Kaidan

by Lupine Infernis

7th Candle

It started ten years after she banished Nightmare Moon.

A letter had materialized on her bedside drawer in a plume of black fire. Celestia read it against her better judgement and barely made it past the first paragraph before tearing it to shreds and throwing the pieces into the fireplace.

The aroma of decay lingered long after the flames had died.

The next time it happened was a year later. She had pushed the memory into the recesses of her mind, but it came surging back as she walked into her quarters and found the same aged parchment waiting for her on her bed.

Celestia could not help herself: she read it through, forced herself to.

The letter was a vivid description of the torment being experienced by one trapped in Tartarus. The style of writing projected a malicious coldness that was unmoved by the suffering it recorded in short yet accurate sentences.

Celestia burned this one, too, and slept elsewhere to give the smell time to dissipate.

The next year, it happened again.

Celestia read of a vivisection being done on a stallion who had murdered his wife and child fifty years ago. It recorded the sound of a sharpened knife gliding across exposed bone, the ululating shrill of his cries, and the squelch of his abdominal cavity.

The next year, same as always.

Celestia was told of a mare who used her charms to lure and kill beguiled stallions. The letter informed her that there was a unique aroma that only formed when heated metal was placed against soft tissue. Celestia had to stop when the writer casually remarked how the bloated corpses of the ponies the mare fooled would waddle in and begin to defile her.

In the calm between this letter and the next, Celestia devoted a significant amount of time and resources to finding the sender of these letters.

One of the ponies she entrusted this task to was a learned scholar, a master at divination and tracking magical signatures. He assured her he would find the sender and created a complex spell matrix to do so.

He cast the spell on the letter she kept and vanished before Celestia’s eyes.

The letter went into the fire and Celestia ended her efforts.

Like clockwork, the next letter arrived in the following year.

It spoke of a recent arrival who ranted and shouted until his tongue was removed and he was tossed into a pit of ants.

Halfway through this letter, a sprite of black flame manifested in thin air and dropped off the pale, bloodless muscle in question.

Years turned into decades.

Celestia tried to ignore them. She threw them into the fire before the words could jump out at her. It worked for a while, but then her dreams were corrupted with images of endless fire, oceans of blood, and walls of writhing flesh and deafening wails.

If she would not read of it, then she would be shown it.

Two hundred and thirty-one years and messages later, something changed.

The writer showed a hostility that was not there before. They sprinkled their paragraphs with snide remarks and none-too-subtle implications that the events they were witnessing were her fault.

Celestia burned it once she was done reading and for once there was no smell.

From then on, the letters escalated in their aggression: the snide remarks changed into death threats and lamentations that they – the writer – were unable to act on their hatred. From this, Celestia extrapolated that the creature writing this was perhaps trapped in Tartarus, too. At the very least, they were incapable of reaching her.

When the three hundred and thirty-fifth letter arrived, it simply read ‘DIE’ and emitted a more potent smell when it burned.

The next letter after that vaporized as soon as she touched it, leaving a burn on her skin. That should have been impossible.

The one after that became saturated in blood as soon as she got near it.

The next one was formed of equine skin with a symbol carved into it that gave her vertigo if she looked at it for more than a second.

Twenty-three years later, Celestia got the greatest shock of her life when nothing came.

She had inured herself to the terrifying nature of the letters to keep her mind intact, but it was their absence that threatened to undo the fortitude she’d built over the centuries. What did it mean? Was it a way to get her guard down? Did it mean that Tartarus itself no longer existed?

Celestia would not know until the next year when the letter came. It was almost a relief to see it again.

There were just four words:

THE SUN IS BEAUTIFUL

Years passed with no letters – Celestia’s paranoia threatened to influence her decisions as monarch of Equestria. She suspected every new face of being this writer.

Decades passed – she took a month-long sabbatical, half to relax and half to make sure that if the writer did show, then she could take them alone.

Centuries passed – as sturdy as Celestia’s memory was, the letters and their contents slowly faded into the fog of time. Her fear of being alone, of seeing new faces seemed irrational now that she had forgotten the reason for it.

And eventually, when her beloved sister was returned and her precious student was the new Element of Magic, Celestia forgot the experience wholly.

Until, the year after Luna’s return, her student came to her with a distressed grimace, speaking of strange and threatening letters describing how beautiful Celestia looked when she was sleeping.

---

---

“Trixie?”

“Yes, Twilight?”

“I feel as if you’re still sore over that amulet business.”

“What makes you say that?”

Twilight rolled her eyes. “Anyway, that was pretty chilling.”

“Chilling is a good word,” Rainbow Dash nodded. “But I don’t think I’d go as far as ‘scary’.”

Trixie harrumphed and went to blow out a candle. “The brilliance of Trixie’s tales is lost in all the air in that head of yours.”

“Yeah, yeah, go eat more of our red liquorice.”

“I shall!”

“What do you think of that story, Starlight?” Pinkie asked.

Starlight thought a bit. “I like it. It’s simple, it lays out the ‘horror’ aspect quickly and clearly, and it plays into the ‘unknown’; we never found out who that writer was or why that mare was receiving letters in the first place.”

“Aw…” Pinkie deflated. “I was kinda hoping for another study and analysis. Maybe a thesis!”

Starlight pouted.

“Jeez, cheer up – I’m just pulling your tail. Besides, if I was going to read any thesis on horror stories, then I’d want to read one done by you. Twilight’s fine, too, but she uses a lot of big words that take more time to spell than explain what they mean.”

Twilight fumed. “Okay, for that, I’m exchanging one of your gummy worms with a potato chip from Fluttershy’s share!”

“Tyrant!”

“Duly noted. That aside, according to my list, the next mare to tell a story is… me!”

Author's Note:

Tartarus - some say "Tar-tar-us" - is a location that exists in a part of Equestria resplendent with unstable ambient magic. This abundance of magic creates a localized space wherein matter and energy fluctuate and shift between reality and thought. Long ago, unicorns discovered this place and sculpted obsidian totems that helped anchor the location in reality. However, there was enough leeway to allow the unicorns to "guide" the environ and its fundamental laws, which was how they created "Tartarus", a name translated to "Eternal Prison".

Interestingly, "Tartarus" can also be translated to "Eternal Garden", though this clearly must be a mistake.

(Otherwise, it is commonly known as 'the scary place with all the monsters'.)

Comments

[Moosetasm]

THE SUN IS BEAUTIFUL

Yeah, and not the one in the sky, apparently.

how beautiful Celestia looked when she was sleeping.

Oooooooooweeeeeeeeeoooooooo