Twilight's Felquines of Xenon

by Mandarko

Selena & Origins of Hollow Shades chapter 1

Selena & Origins of Hollow Shades

A large black catmare with a few dragon features such as horns and patches of scales appears before a dimmed room in an old castle.
“Just follow the star spiders” she looks at the constellation.
“The stars are aligned, let us begin." She thinks to herself. Her voice while in her big black form actually sounded younger than the body let on.
She opens the doors, letting all the spiders walk through it in a straight line.
The spider trail walked up the wall and looped around it. “Hmm that doesn’t look right.”.

“Lumos!” she casts it on a gargoyle as it animates roaring and yellow stars illuminate the walls making some passthrough and creating solid magical platforms to step on. The wall glows yellow with tiny stars, becomes transparent and able to walk through, the spiders stop looping and go through it. As soon as the spiders go through it they disperse into an army of small see-through brightly golden constellation spiders. The spiders turn a purple blueish hue for 5 seconds before turning back to their golden versions.

“The goth ponies from the neon city told me about an ancient book leading to the ashen land, it was destroyed a millennia ago, it contained powerful medicine, artefacts and a source of catacombs with blood related magic, it sounded like necromancy healing magic which would be a perfect addition to necromenders.".

“Interesting room… 12 doors each with a zodiac leading to multiple rooms.” the spiders form a line and start going through each door. She tries to go through 1 hallway, but it teleports her back to the first stone gargoyles much to her annoyance. “You have got to be kidding me.” she turns into lightning and goes back.
“What if I can transform myself into a constellation? Guess I can’t. 12 doors, going to waste a lot of time with these invisible warping walls and of course the spiders go in a straight line instead of showing me… wait a second… “Lumos maxima.” excellent." she casts it, and a few of the golden constellation spiders turn a violet and sapphire celestial hue.
“That doesn’t seem right” she goes back to before the line of spiders branches off into multiple and casts it again there.

Suddenly a full line of violet spiders appears going to the 10^th door from left to right, the Capricorn sign. “Excellent, now I can just brute force it." she turns to lightning and zaps over a hundred times and eventually gets the combination correctly in less than 1/300000^th of a second. “So it’s up, up, left, down down left up right up left up right up right up up right down down right up up” she thinks to herself “I don’t think 1 minute passed for every mistake I made, I don’t think that enchantment is that good and painful” she climbs up a flight of stairs going up the tower where the spiders go, she just walks through them as they phase through them because of the lumos spell they went through. She looks through the tower with an opening and tries not to fall from the narrow edge, there was an old telescope pointing down “Surprised nobody stole this” she looks through it.

“Useless of course, it wouldn’t point me to where I want it to” she climbs one fleet of stairs down and peeks through a hole in the shape of a star “That building? Yeah that seems more likely” she climbs up and smiles before trying to fly off the tower but then gets reset back in the tower and starts laughing “of course my horse, of course it wouldn’t let me otherwise I would have just flown here and not wasted time with the puzzle… backtracking it is then.”

She backtracks and looks at the enchanted hallway “please for the love of god do not make me…” she gets the wall wrong but it teleports her back to the gargoyle where she wanted to
“That’s convenient. I would have asked for a secret opening.” She goes outside and looks at the constellation in the night sky, spiders with the stars on their back still twinkling, she isn’t too late. She hurries to the building and there she looks for entrances “the solarium” filled with flowers including some star-shaped night flowers blooming, their texture felt of powdery snow, they were cold to the touch.

She tore open the walls as the dense night flowers were eating the oxygen in the solarium. She thought to herself that she probably had to grow a giant flower or make the spiders draw a web, she once again got tired of these puzzles. She was also running out of time and decided to brute force it… in one fell swoop she cast a spell that ripped off the ground and stones revealing its secrets, but the hatch door was magically sealed till it wasn’t. One dark blue laser acted as a welding device that ripped off the hatch door open after a few minutes. The constellation spiders got triggered regardless and started crawling down the hatch door.

She stops them since they’re still solid “I lead” she says to the spiders and goes first. She goes under the solarium and into the catacombs. There she cast a spell on a dragon of a statue that animated and yellow moving platforms appeared, soon the spiders followed. The platforms didn’t move all the way. The line of spiders was different, some were solid, hissing and aiming to bite. She cast her light spell and noticed some of the spiders were literally star-shaped. The giant spider hisses and she just grabbed it quickly, the legs freezing in place as if the spider was picked up like a dumb cat by its neck, but still aiming to bite.

She grabbed one of the spiders and placed it in a hole matching its shape, the platforms suddenly changed shape and started moving, the shape was of that of a frog. And when illuminating the spiders on further inspection they revealed to be constellation of scorpions “Interesting”. She stepped on one the platform together with the spider disguised as a scorpion. There was a hole in the magical platform shaped like a spider.

The platform moved above an abyss slowly, when the platform reached halfway in it slowly stopped, the spider disguised as a scorpion flashed green and animated as if it stung the platform shaped like a frog, the platform started slowly disappearing and Selena started flapping her wings to get past the halfway point, but it immediately teleport her back just a few inches, letting her fall in the abyss, turns out there was a pitch black water. She first cast a spell that turned the water to gelatin and then she cast a powerful spell and illuminated the water, no spider, crocodile or poison dart frog was infecting the water, but below it showed something worse there was a giant portal leading to the depths of space and the water was the only thing keeping you from not falling through directly. She could fly since her wings weren’t made of feathers but a weirder material, she flew back and there were platforms you could jump on to reach back up instead of a ladder.

There’s around 50 platforms almost like a dock with boats and there’s a spider waiting on each of them. But on closer inspection each spider is a scorpion when revealed with the special light spell. The platforms showing frog constellations are colored differently from green to red to silver with the silver being the smallest, the red the biggest. The spiders were also colored differently, but only by inspecting each one and there were also treats in one place of different sizes and colors.

Once reached back up she looks at the puzzle already having it figured out on her way back. She thought to herself recalling the old fable: A scorpion wants to cross a river but cannot swim, so it asks a frog to carry it across. The frog hesitates, afraid that the scorpion might sting it, but the scorpion promises not to, pointing out that it would drown if it killed the frog in the middle of the river. The frog considers this argument sensible and agrees to transport the scorpion. Midway across the river, the scorpion stings the frog anyway, dooming them both. The dying frog asks the scorpion why it stung despite knowing the consequence, to which the scorpion replies: "I am sorry, but I couldn't resist the urge. It's in my nature."

“However I recall something else from nature. There’s a certain species of frogs which tarantulas use as pets. The precise motive hasn’t been discovered yet, but it’s said they taste horrible or they’re a different species like cats from wild cats, as such the tarantulas use them to get rid of the flies, mosquito's and other parasites that might endanger the spider’s eggs, the frogs would sometimes hurry up under the tarantula when spotting a snake and the tarantulas would defend them. Nobody knows if it’s a grey symbiosis like raccoons and trashmen.”

She goes to the silver platform which is the smallest and inspects the golden glowing spider on inspection it’s red, not matching. She tries touching it and her appendage goes through it because it’s made out light projecting around. She gets ticked off and blasts it with a light spell throwing it off the platform.
“Good thing it isn’t made out of actual stars.” she does to a few more till she gets an idea.
She grabs two silver bags, one smaller, one bigger and starts going with it through the dock of platforms, suddenly one of the golden spiders approaches her, on inspection it’s a giant silver tarantula. She gives it two bags and goes for the bigger treats. Another spider approaches that’s smaller but still silver colored, she kicks it off as it screeches.

“Too small” She guides the big one to the smallest silver platform.
“I have a hunch big goes with small rather than small with small” … “ehh I’m sure the small one will be replaced with another one, so no crying over spilled milk".
She looks as the constellation spider replaced the last spider she threw off the platform. She looks away for a second and almost got on the platform with the wrong spider, a bunch of spiders appeared together with the other one, she flashes them and it’s revealed each of them are scorpions, she levitates the big silver one and kicks the fake spiders off the platform screeching. She gets on the tiny silver platform and the giant tarantula goes inside of the platform where a hole of a spider was in it.

Halfway in the platform doesn’t flash in any different color, but it covers Selena in a yellow coat of magic as she floats above the water and the abyss finally on her way to the other side. She starts frowning when the platform seems to disappear and she casts a bunch of light spells to keep it afloat instead she seemingly can levitate without her magic and without flapping her wings. “Old cheap erroneous enchantment or it’s by design?” she levitates the rest of the way there before the yellow magic crawls off her and turns into a yellow spider that crawls up the door’s keyhole and turns into a key. She grabs the spider key and turns it opening the door.

“Finally! found you.”
She goes into library full of books about herbs and dark practices. There she pulls a book that slides one of the bookcases open and blue light illuminate a book made out of stone and leather. But it’s behind a grate gate with lock on it. She simply grabs the lock and pulls on it a little harder and it breaks. Inside there was a giant circle room with 10 meter tall briefcases and down in the abyss a bunch of other books thrown there. In the middle there was the book made of stone. When she approached it a large platform spawned from beneath it with cushions, carpet, a magical globe and a fireplace made of white flames that emanated no smoke.

“White light… all the rage back then, now we can’t get rid of it” she zaps it and turns the light yellow.
“Much better” She reads through the book and finds out it wasn’t what she’s looking for.
“A book about cooking.. really old recipes… and together with it an old spell about turning things to stone and undo it and also an old Lumos spell and one against spiders… this is a book about the most common and popular spells and recipes back then, that’s why it was put on display in the middle, completely useless to me.”
She casts the light spell and it amuses her “So weak, it doesn’t even create flying platforms I can step on. Some things really weren’t better made back then”.

She looks up “I can see the constellation, but it’s not an open space, it merely shows if it’s night time or day time, at this rate I can either hurry up, defuse the enchantments or blow up this whole place trying to escape it if it closes on me…”
She looks around the lit large platform with cushions on and spots the wizard’s orb. She touches it and immediately shows her the book she’s looking for, or rather it precisely shows the page she’s looking for

“Well well well, some old things are better than new ones… better than those dimwitted fairies we use as potions and digital pets” “And…” a white wisp comes out of it and instantly flies towards the book, it looked more like a curtain as the magic dripped from it. The book was glowing in yellow , but it was at the bottom beneath the huge amount of books.
“That’s where it is, now to dig for it…” the white wisp instantly teleports the book on a bookstand and everything.
“Full service, that’s more like it” “This is a book about geographical places, where is Hollow Shades?” the wisp instantly turns the page to Hollow Shades which was actually a book within a book which had multiple scrolls and extra notes attached to it.

The “book” was more like a notebook with someone’s scribbles, academic and military descriptions inside of it almost like an archaeologist’s notes.
“Good job, I’d tip you if I could”. The sun is starting to appear in the projecting ceiling and in this domain she doesn’t have control over the sun and moon. The constellation starts to disappear.
“Time to get out of here.” She warps, but her warp is intercepted and ends up at the door where she came from with the spider key still intact.
“Eh worth a try” she hurries back and the globe shows her a secret passageway that opens to the castle courtyard, but it’s actually a portal disguised as a staircase, a portal that teleports her a few inches.
“Ah adorable a one way portal, better than a wall, I can’t go back even if I wanted, I got to take the long way”
She looks at the book “Finally” she warps out, this time charging it up and covering herself in a white and blue cocoon as she travels millions of miles away.
The night clears up as the constellation disappears so do the spiders resume their normal behavior and the star on their backs stops glowing.

The book:
Hollow Shades,
also named Ashen Town, Sleepy Hollow, Sunny Town, Lavender Town is a town in the Between Lands known for its mystical herbs and unorthodox magical spells. The notebook seems to have belonged to someone called Silver Hoof, I wonder if I’ll ever meet him or her.
Day 12^th, Month 2^nd , Year 426, 6:00AM We’ve settled in, the builders have provided us with houses in which to live for the remainder of our stay. Water, oxygen and sustenance is taken care of. The swamp’s poisonous gas are filtered through a magical shield.

Day 26^th, Month 5^th, Year 426, 9:37 PM We’ve opened the catacombs, the cube mirror puzzle was a pain to solve, it took us multiple days. We’ve opened the underground castle, but it’s laid with traps, it seems there’s multiple underground floors and the material is impenetrable, we cannot break into the last level, the logistics and horsepower we’d require to dig up what seems like a 9 story castle would require funding on the level of a war. Because of the dragon and horse war our diggings couldn’t advance fast enough.
There’s a recipe for curing transformation from environmental factors, transformations such as stoning, transforming into a tree.

Stoning – often occurring against basilisks, medusas and cockatrices, sometimes used as an armour defense spell.
Tree transformation – relating to nymphs and mangroves , there’s a certain bacteria in these parts that turns animal cells to plant cells.

There’s a potion for granting and erasing something called a beauty mark also called a cutie mark, the mark was thought to be a curse back then as a similar mark that destabilized one’s identity and turned them into a multiple personality disorder mess started to appear. It was not the mark itself, but the inside of it that triggered multiple marks to appear.
Day 12^th, Month 6^th, Year 426, 7:26 PM on the same day at precisely 9:55 AM we’ve entered the catacombs, we’ve managed to get to the first 2 floors, there were tentacles, worms, mummies, before our colleague on his way back fell dangerously ill from a wound, we’ve quarantined him and kept him in under medical care
My colleagues refused to go one more trip into the underground castle without proper soldier support. I said no to their cowardice and stepped on, in the name of discovery, finding the truth of our ancestors we must persevere and push forward. The weapons, armour, artefacts and scrolls I’m discovering inside could prove invaluable to the war and advancements.

Day 13^th, Month 6^th, Year 426, 7:34 AM I checked with our colleague Grey Hoof, he seems to still be unconscious, but at least his condition is stable. At 8:05 AM I enter by myself on my own accord into the catacombs.
Day 13^th, Month 6^th, Year 426, 11:36 AM - personal log - I’ve discovered what seems to be a sword made out of a pink colored material adorned with an emblem on it, the emblem was of some weird glyphs that I’ve found in the walls, most likely symbols pertaining to their language but to me mere glyphs, our historian colleague will be most interested.
Day 13^th, Month 6^th, Year 3456, 11:45 AM This sword’s material interacts greatly with the enemies in this place, injuring them greatly unlike our soldiers’ previous weapons and spells on them, it would be a shame to degrade it, but no one made an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

Day 13^th, Month 6^th, Year 426, time of occurrence - 2:46 PM – real time as of writing 9PM I’ve managed to reach the third floor by figuring out the glyph on my own and drawing a map of the place. The further I go the more dangerous creatures I encounter, on my way here I’ve managed to find a red gemstone with vitality giving abilities, it has kept my head sane from the toxic fumes from these unoxygenated rooms that smell of toxic mushrooms.

It seems I have already reached the end of floor 3 as another glyph lock awaited me, I inspected the wall with 3 cuboids inside and turned them in the correct password combination. The wall instead of sliding started crumbling, a large golem beast made of stone and in the shape of a frog adorning a large crown-like helmet blinked at me before roaring.

I struck it a few times, but the stone was tough, I started running all the way back, his roars summoned large fairy-like creatures with a similar crown helmet, I sliced one as I ran and grabbed it throwing it at the beast in desperation, my magical arrows merely slowed it down, it seems like I was going to need far more firepower to bring this guardian down.

I ran to the 2^nd floor and the beast seemed to retreat back where it came from after one more roar. On my way here I stabbed one of those large fairies and put it in my backpack for dissecting back to my encampment. I’ve managed to quickly backtrack my steps and in less than an hour at precisely 4:39 PM I’ve managed to get out. At 5:32 PM I’ve returned to campsite, it looked more like a small town than a camp. I’ve given the dead fairie to analyze to our team’s biologist.

I was almost pressed to keep the sword a secret as I told myself I need it, with a little convincing I gave it to our linguist and historian, but to no one else, the soldiers may have had training but so did I and I wasn’t going to leave it to be lost in the local swamps, that artefact is priceless both for historical purposes and as a means of defense and progress into the underground castle.
Day 14^th, Month 6^th, Year 426 the team had returned with more information

_---
Day 15^th, Month 6^th, Year 426, 7:26 PM Our colleague has miraculously recovered, it seems the spell I’ve cast on him had did its job, minus a small side effect of a small golden mark appearing on his chest.

---
Day 21^st, Month 9^th, Year 426, 1:35PM Happy birthday to Golden Leaf, with his platoon’s help we have opened the last chamber to the castle, the throne room, we have secured it and finally tamed all the creatures of the castle. The throne room was chambering a weird clock-like mechanism made of sand with a portal in the middle which we’ve sealed. The spells we’ve uncovered have made us more agile, stronger, giving us wolf-like qualities, our hooves turned to claws and our fangs grew, but the effects are only temporary. I’ve dubbed this ability the bloody hooves despite the fact we gain claws from them. No secondary effects have been reported from the use of this spell.

Day 27^th, Month 9^th, Year 426, 3:00AM rumours spread of shadowy figures lurking in the swamp forests, it seems like our takeover of the underground castle have attracted them, my colleague theorizes it’s because we’ve stopped the clock-like mechanism from running freely, I call bollocks.

Day 8^th, Month 10^th, Year 426, 8:36PM Most attacks seem to have no effect, our conventional materials especially wood seem to turn everything to ash on contact with the creatures, the special weapons merely stun them, but have no effect. It seems like these creatures are not of this world. Our blood-related spells don’t have much of an effect on them. However a new spell and potion seems to have stabilized our wolf form, but turned us into something else, more demonic looking, it seems to have cured any previous physical illness we’ve had but spawned secondary effects in terms of identity loss and identity conflicts, we’ve lost any mark on our chests and flanks, and seemed to gain an almost parasitic transformation ability to defeat what I refer to as time slips, dahakas and time demons.

---
Day 1^st Month 1^st Year 427 0:00 Happy new year. We’ve managed to become the masters of this domain, but in doing so we’ve isolated the entire area, we have no way to return to our initial area and the spells have changed us in drastic ways that no society would accept us, we can barely handle ourselves, it won’t be long before we kill each other to keep this form of parasitism from spreading to the outside world, our top researcher has already been quarantined as we’ve caught him trying to nuke this whole area just to be sure.

Day 1^st Month 1^st Year 427 4:26 AM An earthquake? No. Seems I have spoken too late, the portal is opening up and eating us all up as the good doctor is explaining it to us all that we shouldn’t be left alive.

=========================

The necromenders, Selena and a bunch of guards with scrolls and sci-fi apparatus walk non-chalantly on the ashes of what used to be Lavender town “These ashes aren’t volcanic…”
“Going back is a tricky business, the moon felquine will go first to secure the landing, she has enough power to deal with whatever is on the other side, from the sound of the notebook we can’t send just anyone.”
They prepare the apparatus and start the spell reading. The selenar horse straps onto what looks like a hybrid between a chair and a motorcycle pod. She gets enveloped in a cocoon and becomes part of the time machine itself, she becomes a biomechanoid. A helmet-like crown appeared over her head except the helmet was her head, her legs and arms had fused with the metallic skeleton-machine, her hair had turned into tendrils that attached to the machine. She telepathetically talks “We’ll be able to communicate if everything goes according to plan, otherwise trigger the geothermal chemicals and come back”.
A sphere forms around the mechanoid cocoon and it warps through a tunnel that’s a few inches thick like a portal. It looked like a cal The world starts reverting around it, turning to back to its olden age. The machine starts aging and turning from a silver metal to black and then slowly turns white then yellowish white like it’s made of calcium, almost like a bone and cavern texture. It looked like a giant insectoid skeleton made of machine and bone, billions of years old.
The time machine starts arriving to its assumed destination, merely a few weeks away from its destination to give time for its driver to evolve back into her initial state, the selenar horse starts breathing, the defensive sphere still active, the process starts reversing, the machine turns back to a black metal and the recipient starts slowly regaining its limbs, hair, deattaching herself from the machine becoming entity and object again. Her time machine doubled as a specialized spaceship as a motorcycle and throne in one. The sphere had slowed down the time machine to a gentle landing, but gentle meant 88 miles an hour in this case. The time machine blasted through the portal and left flames behind it and ripped a few trees open. “Somebody forgot to add an extra 0.00(0) to those calculations… either that or this place affected the speed, it should had been 0.088 miles an hour” “Message from 13 billion years from the future” “Please slow down the time machine this time, don’t allow it to function as as a motorcycle this time” “Too late for that”. “Oxygen breathable… not like that matters for my biology” The selenar horse unbuckles the machine and gets out of it.

Comments

[Inucroft1]

The, first chapter of a mixture of IC, OOC and fiction... is very weird and heavy read.
[Edit] this "story" is a utter mess and need a complete and utter rewrite to be even to be barely readable

[Redacted]
Thought sometimes it's better to simply show than infodump/tell

[Mandarko]

11746627
Oh you actually read it? as opposed to downvoting because you saw an ad? in that case mind telling me what did you read in the fic and telling me exactly how ass it is ? is it a round ass, a pear ass, a heart-shaped ass?

[EaTCarbS]

Is this satire?

[Inucroft1]

11747979
Dude, it is all over the place and is a awful exposition dump.

It is pretty bad.

[StuGLyfe]

Imagine being such a notorious shitposter that you buy an ad on a Malaysian Crab Taming forum because you probably have a 2-year vacation.

[BionicFox]

Amazing story the ad was cool too I have a tooth infection right now

[Mandarko]

I feel bad now for removing @simple-as and @Lee Goldson's comments for referencing the fact this fanfic was posted on 4chan since it was already getting a lot of dislikes, so people won't read it regardless of the content, not like the content isn't experimental to begin with. Also 4chan ads are completely useless. 95639 impressions for 437 clicks of which I think only 37 are non bots and only 12 users or so engaged with it.

For those who might be discouraged even scared of voicing their critiques, rants, etc. because I might haha report their accounts or anything and they really need to keep track of those favourites list (a user on 4chan said this), feel at ease that I won't. I'm more of in a state of detached and attached with my wishlist fanfic, I don't get attached to my fanfics in a conventional way. I'm rather more interested to see if anyone has everything to say I already know about it or something new to say.

I welcome anyone to write their critiques, rants, reviews, etc. since I know every single little thing you could possibly have to say about the fic, especially on the negative side. I actually have a mental checklist which I'll verify to see if you managed to check everything off the list.
If you have something new to say, a new perspective, something I missed or wouldn't have thought of in a trillion years then congratulations to you, you're an actual critic and not one of those journalists who can't figure out the crouch button.

[Peppermint N Swirl]

LOL Dat 4chan ad tho. So true

[Mandarko]

11749956
Grown-ass men watching Hasbro's toy commercial titled "My Little Pony" and grown-ass men writing fanfiction about its world and characters. No I'd say we have went far beyond satire and evolved it into a fine silvery paste that cannot possibly in its wildest imagination ever make a choice between black or white.