To celebrate Nightmare Night, Ponyville's local group of country-saving friends decides to take a small trip to the forest, and once there each one of them gets to tell a story.
After Luna had written to her about how she wouldn't be able to make it to Ponyville for Nightmare Night, Twilight decided to organize a small camping trip to the outskirts of the Everfree Forest with her friends. She'd initially planned to have Trixie come along and entertain them with a small show, but unfortunately the unicorn had declined the offer, saying that she had something else to do.
So, since it was, after all, Nightmare Night, Twilight decided that the best thing to do to pass the time would be to tell scary stories to each other around the fire. She was not expecting her friends to each have such a diverse concept of what "scary" means.
"So what are we going to do?" Apple Bloom asked as she set down her bags.
"I'm not sure, actually," Starlight replied while setting up her tent. "Twilight, do you have anything planned?"
"Well, I was thinking, since it's Nightmare Night-" Twilight concentrated to light the fire in front of her "-we could tell scary stories to each other. What do you girls think?"
"Sounds good to me," Rainbow replied, leaning back on a tree while sitting on one of its branches.
"Nothing too scary, thought, right girls?" Fluttershy asked. "We wouldn't want to scare the fillies too much," she added.
"Don't worry, dear," Rarity answered while taking out her sleeping bag.
Pinkie bounced near the fire and took a bag of marshmallows out of her hair. "I like this idea. It almost makes up for how we decided to not wear costumes this time."
"We didn't decide not to, Pinkie. Me and the others didn't wear one because we would be out here, but you can wear one if you want," Twilight said, setting up the rest of the tents.
"Okay," Pinkie said. She dashed off in a seemingly random direction and reappeared from the other side of the camp, wearing a large cylindrical piece of metal with three number dials and a button on her chest, two curved rods on her back ending in small spheres and a third sphere on her head. "I'm a subnet teleporter!" she said, anticipating the question.
Applejack raised a hoof to Starlight's mouth, stopping the unicorn from asking further questions.
"So who starts?" Scootaloo asked as all the ponies sat around the fire and began to cook their meal.
Twilight cleared her throat. "The idea was mine, so I think I should go first, okay?"
Everypony else nodded in agreement, and Twilight began to speak.
"There once was a mare who lived in an old library, isolated from the city. Ponies would occasionally visit her, though most of the time they were scholars looking for some specific book a copy of which happened to be stored there. But usually she was alone, free to read all of her books in silence.
One autumn night, while she was cuddled up in the comfort of her bed, she was startled awake by a sound. The wind was howling and the rain was falling heavy against her window, and she had no way to tell whether the sound that she'd heard had come from outside or inside. It could have easily been a branch that had broken off of the nearby tree, but she decided to make sure that everything was alright downstairs.
She walked down the stairs, lighting her way with a candle, and when she got to the library she found a few books knocked out of their shelves. As she went to put them back in place, a few drops of water landed on her head, and she looked up to see one of the windows still opened. Thinking she'd left it like that accidentally before going to bed, she closed it and returned to her room.
The day after was as uneventful as usual, and she had plenty of time to read. But that night, she was once again awoken by a sound coming from the floor below. She went to check what had happened, and found that some books had again fallen from their positions. All windows were closed, she was sure of that, but she thought it might have been an animal that had gotten inside the previous night and decided not to think too much about it until morning came. As she was putting the books back in the right place, though, she realized they had fallen quite distant from the shelf they were supposed to be on, some even being on the opposite side of the building.
The next day she set out to look for any animal that might have been there, but despite her search she found none. She decided to lock all entrances and check one last time before going to bed, and she only went there once sure that she was alone. In the middle of the night, once again, a sound caused her to wake up, and this time she found piles of book that had been removed from their position. Worst, as she put them back into place she noticed some of those still on the shelves had been put in the wrong place.
When she woke up in the morning, she closed the library and went to the city, where she bought a series of traps to try to catch whatever was causing all of that. Upon returning, she almost screamed at what she saw. Every book was now on the ground, the shelves completely emptied out. The rest of her day was spent reorganizing the whole library and setting up the traps, but when the night came she decided to instead stay awake to try to catch the one behind all of that.
She stayed up all night, patrolling the library, but she found nothing. Still, not a single book fell out of place, so she was still rather happy at the lack of intrusions. When morning finally came, she opened the library and sat on her chair, grabbing the book she'd been reading in those past few days, but as soon as she opened it she froze in shock.
It wasn't the right book. She'd put it back in its place just the night before, and yet the one she'd grabbed from there was a different one. She lifted her gaze to scan the shelves, and with horror she realized that all the books had been rearranged in the wrong order without her noticing."
Twilight posed dramatically to accentuate the conclusion of her story.
"So was it a ghost? Or was she crazy? Oh, wait, maybe she was the ghost!" Pinkie said, bouncing around Twilight.
"That wasn't all that scary," Sweetie Belle whispered to Scootaloo.
"Well then," her sister replied, having heard her, "can I go next?"
"A long time ago, a young mare lived in a house by a river. One day, while she was taking a walk down that river, she saw a basket floating down in the current, and curious she used a nearby fallen branch to grab it and take it out of the water.
Looking inside, she found a spool of thread and a needle. The thread seemed to shift colour in the light, and she was unsure of what material it was made from. She decided to take it to the tailor who lived in the town, to ask if it was his, but he said that he'd never seen anything like it.
After studying it for a while, the tailor asked her if he could keep it and try to use it, and seeing how she had no experience when it came to sewing she accepted. The tailor thanked her, and she went back to her home.
The next day, she was awoken by the sound of someone knocking at her door. She went to see who it was, and found the tailor. He was shaking with excitement, and once she invited him to sit inside he explained that the thread she'd found was magical. It perfectly merged any two pieces of fabric into one, it never ran out, and it somehow seemed to enhance the qualities of every dress it was used on.
The tailor wanted to repay the mare for her gift, and he asked her what she wanted, and after some thought she decided to ask him to take her as his apprentice, something he gladly accepted.
Many years passed, the tailor becoming the most well renowned in the whole kingdom thanks to the magic thread and the mare learning to be even better than he was at the job by coming in contact with all the most famous stylists in the land. One day, in their boutique in the capital city, the old tailor called his apprentice to tell her something.
He explained to her that he was old, and that she'd become better than he was at the job. Therefore, he'd decided to retire and leave the business in her hooves, and before going away to live in a house he'd bought by a lake he gave her the magic thread.
The mare was ecstatic at the prospect of finally being in charge, and even more at the idea of finally getting to decide what to do with the thread for herself. She'd always wanted to try something, although she'd never had the courage to ask her teacher about it, and now she could finally do it.
Immediately, she locked herself in her laboratory and began to work. She would make a dress entirely out of the magic thread, and it would be the most beautiful dress ever made. She furiously, restlessly worked on it, not making a design before but instead letting her inspiration overtake her as she went, and after a full day of work the dress was finally complete.
Overexcited, the mare wore the dress and dashed out in the streets to show it to the world, but everypony who looked at her either began to laugh, turned their head away or simply appeared to be disgusted. The mare was confused, but as she saw her reflection in a puddle of water on the ground she understood. The dress was horrible. It was the worst thing ever designed and worn by a pony, the most hideous thing ever to appear in the world.
Screaming and crying, the mare ran back to her room and tried to take the dress off, but no matter how hard she pulled it seemed to be stuck to her, as if it had been sown to her skin, and nothing she tried was able to remove it, neither cutting it nor trying to burn it away. Unable to stand the sight of her creation she broke and threw out the mirror from her room, although the image she'd seen forever burned itself in her mind.
Devastated and terrified, the mare locked herself in her room and began to cry, and she stayed there for a whole week. After much crying and sadness, though, she devised a plan, one that would fix her problem. She was, after all, the most well renowned seamstress in the kingdom, and as long as she still had the magic thread she would remain as such, so she began to put her plan into action.
It was a slow one, one that would require years to be fully realized, but she persevered. Closed inside her room to prevent others from seeing her, she began with small alterations first. Shorten a sleeve here, use a different pattern there. Using the influence she had over the kingdom's sense of style and her reputation she slowly, subtly modified and directed the fashion sense of the population, until it would match with the dress she'd crafted.
The day finally came. All over the kingdom, nobles were wearing dresses that were but modified and inferior versions of the one she was trapped in. It would be her moment of triumph, to finally walk in the streets with what everypony would consider the perfect dress. And so the mare, now old and tired, finally got out of her room.
But as she began to walk down the streets, the looks she got were the same she'd gotten all those years ago. She was confused and couldn't understand what was happening, but once she reached the fountain in the centre of town and she saw her reflection she finally understood. All the things she'd made unfashionable by altering the trends, all the things that were now seen as undesirable in a dress, the one she wore had changed to reflect those, and was once again the worst dress possible.
The mare ran back to her room in tears, and never got out again. And to this day the dress is still with her, still being the most unstylish piece of clothing imaginable no matter the current tastes of the world."
"Your sister's got a real weird idea of what's scary," Apple Bloom silently muttered to Sweetie Belle.
Rarity pouted, slightly annoyed.
"She's got a point, Rarity," Rainbow said from up on the tree, "you focused on the wrong elements. Who wants to go next? Fluttershy?"
The yellow pegasus looked up, slightly startled. "Well, if no one else wants to go before me..."
"There was a mare who lived in a house in the forest. It wasn't in the middle of the forest, it was more on the edge of it, closer to the city. There were wild animals in the forest, but they were nice and they never hurt the mare. One night the mare was sleeping when she had a terrifying nightmare, and she woke up. She couldn't sleep for the rest of the night."
Rainbow looked down at the other pegasus. "That's it?"
"It was a really scary nightmare," Fluttershy replied, looking to the ground.
"I think it was a great story," Twilight said, trying to cheer her friend up. "Who wants to go next?"
"Oh, me, me! Pick me!" Pinkie said, bouncing up and down in place.
"The pony hid behind a large metal structure, his breath short and ragged. He'd been running from those things for what felt like hours, but he still hadn't managed to get away from them. He had no idea of what they were, of where he was or of how he'd gotten there, all he knew was that they were after him, and they wouldn't stop until they'd caught him. Those horrible, unnatural abominations.
He couldn't take it much longer, he knew. They were too big, too fast, he couldn't run forever and he couldn't fight back. Sooner or later, he would get too tired, and they would catch him. And then it would all be over. He'd heard stories, ever since he'd been a little colt, stories of what happened when the sky opened up and ponies disappeared, but he'd never believed them.
And yet, there he was. Those things, whatever they might have been, had come for him. He'd seen it, clear as day, the deformed appendage that had come down from above him and brought him where he now was. Gone was the comforting and familiar sight of his home town, with its round wall and its inhabitants. Now he was in a strange, unnatural environment, an endless carpet of what felt like artificial grass, an alien light shining above him.
He realized now that the flashes of light ponies often saw in the town were just a small projection of the light he was now immersed in, coming through the portal those strange creatures used to enter the town. It looked like a hole in the sky, when they opened it, he remembered. He'd seen it clearly, when the thing had descended to grab him, and equally clearly he'd seen the strange landscapes outside the city's walls while being carried away, and the portal closing behind him. Then he'd been thrown there, to play that sick and twisted game, running away until his captors got tired of chasing him.
He could hear it. It was like an earthquake, the sound like that of drums, deafening. They were close. Too close. He knew he couldn't make it. In a last, desperate attempt to survive, the pony began to run towards the nearest object, something that looked like an impossibly tall glass tower far in the distance.
But after a few moments, his blood froze in his veins. He saw it, clearer than ever, right in front of him. Those five stumpy legs, that headless body that seemed to float more than walk, the impossibly long and large tail stretching beyond his ability to see. The thing came towards him, and all he could do was close his eyes, but as he was grabbed and pulled high in the air he opened them again, and got to see the white gates of his destination open up to reveal the black abyss he was headed towards. The creature let go of him, and he fell.
The cookie drummed the fingers of his other hand on the table, his gaze shifting between the fork and the glass. He then got up and opened the sideboard again, and from there he took out his jar of ponies once more."
The presents stared at Pinkie in various degrees of confusion.
"You had me until the last part," Rainbow commented. "Applejack, you're next."
None of the others was in the condition to say anything against that, so Applejack began to tell her story.
"It was a nice house. He really couldn't believe he'd gotten it for such a cheap price. The previous owner had seemed eager to get rid of it, even, and he couldn't conceive why anypony would have wanted to go away from a place like that.
Just outside the city, the nearby river providing a reliable source of water, it was the perfect place to set up a farm. Sure, the ground would need some work after it hadn't been used for what looked like years, but with just a little effort it would become the ideal place for him to grow his crops. And on top of that, the house itself wasn't half bad. For something that had probably been built at least a century before the structure appeared surprisingly well kept, and while he'd only given it a cursory look there didn't seem to be any major work needed.
He left his things in the hall and went in his room. He still couldn't believe he'd paid the thing so little. The place had to have been built as the private residence of some noble, judging by all the stuff there was. And it all looked original, too. He was pretty sure the tapestry alone should have costed him more than what he'd paid for the whole house. Looking at the headboard he noticed an intricate hourglass-like symbol etched in the wood, likely the coat of arms of the family that had originally owned the place. He found it weird that he'd never heard of them, but decided to keep his investigations for the day after.
The citizens he met when he visited the town the next day all appeared rather weird to him. As soon as he mentioned being the new owner of the mansion they all looked at him weird, and none of them seemed to want to talk to him. His search for information on the house's previous owners went equally as bad, as nobody seemed to know anything about them, and even the town's library had nothing about them. The most he got was out of a very old pony he met while going back to his house, who muttered something about a curse before shutting up and refusing to say anything else.
He decided to spend the rest of the day looking around the house's interior. Much to his surprise, it appeared to be even more well kept than he'd thought, meaning he wouldn't need to do any work to the house itself. He was distractedly planning what he would do the day after when he stumbled upon a small metal hoop protruding from the ground. Curious, he pulled it up, and underneath a panel of the floor he found a chest buried in sand, locked. He decided he would try to open it the day after and went to bed.
The next morning he woke up at dawn and began to work on the fields. He got rid of all the weeds, delimited the perimeters of the various sections and dug a small canal from the nearby river. When the sunset arrived he retuned to his house, tired after the day of hard work, and after dinner he immediately went to bed, forgetting about the chest.
The morning after that was spent setting up the irrigation system, but once he was finished with that he decided to wait until two days after, when the Moon would be in a favourable position, before sowing. Seeing as he had nothing else to do he paid another visit to the city. The ponies this time seemed worried for him, but he still couldn't get them to talk about what the problem was. That night, when going to bed, he remembered the chest and decided he would spend the day after trying to open it.
Once he woke up, he first activated the irrigation to test it, and after checking to make sure that each patch of land received the right amount of water he went inside to open the chest. It proved to be a far harder task than he'd anticipated, but eventually he managed to pry the lock open. Much to his disappointment though, instead of the treasures he'd expected to find inside there was only a book. Still, he thought there might have been something worth reading there, so he went out to turn off the irrigation. It came as a shock to him that the land seemed to be as dry and even drier than it had been in the morning, something he decided he would investigate upon the next day.
He didn't sleep that night. Awake in his bed, by the light of a candle, he spent all his time reading the book he'd found. It was a diary of some kind, or a report of things that had happened there, likely written by the first owner. Apparently, the land had once not been particularly fertile, and during a drought the unicorn had tried to use a time-manipulation spell to increase the productivity of his fields. It hadn't worked. He read terrible things, of ponies drowned in sand, of a curse upon those who lived in that house, of a land that sucked all life away. He couldn't believe it. He didn't want to.
The next morning he got out of bed before the dawn, having finished the book, and began to plow the fields. It couldn't be true. They were just old tales, legends to scare ponies. The inhabitants of the village were just superstitious, there was nothing supernatural about the place. He should have been thankful for the legend, even, as it had allowed him to buy the place for such a low price.
But once he stood over a small hill, looking over his fields as the Sun finally shone over the land, he felt his heart sink. Beneath the surface, his work had revealed that there was nothing but sand, and here and there the white texture of bones shone through, poking out from their prison.
The pony ran away, terrified, and he never came back again."
"You're one to talk, Apple Bloom," Rainbow said while looking down, "it's not like your sister is any better than Rarity at this."
"Hey!" Applejack called. "What was wrong with my story?"
"Well it was boring, you botched the timing, you spent too much time on uninteresting details and too little on the scary stuff and-Oh, yeah-" Rainbow got down from the tree and stared at Applejack "-sand isn't scary."
"You try growing something on sand," Applejack replied between her teeth.
"Cacti," Rainbow replied with a smile.
Applejack gritted her teeth. "Well, sorry if I didn't want to scare the fillies here! But why don't you tell a story, since you seem to know so much about it?"
"There once lived a young pegasus in a city up on a mountain. He was a great flier, the best of his age and likely the best the town had ever seen if the elders were to be believed. But he was careless. He would often stay out too late, flying even when the visibility was too low. Wind, rain, even hail, if he decided that he wanted to fly there was no weather that could make him change idea. To his credit, he'd never gotten hurt, despite flying inside more than one thunderstorm, but many thought he'd simply been lucky. He knew it was because he was that good.
But there was one thing his parents had strictly forbidden him from doing, and that was flying when The Mist came. Not the normal mist, not that hazy vapour that came up from the ground, not the occasional cloud floating too low, but The Mist. They spoke of it like some kind of monster, like a ghost that snatched away ponies that weren't careful enough. They said that it came when the wind blew from north-north-west, and that it lasted for a day at most, but every time he asked more about it they all went silent. He'd never seen it, but he'd been told he would recognize it if it ever came during his lifetime.
He did. It wasn't like anything he'd ever seen. It was like a wall, a smooth white surface that blocked all light, an avalanche slowly approaching the city. He saw it while flying over the outskirts of the town, and immediately went back to warn the others.
Back in the town, those who had noticed The Mist were quickly setting aside their daily activities and warning the others before closing themselves in their homes. Some were shaking in fear, and some looked at The Mist with hate. He found his parents, who were both frantically searching for him, and as soon as they met up they all locked themselves in their house. Then, his father made sure the window was locked and locked him in his room, to make sure that he wouldn't try to run away.
The young pegasus saw The Mist descend on the town from his window. It was almost like staring into a glass of milk, there was nothing to see but that nebulous white substance that hid all other shapes and forms and colours. He got closer, losing himself in that sea of nothing. He felt it call to him. And why should he not have followed that call? He was the best flyer in the whole town, and that was just mist. At worst, he would have had to wait a day for it to clear, something he knew he could do if he saved his energies while flying, and even if he accidentally ended up carried away with it by some particularly strong current he could just land, since the forests were safe in that area. And besides, wasn't an occasion like this the reason he kept a copy of his window's key hidden in his room?
Disobeying his parents' commands and ignoring everything he'd been told, he opened the window and began to fly in The Mist.
It was weird at first, more like swimming than flying, the air strangely dense beneath his wings and his mane and feathers almost drenched in the white substance he was immersed in. He found moving through it somewhat harder than usual, though nothing too hard for an expert flyer like him. His visibility was practically non-existent, he couldn't even see his own hooves and he could almost feel The Mist pressing itself on his eyes. Curious, he decided to fly higher and see how tall the thing was.
Too tall. He'd couldn't be sure of how much he'd gone up or of how much time he'd spent flying, the complete lack of reference points and natural light making it impossible to tell anything in that white sea he'd thrown himself into. The temperature wasn't helping either. He felt colder, but it wasn't the type of cold one felt when going higher in the air. It was more like The Mist had been cold from the start, and it had slowly drained heat away from him. He decided to go back down.
He closed his eyes and his wings and let himself fall, but moments later he stopped. He didn't know where he was. He might have been closer to the ground than he thought, maybe he'd been moved by the wind to be over a mountain or maybe he'd been kept down by a current. He began to descend in circles, and to keep track of time he started to count.
One, two, three, four, five...
...ninety two, ninety three...
...three hundred and five, three hundred and six...
...six hundred and fifty... seven? Eight? No, he couldn't have counted that much. He had to have lost count. Maybe he should have counted the circles-No, he had no way to tell where one ended and the next began. Everything looked the same there. Hadn't he passed in that place already? Had he even moved at all?
He was tired. Too tired. He couldn't have been too far from the ground. He closed his wings and eyes and let himself fall. Moments ticked by, then what felt like minutes. Nothing. He opened his eyes to his cold white prison. Was he even falling? He began to flap his wings, trying to go up. Or was it down? Was there a direction in there? Was he even flying? He couldn't tell. He was cold, tired, his limbs didn't feel anything any more. He was floating there, without a direction, lost in The Mist, his wings slowly beating out of instinct as he desperately looked for a place to land.
And to this day, he's still there, trying to escape from The Mist."
Applejack looked at Rainbow with a frown. She growled a bit and gritted her teeth, then finally threw her hooves up in the air. "Okay, fine, that was good!" she loudly said, halfway annoyed.
Rainbow Dash smirked.
"So what do you girls want to do next?" Twilight asked.
"Well, actually," Starlight spoke, "I wanted to tell one too."
"Oh, of course. Are you girls alright with that?" Twilight looked at the others, and they all nodded.
"Perfect." Starlight sat closer to the fire, where everyone could see her. "Not too long ago, in a small village near a forest..."
Twilight was staring at Starlight, wide-eyed and unable to form a coherent sentence.
Rarity and Applejack were hugging each other on the ground, eyes closed, their bodies trembling.
Fluttershy was lying limp against a tree, her eyes completely white and a strand of saliva coming out of her mouth dripping down on her unconscious body.
Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were in the process of digging a hole to get away from there, the thing already deep enough to hold two ponies on top of each other.
Pinkie was going through every combination of numbers on her costume and pressing the button in a futile attempt to teleport away.
Rainbow was looking at Starlight with great interest, her wings outstretched and rigid.
Starlight's tent was also staring at the unicorn with her large green eyes, her mouth opened in disbelief, although the only ones who could have seen that she was Chrysalis in disguise were in a state of shock too deep to notice.
"So how was it?" Starlight asked.
"You need to tell me where you found that," Rainbow said. "Do you know any other stories as scary as that one?"
"Scary?" Starlight cocked her head to the side. "That wasn't really scary. Like the ones you girls told, after all. I know one that's actually scary if you want."
Chrysalis developed a pair of wings over her tent-shaped body and flew away.
"Starlight," Twilight said, putting a hoof over the unicorn's shoulder, "we need to talk."
