The New Gods

Little Clouddancer had never been much for the games.

These stupid, stupid games.

Stupid fillies. Stupid colts. All going just to show off how brave they were. She cursed their humiliating games, she cursed their taunts and laughter, and she cursed their hateful mischievous glances.

She cursed her weak heart.

She cursed her delicate hooves for hurting so much from all of this walking over uneven ground.

Why couldn’t she be brave and strong like the other little ponies? How she envied the graceful flitting of the pegasi children over Cumulos overhead, fearless in their daring stunts of highflying daily wing exercise. She envied the mysterious sureness of the unicorn foals as they studied their terrifying magicks. She envied the stronger earth foals, who could run, and jump, and kick fruit from trees.

Her little hooves trembled against the woody roots beneath her, producing a faint rattling noise, as another terrible, filthy little thing scuttled off out of sight. She gulped down another scream. She would not scream. Not while they watched her. They saw her shaking and snickered softly from a few paces behind. She would not turn back, though her little heart ached of fear and trepidation.

She would not scream.

She would show them, those awful foals from village-end!

Such a weak thing! They would cry. And past her seventh Summer, and with not a mark upon her flank to show for it... That quiet one… Does she even know how to talk?

On and on came the voices in her head, welling her enormous green eyes up with tears, and hardening her resolve to continue moving forward, step by aching step. She hung her head low with shame, so that they would not see her crying, and quickly, surreptitiously, wiped the tear away with her cottony-white mane.

The dark leaves of the forest grew darker still, and the vines seemed to creep and crawl around her further with every step she took. Dark, horrid little spiders swung slowly down upon long gossamer threads, looking, surely, to catch hold of her silky mane and creep down her neck; but still, she ploughed on, further into the forest and still further, the colts following, laughing behind her, waiting for her to scream, and run. She kept walking forward.

She would not scream.

With a sudden flurry of movement, a larger creature, possibly a wild stag, bounded across the path in front of her. She stumbled, shocked, and fell back painfully in a heap upon her backside over the root which lay behind her. Biting her tongue, her scream was swallowed, except for a tiny, excruciatingly delicate “Eep!” The bite in her tongue hurt, though not as much as the bite taken from her pride. The salty taste of blood in her mouth, and the salty dewing of tears upon her lashes, she tried hard to block the malicious laughter of the colts from her hearing, forcing herself to hold her head high and walk decisively forward.

She would not scream.

An idea came to her, and she called out behind her,

“Why, Downtree, are you sure you saw a monster in this forest? The most dangerous thing I’ve encountered is tree roots. So your either completely dopey and foolish, and imagined this thing, or you're having me on about it and made it up. Or maybe you just had a few too many your father’s oh-so-grand old cherry brandy he always bangs on about! So what’s with this monster story anyway?” That shut them up. Momentarily. Then came the response.

“Oh, yeah, I saw a monster, all right.” This softly spoken, a dark edge to the young colt’s voice.

“…Tall as a buffalo! With hideous glowing eyes, like a demon, red and yellow, its horns glowed in the dark, sharp as knives, just like its huge talons. Terrified me.” Clouddancer shivered.

“…For a second of course! –Then I-I gave it a bit of this… -ugghh! - And a bit of that… YAAH… and that big, ugly monster won’t have the guts to show its face around here again!”

Bushbreaker, at his side, began to laugh. Clouddancer began to laugh, too, to avoid crying. She jumped in shock at the rustle of a bird flying out from a bush behind her, but still, she would not scream.

“What? What’s so funny? I wasn’t telling you a joke! I was telling you exactly what happened! If you’re not going to take this test seriously, you’re not allowed to be an adjudicator in it!” At this, Bushbreaker broke down on the ground laughing, and holding his aching sides with his hooves.

“…Well,” he squeezed out of his chest finally, “wat’cha do, Downy? Did’ja… did ya take the paper… [Here he struggled to breath from the laughter at his own apparent brilliance]… Did you- take the paper bag off of your head?! Ha! BWAHAHAHAHAH!”

Bushbreaker broke down completely here, rolling upon roots and leaves and dirt, and crying with laughter.

”…Take the… paper bag off your head! Aha! Oh, I crack myself up sometimes!... Take the… Ahahahah!”

Clouddancer began laughing too. The look on Downtree’s face was so funny and sour, trying not to snap. But she trotted over and put a hoof on his shoulder: She knew how it hurt to be teased. He pushed the comforting hoof away, but was clearly cheered by the support, for his expression softened, and he too began to chuckle a little, if only at the ridiculousness of his friend.

“Alright, it was kinda funny, that, but don’t’cha think ya might be a little too overjoyed? You could really work on your joking skills, ya know, bushy.”

“Wait a minute!” cried Bush quite suddenly, silencing his laughter. A very serious, concerned look crossed his face.

Downtree laughed. “What’s up,Bushy? You look scared! Don’t tell me my little monster story…”

“Shhh!”

“Hey, don’t shush me!”

“…You mean…”

“Don’t tell me my little monster story got to you, bushy?”

Downtree began to laugh harder now.

“Hah! You can’t be…”

“Shhh!”

“You can’t be serious!”

“Wait! You mean you were…”

“SSSHHHHHH!”

“YOU MEAN TO TELL ME, THAT YOU WERE LYING ABOUT ALL OF THIS!”

This furiously arose from the mouth of none other than Clouddancer. Tiny, innocent, soft-hearted little Clouddancer. The colts looked over at her in wonder. Every inch of her fuzzy little grey-and-white body, from nose to hoof, was shaking violently with terrible fury. Downtree had been telling the other foals all about his encounters with the beast all month!

“YOU MEAN, YOU LED ME INTO THIS BIG, UGLY, STINKING FOREST, JUST SO YOU COULD LAUGH AT ME, AND ALL FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! I’LL BET YOU’VE NEVER EVEN SEEN THE INSIDE OF THIS FOREST BEFORE IN YOUR LIFE, YOU BIG LIAR!”

“Well… I …” The look on her furry little grey face was surprisingly intimidating.

“Well, look, Cloudy, I-uh- … You were actually doing pretty well on the test. I mean, you thought there was a monster, didn’t you? …. So … I was gonna mark you higher than I thought on this…”

“-And I have been in this forest before! Plenty of times... you think I was afraid to break a few rules? Afraid of a few stupid tales? –BUT THERE IS A MONSTER IN HERE! Old Brownhocks told me all about it!”

This last exclamation drew sudden silence from them all.

“You mean… you believed... and told us… all this time… because… CRAZY… OLD… BROWNHOCKS… told you another of his crazy… stupid… stories!?”

Bushbreaker sputtered this out brokenly, wide-eyed and taken aback. The silence crept through the small, vine-bordered space between them, as the truth sank in. all fear melted away. A look passed between the three little wanderers, long, and mischievous.

“You… believed…” Cloud’s confidence was growing. “That… crazy, old, nutball, gardener from the palace rose gardens? …You know, they only hired him to be nice, right? Why, I… I, heard, that he sneaks out at night to the tool shed and lays all the hammers so that they point to the left, just because he thinks it will turn the fruits different colours! …He’s wacky!” She giggled this out.

As Downtree’s admission sunk in, the silent, wild, pulsating laughter in their stomachs crept up through their chests, then throats, then squeezed into their faces in a rush of jubilant warmth, pushing their fuzzy cheeks into broad, unrelenting grins. Their chests shook, their legs lost strength, and in no time at all, they were all rolling wildly in the muddy leaves of the forest floor, kicking their legs in the air, their small bodies writhing in mirth with the biggest, most belly-aching laughs they’d ever had!

The ridiculousness of their situation lost none of its chaotic ironies on these three foals.

But suddenly, after the biggest gasp for air, Bushbreaker stopped again.

“Wait, stop! Listen.”

The others just kept laughing.

“Oh, come on, Bushy, not this again! What in Equestria do you want us to listen to so much?”

“Shhhhh!”

The two laughing foals gasped for air at once, holding their aching, mirth-trembling sides. And in that moment they heard it and they froze.

They were not the only ones laughing.

Fear came flooding back to Cloud, from the pit of her stomach, but she would not scream. She bit her tongue. She had more confidence than before, and quickly realised what was really going on. The colts were over-acting their role of petrified fear to the point of comical, but she was not laughing anymore. As the hollow, loud, and chillingly child-like laughter faded away again, the colts trembled, their eyes so wide as looking set to jump their spherical skulls and make a run for it on their own. Cloud trembled too, but with fury, once more.

“You two are so stupid, you really think that dumb monster thing is going to work? You just said it was false! You want me to scream, to run home to mother, like a baby, so you can tell all of your friends? Well, it’s not going to work. Whatever fake monster you and your cronies have come up with to scare me with, I am not going to scream. I WILL NOT SCREAM!”

The wind, billowing and moaning between the branches of the forest, picked up. The clouds began to speed across the sky, and grow dark, almost brown. The trees groaned and shifted, and a shadow fell across Cloud’s back.

Bushbreaker and Downtree, their brown velvet coats turned near white with sheer terror, backed slowly, shivering, wide-eyed, away from her, as if from a ghost. Her spine would have tingled with fear at that moment, but she was far too young and furious to be frightened. The colts turned swiftly, wordlessly, and ran, gasping, away, their hooves beating hard against the ground, stumbling on roots, sticks and branches; they ran like rabbits from foxes, or deer from a lion. They ran faster than Cloud knew earth-ponies were capable of running. Still, she held her ground.

“Fine! That’s how you want to play?” she yelled at their rapidly disappearing flanks. “You’ll get back alone, making big stories about me, but when I get back, I’ll tell them you ran away, and the truth about your tall tales! I’m not afraid!” For once she was telling the absolute truth on this count, too angry was she to know fear in her furious rant, though the clattering of branches behind her continued to echo hollowly that same, terrible sound of laughter, like whispered giggles from behind closed doors. The air against her mane heated and trembled.

“I WILL. NOT. SCREAM!”

She yelled this at the now empty forest; at its mosses, at its leaves, its streams, it animals, and at the empty breezes now blowing past her down that gap between the trees where the colts had stood only moments before.

And to make her point, she turned on the spot, eyed closed, nose in the air with a loud “Hhmph!” to continue on to the centre of the woods, just to show how brave she really was next to those lying, cheating colts.

She opened her eyes.

She screamed.