to emulate the unique appearance of the crystal automatons, greeted me warmly. Behind him was the dark features of King Sombra, rendered in alarmingly-realistic wax. More conquerors, and more flashes of terrible memories. They even had one of his horrible blacksteel mind-control helmets that I'd heard of, and it took more willpower than I was comfortable admitting to keep myself from giving it a kick into the darkness.
Beyond them, there was a small snowy display. Under a massive plaster dolmen, three hooded ponies leaned over a mare, her face frozen in terror. One held a knife, and I knew I’d found what I was looking for...almost. The one held in the wax stallion’s glass aura was a fake, meant for display purposes, as stated by the sign that explained the scene. Apparently it had been used by a reclusive northern cult, who had been trying to summon the Crystal Empire back to their time. They’d never succeeded, and eventually had died out by themselves, leaving only their ritual sites and tools. Even the scene on display was a dramatized speculation as to the nature of their rituals, inspired by local tales from the yaks and mountain mares of the north.
The real knife wasn’t far, however. At the far end of the display, under a layer of thick glass, my prize lay on a plain cloth pillow. While they intended for the knife to be seen, they clearly didn’t want anypony to get any ideas about taking it. But I didn’t have any choice; not if I wanted to slay the Banshee, and get out of Baltimare alive.
I drew my sword, took a deep breath, and slammed the pommel of the sword as hard as I could against the pane. A spiderweb of cracks appeared across the surface of the pane, and my sword’s pommel had a new dent, but the glass would break. Another couple of smacks earned me an alarm; an ancient warbling siren gave me a start, before it whimpered and died a second later. The museum’s security system had been degraded over time as well, warning ponies that were no longer here that somepony was trying to steal one of their artifacts.
One final slam broke the glass into jagged shards, and I used the tip of my blade to flick bits of the case into the fake snow of the display, then lever the knife up so I could grab it. And yet...as soon as I held the knife in my hoof, I knew something was wrong.
This knife was too light, and—in a way that was difficult to describe—it felt magically inert in my hoof. From how the brochure and the sign before me described the blade, it should have a dark weight to it. It may have even been the source of the abyss, here in the museum, but this was not that source.
Still, if it was an accurate reproduction, it was a fascinating design. The grip was made of wood wrapped in thin cords of leather, and the blade wasn’t metal, as I thought it might be, but some form of black crystal. The edges of the blade were smooth, unbroken, while even the tip of the fake knife was sharp enough to draw black blood when I experimentally used it to prick the frog of my hoof. The knife’s blade had been sharpened from a single crystal, and yet a hole had been carved all the way through the center, which left a rough, cubical gap.
Even if it wasn’t the real knife, it made for a good reference point for what I was looking for, and I could think of several uses for a fake knife. I wrapped the dagger in some moth-eaten cloth to keep the blade covered, and slipped it into my bottomless bag.
But if this was the fake, then where was the real knife? Even the fake had a reinforced case, one with an alarm; the ponies of the museum must have known that ponies would try to steal the knife, or maybe others had already tried before. It had to be here.
It had to be.
There’d been offices in the lobby, a staff-only area. Maybe they kept the real artifacts in there for study, and only put the fakes on display for exactly this reason. I started to head back that direction, though it took me a disturbingly long time to find my way to the exit; the oppressive darkness of the room had even obscured the light from the doorway, and I’d had to follow the walls again to work my way back around.
I galloped through the geology hall, then the planetarium, and by the time I climbed back over the rusted turnstile, I had to stop and retch. My full stomach made that kind of galloping uncomfortable to the point of nausea, and something felt wrong in my gut. My meal was still too heavy, as if no time at all had passed. Something welled up in the back of my throat, and I stumbled over to a corner to cough up lumps of pale fish meat.
As I wiped my mouth, and tried to cleanse my tongue of the repulsive taste, I found myself staring at the greasy meat piled on the carpet. It was wet, and chewed, but it didn’t seem terribly affected by the brief time it had spent in my stomach. Barely any brownish-black bile had come with it, and it still looked nearly as dry as when I had greedily sucked it down.
Could my stomach no longer digest food? Was that because of my own personal trauma, or did the stomach of an undead no longer produce the needed bile? If that was the case, then I might as well hack up the rest of my bounty; it would never be digested, and would only serve to weigh me down until the next time I was compelled to empty my stomach. But the thought of wasted food, in a world where food was so scarce as to be non-existent...it was frustrating. Not least because it had been fish, delicious fish, even after what I found at the bottom of the pile.
At the very least, my stomach was no longer uncomfortably full. I still didn’t feel healthy enough to do any long-distance galloping, but at least I no longer felt bloated. For the moment, I forced the thin bile back down my throat, and moved to the staircase. I glanced out the broken doors of the lobby for a moment, but the street outside still seemed clear for now.
The top of the stairs was mostly a small landing, with a few public offices for employees. A small hallway ended in a security station, and two locked steel doors. One door was for the security station itself, but the small, reinforced glass window of the other one showed only a hallway that ended in shadow. If I followed that darkness...I felt confident that I would find that knife.
But the door was locked. I could see a rack of labeled keys inside the security station, but aside from a window with a cutout for passing paperwork and identification through, there was no way inside. I spent a few minutes jamming my forehoof through, hoping to find a button or lever that would unlock the door, but no luck.
How had the door been locked to begin with? I could see the key for the security station on that rack, and unless there was another key...had the guard locked themselves out, before they had disappeared? Or was it that whatever had happened to Baltimare taken them while inside the booth? I was sure if I were made of mist, I could get in and out of the security station with ease.
As I sat in the hallway and tried to work out how to get inside, a set of pipes running across the ceiling caught my eye. They were much too small to get into; the faded red paint meant they were part of a fire sprinkler system. I’d heard of systems like this, but they were rare and complex, most commonly found in buildings owned by the crown, hospitals, and private laboratories. Apparently museums were important enough to require them as well, and judging from how it was crudely bolted across the ceiling, the system had been part of the building’s restoration and retrofitting.
If the lights were flickering, and the alarms systems still briefly functional, then the building clearly had power. Degradation had not caused the structure’s infrastructure to fall apart, not yet, so it was possible the fire sprinkler systems still worked. It was a long shot, but maybe, just maybe, I could force the doors to open.
I jammed my hoof back through the security’s station’s window, and summoned my pyromancy. The gentle flame in my hoof didn’t seem to do anything, but the floor inside was carpeted. I focused on my feelings of frustration, with Trixie and our chase after her, and my fear that I might be found, and slain, by the ghosts of Baltimare.
My fireball—if it even really counted as one—was sloppy, and mostly just rolled off my hoof onto the ancient carpet floor. It smouldered for a minute before it finally seemed to catch light, and I pulled my hoof out of the window to watch the security office grow brighter with the paltry flame as the carpet burned.
I had just started to panic that I might have screwed up again, and set the building aflame without any way to extinguish it, when the pipes exploded above me. I was showered in fetid water that stank of mildew and rust, as several pipes sputtered and hissed. The sprinklers themselves seemed to spin lazily, barely sprinkling the water around the hallway, while most of their contents spurted down the walls and soaked the old carpets. There was a fire alarm as well, a bell being struck by a mechanical hammer, but that suddenly stopped with a strange noise as the clockwork failed and the hammer ricocheted out of sight.
There was a loud click from both doors as they unlocked, to my surprise. I’d only needed the security office open, to get the keys, but after a moment I realized that of course it would open both doors. I hadn’t needed to jam my hoof through the window to drop that fireball, anywhere in the building would have worked. Still, I pulled open the security door to check the keys anyway, and grabbed a keyring labeled “storage” as well. Better to take that now, just in case I needed it later.
Water had begun to run down the hallway like a thin stream of watery blood, as the carpets became too saturated, and yet the rusty water kept coming. As I pulled open the door to the storage area, I was hit with yet another splatter of water from a broken pipe within. Was the entire building like this? How many exhibits had my little trick just ruined, throughout the entire museum? Worse, I could hear dozens of other fire alarms ringing throughout the rest of the building—if the Banshee and the rest of the ghosts weren’t already on their way here, they certainly were now.
After I cleared my eyes of the rusty water, I paused in the doorway, and had to check my lightgem. The darkness that obscured the other end was almost certainly unnatural, and I wouldn’t last long if I pushed into it without Dinky’s gift of light. When I did move forward, it was carefully, only for a few steps. Another door, unlocked from the alarm like the first, was only a temporary barrier. Once I opened it and passed through, I found myself in a dimly-lit warehouse.
While the darkness was just as oppressive in here as it had been in the other rooms before, it had been pushed back. Grimy windows high above allowed dull rays of sunlight to play across the room, and kept them from swallowing the shelves upon shelves of crates and historical artifacts. But everywhere the light didn’t touch, the shadows leaked out and spread across, and had enveloped so totally as to be impenetrable without shining a light into them. That far left side of the room looked to be the worst of it; I could almost see the dark fighting the light over there, wisps of black flickering wildly at the edges of the trails of illumination. Across the whole room, hay seemed strewn hap-hazardly, perhaps from packing and unpacking the crates, and strange white dust seemed to have caked a layer atop that.
My hoofsteps kicked up puffs of that dust as I descended a steel staircase down to the ground floor, then moved to where the darkness was deepest. As I pushed in, my lightgem shining like a beacon, even the sunlight from the windows above seemed to go dark, as though I was descending under the surface of that black lake once again. I tried not to think too hard about it; instead, I focused on the shelves, and the open crates, hoping to find some sort of filing system by which I could locate the knife.
A bundle of spears, made of dulled, rusty iron instead of wax this time...tribal masks from Zebrica, made of wood and stone...dusty furniture from Prance...A minotaur puzzle box...A small statue of Princess Celestia, carved from amber—that last one took a moment to identify, for the shadows seemed particularly dark around it, and the edges had begun to soften, as though the darkness was trying to erode and destroy it specifically.
A small wooden box caught my eye soon after, as I started to hear those accursed whispers once more, just at the edge of my hearing. I had to move fast, before the madness of the dark took me again. I yanked the box off the shelf, and my breath caught in my throat as the crystal blade flicked past my face with a scattering of dusty, desiccated hay. The knife rattled across the floor as the darkness writhed, and my hooves shook as I picked it up.
There was no doubt; I didn’t even need to pull out the fake from earlier, to compare the two. This knife was the original. Even holding it in my hoof, I could feel the weight of the dark that suffused the weapon, that seemed to twist the magic around it. I could feel the Aether as it was drawn through the hole in the center of the blade, something that should have been impossible to detect without a magic-sensitive horn. It flowed through that hole as though it were a portal to somewhere else, a fixed point in reality where the darkness converged, but no larger than a pinprick.
I didn’t test the tip on the frog of my hoof. I was afraid of what might happen if I did. I was already on edge from my close call earlier, as though the knife had been trying to slice at me of its own volition. It wanted to draw blood, I could feel it. The blade hungered for it, or something more than that. Ocellus had been correct; this was a cursed weapon, one that could undeniably slay a ghost, or perhaps even a god.
It had no sheath, and time was running short. I kept the knife’s grip in my teeth as I began to gallop all the way back to the entrance. I’d lingered for far too long, here in the museum, and the ghosts had to be nearby, or at least on their way. I might even need to confront them before I returned to the library, and deal with the problem by myself. If I did, then I had to have this knife handy, for it might be my only defense against the spirits.
My hooves sloshed through the fetlock-high water in the warehouse, where it had nowhere to drain to. The shadows seemed to distort around me as I moved their source, but they receded as soon as I reached the pale sunlight that shone through the windows once more. The knife’s crystal blade glittered in the sunlight, as the dark magic within reacted in bizarre ways.
I took the steel staircase two steps at a time, then pushed through both doors to reach the lobby, where water ran down the grand staircase in a dozen tiny waterfalls. I nearly slipped on the wet stairs, but I managed to grab at the railing and avoid that, which prompted me to descend just a bit slower. Then it was only a quick gallop to the doors, where I leapt over the broken glass and into the pale, blinding light of the red sunset.
As I blinked to adapt my eyes, I suddenly froze, for I was not alone.
Ghosts. A few dozen of them, in a small crowd outside of the museum. Spectral pegasi fluttered overhead, their wings part of the mist. Snarls were common across their muzzles, and several had already summoned their translucent knives to their hooves, as if waiting for the order to swarm me.
An order from the ghost in the center, the tallest, and undeniably the most powerful of them all. She seemed even more real than they, but her fur was still ethereal, and drifted like her mane in winds unseen. Her horn was curved, just slightly, and the spiral ended in a wickedly sharp tip. The feathers of her wings fluttered, just a little bit, as she kept them just slightly spread—an order to hold.
But despite her new appearance, despite what seemed to be a ghostly ascension to goddess-hood, I still recognized the teenaged filly I’d seen in Apple Bloom’s memory. She may have been older, and much more powerful now from her experiences in fallen Cloudsdale and here in Baltimare, but I recognized this “Banshee,” now that I had seen her for myself.
Sweetie Belle, the Banshee, had done well for herself. And now, I had earned her ire.
Stats
Page generated in 0.029 seconds
Total duration
1,003 users online
80,068 hits today, 2,054,621 yesterday
FIMFiction
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
Designed and coded by knighty & Xaquseg - © 2011-2024
Follow & Support Us
Support us
SubStar
Chat!
Discord
Follow us
Twitter
MLP: Friendship is Magic® - © 2024 Hasbro Inc.®
Fimfiction is in no way affiliated with or endorsed by Hasbro Inc.®
I'm two chapters behind and will let a few more come out. I can't stand reading so little at a time for such an inspired story.
Keep up the great work, I love this tale and can't wait to find out what happened to the Mane 6, minus you know who, already.
A rare clue about Holly's past then? Doesn't do too much to narrow things down unfortunately.
I'm gonna miss this story for a while, but I get it. Take as long as you need to work on it!
This story has been great so far. You've really got the feeling of Dark Souls and it's lore down. It's been a lot of fun piecing together the mysteries so far as well.
I await your return with baited breath.
10522401
I'm still almost certain she's Derpy. Dinky's comment about her size being wrong could just be her remembering her height from when she was just a small filly.
Derpy also disappeared the day Cloudsdale fell, and Holly woke in the remains of a cloud building.
Derpy was also one of the Pegasi in the show that was in the formation that got drained by Tirek.
At this point there's just too much evidence pointing towards her.
It's no good, I'm going to have to re-read everything from the beginning to get my fix.
10522850
That's makes a lot of sense based on what we know. I've been thinking in more of a video game protagonist feel, where she's a blank slate that learns things as the reader does. Since she has amnesia though she could be anyone, and being a character we already know would fit well.
10523883
My only problem with that, is that
Holly has the memory of being Drained by Tirek while in a formation of other pegasi;Scootaloo was both too young then, and was unable to fly because of her wings.The Tirek flashback decidedly rules out the most plot-significant candidates: Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Scootaloo, and Somnambula, possibly even Cozy Glow.
Of course an observant reader might have already come to the conclusion that the first two were most likely impossible considering certain details we've seen.I'm not entirely convinced that it can't be Ditzy/Derpy, Dinky's reasoning for it felt very wishy-washy.
We know that Holly has to be a female pegasus, probably not of a particularly irregular build, who spent considerable time around Cloudsdale and weather works, so some weatherpony or possibly one of the Wonderbolts.
The fact that she's not plot-significant does fit with the theme of Dark Souls.
The Chosen Undead, True Monarch, and Ashen One aren't actually some great, prophesied heroes, they're just the first people who came along that met the minimum requirements. They happened to have the persistence to finish the job without Hollowing, and it was inevitable that someone would eventually manage it. We know the cycle repeated dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times without fail, after all.
Any glamour ascribed to their positions was put there by desperate kings and immortals trying to convince or trick you into the Fire.
Flying in formation? The Wonderbolts perhaps? That crosses out Dash, Fluttershy, Derpy and Scoots.
So Holly might be Spitfire, Vapor Trail, Fleetfoot or Soarin but he's male so he's out(I don't remember the rest, but I know Dash wasn't with the Wonderbolts when Tirek came waltzing). Though I'm leaning to Holly is Spitfire.