• Published 15th Mar 2020
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The Hollow Pony - Type_Writer



Equestria is a barren land trapped in perpetual sunset, and a single Hollow Pony must do her best to end the curse, amidst demons, darkness, and her fellow undead. (A Dark Souls story, updates every sunday.)

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47 - Pillars of Stone

We fell together, the Blackguard and I, towards the jagged pillars of wood that were fast approaching. I couldn’t kick away the Blackguard fast enough, as I burned and screamed, and it flailed as well in freefall. I was too busy slapping wildly at my armor to extinguish the inferno that had embraced me, boiling the leather I was wearing, to watch the black knight fall to its death. I lost sight of it as a sudden moment of clarity arrived, and I yanked my ruined wings open to desperately try and slow my own fall.

They barely worked. I was aflame, and they’d been ravaged by time and combat. My most recent stab wound and the crushing bite of that chaos-tainted hound from earlier were particularly problematic. But I managed to get them open, and soon the wind blowing past extinguished the fires.

But I couldn’t stop falling. I couldn’t get any lift. I could barely turn my plummet into a downwards glide, and it barely served to slow my descent. The poison bog below approached, and I knew at this height, it may as well have been stone. In fact, far below was a scattering of gray dots amidst an ocean of greenish-brown—rocks from the mountain, presumably. If they were that close to the surface, then the lake must have been shallow, and I didn’t have the time to change course away from them or to try and find a deeper part to aim towards.

All I could do was brace for impact as the lake fast approached, and then it all went black. I’d been killed too quickly to feel the impact, at least. If I could, I would have been thankful for that.

* * *

My world was muck. Filthy, toxic, opaque muck. It filled everything; my eyes, my nose, my mouth, my lungs. I tried to breathe, and all it did was make my chest hurt as it tried to compress the mud in my body.

Pain followed not long after. My chest kept burning, and it all felt like liquid. But the pain helped me become self-aware once more, and my limbs trembled as I tried to gain control of them. Soon, I realized that I could, and my limbs were whole, but the sludge in which I was drowning was too thick to swim upwards. Instead, I had to force myself to crawl through it, while I was still dumb, blind, and poisoned.

I lost track of time as I crawled. I think I succumbed to the toxic sludge, or perhaps my own injuries, more than once. But I continued to re-awaken, and continued to crawl, until I found something solid. Once I had, I forced my broken body to hold onto it.

I was drowning, or rather, I had drowned. But I had still found something solid enough for me to cling to, like the survivor of a shipwreck clinging to driftwood, and I could only hope it was enough for me to be rescued.

As I gathered my strength, I began to haul myself upwards, and soon cold air washed over my broken body. The toxic sludge still soaked my fur and my flesh, but it began to dry and drip away as I clung to what felt like thin stone pillars, or perhaps a seat of some kind. The mud hardened as it dried, and it only broke when I doubled over the side of my new perch, and tried to hack up all the mud that filled my lungs and stomach, to occasional success.

I felt like I was dying. But then, I had already died, a hundred times over. Fatally poisonous mud was just another reality that I had to live with, so long as it filled my lungs, my stomach, and my sinuses.

I stayed there long enough for the mud to turn solid. I felt like a statue, sealed in burning clay. The heat of the sunset only served to bake me in place, as I struggled to live.

Eventually, I heard a voice, though it was muffled by the mud filling my ears. “H-Holly?”

I tried to move, tried to struggle, but it was no use. Thankfully, the voice helped, and I felt fresh, cold air stab into my flesh as the seal of toxic mud was cracked once again. “Oh C-Celestia, Holly…”

Hooves and magic scraped at the mud, and a canteen was emptied over my head to try and wash some of it away. I heard a mare puking, and then a promise to return, and then there was more cold water being dumped over my head, now in buckets. Wet cloth was pushed inside of my empty eye sockets, and the mud within was scooped out until my vision returned.

Dinky looked awful. Her traveling cloak was ragged and mudstained, as were her hooves. She looked as though she’d Hollowed out a lot since last I saw her, but at least she was still recognizable. I’d have to get used to her new appearance, but I probably looked worse.

As she cleaned the mud off of me with buckets of cold, murky water and several thoroughly-ruined towels, she quietly explained what had happened since I’d fallen. Apparently the scaffolding had all come alight as the Blackguard fell through it, and the whole structure had collapsed into a blazing inferno as it fell into the lake. Thankfully, the elevator remained functional, if only barely, so we could still get up into the tunnel without need for a new structure.

Dinky guessed it had been perhaps a month, though as always it was impossible to know for sure. Gilda had already written me off as dead, and Dinky had reluctantly followed her into the tunnel, but something in the dark had turned her to stone in front of Dinky, after which she fled back to the elevator. Since then, she had been searching the lake using a hoof-made raft, hoping to find me, or at least what remained of me.

Surprisingly, I hadn’t lost much. However long it had taken for my cursed body to piece myself back together had been long enough for my bones to set, though my ribs were all wrong, and my wings had a few more painful kinks, as I discovered when I tried to flex them once more. My armor was still mostly intact, even if the plates were dented, and I still had the bottomless bag, which seemed thankfully mud-free. I wished I had the presence of mind required to pull out the flask of sunlight and the Element of Generosity as I fell. Perhaps Dinky could have used them to locate me sooner, or at the very least, she could have taken them from my lifeless body and continued on from Canterlot, if the bag had been damaged or if she had been unable to retrieve the contents from within.

But I had not come out of my fall without scars. My belly was swollen with toxic mud; I suspected I had splattered a bit on impact, as our group had discussed while climbing, and when it had reformed, that poisonous mud was trapped inside. I wasn’t sure which was worse; leaving that in there, or trying to open a hole in my barrel to let it back out. Between that and the time lost in a blink, that fall had been nearly crippling, and I almost had to hope that I wouldn’t survive it all if it happened again. The first time was bad enough.

At least it seemed the Blackguard had been killed by the fall as well. It had not made an appearance since falling into the burning scaffolding, and I hoped never to see it again.

Eventually, I was clean enough that Dinky lifted me off of my perch and onto her raft, at which point she made a startling discovery. My stone perch wasn’t just an oddly-shaped boulder, but a statue, and an oddly-realistic one. Dumbly, I realized I recognized the stallion’s image, because it was carved to resemble Red, the warrior with whom I’d shared a brief conversation on my way back to Ponyville, after Trixie had abandoned me the first time. I couldn’t tell Dinky about this yet, not until we had purged my lungs of mud, but I was reminded again of Gilda, turned to stone by an unseen creature in the tunnels above.

Which meant, almost certainly, that this statue was Red. He must have been encased in stone just as I had been encased in mud, and perhaps he had been down here in the lake even before we arrived. I glanced around the lake at the other stone protrusions, and I realized, all too suddenly, that they closely resembled legs and heads of fallen statues, sticking upwards out of the muck. They must have all been petrified by something above, and then thrown down here? Hopefully not to shatter them, but Red’s statue seemed intact, at least. The others were too weathered and mud-covered to make out any specific details.

Just like us, he had planned to make his way to Canterlot via Hammerhoof, and it seemed as though he had ascended the scaffolding only to be stopped by whatever else made those tunnels their lair. I could only hope that our journey would not be stopped so permanently as his own apparently had.

* * *

Dinky claimed that she’d never piloted a raft before she began her search, which only told me how long she had been salvaging amidst the muck. She navigated smoothly back to shore using her magic to control two long rusted steel poles, which she used to drag the makeshift watercraft forwards with ease earned through practice.

It hurt to watch, to know I had been absent from the world for so long, and that it seemed to matter so little to our mission. Had Ponyville fallen by now? Or were they still clinging on, waiting for us to deliver our request for aid? Had Maud already caught up to Trixie? Would we encounter them here in Hammerhoof, trying to reach Canterlot as well?

Instead, my eyes turned towards the blackened mass of burned wood at the base of the mountain, and I realized after a moment of confusion that it was all that remained of the scaffolding. I felt a pang of guilt; we may have cut a bloody path upwards, but surely there had to still be sane ponies living within the structure somewhere. They hadn’t deserved that fate, to have their home collapse atop them and trap them within the rubble for an eternity. I was only thankful that it hadn’t collapsed onto Hammerhoof, and I hadn’t wiped out the whole town with my shortsighted actions.

Not that the town seemed unscarred; the buildings closer to the waterfront seemed as though they’d been damaged somewhat by fire. Perhaps falling debris had fallen through the rooftops? Dinky caught my gaze, and she winced as well. “That, um…that c-creature, when it f-fell..The whole l-lake caught alight. I th-think there was a l-layer of oil atop the w-water, and that all b-burned for a while. We helped p-put out the w-worst of the f-fires.”

We scraped ashore a few moments later, and Dinky picked up a pile of rusty steel buckets in her magic. “W-wait here a few m-minutes, okay? It sh-should be safe, most of the H-Hollows have been c-cleared out by now. I n-need to return these, and f-find a healer for you…”

I nodded sluggishly, and Dinky limped away. Her wounded leg had never healed properly, and I felt another twinge of guilt as she disappeared into a scorched alley.

Time passed. I watched the waves of the lake roll over the shore gently, lacking the fluidity to lap as clean water would. Instead, there was a disgusting skin over the top of the liquid, like mold or floating ash, and that cracked as the water met land. I wondered how many other Hollows remained under the surface, unable to pull themselves out as I had, and unable to die.

Something gently approached from behind, sniffing and gently padding through the silty mud. I limply turned my head, and found myself looking at one of the red-furred hounds that had apparently survived both our ascent and the collapse of the scaffolding. It must have still been sniffing around the shore, looking for food. Despite my filthy state, it seemed as though I was still edible in its eyes, and it bared its teeth as I tried to reach for the spear still attached to the side of my armor.

I saw the creature’s dark throat brighten as it prepared to bathe me in flame—but it never succeeded. A bolt of magic lanced through its side and threw whatever was left into the lake a few body-lengths away, leaving only the smell of ozone and charred flesh.

“Holly?” A female voice asked. Not Dinky, but still familiar. I slowly flopped my head back to face the source, and found the wizened figure of Mistmane peering down at me from a short distance away. I tried to greet her, but all that came out was a wettish glob of toxic mud. She winced, but came closer, scanning me with her horn. “Goodness, you are in a state. But I trust you are still in there?”

I nodded shakily, and her old, cracked lips formed a smile. “Good. Meadowbrook is not far, and she may be able to help—”

“Get away from her!” Dinky squeaked, as she charged into Mistmane’s side—or tried to do so. Mistmane dodged faster than any mare her age should have been able, and Dinky skidded to a halt a few paces away, hooves barely splashing at the edge of the lake, ripples spreading across the filmy surface.

If anything, Mistmane seemed amused by the attempt. “Greetings to you as well, Dinky.”

That finally gave Dinky pause, as slow recognition crawled across her features. “M-Mistmane?”

The old mare tilted her head. “Indeed. You seem…confused? And I thought Twilight Sparkle trained you how to defend yourself better than merely charging at your enemies, like a raging minotaur.”

“It’s…I…I’ve b-been having a rough time.” Dinky quietly admitted while she slowly approached me. She still seemed somewhat suspicious, and she checked on me just in case Mistmane had done something in her absence. “I c-couldn’t find a healer…a l-lot of f-folks abandoned Hammerhoof w-when the scaffolding c-came down…”

Mistmane smiled gently at her. “Lucky for you that Meadowbrook is near.”

Recognition and surprise washed over Dinky all over again. “M-Mage Meadowb-brook is here?”

“Indeed she is,” Mistmane said with a nod. “And I presume you are the precocious young filly that she spoke so highly of, from the end of her time in Baton Verde? She mentioned that Holly here was accompanied by Ponyville’s young Archmagus. I’m only sad that we did not have the time to catch up properly before, when we met in Ponyville.”

Dinky shrank back in shame. “I…I w-wouldn’t…that was…” She stammered. Eventually, she gathered up the will to quietly say, “I d-don’t think she t-told you the whole st-story.”

“Then you may tell me the rest,” Mistmane said, with an old, knowing smile. “Come, we are staying with a friend nearby. You are lucky that I chose to take a walk along the shore soon after we arrived.”

* * *

Mistmane led Dinky—who carried my near-lifeless body in a field of levitation—along the shoreline, away from the mountain, but skirting the edge of town.

On the way there, Dinky related the rest of our story of escaping the caravan attack. Our panicked desertion, her ill-advised wink, and our first encounter with the black knight. She had taken to calling it “the Blackguard” as well, and she explained the name better than I could’ve. It looked like one of Celestia’s Golden Guard, wearing their full set of armor, but twisted and scarred and darkened, turned black by heat or by magic. Hence, Blackguard. I hoped that this would be the last time I had to think of them, but I knew we couldn’t have been so lucky.

Mistmane kept silent, but I saw recognition in her eyes at the description of the creature. She’d seen it elsewhere as well. I’d have to ask her about that, when I could move my mouth again.

After a short walk, we came to a nondescript building about three stories high, a block away from the edge of the lake. From Mistmane’s description, it seemed that even before the sun stopped, the small mining company that had built it had gone out of business, and the building’s next owners had converted the top floor into a loft. Her friend, Somnambula, had taken up residence there in the time since.

I remembered that name. She was another of the Pillars of Equestria, and Dinky had mentioned her before, back in the jail cell, when we were swapping stories with Trixie. She was studying the magic of Alicorns. But I had heard that she was still in the town that shared her name; what was she doing here? Had she been locked out of Canterlot as well?

While there was still a fire escape that could be used to access the third floor of the building, using a ramp made of wooden boards, Mistmane instead moved towards a cargo hook attached alongside the fire escape. After a moment of confusion, I recognized it as another elevator, of the same design as that which we had found at the top of the scaffolding. Mistmane’s horn flashed as Dinky carried me onto the platform, and I heard the pulleys of the machinery grind as we were gently pulled upwards to the loft. A moment later, we came to a bumpy stop, and Mistmane rapped her hoof against the door to let the inhabitants know they had visitors.

After a moment, the door opened, and the familiar figure of Mage Meadowbrook peeked out. Her Hollow embers flicked between the three of us, and she smiled only lightly. There was a pulse of pain in my heart at how she didn’t seem to recognize me or even Dinky immediately. “Come in, come in. Somnamb’la, we got guests!”

The loft’s interior was in noticeably better condition than the exterior would suggest. It was clean, without any debris or trash on the floor, the furniture was intact and almost undamaged, and the supplies stored in crates at the corners of the room all seemed well-organized and properly packed. Were it not for the faded colors of the carpet and the unpatched holes in the cushions, I could have almost believed that this room belonged back in old Equestria, before the sun stopped.

At the center of it all was a new mare, a pegasus, Hollowed but peaceful, who seemed to be sitting in meditation. What remained of her fur seemed to be pale scarlet, but her flesh was clearly visible underneath. She wore a transparent sheer dress, and a worn headdress that obscured her mane. She gently opened one eye to watch us enter—I was stunned by just how brightly her Hollow embers burned—before closing it again, as she gave us a welcoming nod.

“Dinky Doo. It is a pleasure to meet you once more, though I would not be surprised if you do not recall when last we met. And the other mare is Holly, I presume? The brave Hollow that lost my enchanted mace?”

I could barely move, but it was enough to wince. She knew about that, since Mistmane had probably told her. I could only hope repaying her for that lost weapon wouldn't cost me too dearly.

She let out a chuckle. “Fear not, friend. All I ask is that you keep better track of any future enchanted weapons with which we might entrust you.”

Meadowbrook gave me a reassuring smile as well, even as she checked my body for the extent of my injuries. “Looks like ya went swimmin,’ didja? Woulda figured you’d had enough o’ that in my little bayou—this mud’s even worse.”

“C-can you heal her?” Dinky asked quietly.

“B’lieve I can, but gotta wash her clean first. And I s’pect she’s gotten her lungs filled as well. I’ll get that cleaned out first, so’s she can tell me the rest of the damages. Dinky, you go settle in a bit, Somnamb’la and Mistmane can tell y'all ‘bout her work here in the meantime.”

* * *

I’d rather not recall the process of getting the mud from my body in detail. It wasn’t as unpleasant as discovering it had invaded me to begin with, but removing it was still disgusting, and took quite a while. Meadowbrook chose to work outside on the fire escape, to keep the loft clean, and at least she left the door open so I could be part of the conversation as Somnambula explained her work to Dinky.

“You are, of course, familiar with unicorn magic.” Somnambula began. “And from what Mistmane tells me, you have also recently begun to dabble in Pyromancy.”

“Barely,” Dinky conceded.

“It is enough for a point of reference. There is also earth pony magic, such as that used by Meadowbrook, Magnus, and Zecora, which is often conflated with Pyromancy. It is much more focused on the world around and below us, however. Pegasus magic relates to the creation and control of weather, air currents, and so forth. But there is another form of magic, which is even now developing all around us.”

“New m-magic?” Dinky asked. “As in…d-did it exist before, or d-do you mean it’s c-completely new?”

Somnambula bore an eager grin. “I cannot tell you for sure. I suspect it has always been present, but too weak to be noticed, let alone studied. Now, it grows in strength, building slowly but steadily, and it can be accessed by anypony willing to put their faith in it. I call this magic ‘miracles,’ for it seems truly miraculous.”

Meadowbrook paused, and spat the knife into her hooves so she could speak. “Zecora gave us the final piece we really needed. Proof of the magic. Holly, y’still got that flask of sunlight on you? I don’t see it here…”

“B-bag…” I croaked.

Meadowbrook glanced at my mudstained bottomless bag, and slowly nodded. “And y’haven’t noticed any odd interactions with it? The flask bein’ hard to reach, or maybe the bag gettin’ a little, ah, bitey?”

Dinky tilted her head at us in confusion. I slowly shook my head. “There’s…d-dust, sometimes. Have to b-brush it off…”

“Dust…interestin’.” She glanced back to Somnambula, who nodded as though she’d just slotted a puzzle piece into place. “But nothin’ else, good. The flask itself is kind of a livin’ miracle, pulling in the kind of fire that keeps us all alive, even after death, an’ stores it for later use. Some from the air, some from us. Guess it emits a little of it too, to protect itself.”

And maybe protect the pony holding it. Perhaps the flask of sunlight was why I seemed to be able to return, even after going Hollow? I didn’t have the words to ask that question now.

“Using the flask that Meadowbrook brought with her, I have been able to study this magic much more easily.” Somnambula continued, as Meadowbrook went back to cutting. “It is possible to channel this magic using not only a flask, but other talismans, to heal the wounded—such as Holly, once Meadowbrook has finished her work—and push back the Dark. That mace was one weapon that I tested the magic upon, as an enchantment, and I hear that it performed excellently against the undead of Cloudsdale?”

I nodded again, and Dinky raised her hoof like a student in class, before she sheepishly lowered it. “Um. B-but we’re undead t-too. It c-can heal us, and s-slays skeletons?”

“Intent seems more important than ever with this magic. An enchantment upon a weapon kills, while a spell to heal would do so for any near the caster, regardless of allegiance. The school of Pyromancy has a similar spell to heal the living. It is curious that miracles seem to have no such limitations. It all depends on what the caster desires, and making that intent clear with emotion, rather than incantation or magical focus is very important.” Somnambula smiled once more. “I have found that recalling pleasant stories of my past, my friends, and my thoughts of Princess Celestia all summon wonderful results.”

“Aside from that one time ya somehow teleported back home, and got us all panicked for weeks thinkin’ you’d exploded yourself,” Meadowbrook joked.

“Mm, yes,” Somnambula nodded. “Thoughts of home, specifically, have an unusual effect. I’m still testing that, in hopes that it may become more reliable and less…subjective. My hooves would certainly appreciate such a spell, I think, and it would certainly solve our current conundrum with Canterlot.”

Dinky sighed. “S-so you don’t have any s-secret way into the c-city that we c-could use.”

Mistmane shook her head. “That gate was our ‘secret’ way in. A service tunnel that saw much less use than the train tracks or the main road. Well-lit, well-guarded, and led directly to the city. Alas, it seems that Celestia—or somepony acting on her authority—has chosen to shut us all out.”

“There may be another way,” Somnambula said, gesturing to Dinky, “with which you already seem familiar. That elevator up the mountainside was created by Mistmane a time ago in order to aid these experiments, though it quickly saw use as a very dangerous shortcut up past the scaffolding on the lake instead.”

“Oh,” Dinky said quietly. “S-sorry. I k-kinda broke the locks. Any unicorn c-can use it now.”

Mistmane furrowed her brow at her with a displeased hum, and she glanced out over the lake. “I’ll need to fix that then. At least it still functions. In any case, the original test subjects present an issue that must be overcome if we are to reach Canterlot.”

“The..things, in the d-dark?” Dinky asked quietly.

“You have encountered the changed cockatrices, and yet you still live?” Somnambula asked, as she raised her eyebrow.

Dinky shrank down again. “S-sort of. Gilda w-wasn’t so lucky; it t-turned her to stone. But…y-you can fix her, r-right? I’m s-sure that Meadowbrook has c-cured petrification, since T-Twilight told me about one t-time that she got p-petrified, and Zecora s-saved her.”

Meadowbrook dumped a bucket of water over me, to wash more of the mud away. “Ain’t normal petrification; which is actually good, because I don’t have the herbs needed to cure that. Nor do I have Fluttershy’s, ahh…way wit’ animals. Filly apparently could talk a normal cockatrice into reversing the spell jus’ by staring it down.”

“This form of petrification seems more akin to a curse,” Mistmane explained. “The victim is neither encased in or turned into stone. Instead, it seems as though time no longer affects them as it does us. What seems to be stone to us is closer to an afterimage, such as that caused by a bright flash of magic; a remnant of the creature that was attacked, until time presumably catches up to them, and they are released. A form of ‘stasis,’ would perhaps be more appropriate as a description.”

“Not that we have seen any such creatures released normally,” Somnambula regretfully mused. “It may also be possible that the way they now experience time is reversed, in which case they will never catch up to our time. Perhaps the answers lie not in the victims themselves, but in the creatures spreading the curse themselves?”

“Y-you said it was a ch-changed cockatrice, r-right?” Dinky asked. “Like in the Ev-Everchaos? B-but how’d one g-get up here? The dogs m-might’ve just walked, but…” She trailed off.

“We are…not sure.” Mistmane admitted. “And the changes do not appear to be purely chaotic. Instead, they seem to be a mix of chaotic energy and the Dark.”

The Dark. I could hear the capital D. Not just mundane darkness, but something malignant that crawled out from the cracks and crevices of this world. I’d seen it everywhere, from the lake above Cloudsdale, to the caves above us, to the blade in the Baltimore museum, to the bag I kept at my side. I felt it inside me, inside everypony I knew, because it had wormed its way into all of us. It burned a hole through our flanks, replacing our cutie marks with that dark sign, and it seemed to overtake Hollows as it turned their blood black.

Every time I met these ponies, these Pillars of Equestria, they spoke about it. They knew something about it that they weren’t sharing. It was time for me to finally get some answers, now that Meadowbrook had fully emptied my lungs.

“W-what—” My lips cracked, and Meadowbrook gave me a canteen to sip from before I continued. “What is the D-Dark?”

Silence filled the room. The sort of silence where a pony could speak at any moment, but nopony wanted to be the one who did so.

“We don’t really know,” Mistmane eventually admitted. “I think…perhaps we are not allowed to know the true shape of it. We have experienced it, but we were protected. Starswirl pulled us into a space that he called ‘Limbo,’ in order to isolate the Pony of Shadows…poor Stygian was already deeply touched by it, though he seemed to recover eventually.”

Dinky frowned, and I could see her trying to fit this new knowledge with what she knew. “Is…is that like w-when a unicorn uses a W-Wink spell to travel?”

Mistmane nodded. “Indeed. I think that perhaps it is the same space, but where a Wink spell merely skims the surface—between the true space and the reality that we know—Limbo is somewhere deeper within.”

Deeper? I could still hear the space-that-wasn’t-space beating on Dinky’s shield, trying to break it, trying to consume us. I couldn’t imagine willingly venturing deeper within that nightmarish space. And if something was trying to get out…or had already gotten out…

Mistmane saw my countenance growing pale, and she continued. “There is something inside that space. Or…perhaps it is that space, like a force of nature, or an altered state of being. Princess Celestia can push it back using her sun’s light, banish it back to the dark cracks of the world…but she has less control over her sun than she normally would, and the dark is bleeding out of the cracks all over the world now. I do not know what is emerging from those cracks, be it creatures or some sort of Dark reality overwriting our own, but studying it is what eventually drove both Stygian and Princess Luna mad, so long ago. And now in our modern age, they have both disappeared into some sort of portal at the peak of the Canterhorn.”

This was a lot to take in at once. Only Magnus had mentioned Princess Luna before, and he had mentioned she was “recruiting” for something that had included a pony named Stygian. A Covenant of the Dark—or perhaps fighting the Dark—beyond a mysterious portal.

I forced myself to refocus on the here and now. “And…y-you think that the D-Dark in the tunnels above…it ch-changed a creature in there?”

Meadowbrook had been brushing more of the mud out of…I tried not to think about where she was brushing the mud out. I could only hope that the flask of sunlight would close the wound after she was finished. She paused to answer, “The Chaosfire changed the cockatrices once; the Dark changed ‘em again. Now they’re somethin’ else. But if Somnamb’la thinks she can use these Miracles to fight back against the Dark, I’m eager to try.”

“Specifically, I have enchanted a staff with a Miracle to emit sunlight, or the magical energy that we describe as sunlight.” She paused, lost in thought. “Were that I could get into the Royal Library; I would love to compare my notes against those of old Unicornia, back when they were forced to move the Sun and Moon themselves. With a powerful enough Miracle…”

She shook herself, to set aside the idea. “For now, our hope is that this Miracle will be enough to reverse the petrification, or at least weaken it. As I said, I have already enchanted the staff,” Somnambula indicated a plain-looking length of wood, carved into the shape of a staff. Mounted to the staff’s head was a carefully-crafted brass emblem of Princess Celestia’s cutie mark, a sun surrounded by whorls of fire.

The conversation passed me by for a moment as I stared at the symbol. I couldn’t help but think about how it looked unsettlingly similar to the mark upon all of our flanks—a central circle, surrounded by curling lines. But Celestia’s sun represented the light being emitted from within, while our Dark marks seemed to represent the opposite, the colors of our coat being pulled into the void like water down a drain.

I shook myself out of it, and forced my attention back to Somnambula. “S-sorry…Say that a-again?”

Dinky responded, instead. “She s-said she needs a t-test subject. A p-petrified pony that we c-can bring here, so she c-can use the staff on them.”

I felt eyes upon me. Somnambula’s in particular. They knew that I was the most expendable of the group. As much as it made my blood curdle, I couldn’t exactly say they were wrong.

Not a volunteer,” Mistmane specified, easing some of the pressure I had felt. “There are already enough statues outside, and we cannot afford to lose more ponies should this fail.”

A statue from the lake, then; a pony that was to be revived from the stone death that was petrification, or at least looked like petrification. My mind flashed to Red, the one pony I’d recognized in that morass besides Dinky. Gilda was also apparently an option, though we would have to use the elevator to go up and retrieve her, and the area in which she was petrified might still have been dangerous. So Red was definitely a better choice.

I nodded. “Okay. G-get a statue from the l-lake, bring it b-back here, and we’ll t-test the staff. If it works, then we c-can use it to pass through the t-tunnel?”

“You’ll still need to fight the cockatrices, but yeah, that’s the gist of it,” Meadowbrook agreed. “First, though, we gotta finish cleaning you up. And you’d better not go for a dip gettin’ that statue, after all the work we jus’ put into gettin’ you clean!”

Author's Note:

I cannot emphasize enough just how nasty that lake is, even before Holly accidentally set it alight. It's the kind of thing that would be a major ecological disaster, poisoning the land for miles around, if there were still wildlife and enough society left to care about the toxic effect it's having on the natural world around it.

As for the Pillars, it's good to see them again, no? Especially Somnambula—amusingly, the story has been added by two different groups of Somnambula fans here on the site for over a year, but up until now she was only ever mentioned in passing once. Hopefully I do her justice, as she slots into her party role in the Pillars as "cleric." (Meadowbrook is an alchemist/healer, Mistmane and Starswirl are a sorceress and sorcerer respectively, Rockhoof is a big tanky brawler, and Flash Magnus is a much more defensive shield-based fighter.)

This is also our first look at Miracles, the third type of magic used in the Souls series. It's much more established there, while in this setting, it is considered to be the cutting edge of unconventional magic types, very freshly discovered and still being developed!

The song for this chapter is: Laura Veirs - Salvage a Smile

Big thanks, as always, to my pre-readers Non Uberis, Prince-Nightfire93, and Citizen for all their hard work!

I've also got a tip jar, if you're enjoying the story and want to toss me a couple bucks!

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