Werewolves of Knicknik

by Atuhor Name

CH. 26 Doctor Willow

Doctor Willow

Twilight glared at the guards on the wooden wall surrounding Knicknik.

They were abominations, the word just leapt to the forefront of her mind ahead of all the technical information she had about them.

There were plenty of forbidden documents that Twilight had access to throughout her later schooling under Celestia. It was a mark of pride that Celestia and her teachers had considered her responsible enough to know that she should never use them. And these guards represented the antithesis of everything she believed about magic.

An uninformed eye would have called them “an advanced form of necromancy” and left it at that. But Twilight could see, she could see the strands of magic in the air leading back into town. These weren’t some dead things risen up and puppeted through magic, nor were they some soul brought over from the other side and bound.

These guards were the pieces of a still living pony’s soul embedded into some kind of horrible construct. Whoever they were a part of was still alive, and likely chained up somewhere in town.Or maybe they weren’t.

Twilight didn’t know the exact details of this spell, it went beyond what the libraries of Canterlot would allow to exist, it went beyond what should exist. This was a new invention somebody here had borne into the world. She could guess some things about them right off the bat.

They would regenerate until they completely consumed the soul of whoever they were connected to. They could use whatever powers of the pony they were connected to, possibly multiple ponies. And Twilight guessed they could use all of the spells that their master knew.

Twilight could feel a hatred for them and whoever created these abominations burning in her chest. She could find no words to describe how she felt about these things and their creator. There technically weren’t any rules against these things, because no pony and nobody else on the entire planet would have wanted to create them.

Twilight tried to focus, but it was hard, those constructs were like a rash in her brain, they encouraged her to take rash actions.

“Twilight!” Naudia admonished. “What has got you so angry, you’re not even listening to me, calm down, your werewolf traits are showing.”

“I can’t, those… those things.” Twilight growled gesturing at the guard constructs on the wall. “They make me angry, it’s like my special talent just rejects their existence.”

Naudia hadn’t seen anybody in town react as harshly to those things, and they had to live in the same town as them.

“Okay, okay, I know how to deal with this, deep breaths, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13…”

Naudia let her go on like that for a minute, this was the most extreme “calming session” she’d ever seen out of Twilight. She’d only ever heard about this type from Cadance. Twilight’s wolf-like appearance did not abate.

“…1229, 1231, 1237, UGGGGHHH, this isn’t working.”

Twilight in the end had to turn away from the town entirely to focus on what Naudia had to say.

“Just to confirm with you again Twilight this is the signal.” Naudia cast her magic and Twilight could hear a staticy buzzing in her ears. “If that happens you have to enact Escape Plan A, all right?”

“I should be fine, I’ll… I’ll just see what you can do with these tablet things in the meantime, I don’t actually have to watch the town that closely do I?”

“So long as you can hear this signal.”

Twilight nodded, still not looking back at the town.

“Good.” Naudia didn’t seem entirely convinced. “I’ll be off then.”

-------------------

Naudia snuck in, this time she was cloaked, and she had a general idea of where this “Doctor Willow” lived. However it wasn’t really that simple and she couldn’t exactly ask for directions. She was left with no choice but to split up.

The town was disturbingly empty and quiet.

The first place Naudia visited turned out to be a restaurant, but it’s pretty clear it had been closed for some time. It was dusty, it smelled but not of food or moldy food just an enclosed space, it felt like an abandoned building with a scattering of tables and chairs in it. Naudia didn’t like places like this, it was like seeing a farm that lay fallow with neglect. Back home in ponyville Naudia knew changelings would pay good money to have the “(blank)-est restaurant in town” this was the kind of place that would erupt into some kind of themed restaurant serving “changeling specialties from the frontier” (Usually some kind of existing pony recipe changelings adapted).

Outside Naudia noticed something strange, the hoofprints in the dirt were… weird. It was like ponies walked entirely in single file along some kind of pre-determined line and just branched off whenever they got to where they were going. There were no hoofprints going to the restaurant she just left.

The next building Naudia visited was somepony’s home. But there was nobody home, it didn’t feel like a home. The walls were covered with aimless drawing, so were the floors, there was a stepladder that had been used to draw on the ceiling. The photographs on the mantle had been pulled out of their frames so somepony could draw on the backs, and the drawings were just left there where they finished drawing.

It took Naudia a good while to figure out why all of this made her feel uneasy, and when she did she wanted to leave immediately. All of the drawings were odd, things ponies wouldn’t normally try and draw. Somepony had drew a cork coaster on the wall in precise detail, but it had no shading, it had no style, Naudia didn’t even get the impression that a pony had intentionally drawn this. Next to it on the wall was a drawing, of the patch of wall to the side of the drawing. On the back of one of the photographs was a drawing of a corner of the empty photo frame the photo had been taken out of.

It felt like the house had been hollowed out from the inside.

Naudia left rather quickly, there wasn’t even a hint of emotional residue like you would get on something like a photograph in the entire household.

The next building she checked that wasn’t like that house was a warehouse.

This was not the place.

Naudia knew this was not the place before even setting hoof inside, but she had to see what was going on in there.

This was some sort of draining facility, where ponies were sitting lined up, unrestrained, and you could watch their souls drain away. There were more of those sailor ponies managing things here, like the one back at the werewolf settlement Naudia didn’t get any kind of impression that they could think for themselves. Naudia’s eyes were drawn back to the foul off brown substance that was a pony’s soul being drawn from their still living body into some sort of pool. There were strands flowing up out of that pool but they faded away after going a couple feet.

Everypony looked so… happy. Like a piece of abandoned furniture that lacked even a hint of emotional residue.

Naudia shook herself, she realized that she had been staring, the ponies hadn’t even reacted when she opened the door. She was tempted, just for a moment, to go up to one of them and see what would happen if she poked them in the ribs. She didn’t, but she had a strong suspicion of what would happen if she did.

The next building Naudia entered was grim. It was the general store, apart from being looted the shelves were still very orderly, Naudia suspected that the bits in the register and the safe in the back were probably still there.

But Naudia did not go very far into the general store, there was some sort of bean plant that had overrun the store. It was huge, it fruited unnaturally and grew in an orderly manner. The store’s windows had all been boarded up and not even a single shaft of sunlight entered into the building. Naudia had some idea as to why this plant had grown so large.

Naudia left, trying to avoid looking at the large round object wrapped in roots, it was stark white.

-------------------

Meanwhile outside of town Twilight was trying to find a way to avoid looking at the town itself while still trying to listen for Naudia’s signal.She couldn’t focus on the tablet.

She had to keep thinking up new ways to keep herself distracted, ways she wouldn’t become distracted from.

She started by sniffing around at the ground, just to see if she could find out what dogs saw in that. She almost thought she got the idea of it when she ran into some animal dung, and decided she couldn’t really see the appeal.

So she tried digging a hole, dogs seemed to like doing that. In the heavily root matted forest where she was at it wasn’t that fun. She kept running into roots, while her claws could cut through them like butter it would have been better if it was just dirt.

Twilight tried pacing around, back and forth, but she kept getting glances at the town whenever she turned around the wrong way. That did not help at all.

She tried counting all the plant species she could remember from her textbooks, and that was great, absolutely perfect actually. There were a lot of different kinds of plants around her, but she ran out of plants, then trees, and she hadn’t studied up on moss.

Twilight could feel her gaze being drawn back to the town and the-

Twilight jerked her head back away with a feral snarl.

Twilight thought that she shouldn’t feel like this, but those things, they were so terrible that Twilight skipped over every other emotion and moved straight on to rage. Something that looked like a pony should have given her some kind of sympathy for them, but they weren’t ponies, they weren’t even alive. She couldn’t pin it down in her head but any time she thought even slightly sympathetically about them she’d look over at them and something primal in her head screamed at her that they were bad, not alive, fake, not pony! And then her training in magic would give her all kinds of terrible, terrible facts about them.

Just looking at the town also reminded her of Appleloosa, the way it was built, the way it was laid out. Waiting around that caused her to make up scenarios in her head, what if one of those things on the wall was feeding off of Braeburn?

Twilight eventually had to sit down back herself against a tree and agitatedly wait. She didn’t want to admit it, but she was hoping that Naudia would send off that signal.

-------------------

The next building Naudia found was at least better than the last few, it was a bar that had been boarded up, and judging by the boards it had been broken into a couple times. The place practically exploded with emotional energy.

It wasn’t happy, it wasn’t useful energy, but the ponies inside here would still probably be alive.

Naudia heard the voice of that prospector pony she’d seen talking earlier as a leader, Meadow Dispach, probably.

“They’re picking us off!” It was nice to see that one of the guards wasn’t corrupted by all this.

“I know that, but remember what they did to Petzite when he tried to run?” Naudia only vaguely recognized that voice, she drew a blank on the name.

“We’re only about 50 feet away from the walls, y’all shouldn’t be arguing when you could be diggin’.” That was Pete, he seemed to be the leader.

“Pete, they’ve already broke in here three times. I’m pretty sure they know about the tunnel, they’re keeping us here intentionally so they don’t actually have to build a jail or something. They know where we’re at, they don’t need to see us to know where we’re at.”

Things escalated from there, and what was when Naudia decided to step in. She slipped underneath he barricaded door which looked like it had been broken down a couple times already

Inside the boarded up bar Naudia saw three ponies arguing. One was Meadow Dispatch like she expected, the other was Pete, and the third was a pony Naudia had only vaguely remembered from her first excursion into town, Calva or something. Things were quickly getting out of hand and Naudia couldn’t wait for the rest of herself to catch up, so she ended up decloaking as a roughly beach ball sized redback rat.

The building was filled to the brim with ponies that looked unhappy, ponies with dirty brown stained bandages, and even a few that were in much worse states lying at the back.

The arguing ponies did not notice Naudia, but a few of the ponies hanging around at the sidelines started to.

Naudia decided to speed things up and thumped at the floorboards to get their attention.

The three arguing ponies stopped arguing to turn to whoever had interrupted them only to find a giant rat standing there looking at them.

“That’s the most venomous looking little bugger I ever saw.” Pete said noting the black appearance and red stripe along Naudia’s back.

“It’s got wing, thingys?” Calva said confused by the wings without membranes.

“Naudia!” Meadow Dispatch said, “Did you come back here to help us?”

Naudia mulled over that one for a second, to be honest she hadn’t thought of these ponies at all since she left town the first time. She debated with herself if she should be honest for a second.

“I didn’t come into town for that,” Naudia could see Meadow Dispatch noticeably sag at that. “But I think now that I’m here, we can help each other.”

That deflated Pete who seemed to have been puffing up in anger at Meadow.

“What’s the situation around here?” Naudia asked.

“Doctor Willow has gone mad because of some new spell he cooked up. Every day or so they break in here and take ponies away.”

“I know that, what is the situation here, now, why haven’t you guys ran away?”

“Anypony who tries to run gets zapped, those guards are unnaturally fast. They don’t even need to hit a pegasus to knock them out of the air.” Pete explained. “So we’ve been digging a tunnel to hopefully get that out past the wall and escape that way.”

“The problem with the tunnel idea is that we’re still a long ways from even reaching the wall, and it needs to be a ways away from the wall to reach the woods outside of town.” Calva explained.

“How many ponies do we need to get out of here?” Naudia asked.

“Well there are about 50 of us in here, and they’ve caught almost double that. I think they have at least that many sailor ponies.”

“Anybody they caught is already dead.” Naudia stated grimly.

“So… only 50 ponies left in town then.” Pete and the rest of the ponies in the room looked down.

Naudia looked around at the ponies in the room, they looked like they hadn’t eaten too well in a couple days. They were all running on fumes, and they’d been enduring random incursions by those monsters outside.

Naudia was having to think about this, which caused her to unconsciously wave her bottlebrush tail around.

“Okay so, here is the deal-”

Naudia cast a spell to create a miniature lay of the land on the floor. But she had to stop because the ponies all started by it.

“Calm down, it’s just an illusion, anyways, I came in from here, and that’s where I’m planning on leaving from. I’m going to make a big, BIG distraction from here, keep an eye on the outside and you’ll know when it starts. I need all of you to try and sneak out on the opposite side of town, get into the woods and meet at this spot. There will be somebody waiting for you when you get there.”

“So you’re telling me you think you’ve got something that can distract these things long enough for us to escape?” Pete asked. “Because I’ve tried shooting them, it don’t do nothin, but they just get back up, they don’t even bleed.”

“Trust me I know what we’re fighting. If you run into trouble yourselves, fire that shotgun off into the air and I’ll come running as quickly as I can.”

“We can’t just leave right this instant.” Calva said. “We’ve still got ponies down in the tunnel and we haven’t packed up any kind of supplies.”

“I still have something in town that I need to find, where is Doctor Willow’s house?”

“Are you sure you want to go there, uhh little rat thing?” Pete asked.

“I have to see it for myself.”

“Are you absolutely certain you can make it out of there alive? I mean it’s one thing to go up against those guard… things, but some lads tried to take him out when all this went south. Didn’t even flinch, he doesn’t feel like a pony anymore.”

“Is he one of those guard constructs as well.”

“Oh no, he’s alive, he’s definitely alive. But he can suck all the warmth right outta a room just by walking through the door.”

“I never thought somebody could just get up with a spear in his chest like that.” Calva said. “Damn necromancer.”

“I don’t like werewolves.” Pete said. “But this Doctor Willow and his ‘cure’ for them is about the worst thing I could imagine.”

“He hasn’t even talked about curing werewolves for months.” Calva said, turning his nose up. “It’s all been about his ‘special project’ I’d bet my last dollar he’s why we’ve had so many ‘wild animal’ attacks recently.”

“I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Pyrite, healing a broken leg my left hoof.” Pete spat on the floor.

“I think I actually have all the info I need here.” Naudia said. “But I still need to start up the distraction away from where you are so you can escape. And I want to see what’s inside of this house myself. Where is it?”

“Are you sure?” Pete asked. “You’re doing us a lot of good here, I don’t exactly want to have to try and put you down or something once Willow gets his hooks into you. I barely know you.”

“I’ll be fine.”

The ponies explained to Naudia where Doctor Willow’s house/clinic was, it was clear on the other side of town. So it was fortunate for these ponies that Naudia had started her search where she did, or else she might not have run into them.

With that she scrambled under the barricade to head out.

“Y'all come back alive now!”

-------------------

Naudia arrived at Doctor Willow’s house. The whole thing was very much intact, looked almost untouched. There was a greater concentration of “ponies” here than back where she just came from. Doctor Willow’s house looked like your typical wooden desert western style construction.

Inside the front door was a waiting room, there wasn’t even a pencil out of place, the walls seem to be newly painted. But here and there Naudia could see that there were glints of gold, a golden pen, a golden picture frame, enough that she could notice it.

Through the back was a treatment room, nothing special, a golden stethoscope hung on the wall and the scale in here was accented with gold. Everything was perfectly in place, the syringes in the case were alphabetized.

Naudia noticed a glint when she opened the door, the deadbolt into the backrooms was made of gold.

The candle lights in here revealed to her that one of the nails on the wall was made of gold as well. This was some kind of office, there were a couple gold paperclips inside a pile of normal ones. Another golden pen, this time with a golden ink stand.

The next room was a living room, one of the legs on the couch was made of solid gold. There was a chicken leg on the coffee table, it looked to be coated with gold.

The hallway leading away with the living room was littered with piles of gold, they looked like somebody was going to either clean them up or sell them off “one day”. Naudia carefully stepped around the piles of gold spilled out on the floor.

The stairs leading up Naudia noticed something, a pip of gold, stuck to a hole in the wallpaper for whatever reason. Then another, a bigger one with a bigger hole. This one appeared to have eaten through the wall behind it.

In the upper hallway the walls and ceiling were just covered with these small growths of gold, eating away at the building itself, they had things like pieces of paper or wood stuck over them. All of it was slowly being consumed by gold.

Naudia stayed as far away from the walls as she could, she was being drawn to one of the rooms. The room with a metal door.

The metal door was entirely unlocked, like it was just like any other door in the house. The other side of the door had lots of scratches on it. It was a very heavy door.

The inside of the room looked to be freshly wallpapered, but you could see long indents underneath the wallpaper. The window was barred, and the bolts look to have been stressed.

Here is where the concentration of gold was the greatest, growths of it teemed along the walls. They watched you as you looked around the room, drawing your eyes like a spiraling whirlpool, deeper and deeper where their concentration grew greater and greater.

Until you had to look at the green mare sitting in a chair in the corner of the room. She had Red hair without a lock out of place. Her features were arranged to be stunning, like a bouquet of silk flowers. Her expression was that of serene peace, as if she would never want anything ever again.

Naudia couldn’t make eye contact with Pomology Pear.

“What a curious creature. I wonder what it tastes like.”

Naudia turned around to find Doctor Willow was standing in the doorway, staring at her, there was a strange kind of hunger in his eyes. On the ground in front of him was an unmoving squirrel, seemingly untouched but to Naudia it felt like it had been drained out.