Umbreka

by Armanico Vita

Once Bitten...

Fluttershy lay there, on the cold, solid ground. Fortunately, she wasn't hurt too badly, mostly just shaken at the sudden turn of events. She felt the icy trickle of of the cave's saliva pelt her on the snout. She was too sore to move, but the steady stream of droplets was compelling to her to do otherwise. She sat up on her haunches, retired her goggles up to the crown of her head, and blankly stared out the mouth of the cave. The gorgeously, chromatic world she was just a part of had turned gray in a matter of minutes. The massive cloud was large enough to blot out any sunlight that was still left in the afternoon gleaming. Dark greens and brown turned to black and the melodical chirping of birds changed into the howling roars of thunder. The soft pitter-patter of droplets turned into a symphony of crackling precipitation.

Fluttershy waited for her eyes to fully adjust before standing up on all fours. She let her wings extend outwards as she gently fluttered them. Any loose moisture that had collected within the barbs of her feathers had now been shaken off of her. She let her wings retract back into place and studied the room around her. The cave was a monotonous shade of gray, at least the visible portion was. It stretched back a long distance, even further than her vision would let her. There was no telling how far it stretched on or even where it leaded to, and she probably didn't want to find out either.

The thunder was letting up for now, maybe that meant the storm was coming to an end. She relaxed her back up against a spire of stalagmites and rested her eyes shut. She welcomed the rhythmic pounding of the rain into her ears, it lent her gentle heartbeats a pleasant ambience. The sounds rebounded off the stone walls around her, providing a gentle tune that tickled her eyes. Fluttershy lent her own percussion into the mix, tapping her hooves to create a light beat. She hummed out the tune to one of her favorite songs. It was the song her mother used to sing to her when she was just a little foal. When the song was over she was overcome by an immense feeling of exhaustion.

Fluttershy was about to slip into the warm embrace of slumber when a bolt of lighting struck down, impetuously, near the mouth of the cave. It's deafening boom echoed off every surface around her, pelting her ears with an explosive shock. Her vision doubled and her thoughts were pierced by a sharp ringing sound resonating in her eardrums. She stumbled around the room, trying to regain her bearings. Another strike landed nearby, this one being more drowned out than the first; it sounded like she had been dunked into a large body of water.

The bright flash being cast down into the cave highlighted the arrangement of stalactites and stalagmites near the front entrance just long enough for her to catch a quick glimpse. The horizontal projections shot downwards towards the ground and sharpened off at a needle-point tip. They were the canines of the mouth, the teeth that were used to rip fresh clean off the bone. They all looked eerily enough like rows of the jagged teeth found inside most carnivorous monsters. The sight of this left Fluttershy distraught. Her concussed head allowed her to see more than one pair of teeth, grinning wide as they shifter closer and closer.

Fluttershy felt her sanity dropping quickly and she needed to get out of there. The sharp crackling of downpour against the forest floor was turning into the guttural growls of an ancient dragon, ready to gulp her up in one fell swoop. Using the stalagmite as a crutch, she pulled herself onto her feet and stumbled around looking for a way out.

The options she were left with were less than she had hoped. If she went back outside in that weather, she wouldn't be able to hold out until the storm dried up let alone survive an entire hour. She played the scenario through in her head. There was only one choice left, she had to continue down the dark corridor behind her; it was a much better option than getting splattered against the thick wood of an oak. Swiftly, she turned tail and blindly ran into the seemingly endless tunnel of limestone rock.

Her momentum was brought to a slow crawl as the tunnel began to narrow itself in around her. She rubbed at the element hanging around her neck, each passing stroke caused the tourmaline gemstone to radiate a bright pink light. The polished stone was painted painted in the pink glare of her glowing pendant. As she tilted her head left and right, the swath of pearl light bobbed with her. She proceeded slowly, her gait slow and cautious, for what had to have been several minutes in the heart of the hillside.

The air was dank and moist, though it wasn't from the storm that was still roaring against the surface of the world far above her. The subterranean passage had a finely preserved quality; the walls and floors of the place felt as if they hadn't been disturbed in ages. The deeper Fluttershy went, the more shocked she was to find herself breathing normally. She was still getting plenty of oxygen and if she didn't know better, she'd imagine that she had been breathing just as easily in the open air.

Fluttershy had assumed that this was a natural cave. As she glanced left and right, she noticed the lack of etchings on the walls. There weren't any signs of knicks from a pickaxe, or insignias marked into the rock. However, the tunnel was so smooth and perfect in its descent that she couldn't help but assume that something had willfully dredged it. She imagined that perhaps this chamber she had stumbled upon was built in ages long gone by. Maybe weather and time had eroded the material to its present smoothness, she knew a lot about nature but she wasn't going to try and pretend she was an expert on weather. She merely trotted forward and explored.

Further on down the ramp she heard the echoing splashing of water colliding with the surface of stone. She held held her pendant up to her face and aimed it around the tunnel. A small flicker of light reflected off the steady stream of crashing raindrops, sending small flickers of pink light into the cornea of her eye. She walked closer to the curtain of water, letting her pendant create a small kaleidoscopic show of glistening colors off the falling droplets. There was suddenly a cold dust of air, as if a mysterious wind was being funneled through the chamber. The opening in the ceiling where the constant stream of water was flowing in from led all the way back up to the surface of the mountain above her. Clicking her goggles into place and grabbing onto her butterfly pendant, she stood under the waterfall and looked upwards. Through the constant pounding of heavy raindrops against her face, she was able to make out a branching set of paths winding off from the original that led straight into the sky. Fluttershy stepped back and shook her mane dry, grinning at this discovery. She knew now that she wasn't straying too far from the surface world.

Glancing down, her eyes followed the brook's path as it rivered down the tunnel in front of her and hanging a sharp right into a far steeper tunnel. She covered her bag as she stepped through the imposing wall of liquid. The water was chilling to the touch and the light breeze whisking in from the tunnel above. The corridor echoed with each splashing stepped as she trudged through the icy rainfall. The current grew faster as she hooked right and proceeded down the steeper incline. The tunnel she was following was joined in by many smaller, subsequent tunnels. The all bled together and converged into one path like the veins in a pony's body.

More time passed by as Fluttershy carefully followed the highway of interconnecting paths, hers being the artery. Every new tunnel she passed emptied off into hers, filling the tunnel up to the top of her hooves in water. In the distance she could hear the echoes of the trickling stream double, triple, and then turned into a gentle roar that drowned out the storm above the mountain overhead. Fluttershy noticed that her gem's glowing stopped piercing the path ahead. If the tunnel she was just in was an artery, this had to have been the heart.

She stood at the entrance to the large underground cavern. She closed her eyes and focused in on the element of kindness. She let her mind ease up and meditated deeply. The gentle sound of oiled gears turning and then an abrupt clicking noise could be heard. The pink glow intensified. She found herself squinting, then lifting her water-slicked goggles to get a good look at what she saw.

The chamber was spacious, a surprising contrast to the claustrophobic corridors that had led her down there. Pooling about a forest of limestone stalagmites was an underground lake, stretching left and right—from wall to wall—at a width of over three hundred feet. How long the chamber was, Fluttershy couldn't tell.

The lake water below her was covered in a thick layer of brown-green mucus. She could have sworn she spotted a peculiar arrangement of pale stones below the surface. Dropping a rock into the murky depths, she watched as the ripples part an opening in the slime for her to see. Not to far below the muck, she could make out the outline of hundreds of white spheres resting on the bottom of the abyss. Fluttershy let out a gasp, "These aren't stones, they're..." She could feel warm, bated breaths roll down her neck and onto her spine. She closed her eyes and nervously rotated her head one-hundred eighty degrees. Her heart rate speed up tremendously as her eyes began to peel open. "...Quarry eggs." All she could see were a set of grinning blood-stained yellow teeth and the scaly red face they were attached to.

The quarry mother made the first move. It's head reeled backwards, jaw opening up wide enough to swallow even Princess Celestia in a single gulp. The eel lunged forward ready to finish Fluttershy off, it's shear force was enough to shake the walls around it, and just enough to make the edge Fluttershy was standing on to chip off. Fluttershy flailed around as she plummeted into the vile gunk below her.

There was a sick, crunching noise as she smashed into the water. Her fall was broken by grand cluster of eggs, all piled together in a spire of black adhesive. The landing sprayed a dark tar in all direction. Fluttershy emerged from the depths gasping for air. Her mane was stained black and her face was covered in green bile. Enraged at the loss of her children, the mother quarry eel bulleted out of the hole and aimed itself straight at the yellow pegasus's head. Fluttershy dove down into the depths, narrowly avoiding decapitation and causing the eel to slip overhead, crashing itself through a few healthy clusters of eel eggs. The eel fumbled around in the black glue encasing it's body in a sticky tomb. It let out a hostile shrill. Under normal conditions, the cry would have been loud enough to be heard from at least a mile away. The cave they were in amplified the sound to echo all throughout the underground labyrinth. Fluttershy trembled as eyes all around the room lit up from their peaceful slumber.

One by one they each crawled out of their holes and flopped their way into the breeding chamber. Each one nose-dived into the water just to arch out and fly in her direction. Fluttershy dove down once more, dodging clamping jaws by shifting left and then right, her outstretched hooves reaching for the stone floor. Once her hooves clapped up against the limestone floor, she threw all of her weight against the surface and propelled herself out of the water like a torpedo towards the entrance; a jet of water following her escape. She slipped through the jaws of one eel and managed to smoothly land on the cliff above. Using all of her strength, she galloped forward, climbing up the rising incline. Her heart beat skyrocketed and her lungs began gasping for much needed air. She was rapidly exhausting herself, but she couldn't stop running. Each eel threw itself forward in attempts to rip a chunk out of her hindquarters. Due to their recklessness, the cave began to shake and crumble around them. Fluttershy strafed left, narrowly avoiding a large piece of ceiling that instead, struck one of the eels between the eyes and impeded the path of the melee behind her.Without stopping to look back, Fluttershy made a straight beeline for the hole she discovered not too long ago.

Fluttershy skid to a stop underneath vertical escape tunnel. It had stopped raining some time ago and now a bright sun beam shone down on the spot she needed to be. Slapping her shaded goggles on, Fluttershy aimed herself skyward and began her steady climb to the safety of the surface world.

Fluttershy collapsed into a heap of yellow hair and feathers right next to the entrance of the hole. Her eyes burned as the adjusted to the sudden change in lighting. She wheezed and coughed as her lungs took in the well deserved oxygen they needed. She took her goggles off her face and threw them to ground. Her whole body went numb, minus the tingling sensation she felt in her legs. Even though it was daytime, she felt like she could sleep for days.

As she was digging through her saddlebag, she heard the sound of a repulsive, crunching noise from behind her. At first she didn't feel anything, but after she turned to see what happened, she let loose a blood-curdling scream. One of the eels had latched it's teeth onto her right wing and it was intent on dragging her back into the den with it. Fluttershy, had to break free from this monster's iron grip on her wings. She kicked and she struggled as she was slowly being dragged back towards the pit, but nothing she did seemed to work for her; there was only one last thing she could do if she wanted to save her own life. She put all of her weight to one side of her body and swiftly rolled over to the other side without hesitation. She heard the deafening pop and her appendage went limp. Painfully, she wrapped both hooves around her wing and squeezed it free from between the clenched teeth, allowing the eel to plunge to its rocky grave below.

Fluttershy's wing lay useless at her side, unable to even retract back to its original placing. She stumbled as far away from the hole as her legs would allow her and rested her body up against the thick of a tree. Lifting up her wing, Fluttershy noticed that the eel had torn into her skin and left a gash running the length of her wing.The warm blood trickled down her feathers into her torso and mixed with the dirt to form clumps in her fur. Before she had the time to bandage her wounds up, her vision doubled and she passed out from the immense pain.

Comments

[Regidar]

Hm, quarry eels. Man, why you gotta be such a rip-off?

[Armanico Vita]

1791555

If I may ask, how is it be a rip-off if quarry eels are cannon to the show?

[Regidar]

1793309 Wait, they are? Am hallucinating again and forgetting about quarry eels?