Chapter 8
A tiny figure stood, angular and sharp in the clear, cold air, on the brink of an abyss. He stood, alone and indecisive, and steam eddied around his fetlocks, plastering his fur against his body with a clammy, stinking dampness. He stood, one of only two mortal souls for hundreds of leagues around, and he wondered and feared and doubted.
Another foul gust of fumes billowed up from the gaping pit below, and the Mule cringed back, stomach churning. Somewhere below, working her way down into the bowels of the mountain, was the madmare who had dragged him here. The Dark Lord Sassaflash! Lord of nothing, neurotic, brilliant, megalomaniacal, and mysterious.
Broken.
Not too long before, she had stood where the Mule was standing now, her hooves dusty with ancient ash. Strapped to her back was a small, rounded bundle, and hanging at her sides were several coiled lengths of rope, a carbide lamp with a mouth-grip, a knife, and various other pieces of caving equipment. For some moments she had been staring into the pit, ears pressed back against her head. At length she raised a hesitant hoof, extended it--and then withdrew it again. Turning, she had looked back at the Mule, her face a shade more pinched and strained than usual, and said, “So it ends, and so it begins, Mr. Mule. Or perhaps it will only--No. I am the Dark Lord Sassaflash! Before me the weak tremble, and the mighty...” She hesitated. “...also...tremble. Yes.” The Dark Lord cast a quick, nervous glance over to the yawning chasm. “I am the Dark Lord Sassaflash. I deal in strange powers, and in mysteries. I have power over them. Over the strange powers. I am the Dark Lord Sassaflash!" There was a moment of silence. Then she had sighed, her shoulders sagging and ears drooping. She suddenly looked very, very frail. “But It is a God.”
She had closed her eyes, then, and inhaled a deep draught of the cloyingly venomous gases wafting up from below. She shuddered, but forced herself to draw another long, slow breath, tasting--almost savoring, it had seemed to the Mule--the death-laden mists. Some of the tension left her face, fading away into a tired resignation, and when she had opened her eyes again, their customary fire was only barely visible. She looked away from the Mule, back down into the darkness, and murmured, “My odds, Mr. Mule, are poor. I must know that. You must know it, as well. Wait for me here a day, and no longer. If I do not return by this time tomorrow, in all probability I will not be returning, and you should head south, back to civilization. Do not tell my acolyte what happened to me; fashion some soothing falsehood or other.” She gave a grim chuckle. “Perhaps you could claim I left the waking world, and entered the Dreamlands. Some of the greatest dreamers have been rumored to do so; why not me?”
The Dark Lord stepped forward, and began to inch her way down the steep incline of jagged, ash-covered ʻaʻā into the darkness. The Mule watched her descent in silence. Just before she passed from view into the caverns beneath, Sassaflash had looked up, her face pallid and colorless in the shadows, and called, “One last thing, Mr. Mule. We have had our differences, I know, and I do not pretend that I might not have preferred you to be less assertive and more subservient. You were not, I confess, quite what I expected. But taken as a whole, you have been a commendable minion, and I--well. It has been...worthwhile knowing you.” A pause. “Thank you.” Then she had turned, and vanished into the deeps.
That had been an hour ago. A chill wind whimpered and moaned over the stones of Voormithadreth, scattering whorls of ice dust through the air, and the Mule heaved a heavy sigh. “She shouldn’t ought to have went,” he muttered to nopony in particular, and drew his thick woolen wrap more snugly around himself. “She just shouldn’t.”
You will simply die. There is no other way it can end. That was what Odsin Ends had said, back in that mystical little shop in the Hollow Shades. The Mule began to suspect that the shopkeeper’s prophecy would end up being a true one, and the Dark Lord would perish here in the frozen north, all her plans crumbling into dust and death. Her rise to power--however she planned for it to happen--would never occur. Celestia and Luna’s eternal reign would never be challenged. The will of this angry, hurt pegasus would never be wrought on the world. For an instant, before he caught himself, the Mule thought, and I reckon it’d be better that way.
Well. Maybe it would. But if the cost of that reprieve was Sassaflash‘s life, he found that he didn’t really fancy seeing it paid. The Mule stood in silence for a moment longer, brooding as he stared down into the mist-shrouded pit before him, and then he gave an irritated snort and hoisted himself up. After a moment’s rummaging through the small pack of supplies he had carted up the mountain from their base camp, he retrieved a spare carbide lamp and another length of rope--packed on the general principle that it was always a good idea to have at least one or two spares, even if Sassaflash herself had rejected them due to a fear that the extra weight would slow her down--and slung the pack on to his back, muttering “I ain’t gon’ have no blood on my hooves. Not hern, not nopony’s.” Small rocks and pebbles tumbled off and away into the darkness as the old creature began to inch his way down the steep incline, into the heart of Voormithadreth.
-----
A flame burned in the dark. Distant columns and crags of stone wavered in and out of existence in its shining beam, their surfaces glistening with pallid, damp light, while nearer at hoof long black shadows flung themselves out from the backs of boulders and rubble to join the deeper darkness of the caverns beyond. There might also have been shapes in the distance, like coils, claws, or something else entirely. It was difficult to tell.
Through that darkness, brandishing a beam of light, crept a very small creature. Her hooves slipped and slid on the damp rocks, her mane hung limp and bedraggled from her head, and as she struggled through the hot, heavy air she swallowed each new breath with a choking gulp. Between the occasional open galleries and halls the way was often cramped and difficult, forcing the mare to crawl through twisting passages and squirm down fissures, and yet she felt curiously free of any sense of claustrophobia. If anything, the reverse was true; even in the tightest crevices, where the rough, scraping stone pressed against her skin and pinned her limbs to her sides, there was a strange sense of exposure. The rock surrounding her seemed fragile and impermanent, and Sassaflash almost expected it all to just dissolve away, like a salt crystal dropped into a cauldron of boiling water. There was something older and more solid than rock in this place, more inflexible, more unchanging. It seeped through the stones and hung, languid and venomous, in the heavy air. As the mare ventured deeper still, it began to drift through her mind, brushing her half-formed thoughts aside like so many twigs. She walked in scattered dreamscapes, and time slipped back and forth in her mind.
Strangely regular systems of cracks broke the smoothness of the cave’s walls and floors, arcing out across the slick, fragmented surface in sprawling, branching configurations that seemed to have no definite source, and no definite end--but why was she just noticing it now? They had been there for...hours? Had she been here for hours? Surely not. She would have noticed, wouldn’t she? If only she could think...
But she couldn’t think, couldn’t think for the fear screaming in her mind, howling and flapping in blind terror. Fear! Why was she afraid? She had just been wandering through the darkness, it had been still and quiet, and now suddenly she was running and her pursuers could see her, they could see the Eye in her mind, there is no such thing as a shoggoth! There should not be such a thing as a shoggoth!
Of course there was no such thing as a shoggoth. The Mad Arabian had been quite clear on that point. She shook her head, trying to break free of the last clinging tendrils of the waking nightmare that had just assaulted her mind, and plodded deeper into the cave, slow and weary and dazed. Her legs hurt. Why did they hurt so much? She would keep going, she had to keep going, she had a purpose, but why did it have to hurt so much? She would rest a bit, perhaps, rest in the darkness, and--but what was that sound?
Nothing that large should breathe.
But there was nothing else here, nothing except herself. The Dark Lord cantered to a halt, her breath coming in harsh, ragged gasps. Something was wrong. Very wrong. She was--they were hallucinations, they must be. The air was bad here, perhaps, poisoning her mind and warping her grasp of reality. The bewildered mare forced herself to sit still, staring hard at the solid, real stone in front of her and trying to resist the clinging strands of madness tugging at her mind.
As she stared, her thoughts a muddled whirlwind, she began to glimpse something almost like a pattern in the cracks lacing the cavern’s stone walls. There was some consistency or regularity that bore a strange and unnerving familiarity. She could almost see a recurring symbol hidden within, like the veins on an oak leaf or the branching of a twig. If only she could remember what it was, and why it seemed so...watchful.
Grah’n vhdaht ooboshu Ya...
Sassaflash scrambled to her hooves, her chest heaving and eyes dilated. Those rumbling words, whose dying echoes were, it seemed, even now shuddering their way through her bones, hadn’t actually been spoken. The memory of them had sprung into existence in her mind, separated from the words themselves by a gap of time in which they had never been uttered. Had her memories been altered, somehow? Had the past been altered? Perhaps, she thought, she was going mad. She should turn back, maybe. Maybe it would be wise to seek someplace less dark and unwholesome, where the stones were not marked with those curiously angled patterns...
Grah’n vhdaht ooboshu Ya.
Unspoken words thundered in her memory, shattering her thoughts. The pegasus half-slumped to one side, the beam of her carbide lamp swinging wildly as she slid. At the last moment she caught herself and tottered upright again, forcing her shaking legs to stand firm. She couldn’t go back. She had come here for--for a purpose. What that purpose was, she couldn’t quite remember at the moment, but it had been important, she was sure of that. She was Sassaflash, after all; the Dark Lord Sassaflash. Any purpose she had had must have been an important one.
Tsathoggua fhtagn, ssgagt’khoth nafl’ah zhog syha’h.
The mare swallowed painfully. Lungs filled with poison and mind reeling towards madness, she stepped forward into the dark.
-----
Down, down, ever downwards coiled the shafts and blocks of stone. The walls of the caverns through which the Dark Lord stumbled began to curve as she delved deeper, twisted and shattered into unnaturally arcing columns and spirals like seawater churned in a maelstrom. Here and there the rock glistened with glassy smoothness, the solid stone shaped into drips or sagging, rippled lumps like melting jelly, and several of the long, trailing stalactites hanging from the cave ceiling were twisted in odd directions, bent halfway along their length as though “down” had been abruptly redefined during their growth. They are breaking, thought the weary mare, just like me.
Twisting columns jumped in and out of view in the wavering glare of the her burning lantern, stretching up to unguessed heights and--at times--plunging down to equally unfathomed depths. The vaults through which she wandered were growing larger, she thought, and the stinking air was growing hotter and more humid. The stench was overpowering now, and when she inhaled Sassaflash could feel a foul-tasting greasiness clinging to the roof of her mouth and burning on her tongue. She struggled through another narrow crawl. One less layer of stone stood between her and her goal, fallen behind as she pushed on and down. That was what it felt like: not as though she were delving deeper into a cave, but as though she were pushing barrier after barrier aside, forcing her way towards the source of the foulness that clung to the mountain’s rotting bones. Great grottoes, the columns of their jagged walls twisting and spiralling in strange whorls, passed her by. She skirted abyssal pits and fissures, crawled through crevices in blocking walls, crept along smooth-walled magma tunnels left bare and cold in the volcano’s extinction…
And then suddenly there were no more walls, no more columns, no more pits. As if awaking from a dream, Sassaflash found herself standing on a crumbling ledge in the midst of emptiness, the beam of her carbide lamp shining uselessly off into the void above. It illuminated nothing; the far walls of the chamber were too distant for the beam to reach. A strange wind, noxious, hot, and wet, slid along her frame, picking at her mane and fur with a clammy, unwholesome touch. Despite the bizarre wind, there was a stillness to this place that filled the mare with a strange terror. Something was grasping the stones, the air, the very forces and laws of reality, and binding them in service to an alien will. Nothing could happen here except at its bidding.
The wind shifted. The stone beneath the mare’s hooves shivered. There was a great, lingering sigh from out in the darkness, vast and deadly as the hiss of a boiling sea. Something alive--or not dead, at least--was out there; something huge. In fascinated dread, Sassaflash swung the beam of her lamp slowly down.
In its light, at last, she beheld Tsathoggua.
She beheld Tsathoggua, and the stories were lies. Glib nothings. Fairy tales, told by the ignorant to the foolish. This was the nightmare of Gods, and the God of nightmares.
A sloth? A toad? A bat? All of those, yes, it was understandable that the slobbering, mountainous Thing sprawled flabbily below had been compared to them. The comparison might even have occurred independently to Sassaflash. But this was not because It actually resembled them, or any other living thing. No, it was simply because, in Its bloated, obscene immensity, It was less unlike them than it was anything else. Those drooling slit-mouths could almost be mistaken for eyes, and the writhing, filth-stained tendrils wriggling like dying worms across Its damp, swollen bulk were reminiscent of fur, in a vile, abhorrent sense. It drew a breath, Its wet mass swelling like the rise of an onrushing tide, and that was wrong, for nothing that large should breathe. Nothing that large should ever breathe.
The Thing stirred, and Sassaflash suddenly felt horribly exposed, as though her fur, flesh, and bones had been flayed away, leaving her mind naked and bare. Her thoughts crumbled, pushed aside by an invading presence too large for her head to contain, and Its consciousness smashed against her mind with an almost physical force, sending her stumbling back with a faint cry. For a moment she merely stared at Tsathoggua, incapable of grasping what had just happened, and then a blizzard of fear rushed through her, howling in her thoughts, her memories, her plans, and her very self and freezing them all. It knew. It had not just seen her, but noticed her, perceiving her mind and grasping its contents. She started to fall; she rose; she darted left; she looked, eyes wide and frantic, over her shoulder at the rock wall behind her; she whimpered. There was nowhere to run, nowhere in the universe to run, for no matter where she went this Thing would still exist, and its existence itself was what terrified her. Slothful and ancient, It had slumbered here in Its pit under the Earth for thousands of millions of years, an alien parasite trespassing into the good, sane, wholesome universe and eating out a nest of unreality in the belly of Its host.
A shudder rippled across the ciliated swell of the Beast’s belly, and the mare edged back, cowed and cringing, her eyes clenched shut and her stomach churning. Her legs shook. It was wrong, that Thing. Obscene. Evil. She tried not to vomit. She almost succeeded.
The world wheeled around her, spinning in darkness. She tried focusing on the rock in front of her, eyesight shifting in and out of focus in her near-delirium. Then came a moment of sudden clarity, and she saw, arcing across the stone like a forking branch of lightning, the same symbol or pattern she had seen throughout these caverns, present in the cracks in the walls, in the chance alignment of stalagmites, in the shape of a subterranean stream, in the facets of spindly, brittle crystals…
H’ah, gof’nn.
Sassaflash whinnied in anguish as the eldritch commandment slammed into her brain--but strangely, she had not felt it come from the slavering monstrosity looming out there in the darkness. No, it had come out of the stone in front of her. She stared down in bewilderment and fear, trying to make sense of this new madness--and then her eyes widened.
“No!”
The mare threw herself bodily back from the stone, her face a rictus of fear. Out of the stone itself? No. Out of the pattern etched into the stone. Out of the same “natural” arrangement of cracks and fractures she had seen scattered throughout the bowels of this vile mountain. Out of the symbol that brought death or madness, always, inevitably, to those who saw it and possessed it within their minds. Out of the same sigil that her sister, back in the Hollow Shades, had only half-finished before Sassaflash had shocked her into insensibility.
Out of the Elder Sign.
H’ah, gof’nn. H’ah.
An acrid scent swirled up through the poisonous air, adding a biting, acidic touch to the miasma already choking the pegasus. A rock fell in the deeps as something, or some things, moved in hissing, splashing multitudes far below. Greet her, children. Eat her, children. Do unto her, children. Do unto her. Even in her demented, half-insane state, Sassaflash still remembered enough Aklo to grasp several possible meanings of the Great Old One’s mind-blasting words. They were coming for her, the formless spawn of the God, black and fluid and remorseless. They were coming, and she had no chance of escaping--not from them, and not from anything, now that the Elder Sign was etched into her memory, marking her for all servants of the Old Ones to see. To run would be pointless.
She ran anyway.
-----
At first, the Mule thought the screaming was just another hallucination, like the others—still faint and easily dismissed, at this shallow depth in the mountain—that had begun to plague his mind. It echoed, wavering and shrill, out of the depths ahead of him, and its occasional lapses into silence were interrupted by bursts of mad, cachinnating laughter. Instead of fading away like the other delusions, though, it persisted, growing louder and more desperate as the old creature worked his way deeper into Voormithadreth's heart. He almost would have supposed that it was real, but of course that was impossible; after all, he and Sassaflash were the only two souls in this place, and…
The Mule stopped dead. Sassaflash. But how could that be? He couldn't imagine her in a panic; not her. She was different; she was the Dark Lord Sassaflash, austere, controlled, gripped with iron self-will.
But she was also a pony, and ponies could be broken. He stepped forward, scrambling over rough masses of collapsed rock, sliding along sheets of flowstone, and cantering across the rare flats. There was another scream from the darkness beyond, and this time the Mule could make out distorted words in the stricken howl: “...no such...” The voice lapsed briefly into incomprehensibility, then rang out again, raw and terrified, “...a shoggoth! There should not be such a thing as a shoggoth!” Another, more distant sound echoed out, like the tinging clicks of overheated metal cooling blended with the rush of water. Rock shattered somewhere in the abyss. There was another scream, seemingly closer at hoof: “Iä! Let me be not seen! Iä, Shub-Niggurath! The black goat of the woods with a thousand young!”
Despite his exertion and the stifling heat of the mountain’s depths, the Mule suddenly felt very, very cold. He forced himself not to speed up into a gallop, willing his limbs to move carefully, precisely, safely over the uneven stones. He’d only break his neck if he tried to run. Raising his head, he called out, “I’m a-coming, Miss Sassaflash! Just you sit tight, I’ll be nigh!” His voice was muffled by the lamp’s mouth-grip, but in these echoing caves she should have been able to hear him nonetheless. The only answer he got, though, was a chittering stream of frantic laughter, high-pitched and mad, that crumbled away into a string of gasping sobs.
He came upon her quite suddenly. The Mule had just clambered his way down into a low-ceilinged chamber, scattered with hulking lumps of rock like giant shrouded figures and wide pools of stagnant, lukewarm water, and was just trying to decide which of several black, branching tunnels he should pursue when she charged into view, careening in frantic desperation through the cavern. The mare was a pitiful sight, wild-eyed, tatter-maned, and whimpering. The bundle strapped to her back and her equipment were gone, save for the frayed remnants of a strap still clinging uselessly to her body, and there was a long, bleeding gash along her flank where something sharp had struck her. Gone, too, was her lamp; the Mule could only guess at how she’d managed to come this far without braining herself on a low-hanging rock formation or tumbling into a pit. At the flash of his own light her head turned, but she showed no sign of recognition, bolting past him and whimpering to herself. She was moving like a mouse cornered by a hunting cat, flinging herself forward not to arrive at some destination, but simply to escape. After a moment’s shock the Mule galloped after her.
“Miss Sassaflash, it’s me! Your minion!” He forced himself halfway in front of her, trying to slow her down before she hurt herself. “Miss, ease up! It ain’t--”
“They are coming they are coming gof’nn Tsathoggua Y’ah they have found me forever run!” She struggled away from him, kicking and biting, and charged blindly into one of the chamber walls, her body thudding heavily against the wet cave floor as the impact knocked her to the ground. Struggling to her hooves again, the mare launched herself off towards the steep mound of rubble the Mule had just climbed down, sobbing, “I didn’t mean to see it! I’m too small; don’t look at me! Why does the Elder Sign have to exist? I didn’t mean to see it!”
From somewhere deeper within the mountain there came that same echoing, splashing sound, mixed with harsh metallic tings. He wasn’t sure, but the Mule thought it was nearer than the last time he had heard it. Sassaflash burst into a peal of inane laughter and began to scramble up the slope, clawing her way towards the distant surface. Her minion struggled up after her. “What’s coming? What’d you stir up down under there?”
Sassaflash made no answer at first, her mouth hanging open as she gasped for breath, bruising and cutting herself against the jagged rocks in her desperation. Then there was a sound like a whip crack from somewhere behind, followed by the rumble of falling stones, and the mare screamed and lurched forward. “Not this path! Not this end! Iä, Shub-Niggurath! The black goat of the woods with a thousand young, the black ram of the woods with a thousand ewes!” As she shrieked the last few words of the blasphemous prayer, launching herself in frantic lunges up the slope, a slab of basalt slid out from beneath one of her hind hooves, rattling off to one side. With a strangled scream, Sassaflash reared up in a futile attempt to regain her balance--and then, in her panic and madness, something snapped. Her eyes rolled back in her head, her legs quavered and crumpled beneath her, and she fell, tumbling back down the long, jagged incline. She hit the bottom hard, rolled over several times, and then lay still.
Something slid, hissing, against stone somewhere in the caverns beyond.
The Mule stood frozen in horror for a second, but only a second. Wheeling around, he half-climbed, half-slid down the rubble to where the stricken mare lay sprawled on the cave floor. Whatever was chasing her was drawing very near, and there was no time to crawl out of this place--particularly not dragging an unconscious pony with him. The Mule cast a glance around the cave. Nope. No miracles. No dei ex machina. Just jagged columns and basalt slabs, crumbling rubble and ancient stones. His heart hammering in his chest, the old creature bit down on the strap still bound around Sassaflash and dragged her across the floor into the lee of one of the hulking lumps of twisted ʻaʻā, creeping around it to put its stony bulk between them and the entrances of the passages opening on to the room. Then he raised his lantern, took a deep breath, and blew out the flame.
Total darkness reclaimed the caverns--but not total silence. In the stillness, the Mule could make out a soft, swirling, liquid sound, shifting and hissing as its unseen source poured itself through nearby passages. A faint odor wafted through the air, gritty and biting like the pungent sting of metal dissolving in powerful acid, and the Mule shivered and hunkered down, trying to exist as little as possible. Them’s going to kill us, he thought, his eyes squeezed shut, as though that would somehow make him less visible to whatever alien senses the hunting things were using. Them’s going to kill us dead. We won’t never get home again. He huddled in the dark, crouched next to Sassaflash‘s limp body and waiting for death.
But death never came. Evil bubblings and swishings echoed through the caves as the seeking monstrosities coursed to and fro in search of their prey, and once or twice the sounds and stench grew more intense, as though one of the things had passed by an open tunnel leading into the chamber, but that was all. The hunters seemed confused, somehow, or disorientated, as though abruptly deprived of some crucial clue to the whereabouts of their would-be victims. Maybe they relied on sound, and the sudden silence had baffled them? The Mule just didn’t know.
Whatever the case, though, by degrees the sloshings of the fluid creatures grew fainter as their distance increased, and their occasional strange snaps and plinks faded. At length they subsided into complete silence, although it was some time after he had heard the last faint splash that the Mule dared to move--and even then, he did not light the lamp again. It seemed wiser not to. He turned to Sassaflash, lying limp and still on the cold stone floor, and pressed his ear against her side, listening.
Th-tmp. Th-tmp. With a small, quiet sigh of relief, the Mule raised his head. A heartbeat. She was still alive, at least. Kneeling beside her, he nudged her, and whispered, “Miss Sassaflash? Miss? Miss, wake up. We got to go. Them things is still out there.”
No response. The Mule’s face creased with worry.
“Miss, I...I don’t know what to do. I ain’t strong enough to drag you out’n this place by my lonesome. I don’t know what this place is, I don’t know what them things was, I don’t know what I shouldn’t ought to do, or what I should.” The old creature bit his lip. There had to be something he could do--something he should do. He had so little to go on; just a few oblique hints and ominous warnings, and that was it. She was always so guarded. There had never been a time when she had really said anything, openly and without reserve, and for every word spoken there were always sentences and paragraphs left unsaid. Well, ‘ceptin’ just now, when she was a-screaming and a-carrying on, mused the Mule, wryly. She weren’t hiding nothing then, I don’t reckon.
Maybe that was it, though. Much might be said in the candor of terror; had she revealed anything useful, dropped any precious guidelines, while she was struggling to escape from these monsters? There had been the ranting about Eeyah-Shub-Nibblenath, or whatever it was, but that wasn’t much help. He remembered Sassaflash‘s father whimpering something similar back in the Hollow Shades, when the Dark Lord had erased her sister’s recent memories in an effort to drive the Elder Sign out of her mind, but aside from--
The Mule’s train of thought crashed. The Elder Sign. Cthulhu’s Eye, she had called it, and he remembered the riddle she had posed to Starshade: “Yes, dark things fear the Elder Sign, but did you never think to ask yourself why they fear it? They are slaves of the Great Old Ones—slaves of Their priest, the Dreaming God–and what does a slave fear most?” The eye of their master, obviously. Being noticed. Being seen. And just now, Sassaflash had said that she hadn’t meant to see it, begging something not to look at her--and then asked, desperate and terrified, why the Elder Sign had to exist.
Realization struck, forcing a gasp out of the old creature. They wasn’t following your voice, or smelling you, or nothing; they was following your mind, and when you done got knocked out, they couldn’t follow it no more. But when you wake up again... His throat tightened. If she woke up, they were dead, but if she remained as she was, they were trapped--and would eventually be found and killed just the same.
Eyes wide but unseeing, the Mule stared off into the darkness. For some minutes he made no further move, simply sitting and thinking. Plans, ideas, and possibilities came and went through his mind, all of them impractical, impossible, or immoral to varying degrees, until at last the well ran dry, and he could think of only one way out. It was wrong, and demanded a heavy sacrifice of the Dark Lord--but he wasn’t a schemer like Sassaflash, and this was all he had.
With a weary sigh, the Mule pulled his own saddlebag off his back and began to rummage through its contents, searching by touch for a certain item. "This ain't right,” he muttered. "It just ain't. But I don't see what else I can..." He trailed off, ears lying flat against his head as he hooked a hoof around a bundle of dried worrywort and withdrew it from the satchel. Reaching out a hoof, he gently touched the Dark Lord's bruised, battered side. "I always knew you was hiding an awful lot, but...I only knew it. I didn't see it. The act you was putting on--mostly for your own self, I reckon--was so good, you had me half believin' it, even when I thought I seed through the whole thing." He shook his head. "But watching you having your spell back there, falling apart every which way...You really is a pony under all them fancy words and carryings-on. Not a Dark Lord, not a God-Killer--just a pony. And you been hurting this whole time, hurting bad, and I just been watching, 'cause part o' me didn't really see that--that you was real."
His face hardened. "Well, I ain't a-going to watch no more. I'm getting that thing out'n your head, and then..." He took the wad of worrywort in his mouth, chewing at it to soften it, then spat it out again. "I reckon you ain't never had a friend. Maybe this ain't the best beginning, but starting now I'm gon' try to be one. I just wish I didn't have to start by doing this." Feeling his way over to one of the small subterranean pools he had observed earlier, he scooped up some water in a small cooking pot--he was so, so glad he had just grabbed his pack when he had entered the caverns, without trying to sort out what might be useful or not--and submerged the sheaf of worrywort within it, mashing at the sodden leaves with his hooves to try to leach out their essence into the lukewarm water.
The scent of forgetfulness drifted on the air.
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Personally, regardless of how you classify this story, it is safe to say it is all incredible.
The sheer atmosphere in this chapter is just great. It felt like I was there, in the caves with Sassaflash, feeling the heat and smelling the rot and feeling time run away. You continue to be one of the best authors on this site.
^ ditto both
It is Lovecraft. It is pony.
It is both at once, and thus, the sanity of the reader is stealthily eroded away, for like a shoggoth, it Should Not Be.
OK, it really should be. More, more!
Shoggoth is still there because even Celestia and Luna between them coldnt excise teh volcano and throw it into the voids where the Gods could dream silently? No wonder Sassy thought she could tap into the power, forgetting that the tap almost always has to be able to handle the power in the first place.
Lets see if Mule can get them out of there alive now.
Oh sweet, more Sassaflash! I have to wonder how she even hoped to kill the creature in the first place, if It's so powerful.
Also, good thinking Mr.Mule! Figuring out shoggoth hunting patterns so readily!
Poor Sass.
I am envious of your ability to sustain a scene that lesser scene-setters than yourself (read: me) would have glossed over with a tepid "further and further into the mountain she went."
Also, "they have found me forever" is the creepiest combination of five completely innocuous words I can remember.
Could you enlighten me on the nature of 'a'a? I was chalking it up as a Unicode glitch or something but then it repeated. It is a bit of a difficult term to do a search of.
Another nice chapter, and as is so rarely the case, the illustration did not detract.
As always, many, many thanks for the kind words, all! Every last comment is mostmuch appreciated, and seeing that someone's taken the time to give their thoughts on the story warms the cockles of my heart, each and every time.
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Heh, thankee--although I know that at times I do tend to get just a little TOO long-winded. Purple prose and I have a long history together, and our relationship has not always been a healthy one. Still, as this is a Lovecraftian story a certain violet tint to the text is kind of appropriate, so I'm glad it's easy enough to stomach! As for ʻaʻā, it's a Hawaiian word, and is one of the two main classes of lava flows (the other being pahoehoe). Pahoehoe formations are characterized by a sinuous, rippling, rounded surface, while ʻaʻā is sharp and jagged--imagine a rock made of shattered chunks of glass, and you get a pretty good idea.
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As regards Sasseflash's specific plans, all I can say is wait and see. They'll be popping up again, and not just for the sake of tying up loose ends.
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I loved seeing references to geological formations that I've only learned of in university! 'A'ā flowing on a steep gradient can look like hot ashphalt decomposing itself in one's general direction. It's a really neat formation! :D
...Because I'm a foolish little author and can't help picking at the durn thing, I've made a few slight alterations to this chapter. VERY slight, mind; just some rewriting of the last two paragraphs (not counting the final sentence), to make the Mule's dialogue and actions work a little better. Carry on!
Wow, well that didn't go very well. Did Sassaflash even have a plan for what she was going to do once she got inside the mountain and found Tsathoggua? I suppose she might have had one, and it just didn't survive contact with the enemy at all, so to speak.
So that's what loosing 1D100 sanity is like!
I'll second the comments saying that this is both Lovecraft and pony all at once, inasmuch as I'm (not very) qualified to make that comparison. I'll also commend you for actually getting me to read something at all Lovecraftian, since I normally have no desire to do so.
What I'm trying to say is that I really like this story, and would like more if you please.
(Also, Mr. Mule keeps on being awesome. I've probably made the comparison before, but he and Sass give me a faint Jeeves/Wooster vibe, and I love that.)
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As a longtime fan of P.G. Wodehouse's work, that comparison makes me very happy--although you'll have to forgive me if I avoid having 'Sash what-ho-ing all over the place and stealing antique cow creamers, while the Mule quietly and effortlessly picks up the pieces in the background.
Oh bless that mule!
But how is the Dark Lord Sassaflash going to rise, now that her initial plan to confront a great old one has failed? Will she go back and try again with a blindfold?
4664345 Oh no, of course not! By the comparison, I meant more along the general theme of the supposedly "lesser", lower-class servant often turning out to be far more competent and intelligent compared to their upper-class, supposed "betters" than would be initially expected.
After all, Mr. Mule was brought on to the expedition as nothing more than a pack animal, really. He was just supposed to be "dumb muscle", carrying things around while Sass did all the "important" stuff. Instead, Sass' plan has swiftly gone to pieces and Mr. Mule is now pulling her posterior from the fire, so to speak. That's what I'm getting at there, and I love it.
Well, damn.
That happened.
With the ending, it feels that the real story is just now about to start. I like that. Definitely looking forward to seeing... things... that happen. Not the least of which would be the long-term effects of Mister Mule's little revelation.
Really have to wonder, though, how the heck Sassaflash expected to accomplish anything down there. Then again, she admitted openly the chances of survival were minimal, but... Eh. For that matter, however, I also have to wonde just in general about this thing's presence in the world of Equestria (as in, the world at large). If its presence is such an abhorrence, is have to think/hope something could be done, but I can't assume even the Princesses would be able to do anything. Hrmph.
Anyway. Can't say I'll ever look into Lovecraftian stuff, but I am going to continue to enjoy this. Keep up the good work!
When someone asks if you can kill a god, you say no!.
Poor Sassaflash. Still, there is hope, however faint, of a happy ending here, for she has that most valuable and precious of things, especially in a cosmic horror story. She has a friend. Moreover, she has a sane friend who, while aware of his lack of paddles, doesn't know just how far up Eldritch Shit Creek he is. Definitely a bonus there.
Looking forward to more. I know not how sane the aspiring Dark Lord will be by the end of this. We'll have to wait and see.
I enjoyed this chapter. It was a tonal shift, yes, but it flowed well from the hints of darkness we've already seen, especially the last few chapters. I just realized that as Sassaflash gets farther from Ponyville physically the tone of the series moves farther from the average comedic episode of the show. Though really the MLP: FIM world is full of nasty enough stuff that it isn't hard to imagine Tsathoggua there.
I seriously hope she wasn't planning on stabbing the thing to death with that dinky camping knife. But that would have been fun to watch.
This is very nicely written and I can assure you that your prose is wonderful.
I should also compliment you further by stating that until reading the second edit on your author's note for this chapter, (8) that I had no idea you'd performed any retconjuration on the story.
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Apologies if replying to a 45 week-old comment causes you bother, but I had to thank you for the mental image of Sassaflash, (The Dark Lord) pummelling Tsathoggua with Ditzy Hooves' daughter.
Looks like the image link isn't working any more. I would love to know what that contained.
On second thought, that is how a lot of Mythos stories start...
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I do believe it was this: https://derpibooru.org/images/1616505
derpicdn.net/img/view/2017/12/26/1616505.jpg