Forbidden Deeper

by SaltyJustice

Chapter 17

"Ha! Hey Inkie, look!" somepony shouted.

I looked around quickly. I was standing outside my house, in our rock garden, checking some of my own personal projects. They hadn't been turning out so well, so it wasn't exactly captivating my attention here. Something else tugged at me.

Wasn't I supposed to be doing something important?

Evidently not, I supposed.

"Inkie! Look!" somepony shouted again. Definitely coming from the roof. I backed away from the house to get a better look but there was nopony there. Hmm.

Pinkie appeared from the other side of the house, hovering into view above the roof, and waved at me before vanishing down the other side.

I went around the house to investigate, and found the most bizarre sight. Somehow, without me having heard her doing it, Pinkie had smuggled in a trampoline and assembled it on the other side of the house. She twirled in midair like a trapeze artist and bounced hard, waving to me as I looked right at her.

"Look! I got a trampoline!" she shouted.

"I gathered," I said.

Off to one side, my other sister, Blinkie, was standing, admiring the sight of the thing. It was pretty big, not one of those narrow trampolines made for exactly one pony. This one could probably fit several if you didn't collide in midair. Which was exactly what I was expecting to happen.

"Come on, hop on! It's tons of fun!" Pinkie shouted. I've heard her whisper before, but usually? Shouting.

"Pinkie, what's going to happen if you and I hit each other on there?" I asked.

She shifted her weight on her next bounce, slowing her descent and bouncing barely at all. On the next hit, she stopped completely, her eyes closed, lost in thought.

I heard a bird chirping from the lonely apple tree, the only one on our property. Pinkie continued to think as Blinkie made her way around the trampoline and closer to me.

"How'd you do that?" she asked me. She brushed aside her mane to better see, and I watched over the next two seconds as the cast-aside follicles inexorably found their way back in front of her eyes.

"It's simple. Just ask her to consider the consequences of her actions, and it's like flipping a switch," I said.

"Wait!" Pinkie shouted. Again with the shouting.

"If you hit me in midair, but I don't hit you, then it was a miss, right? But if I hit you, and you don't hit me, it's a miss. Only if we both hit each other would anything bad happen, and that's like a one-in-three chance of happening. It won't be that bad, come on!" she said.

I admit I was stunned by that logic. Nopony ever accused Pinkie of being dumb, not in my recollection. She was probably smarter than all of us put together, because I could see there was underlying combinatorial math there that nopony had ever taught her, to my knowledge.

"I'm not going on if you're on it. I don't wanna get hurt," Blinkie said, so low as to be almost a whisper, but Pinkie could hear it just fine.

"Okay, your turn then!" she shouted.

I watched Blinkie bounce for a while, though the sun didn't move much. What time was it? I felt like I had been up forever, but it should have been about ten in the morning. Regardless, Blinkie seemed to be enjoying herself quite a lot, giggling quietly to herself and feeling the wind rush through her hair.

Amazingly, Pinkie was actually being fairly disciplined, and standing next to me without darting off.

"Is something wrong?" I asked her.

"Oh nothing, just enjoying my brief time here," she said.

"Well you can come visit whenever you want," I said.

"I can?" she asked.

That was confusing, to say the least.

"Well yeah, if the Cakes will give you time off. Door's always open," I said.

Her head started bobbing and I had seen that sort of thing before, she was coming up with a song. Fortunately for me, she didn't sing it. Her songs can be a lot of fun, but never the first draft, let me tell you. It's best if she works out the kinks and doesn't try to make up the lyrics on the fly. Instead, she started humming something to herself, stopping and restarting every now and then.

You know, what was I supposed to be doing? I realized then that I was wearing my hardhat. And my rock hammer. And I had a pickaxe strapped to me, and saddlebags loaded with flares. Flares? I had a feeling that something earth-shatteringly important was supposed to be happening but I couldn't quite remember what. Was I supposed to be in a mine somewhere?

"You wanna have a go?" Blinkie asked, settling herself and hopping expertly off the trampoline.

"I dunno, I was supposed to be doing something," I said.

"Once you start, you won't want to stop! It's great! Just for a minute? Please?" Pinkie said, alternately proclaiming and begging with a change between the two so quick it'd give you whiplash.

"Oh fine. Hold my pickaxe," I said.

She didn't hold it, she just let it sit on the ground, but she made sure no dust got on it. Because a dusty pickaxe meant something in that tangled mess of a mind she had, I guessed.

I climbed onto the trampoline and tested it. Very strong, and quite well made.

"Where'd you get this from?" I asked.

"Oh, didn't you hear? There was a circus in town, and they had this trapeze act, and I went, and it was soooo awesome, and I was like, I wish I could do that. So I asked them if I could try it out, and then the guy, really nice guy, said, sure! You can keep this trampoline, we were gonna replace it anyway! And I was like, no way! And he was - " she babbled.

"Okay I get it," I said.

I ain't no dummy, though. If they were going to replace it, it probably had some fault that Pinkie wouldn't have noticed. It didn't smell bad. It didn't look bad, and it certainly wasn't broken or Pinkie and Blinkie would have found that out. Maybe they thought it was bad luck, I knew how some performers would get really superstitious sometimes.

I pushed down and jumped off the mat, and the springs bore me aloft, then down again, then up, higher than before. This was fantastic, mostly because it was so relaxing. The impact with the mat was gentle and the lift was amazing, but the best part was the height. I could see everything for a mile around. Of course, our property is pretty flat, but I could see above the treetops of our neighbors, something I had never seen before. Most importantly, I was in control, not being carried by a Pegasus or something, I could decide how high I went, and I wanted to go higher.

I shifted my weight as I landed so I could bounce even higher, clearing the height of our house's roof, but it seemed I had hit the limit. The trampoline could propel me no higher than that, no matter how hard I tried.

Blinkie moved over to the one of the poles that held the thing up and seemed to be fiddling with it. Pinkie took notice and followed her. What was she looking at?

"Hey, stop! Stop!" Pinkie shouted, and I instinctively reduced my bounce as quickly as I could. Blinkie pulled a pin out from the leg and caused the trampoline to collapse just after I took off, and the sudden change of balance caused me to flip over in the air.

I landed hard on all fours, barely. One split second of difference and I would have hit my head, and hardhat or no, that would have been bad, even fatal.

"What the hay were you doing?" I shouted at Blinkie.

Blinkie had lost all notice of me and focused her ire on Pinkie instead.

"You idiot! I had it, why did you stop me!?" she shouted, and lifted her hoof to strike Pinkie. Blinkie. My shy little sister who had once told me that she was literally incapable of hurting a fly. Something was profoundly wrong here, and only just now had I noticed it.

Blinkie smashed Pinkie's head with her hoof, a blow that I could hear from where I was, and knocked Pinkie down. She landed hard on her back, and spun around, rolling over and starting towards me.

"Run! Run!" she said.

"Blinkie, what has gotten into you?" I asked her. A dark, angry look had come about her, even looking at her seemed to dim the sun around us. It was cold, suddenly and for no reason, despite it being a hot summer day.

"Traitor!" she shouted, and she dove at Pinkie. She grabbed on and the two fell over in a heap, wrestling with one another. This wasn't like when we were fillies, this wasn't play fighting, Blinkie was trying to kill Pinkie, and I was just shocked.

I stepped back and my hoof connected with my pickaxe, sending out a high-pitched ping sound which cut through the fog over my head and rattled something deep within me. I knew what they feared, somehow.

I sat down and pulled out a flare from my saddlebag, checking it over to make sure I hadn't wrecked it earlier. I chomped the cap and pulled it off, sending a powerful bright white light everywhere, illuminating the world, really illuminating it. It revealed a black, almost insect-like carapace floor beneath me, but only when the flare was within a meter of the ground. Somehow this intense light could reveal the truth. They feared light. It all made sense.

I threw the flare at Blinkie, and she screamed as it revealed her true form, some sort of creature made of black, flowing rock. All across her skin, especially her eyes, were green etchings, much like malachite but darker, deeper. Pinkie, too, was a creature like this, and she grunted and turned away from the light, but kept on fighting Blinkie, or the thing that only looked like her.

"Get out of here! Run, Inkie! Run and don't stop!" Pinkie shouted at me.

I turned and bolted, where, I don't know. The world around me was dissolving, gone was the farm I had grown up on. Gone was the blue sky, the house, the trampoline, all had turned to some thick, hard, smooth substance. I was barreling blindly through some sort of cave system, without regard for where I was going, just away.

The conflict behind me echoed ahead until I had outpaced it, leaving no sound save the clacking of my shoes on this stuff. I could remember what I was supposed to be doing, at least, but I couldn't see the others anywhere. Did I risk calling out? Were they anywhere near me, or were they dealing with their own problems?

I had no answers, I just charged off, turning whenever I felt like it, until I tired and had to slow down somewhere in these caves. Direction was meaningless, as was time. This was stupid, I shouldn't have come here but I did because I was worried about Pinkie. That creature wasn't her, but it had saved me anyway. Didn't Princess Cadence say something about that? Why didn't it try to kill me?

I could hear talking from somewhere up ahead, and I instinctively pulled out another flare, in case it was a trick. The talking wasn't coming towards me, though, and I couldn't make out any of what was being said through the echoes. There were two voices, I was sure of it. One was Princess Cadence, and the other I had never heard before, a mare's deep voice.

I ventured towards it, or at least towards the nearest echo, keeping the flare in my mouth if it came to that. They were talking about something very genially, like old friends, I think.

"Now, what say we play a little game?" teased the mare's voice.

"You're dead. Why don't you just stay dead?" Cadence asked.

"Because, like you, I am compelled to return over and over. Isn't that funny, how we share this? We have so much in common," the mare said.

"You're a mass murdering freak whose soul is imprisoned in a cage buried and forgotten. We have nothing in common," Cadence said. There was no anger there, but the words betrayed they weren't exactly old friends. Perhaps just speaking cordially out of respect?

"Come now, you may look like all these other ponies, but it's just superficial. You could be so much more, you are immortal, undying, powerful. Why fight for them? What have they ever done for you?" the mare asked.

"You don't get it, and you never will. I was created for a purpose," Cadence said.

"So was I! It is you who will never 'get it'. You can reject that purpose, can't you? Then why don't you!?" the mare shouted in defiance. I snuck closer, but these two were still some distance away. It was impossible to judge with the echoes just how far I was, but they did seem to be close.

"I like it. I came to agree with it in my own way, in my own time. That's why I fight for them, because I love them," Cadence said.

"Oh, then you'll love this game I came up with. Care to play?" the mare asked.

"That depends on the conditions," Cadence said.

"Oh it's very simple. If you manage to kill me, then you get to go, and I, well, I die. For real, I promise," the mare said.

"Uh huh. And if you kill me? This sounds not at all like a game, more like a death match," Cadence said. Her composure was astounding, this mare was making death threats and she didn't waver.

"Oh no, see, I've been planning this one for a very long time. It's got everything you love, I made it just for you!" the mare said.

The bizarre cavern around me started to shimmer and shift again, and I couldn't follow their voices anymore. They were becoming more distant.

"Okay General, it's not like I have much of a choice," Cadence said. Then she was gone, along with her interloper, and I was surrounded by a wall of granite that looked much like the palace in Canterlot.

I couldn't find a way in, though, the wall ran all the way across the cave in both directions, from top to bottom. Whatever game they were playing, I was stuck sitting it out.