The First Night
Crafters Tales: Journal of the Lost One
The First Night
Twas a late night in Ponyville and everypony was sleeping soundly as Lunas bright moon hung high in the cool night sky… Well, almost everypony… In the large hollowed out tree, there was one particular lavender unicorn that was preventing her scaly assistant from getting any sleep…
The mare threw a book, depicting hooves holding an apple, onto the ground with intended malice. This shocked the young dragon assistant greatly, partly due to the fact that she never purposely threw books with the fury of a thousand stars, and partly because the noise woke him up from his nightly slumber. The dragonling looked up from his bed to see the mare backing away from the book in hast whilst yelling the rapid fire statement of “NOPE! NOPE! NOPE! NOPE! NOPE!”
“Twilight?” He asked.
“SPIKE! DARGON! FIRE BREATH! NOW!!!”
“Wha- AUGH!” The dragon was lifted up from his bed by a purple magical aura and pointed to face the book which had his roommate so riled up. With the pull of his tail, an emerald flame burst out from his mouth and burnt the book to a crisp. Only when the book was in ashes, did the magic give the dragon permission to fall onto the floor with a loud, spine shattering, thud.
“Oh, I am SO going to write her a stern letter!” the unicorn said in a voice of authority.
The dragon got up and started to rub his head. Dazed, he asked, “Wha? What’s wrong?”
“Moondancer, that’s what!” Twilight shouted. “She sent me that… That THING! It isn’t even worthy of being called a book, let alone literature!”
Looking at the charred remains, Spike thought it must have been extremely horrible. Twilight had never reacted to a book this badly before, not even to the books she found when she accidentally wandered into the… *ahem* Forbidden wing of the royal library, back at Cantorlot.
“What was it?” Spike said as a voice of concern.
The mare got up close to him and stared directly into his eyes and said, “A mare, so devoid of emotion that not even discord can affect her, falls in love with a pixie who claims to be a vampire and…” Twilights eye began to tear up. “It was too painful to read… I mean that literally… It physically hurt my eyes and I might have a brain hemorrhage now… Why would Moondancer send it to me? Is she still mad that I didn’t go to her summer sun celebration three years ago? I had to prevent eternal darkness from falling over Equestria!”
“It can’t be that bad…” Spike Answered.
Twilight looked him in the eyes once again and said, “It was…” Before sobbing again. “And that’s just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg! I scheduled this hour to read. Now I have nothing to do!”
“Twilight,” the dragon said in a serious tone, “It’s 2:00am. The only ones awake right now are those in Neighsia, Princess Luna and her guards, Slendermane and you. Did it ever occur to you that you could just sleep?”
The purple mare started to get panicky, her mane started to look bedraggled. Unfortunately for Spike, he know what this meant just as much as everypony knew what it meant when Pinkie Pie had her hair straightened out…
“Spike,” She said, “If I do that, then I will wake up an hour early. That means that I will be an hour early for my meeting with Fluttershy. That means that I will be early for Rarity and everypony else!” Her speech rapidly got faster. “And since now I don’t have anything scheduled for my hour before I sleep tomorrow, then I will be forced to call it lights out early again! This throws my entire schedule out of whack! It will end in total chaos!”
Spike shuttered at the thought of what happened the last few times Twilight thought her schedule was slightly off. He got up as she was running around the room, grabbing various things such as paper and quills as well as an extremely long scroll that was her planner and she started to reschedule her month, moving about and muttering things like I’ll move this to here, and put this over here and do this while doing that...
“Oh yes,” The tired dragon said with a not so subtle sarcastic tone. “It really is a shame you can’t do anything else. Celestia forbid you actually read another book, I mean it’s not like we live in A BUCKING LIBRARY!!!”
“SPIKE! WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE!” The mare said, turning around and grabbing him with her magic. But in her haste, she tripped over the long piece of parchment that she was using, sending the young dragonling straight into a wall with a sound that might as well have been saying “Ouch.”
“Ohmygosh!” Twilight said, running over the wall to help spike out of the hole with her magic. “I am so sorry Spike, I never meant to do that. I swear I will never do that agai-” Twilight quickly dropped the dragon again to peer into the hole and said, “What is that?”
Spike sat up to rub his head once again and asked, “What is what? Did you find some sort of portal with a bunch of monkeys watching us? That’s what Pinkie says she sees whenever she breaks a wall.”
“What? No! That’s not it!” Twilight said, pulling whatever it was, out from the hole in the wall with her magic.
“It’s a small chest, and it has…” She said, opening it. Pulling out a dusty old book, she finished to say, “It has a diary in it?”
“Let me see that!” Spike said, grabbing the book out of Twilights magical grasp. Flipping through the pages, Spike quickly stated, “Twi, this isn’t a diary, it’s a journal.”
Confused, the lavender mare looked at the dragon and asked, “What’s the difference?”
“Well,” The dragonling explained, “A diary is for girls. A journal is where a guy writes down his thoughts and anything exciting that happened to him during the day.”
“So it’s a diary?”
“NO! Guys don’t have diaries. That’s for girls and they’re girly.”
The unicorn smirked. “And who are you to talk about what’s girly and what’s for guys? I’ve seen you with that purse Rarity made for you.”
Spikes face was red. “That isn’t a purse!” He shouted, “It’s a satchel!”
Twilight struggled to contain her laughter. “And let me guess…” She started. “Next you’re going to say that wasn’t My Little Humans you were watching last Saturday?”
By this point, Spike resembled a tomato. “That… That show isn’t as girly as it seems!”
“Yes, there is absolutely nothing girly about a show that spends an entire episode on how to make a dress.”
Spike was ready to explode, but Twilight decided that enough was enough, and she was done joking with him.
“Relax,” She said. “I’m just messing with you.”
“I think you’ve been hanging out with Rainbow Dash too much.”
Twilight blushed and said, “Whatever. Anywho, what does the diary-“
“Journal.” Spike corrected.
“Riiiight.” She said, drawing out the i. “So anywho, what’s it say?”
“I have found some sort of library,” Spike read, “It’s like a tunnel, but all the walls are shelves. It’s probably, just part of a small section of a larger library, yet the way deeper is blocked by some sort of hard igneous stone. Most likely one of those… things… brought magma, and placed it here in an attempt to destroy, this knowledge… They didn’t anticipate it mixing with the water, probably from a fountain, judging by the formation it made.
“I doubt anypony will ever read this, but if they do, they should know about these islands, lost within the fog… That and I wish to keep what tidbits of sanity I have left.
“That is why I should probably start at the beginning…”
-=CT=-
The waves crashed on the sandy shore of the beach as the clouds moved across the sky. It was quiet and not a sound was heard other than the sound of the sea… At least that’s how it was until a lone creature, washed up and unconscious, started to stir…
The earth stallion shot up with a quickness, rubbing the sand out of his dark blue eyes. He ran his hoof through his brown hair and looked down at his teal blue coat… Something was gnawing at the back of his mind, telling him something was wrong. Then it hit him, he had not a single idea as to where he was, how he could have gotten there or even who he was.
That last thing is what scared him the most. As if by instinct, he looked down to his flank to see a sword and pickax on some sort of table or bench as his cutiemark.
Crafter, he thought. My name is crafter. My talent is making things.
Relieved that he had even just a fraction of his past, he focused, trying to remember more. He found that he had access to a large amount of trivial information such as the fact that zebras have a natural instinct for potion making or that Nightmare Moon had been banished to her lunar prison about 532 years ago… But he had no recollection of his past or how he had come across this knowledge…
Looking out to the cerulean sea that had brought him there, he could see what seemed to be the horizon, yet his eyes seemed to play tricks on him as there seemed to be a distant fog… This concerned and prompted the teal stallion to pick himself up and trot away from the coast to the woods.
The woods weren’t real thick. There were just a few spruce trees and a couple of birch trees, but one would get lost if they didn’t keep bearings straight… Not that Crafter cared about where he was. He focused only on where he was going, which was nowhere in general, he just wanted to find something.
As the day wore on and the sun began to fall behind the western horizon, Crafter began to feel uneasy… The only animals that he had seen were a pack of wolves, but they ignored him. There was so much life around him, but the island seemed completely void of any pony-made objects.
Dusk fell and a cold wind blew as Crafter entered a large clearing, sending shivers down to his tail. Looking out to the clearing, Crafters face lit up as he saw something he had sought after all day. Another pony!!
It was dark, but in the center of the clearing was the frame of a pony in silhouette… And it was moving as though it was injured…
“HEY!” Crafter called out to the stranger. He had successfully gotten its attention as it slowly turned to limp towards the lost stallion. “Hey, do you know where the nearest town is? I don’t really know where I am…”
As the ‘injured’ pony came into sight, it was revealed as to why it stumbled as it moved. Its flesh was a sickly shade of green and smelled of rot. Crafter was breathless, not of the sight or smell of the undead creature, but because he realized that he was screaming. Frozen in the spot where he stood, he soon realized that screaming was not the best idea, as more of those… Things… came out of the woods.
Taking the hint that he would die if he stayed rooted to the ground, Crafter turned away from the clearing and ran as fast as his legs could take him. The creatures were slow, but they persisted. Crafter dared not to turn around as trees whizzed past him, taunting him as they could be hiding more creatures in their shadows. Not seeing any other option, Crafter ran up a tree with the impossible speed and acrobatics that only somepony in fear for their life could achieve.
As the things got closer, Crafter held his breath. They were surrounding him, jumping at the tree, but they seemed incapable of climbing. The terrified earth stallion let out a sigh of relief as the adrenaline began to leave him. His stomach started to gurgle and he began to think. I haven’t eaten all day, have I? Looking around in the tree he was in, he found a few apples and started to munch. I might as well make myself comfortable, I’ll probably be here all night. He though as he looked down at the horde below. Now that they were up close, he could see them in more detail. They were pegasi, but their wings were rotting along with their flesh. Their mane and tails were a darker shade of green than their coat and their cutiemarks were unintelligible, as they were rotted over. They gave off a putrid smell as they limped and moaned about, but other than that, they looked like any other pony.
Zombies. Crafter thought while eating, I’ve been run up a tree by zombies… I hope this will one day make a good pub story.
Crafter didn’t have very much time to himself as he was snapped out of his thought as his current apple exploded, replaced by an arrow that lodged itself deep into the tree. Crafter looked in the direction that the arrow had come from to see a brittle framed silhouette. As it stepped into sight, Crafter nearly fainted by the ghastly sight. It was probably earth pony, it didn’t seem to have wings or a horn, but something was missing…. Its skin… Well, that and its muscle, nerve tissue, internal organs and pretty much everything except for its bones. The skeletal spawn turned its empty eye sockets towards Crafter as loaded something into some sort of mechanism it was wearing.
Crafter only realized too late what it was as he felt a scalding pain in his left hind leg. He looked down to see the shaft of an arrow sticking out of his knee.
“Buck! Its got a crossbow!” The teal stallion cursed. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the skeleton taking aim once again…
Buck, I’m done for! Crafter thought. He couldn’t move fast enough to avoid the next shot, what with his injury. If he left the tree, the zombies would finish him off. I guess this is it… The terrified stallion braced for the impact of the final shot. The snap of the bow was heard as the arrow whistled through the air. There was a yelp of pain, followed by a thud of something heavy falling to the ground.
Crafter quickly opened his eyes to see the dying body of a wolf on the ground below, bleeding from an arrow wound in its chest. Crafter thought, It must have jumped in the crossfire by accident, poor thing.
The low growl of nearby animals snapped Crafter back to reality as a rather large pack of wolves slinked out of the shadows, surrounding the skeleton who murdered their kin. The sudden appearance of living flesh gained the attention of the zombies as they watched the wolves close in on the boney enemy.
In a clash of fur and bone, the wolves tore the skeleton to shreds, leaving only a few arrows and a couple of bones. The wolves however did not rest as they sensed the zombies closing in on them. The wolves slowly backed away from the horde of zombies, not breaking their gaze off of the blood thirsty eyes of the undead. The tension was thick and both sides were biding their time, waiting for the first opening. That opening happened as one of the wolf pups backed into a tree root, falling to the ground. The zombies sprang into action causing the wolves to attempt a hasty retreat as the living cadavers were right on their tails. Twas truly a horrid sight to see as both the zombies and wolves disappeared into the dark cover of the nightly woods. Crafter sighed and thanked the deus ex machinas and hoped that they would be alright, however, he still had one more problem to address…
Crafter prepared himself for what he was about to do… He bent into an awkward position, it didn’t help that he was stuck in a tree. He grasped the arrow in his leg with his mouth, and pulled… The searing pain was unbearable and caused his jaw to clench shut, so tight, that the arrow snapped in half as though some twisted form of justice. The only thing that was preventing him from letting out a blood curdling scream was the knowledge that doing so would probably attract more of those things. Once the pain left his body, the teal stallion looked around to see zombies shambling about, but the either didn’t notice him, or they didn’t care…
Exhaustion began to set in as the moon fell. Crafter thought he had seen another ponys silhouette, but he left it to his tired eyes playing tricks on him, due to the fact that it seemed tall and thin… And it disappeared in the blink of an eye…
The sun began to rise as dawn approached. That’s funny, it should be like three in the morning. Crafter thought, half asleep… Asleep? ASLEEP!!! He shot up from the position he was laying down on with a panic as he had realized that he fell asleep. He looked around, sure he would have to fight the monsters that haunted him in the night, but saw something that slowly brought a smile to his face.
As the solar light touched each of the creatures, they began to frenzy as they spontaneously combusted, leaving only some feathers from the zombie pegasi and some bones and arrows from the skeletal archers…
Crafter couldn’t hold back as he let out a mad cackle…
-=CT=-
Twilight was pulled away from the journal by a loud crash downstairs. She then first realized that at some point during the reading, Spike had handed off the book to her, and second, someone was in her kitchen. Cautiously, the lavender mare walked down the stairs with the grace of a drunken elephant on a unicycle riding towards a banana peel. Getting up and popping her spine back into place, the lavender mare made her way to the kitchen. Upon entering the room, she immediately took notice of the pile of pots and pans with her draconic assistants tail sticking out of it.
“Spike,” The unicorn said in concern, “What are you doing?”
Climbing out from under the pile, Spike began to clean up until the only pot was on his head.
“Sorry Twilight, I was just trying to make breakfast and I fell.”
Twilight, considerably confused, look out the kitchen window to see the sky getting lighter as the dawn sun rose.
“Oh sweet Celestia, Spike, what time is it!?”
Spike started the fire on the stove and boiled some water as he spoke. “It’s about 6:30, same time that the sun rises every day…”
“OHMYGOSH!!” Twilight gasped. “I was reading for four and a half hours? Spike, the quill and parchment! We need to reschedule this month around this diary!” And with that, the lavender magician ran upstairs, leaving the dragonling confused.
“But Twi! It’s a diary.” The dragonling muttered.