We emerged from that forsaken pit. Finally. But my relief was short-lived.

It was as if we’d entered a different city, like something out of the deepest pits of hell itself. I flashed my light across the sky and watched as the wretched spires of balefire-melted concrete and twisted metal loomed ominously over us.

The steel frames of those ancient high-rises had been reduced to nothing but gnarled and twisted spikes. The balefire had consumed the buildings they once held high, melting and sloughing away from their bubbling skeletons. Others, too structurally weak, were instead utterly destroyed, their broken remains piling several stories above us and around us in immense mountains of snow-capped concrete and steel.

It was no longer a city. Not even a fallen one. We had entered a mass grave. Every step I took, crunching through the snow-swept rubble, was a step knowing that somewhere beneath me someone had died.

No one could have survived.

Not that close to ground zero.

And yet I didn’t feel any safer.

I bit my lower lip and flinched every time I swung my light left and right, afraid that I’d see more than just the unmarked graves of Poneva’s countless dead. The city could have its darkness. And it did. The night belonged to them. They were using it against us. Watching us. Hiding from us. Surrounding us.

Whenever I panned my flashlight’s beam across the rubble before me, I was afraid I’d lose Candy Cane to that sea of shifting darkness. Only my ears and the glow of her magelight kept us from being swallowed up by the black sea that parted before us.

Even at the stable I knew that creatures of the dark were drawn to the light.

Our precious lights.

We walked on, our lights nothing more than beacons in the dark – but not for us. For them. For all I knew, they were drawing closer. Stalking – slithering silently through the night.

If there was something out there … we had no way of knowing.

A different kind of silence hung over that place. It was a brooding silence – the silence of a bloodletter stalking its prey, the silence of a sneaky pony crawling through the rubble. I knew what it was like to move without being seen. I also knew what it was to be hunted by monsters.

It was that same feeling ... wading through the darkness, hoping I wouldn’t be pulled under and drowned … devoured beneath the black tides.

The only sounds my ears could distinguish were the winds that scattered snow around us, our hooves crunching through the pale, and the uncertain beats of my heart. I kept telling myself that there was nothing else out there but us.

But that was what they wanted.

I could still hear the voice that whispered into my ear in that frozen tunnel, calling my name … it knew my name. How did it know my name?

Hooves crunched through the snow.

The darkness shifted around us.

My pace quickened, and with every step I took, I counted – mine, and hers.

This time, I swore I’d be right. I swore that they would be ours, and ours alone.

Mine, and hers.

Mine …

Hers …

Ours. Alone.

I could feel my racing heartbeat slow to the speed of our trot as we made our way through the snowy rubble. I breathed in, and breathed out. My breaths came and went in thick clouds of mist that seethed out of my cracked lips. I watched them drift away, carried off by the slowing breeze. I gulped, and blinked twice, eyeing the red and white swirls of Candy Cane’s mane as she led the way.

I listened to the monotonous, muffled clops our four pairs of hooves made through the rubble, and the slowing rhythm inside my chest. Monotony and repetition made ponies bored.

It made ponies comfortable. Predictable. Safe.

Prey never felt endangered until danger actually came.

But there was nothing there but us. Those were our hooves clopping through the rubble. No one else’s. Nothing else’s.

I found solace in my boredom, preoccupied, and safely bemused.

The air was still now. The wind no longer blew.

Clop – clop – clop – clop –

Our eight hooves. Our eight hooves.

My right foreleg panned lazily across the hills of debris, illuminating whatever my flashlight touched. Silence had smoothed the anxiety that was pumping through my veins. Now I was only cutting swaths through the night to light my way through the darkness.

Business as usual. The picture wasn’t any different from any other night I’d spent outside in the wasteland. The darkness parted. My path deepened. It kept my legs moving. We would get there sooner or later.

With my distant eyes, I caught, atop a mound of rubble too steep to climb, a crumbling wall that had somehow withstood the spellfire scourge. I frowned at it. The cadence of my trotting hooves stumbled, and slowed to a walk.

It was just my fucking imagination again. My eyes were making something out of nothing. I swung my light back, knowing it was just another well-placed chunk of concrete.

It wasn’t. I was wrong.

I kept my light trained upon it, squinting through the darkness as I noticed, that painted across its surface, were two distinct black smears. They were frail and distorted, each smear curling away from the broken path we walked.

I blinked, and blinked, and blinked.

And they were still there.

I gulped as I neared, the silhouettes becoming more and more defined. They were unsettlingly familiar shapes: like shadows cast against a wall and frozen in time.

Shadows. Shadows without ponies to cast them.

I peered through the night and saw that one of the spindly, contorted shadows had a limb-like smear held over it.

Like a pony shielding her eyes from a blinding light.

I broke my comfortable silence with a trembling whisper.

“C-Candy Cane?”

She paused midstep, her ears perking as if she’d heard something. Candy Cane darted her head around frantically, startled. She loosened up when she saw me. The mare took a deep breath.

It was just me.

“What is it?” she asked, quietly.

I cocked my head in the direction my flashlight was pointing.

“Do you see that?”

She nodded slowly as we both watched the wretched smears, shivering beneath our coats.

“What the hell are those things?” I kept my eyes trained, searching for movement. But I found none, and neither did my EFS.

Candy Cane hesitated, biting her lower lip. “Blast shadows,” she whispered. “They’re whatever was behind a pony when he or she got vaporized.”

Several long seconds passed as I gazed at the three pony-shaped shadows, their agonized silhouettes frozen mid-gallop, and their jaws dropped and distended as if howling into the balefire oblivion.

Vaporized. Erased. Wiped from existence.

I wondered, for the split second they spent conscious as their flesh burned away from their bones, if they felt pain. I wondered if they felt the shrieking, agonizing pain of being stripped away molecule by molecule, from flesh to bone, before their brains boiled away and joined the wind that scattered their ashes across the earth.

I wondered, in horror, why I was asking myself those questions, and found myself equally terrified that I knew the answers. I tried to push them away, but the thoughts ran circles around my head, drowning out my own, swallowing them up in balefire.

A strangulated gasp escaped my lips and I winced, the air sucked out of my lungs as my skin began prickling and tingling madly. I blinked away the rivulets of boiling hot sweat that streamed down my face. My lips opened to scream, but my mouth ran dry, charred, arid, and desiccated.

“We shouldn’t stare,” Candy Cane said out loud.

I inhaled sharply, trembling uncontrollably as she started along the path once more. I lifted to my muzzle a quaking right hoof to wipe dry the sweat that was pouring down my drenched, matted coat. I touched my face ... but it came away dry.

There was none. There had been none. My chilled, goose-bumped flesh shivered beneath my barding. I gulped a lump down my throat, swallowing the saliva that had been there all along.

I stood there, swaying back in forth, my distant eyes lost in delirium as Candy Cane started away from me. I lifted a hoof to follow her, but hesitated, frowning as my eyes darted back and forth across the ashen drifts.

I turned, lifted my leg, and panned my PipBuck’s beam back into the night, parting the sea of darkness like curtains on a stage. It found its mark, illuminating the blast shadow-painted edifice as I squinted through the snowfall.

They were gone.

They were gone. Bare as a bone – gone, like the wind that howled past us. They vanished as if they were never there.

Vaporized. Erased. Wiped from existence.

My right forehoof dipped back down into the rubble, and the darkness slithered back into the void I’d left behind.

We shouldn't have stared.

I cantered after her, the hairs on my mane standing on end as my shivering intensified, the winds biting deeper into my barding. They wormed their way into the fabrics, raking their icy talons against my livid flesh.

Candy Cane trained her eyes upon the way in front of us, her stare never leaving the illuminated path she cut through the night. Not wanting to look. Not wanting to find anything she didn’t want to see.

But the more I looked away, the more I saw – the more the darkness unraveled before my eyes.

Wherever my light shined, there was a shadow. My beam darted across the grave world around me.

There they were.

Smeared across every wall, every surface. Shadows of all shapes and sizes flashed before my eyes.

Flash.

Tall ponies.

Small ponies.

Dead ponies.

Flash.

Above us.

Around us.

To my left – to my right.

Flash.

My canter became a trot – faster and faster –

Flash – flash – flash.

Ponies reared up on their hinds as the balefire took them – mothers shielded their children from the emerald light – couples held each other close as they burned away – as they all burned away – as they all burned away –

Flash.

I stopped in my tracks. Candy Cane called out my name, but I didn’t answer. I couldn’t tear my eyes away.

Shadows. Two agonized blast shadows, frozen in time mid-gallop. One of them cradled a bundled up smear against its chest, holding it close like a mother cradled a child …

A child. It was … was …

“Goddesses ...” I whispered, clenching my eyes shut as my shoulders quaked with shuddering sobs.

Something shifted in the rubble behind us.

I swung my light around. There was nothing there.

I let out a trembling breath into the frozen air as my pulse hammered inside my temples. I watched the icy cloud hang before my muzzle.

Then a gust of frozen wind chased it all away.

Candy Cane’s shriek spun me around. My heart nearly skipped a beat.

Five wretched blast shadows painted the wall before us – their jaws agape in silent agony as they covered their eyes and cowered in horror from the path ahead.

I stared, frozen upon my hooves.

Then their heads swiveled to face us.

“RUN!” I screamed, but Candy Cane beat me to it.

We turned tail and bolted as my heart threatened to leap outside of my chest. It didn’t matter where we went.

‘Anywhere but here.’

Thump – thump, thump – thump –

Our eight hooves. I counted our steps. Eight. Eight hooves. I thought we were alone.

But the shifting darkness was now churning like a turbulent sea.

Tides of darkness crashed all around us as the wind began to moan and the ashen snow began to fall.

I counted, knowing that only eight hoofsteps should’ve been crunching in our wake. Only eight. But my right ear perked as hooves pounded through the snow next to me.

I turned, knowing that Candy Cane was galloping beside me.

The blood drained from my face.

No one was there.

Candy Cane was at my tail, gasping frantically for air as she fought to keep up.

Eight hooves. Eight hooves. Eight hooves.

Thump – thump, thump – thump – thump.

My light flickered before my eyes.

‘NO!’

I watched in horror as my precious light began to die. ‘No – no, not again, PLEASE, GODDESSES' –

Rocks tumbled down the hills of rubble as they crumbled around us.

We were not alone. But then I realized: we had never been alone.

My EFS fluctuated. Behind us. In front of us. To our left. To our right.

Never did their blips linger in one place for too long. I cut flickering swaths through the darkness around me, searching frantically for the horrors on my EFS.

Flash. The walls were bare. Flash. The walls were bare. Everywhere I shined, the walls were bare, and the shadows were nowhere to be seen.

But the blips on my EFS screamed that I was wrong.

I was wrong. They were everywhere. All around us. Closing in.

The snow thickened. The wind shrieked madly as it howled at us from every direction.

I whimpered and begged. But my precious light continued to fade before my widening eyes.

It flickered and waned to a dim, ruddy glow as the darkness devoured my dying light.

Muffled thumps crunched through the crumbling debris.

Those distant thumps became not so distant hoofsteps. I could hear them galloping down the jagged hilltops around us. Eight hooves. There were only supposed to be eight.

Then there were twelve. Twelve hooves crunched through the snow. Faster – matching our pace, stalking us within earshot - lurking behind the howling darkness.

I didn’t want to look. I didn’t want to look.

The air shifted around me – and I swung my flickering flashlight about, its beam skimming atop jagged slopes too steep to climb.

Nothing. Nobody. No one.

Sixteen hooves pounded through the snow.

Then twenty. Twenty-two.

Eleven pairs of hooves. There should’ve been twelve. Should’ve. Its muffled clops were missing steps as something dragged and flailed after us through the rubble.

Rocks kicked up small plumes of snow - only a few steps ahead of us.

My dying light flickered across the rubble on high, and for a single fleeting second, I watched as dozens of shadows peered down at us.

I opened my mouth to scream.

“We’re almost there!” Candy Cane blurted out, shattering the feverish delirium that screamed inside my head.

Silence. With a whirring flicker, my flashlight brightened once again. The both of us felt it. Something inexplicable in the atmosphere had changed.

The wind sighed. The snowfall thinned.

And all that remained were our eight hooves and my drumming heartbeat.

We stood there, gasping for air, weapons levitating next to us as we waited, and listened.

Silence.

I looked at her, and she looked at me … with distant eyes. Something caught her attention in her peripherals and I watched her eyes dart to the darkness. But there was nothing there. Candy Cane shook her head, nickered, and continued onward at a feverish canter.

So did I.

With my pulse still hammering in my temples, we approached the remains of Poneva’s Ministry of Morale in quietude. Even the wind had been reduced to nothing but a chilling breeze. Quiet and somber. The silence was still a heavy one.

As we neared, I was dimly surprised to see that the Hub was still towering over us. Whereas the rubble and framework that clawed its way skywards around us resembled individual bones, the Morale Hub was a near complete skeleton, melted into the earth but somehow still standing.

Through the contorted remains of a metal fence we walked and found ourselves at the mouth of an immense, abandoned courtyard. Before us was an open field, strewn with debris and charred carnage. Tall metal posts, topped with the distorted bell shapes of ancient megaphones rose up atop the snow-swept ruins, their shadows forever casted across the gravel behind them.

The wintry winds cradled them back and forth, their charred, metallic forms sighing in the desolate breeze.

We stood there – or rather, Candy Cane stood there, and I waited as she listened. Her ears perked as she shifted on her hooves. Listening to what, I couldn’t tell amid my heartbeat and the moaning wind. But she remained there, glancing around as she listened to what I couldn’t hear.

Seconds that felt like minutes passed. Then I heard it. In the distance, I heard a voice, warped and stuttering like an ancient record player. My ears perked, listening through the frozen gales.

“… smile, smile, smile …” a mare’s distorted voice whispered from beyond what my dilated eyes could see. It faded from my senses, traces of its haunting croons echoing distantly behind us, before waning back into the nothingness.

“Come on,” Candy Cane murmured.

‘No,’ I thought, ‘No. Fuck this.’ But out of fear of being left behind, I forced myself to follow. Further into the blackened courtyard we walked, the voices growing louder and louder.

We approached a charred, twisted megaphone pole, the mare’s warped and distorted singing emanating from its dead speakers.

“Impossible,” I murmured, eyeing the pole’s horribly melted length, its metal shell fused to the rubble beneath it.

And yet her voice still rasped to us its chilling sing song. I listened. And I listened closer … her voice whispered from every direction.

“But if you're kind of worried… sssss… I'll work real hard and do my best to turn that sad frown ssssstthpphBRRZT …”

I exhaled a breath I realized I was keeping in, and watched as the wind carried it away. The storm was intensifying again. Its tortured moans filled the air once more as ashen snow flaked across my shivering body. We stood there next to each other, listening.

Listening … for something.

Then we heard it.

Laughter. Laughter in the distance. Children playing. Their faint giggles and playful laughter echoed in the darkness.

A wracking shiver quaked across my body. Then nothing. My ears perked. I let out a long, drawn out breath. I listened. And listened.

“Hahahahaha … hahahahaha …”

I listened as their voices echoed through my ears … my mind … my thoughts. I started forward in the direction of their voices, slipping my gun into its holster.

“Red, wait!” Candy Cane said, trying to pull me away, but her hoof missed, and I continued, the haunting music and their cheery laughter drowning out her voice.

Drowning out everything.

“Ssssssssscome on everypony smile, smile, smile ….”

I put one hoof over the other, the innocent voices of young fillies and colts cheering me onward. Their faint, echoing voices grew louder and louder as I stumbled blindly through the darkness.

“Frrrrrrrrrrrrill my hhhhheart up with sunshine, sunshine …” the mare crooned as the foals laughed and sang along.

“Red, what are you doing!?”

I didn’t even remember how I got there. I stood in front of a collapsed, melted building, its walls flowing through the snow like solidified lava. Through a gaping, black hole in the collapsed, crumbling wall before me, I heard, inside …

Voices.

The more I listened … the louder they became. All around me from every direction they began to echo.

I stared into the darkness … the rippling, black void that writhed and churned before me as I peered into that gaping hole in the wall. I stared into that darkness … and the darkness stared back.

It stared back and sang into my wilting ears.

“Allerrrrrrr … I really need'srsssbbrrt a smile, smile, smile … from thesrrsst happy friends of mine!” the children sang along, giggling with cheery voices that belied the frozen, dead world around us.

Their laughter echoed over and over inside my thoughts as I stared, entranced, enraptured … enthralled.

My lips began to move in time with their wretched song as I continued to stare, the hole’s mouth whispering me onward … to step in … to reach into the inviting darkness.

“Hahahahaha, HAHAHAHAHA!”

“Red … Red, it’s not safe here,” Candy Cane’s muffled voice told me. “Red, we can’t stay here!” she shouted over them.

But I could barely hear her.

I felt her hooves grab me by the shoulders and shake me … but I couldn’t move. Something was coiling itself around me … my insides … every fiber of my being – draining the blood from my face … the strength in my legs.

“All I really need is a smile … from these friends of mine …” the mare crooned, “Smiles from these friends of mine – MINE – MINE!”

The laughing children shattered into a million pieces.

They screamed. In agony. Their little voices shrieked into my ears as if they were being burned alive, their flesh cooking and sloughing off their screaming faces. They burned. But they couldn’t die.

My shoulders trembled and my eyes ran red with bloody tears.

The mare’s voice loomed over their shrill cries. Her distorted sing song stuttered - coughed - and played in reverse, her pitch dipping and warping diabolically.

My entire body began to quake as the children’s screams coalesced into the tortured shrieks of a single burning filly. She screamed into my ears. My soul.

But the warped, sinister music crashed against my senses - again, and again - threatening to drown out everything inside me and the filly's anguished cries.

I screamed. But I couldn’t hear my voice.

“Red - we need to get out of here!” I heard Candy Cane beg.

“NOOO!” the filly's horrific, tormented voice shrieked into my ears – stopping my heart – hurling me into the snow – plunging us into utter darkness.

I slammed into the drifts. I lay there with silence inside my chest, my mouth gasping for breaths that wouldn't come.

Then my flashlight flickered to life. And so did my heart. Hooves yanked me to my fours. Candy Cane clung to me as she let out a horrified scream.

I swung my light across the snow, and its beam waned, dwindling – dying away as the darkness thrashed around us. Red dots drowned my EFS.

My legs buckled beneath me. My ears pinned themselves against the sides of my head. The screaming. Goddesses. The screaming. From every direction came the tortured screams of a burning city – a city of ponies - ponies burning in endless, hellish purgatory.

A rippling, black hoof shot out of the snow. A second. A third.

Billowing, skeletal shadows rose up from the ashen drifts – emerging from a sea of writhing darkness. Tall shadows, short shadows, mares - stallions - foals - too many to count.

Too many dead to keep buried.

Their melting, wretched bodies shuddered and flailed as they clawed their way out of their shallow graves, wailing in burning agony with their broken, distended jaws.

They lurched forward, trailing tattered clouds of pitch blackness as they shambled after us with their withered, tortured limbs. Some held out to us their trembling hooves. Others didn’t have any hooves to lift.

Behind us, they awoke, rising from their shallow, frozen graves. Above us, on the rooftops, the shadows were perched, peering down at us … watching … waiting … hungering ...

“Goddesses … no …” I heard myself say.

Candy Cane magelight flickered to life as she screamed into my ears.

“LET’S GET OUT OF HERE!”

She wrapped a hoof around mine and yanked me with her as she bolted through a hole in the Ministry hub’s wall. They were inside. Waiting for us, legs outstretched. But Candy Cane blundered through them – and so did I.

Their dark forms washed over me, and I felt my heart skip beats. Stars exploded in my eyes. My blood chilled and thinned inside my veins.

Candy Cane dragged me through the darkness, screaming like a madmare. Through doors, through rooms, through halls, up flights of stairs we galloped, tearing through the debris, and the ashes, and the shadows that reached for our thundering, warm hearts with their cold, dead hooves.

Then she stopped, her hoof letting go of mine, sending me sprawling into the rubble with a jarring crash.

“Cane … what the –”

Then I realized why she stopped.

I beamed my flashlight into the darkness, and standing before us was a young, maroon-coated unicorn mare with gray, cloudy eyes. She raised a hoof into the air, searchingly, her pale mane shimmering as she waved her hoof blindly in the air.

“Cane?” her tiny voice cracked, terrified. “Cane … where are you?”

The mare beside me fell to her knees, mouth agape and eyes widened to saucers.

“No … no …” Candy Cane whimpered, cupping her mouth with a hoof as tears began to stream down her cheeks. She gazed upon the mare, trembling uncontrollably. “No … no, no, no …”

The shimmering pony sobbed, weeping silvery tears. “WHERE ARE YOU!?” she cried frantically, blind and helpless in the darkness she could not see.

Candy Cane started towards her, wanting to hold her but unable to accept the reality of what her eyes were seeing.

“Cane, what … what are you doing? Who is that?!” I shouted into deaf ears as the mare’s sobs drowned out my voice. “Who the hell are you?!”

“I’m here … it’s okay, I’m here,” Candy Cane told the younger mare, both ponies ignoring me as if I wasn’t even there. As if they were in their own world, and every attempt I made trying to draw her attention away was just a muffled voice on the other side of a foggy window.

“Where’d you go? Why … why’d you leave me?” the white-maned mare asked, betrayed. “I waited for so long … but you never came back … you never came back for me like you said you would …”

Candy Cane cried, wiping away her cheek with a trembling sleeve.

“I-I had no choice! They took me away – I-I had no choice!”

“YOU SAID YOU’D COME BACK!” the mare screamed, “You left me behind! YOU LEFT ME BEHIND!”

“I’m sorry … I’m so sorry … I couldn’t fight them … or they would’ve killed us both,” Candy Cane murmured, shaking her head furiously.

“No – you gave up,” the pale mare snapped. “You knew that you weren’t strong enough to fight them … you never were.” The sobs shuddering inside Candy Cane’s chest froze. “Father and everypony else died for nothing … because you gave up.”

“I ... I … that’s not true – THAT’S NOT TRUE!” Candy Cane screamed, pounding a hoof into the snow as tears poured down her face.

“That wasn’t the first time you got our father killed … don’t you remember? Don’t you remember? Mama and Papa died to save you … and look at what you’ve done with yourself. You wasted the second chance they gave you … the chance they gave us!” she spat.

“No … no, no, no …” Candy Cane sobbed, the other mare’s words plunging deep into her bleeding heart.

“Yes. You know I’m right … you know I’m right,because you gave up on me too.”

Candy Cane blurted out a quaking sob, clenching her eyes shut as she fell to her haunches and held out her forehooves, pleadingly.

“I swore to the Goddesses that I’d do everything I could to get out and come back for you! I broke out seven times! Seven. Times!”

The pale mare let out a cruel laugh.

“The Goddesses … where I am now, where Mama, and Papa, and Father – where everypony else is … where you’re going to … there are no Goddesses. You’re right: there never have been.” She bowed her head, her pale mane falling before her darkened face. “The Goddesses ... they’re all lies … just like the lie you told me when you left me behind ... just like the lies you’re telling me right now.”

She convulsed as if struck by a freight train, her face contorting with agony as the mare’s words tore her apart.

“If only you’d just died the first time …” she whispered in a tiny voice. “If only we’d just died the first time, Father never would’ve thrown his life away trying to save us. He never would’ve wasted his life just to save you ...” she hissed.

I eyed my EFS. An immense, amorphous red mass was standing before us.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the blast shadows were trapped at the other end of the hall. Some tried dashing forward, only to shriek as their silhouettes rippled and distorted. They howled at us both, trying to lay upon us their cold, dead hooves.

Candy Cane’s suffocated voice sent shivers down my spine.

“You’re right … Mama and Papa … Father never deserved that … none of them did.” I heard Candy Cane murmur through sobs. “Maybe … maybe we really should’ve just died.”

My jaw dropped. “Cane … Cane! What are you talking about!?” I laid a hoof on her shoulder, but she shrugged me off, shoving me away from her.

The younger mare held out a hoof, a demented, crooked smile creasing her lips.

“We still can,” she cooed, her tone bitter sweet. “And when we do – when we finally do, we’ll be together, just like you always wanted.” She grinned wickedly. “We’ll never ruin anypony’s life ever again.”

Candy Cane stumbled towards her.

“Never again …” Candy Cane whispered. “No more wasted time … no more wasted lives …”

I watched as Candy Cane reached out to touch the trembling mare’s outstretched hoof, their hooves merely breaths apart.

My eyes widened as I saw that the floor dipped inward and fell away into the abyss. ‘No.’

The pale mare was standing on the other side.

“CANE - STOP!” I screamed, lunging towards her.

But she couldn't hear me. She was lost in her own world, lost in her own delirium … lost in her own dark history. Just like how her father made her.

With a shriek, Candy Cane lost her footing and plummeted into the abyss.

“NO!" I cried, screaming my throat raw as I dove for her. I slid to the crumbling precipice, hoof outstretched and listening to her scream fade away as she plunged into the darkness.

She was gone.

She was gone.

“No …”

I slowly lifted my eyes and stared at the pale mare that stood over me. She cocked her head, a disturbing grin stretching across her cheeks. Her eyes flashed green and trails of violet energy rippled from the corners of her emerald eyes.

And as I shrunk beneath her wicked stare, her chilling, insidious voice whispered:

“Yes …”

Her jaw ripped open with a blood curdling banshee wail, distended and vomiting violet light that blasted frozen air past my face. Then her flesh sloughed off her bones – and her limbs exploded away from me into a cloud of living darkness that splattered the wall behind it. With a sickening squelch, it seeped through and vanished.

And left me to an approaching tide of flailing apparitions.

Alone.

In that instant, the blast shadows were turned loose.

I looked over my shoulder, and there they were, dozens upon dozens of contorted, wretched shadows galloping down the hall, hooves outstretched. With no one left to hold me aloft, and not with a single shred of courage left within me, I panicked.

Teary and wide-eyed, I stood there helplessly as they stampeded towards me, my chest rising and falling with shallow, suffocating breaths. They took her away. Candy Cane was gone. I failed Summer Smiles. I failed Candy Cane. I failed. Another pony added to the list of ponies I could’ve saved.

And once more, I was one with none. I was doomed to die cold, helpless, and useless.

I glanced around numbly, unable to shed anymore tears. To my left, I saw that the hallway continued into the night.

I was a doomed pony. But I figured I’d make them work for it.

I ran. I ran. And I ran. My flashlight’s fading light struggled to pierce the darkness that threatened to engulf me. But it was no use.

It wasn’t long until I found myself at a dead end, my hooves scraping desperately against an unyielding mountain of rubble. I bowed my head and frigid tears streamed down my cheeks as their maddening death rattles drowned out my thoughts.

And washed away my will. And extinguished my resolve.

In the dying light, I watched. Helplessly. At the far end of the hall, they staggered forward, their jaws distended and agape as they howled in unending, ceaseless agony.

I whimpered once. And I felt my legs buckle beneath me. It was over.

My beam flickered weakly as it clung desperately to life, my own short existence flashing before my eyes as the coalescing tides of howling darkness washed ever closer.

Flash.

They closed in.

Flash.

I could see their skeletal faces –

Flash.

Dripping like melted candlewax –

Flash.

Black flesh sloughing off their bones –

Flash.

Their shadows loomed over me –

Flash.

A cyclone of distended maws fell upon me –

Flash.

And I knew no more.

Footnote:
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