Chapter 1 - Darksign
On the day that changed my life I woke up dead.
My eyes flew open but all I saw was blackness. Rain pattered on the window of my quarters as I panted, curled into a ball with my forelegs pressed to my chest, trying to remember the bits of nightmare that swam away from me, submerging themselves into my subconscious. There were no images, only feelings of a crushing darkness, something eating at me from the inside like a parasite and a heavy, leaden sensation that weighed on my mind and my body. Hugging my tail to myself, I exhaled slowly. Fur rippled as I reached up and touched the iron key hanging around my neck to my flesh, taking comfort in its presence. It was cold. That brought a frown to my face in the dark as I pressed my hoof down a little harder. By all rights it should have been warm from contact with my body, but it was frigid and hard.
That was when I realized that I wasn't breathing.
Fear rising in my belly, I sucked in air to fill my lungs again, then blew out and held my breath. The urge to breathe that practically every creature shared didn't come. Whimpering, I tore back the bedclothes, craning my head down at my haunch where my cutie mark was emblazoned. It was so dark that I couldn't see anything until a flash of lightning lit up the room with blue-white light, and that fiery-rimmed brand stared back at me, a mark of rot seared into my flesh where the scroll overlaid with magic burst had once been. The light faded and my vision went with it, but the image of the thing had burned itself into my mind forever.
I rolled out of bed, legs tangling in the sheets as I kicked at them, tail whipping across the bed as I staggered to my wardrobe. The one thing I knew was that I had to leave, now. A faint aura manifested around the doors as I pulled them open, my Sorcerer's cloak, hat and boots right where I'd left them. I tugged them on as fast as I could, the magic glowing around each item as I levitated them onto myself, automatically dressing in the prescribed way that all apprentices were taught. Some habits just die hard.
"Scarlet?"
A flare of light burst from the other side of the room and I squinted against the glare, putting one hoof up to shield my eyes. When I lowered it slightly I'd adjusted enough to make out the unicorn mare on the next bed and the sphere of brilliance emitting from her horn. Moon Dusk was squinting too, sitting up as she tried to make out what I was doing. Then her eyes went wide, expanding into huge orbs as her mouth dropped open. I lowered my hoof, blinking to clear my vision as she shoved her flank back against the wall, trying to get as far away as she could. "Moon," my voice croaked, not my own. "Wait-"
"Hollow!" When she yelled blue magic coalesced around her horn. For a second I stood frozen, unable to believe that my own roommate was about to fire against me, but then she threw her head forward and I dove away. The Soul Arrow blazed past me and glass shattered as it smashed through the window, hurtling out into the night. She was already rearing back again, and without thinking I scrambled away, bashing the door open with my head and stumbling out into the hallway.
"Hollow!"
Other apprentices were already opening their doors, sticking their heads out cautiously, and their eyes followed me as I galloped past. I tramped down the front stairs, blurred through the courtyard and burst out into the rain-swept night, their shouts following me as I galloped away.
---
The streets of Vinhaym were deserted as I scurried away from the Dragon School. I'd been taught that it wasn't safe to go out after dark, and on a night like this any sane pony would stay inside. The rain poured down and soaked my cloak, water burbling through the gutters and drumming on rooftops while my muscle memory led me back home. When I was a foal I could navigate by the lights: butcher's shop halfway down Starswirl Street, the apothecary on the corner of Starswirl and Logan, and at the end of Logan just past the tailor was my house. Now all of those places had closed, due to lack of meat for the one, the Dragon School monopolizing all the medicine and potion on the other and, it was rumored, because the tailor had been afflicted with the Darksign. No one knew for sure because one morning her shop didn't open and she was gone. Now her house sits empty without a door.
My focus wasn't on that, but on the single candle that my father always kept lit in our front window. Clambering onto the steps, I put my front hooves on the door, slamming them against the wood. "Please open. Please..." There was a clunk and thud from inside as the door's bar was removed. It was pulled open, revealing the earth pony standing behind it with the light that spilled down the front stoop. The stallion barely had time to look at me before I lunged, wrapping my hooves tightly around his neck and burying my face in his coat. "Thank you, thank you," I managed as he pulled me inside, shutting the rain outside in favor of the heat and light of my home. "Father...I'm..."
"Undead. I know," he finished for me before I could say it. "Do you still have the key I gave you?"
I nodded, using my magic to fish it out from under my coat. It hung in the air between us before my father took it gently between his teeth. "Steh rite ter," he turned and trotted off. I could hear his hoofsteps on the stairs and then above me as they tramped across the floor, going this way and that. Shifting my weight from one side to the other, I looked out the window as if Moon Dusk was going to be leading half the school up the street, and caught sight of my reflection.
I jolted back, and the thing did too. I'd seen corpses before, but a dead body and an Undead were two very different things, and the abomination that stared back at me was one I'd only ever seen sketches of in School books. This creature's skin had gone mottled and turned a shade of red I'd only ever seen on bruises, wrinkling in some places and stretching thinly in others, making the cheeks gaunt and bones prominent, with stringy, limp hair framing its blasted face. What got to me were the eyes. They were black, without pupil or iris, as dark as their own sockets and sunken in so deep that they might as well not have existed at all. My mouth dropped open and its did too, exposing jaws of moldering, yellowed teeth.
Frozen, I stood there, staring at the monster that was me. "I've got a saddlebag packed-" I heard my father come downstairs but I wasn't listening up until I felt him put his hooves around me. Turning away, I embraced him, shutting my eyes as he slowly rocked me, all but cradling me like he did when I was a foal. "Don't fixate on it. Just keep moving."
"Keep moving?" I looked at him, hooves splashing in the puddle of rainwater that had formed around me as I settled back onto all fours. "What do you mean?"
"You have to go," he turned away, fetching the saddlebags he'd packed in his teeth and hoisting them onto my back. I sagged a little under their weight, staring at him as he turned to the table again.
"But...I'm an apprentice at the Dragon School. I mean, maybe they'll take away my position because I'm undead but I'm still me. I haven't done anything wrong. Father?" I stepped around in front of him, trying to get him to look at me, and when he finally raised his head his eyes were shining.
"You're not the first pony this has happened to," he managed. "The Vinhaym Guard deals with them quickly and quietly, often with the help of the Dragon School. They're rounded up and hauled away to asylums, and we never see them again. It doesn't matter who they were." He brought around a sheathed dagger in his teeth and dropped it into my saddlebags. "Don't let them take you."
"But..." I could feel myself shaking as I sought back to my earliest lessons, under this roof and at the School. "What about the most powerful kind of magic? The magic of friendship? Don't I still get that?"
My father looked into my eyes. "Friendship means nothing to the dead."
A shout in the distance made us both look up, just barely heard above the hiss of the rain. "Go," my father lowered his head, pushing it against my rump and actually sliding me in the direction of the back door. "You can't be here when they come."
"But what about you? You're coming with me, right? Father...?"
As he pushed open the door he looked out into the night for a moment, and I realized how old the stallion really was. "Your bags have everything you'll need. Go past the town's limits and keep going. Don't stop for anything. I'll be right behind you."
Stepping out into the cold rain, I glanced over my shoulder, but he'd already shut the door. Much closer now metal scraped on metal and I took off, galloping out of the alleyway and down the opposite street, cobblestones clopping beneath my hooves as I ran. The shouting grew louder even as I got further away, but I couldn't make out any words or distinct voices. Stopping under an awning, I half turned, trying to find the strong, familiar shape of my father on the road behind me. Then there was a whooshing noise that I'd only ever heard at a newly kindled fire and flames danced up around one of the buildings...my home.
"FATHER!"
The voices were getting closer. "That way. I heard it shout."
Whirling, I turned and ran.