Lyra lay panting in the soil. Dirt smeared her barrel and stiffening stifles in her unnaturally prone position. Sweat stung her eyes as she stared out across the clearing. Though it must still be at least a couple hundred yards away, she could already hear the snuffling and grunting of its approach.
The shadows were lengthening, but the coming of evening was doing little to dissuade the heat of the day suspended in July humidity. A tree glinted at her, telling her to remain at the ready.
"I know," she whispered to the nothing around her.
She did know. The guttural noise of an industrial-sized orifice thrusting fetid breath into the air wouldn't let her forget. She was ready. She'd been ready to finish this grim business and go back to their nice safe home since they'd first reached the edge of the Everfree this morning. The beast snorted again, it’s shuffling legs crunching twigs and small animals alike beneath steel horseshoes.
Lost in her thoughts, Lyra jerked as, suddenly, the snuffling had stopped. A huge body, built like a small house lurched through the grass. It stumbled crudely on two legs, like a foal taking it's first steps. As soon as Lyra could make out the shape independent of the surrounding trees, she opened fire. The crossbow bolt swung through the air, barely passing over the small lump that was possibly the thing's head.
Hearing the dim thunk, the beast stopped. Snorting its displeasure, it paused only a moment to look about the clearing before sprinting back into cover and disappearing.
The teal unicorn sighed, waiting for the explosion.
“You missed!" Bon-Bon bounded from her observation post in the tree, howling with rage that dispensed all notion of stealth or tracking, "how could you miss?”
Lyra’s joints popped and cracked as she dragged herself to all fours. “I don’t know, maybe somewhere in my profession--my profession as a professional musician that I actually get paid and have received training for, maybe somewhere in learning that trade in which I am actually skilled, somehow in doing that--I didn’t learn how to fire a crossbow.”
"Well, did you at least learn how to light a fuse?"
A blast from behind Bon-Bon answered her question. Flaming splinters and bark scattered through the air, tracing afterimages of red and yellow. The wood screamed and groaned as the arboreal being entered its death throes. Slowly, snapping itself as it folded around the chunk carved from it.
From where Lyra stood, it was at least a 50 point buck, or it would have been if it weren't a tree. Still the spread between its top branches as it tumbled to the ground was quite majestic. As tree killing goes, it was a magnificent accomplishment.
Changing her complaint seamlessly, Bon-Bon continued, "and you overpacked the bolt. You might as well just throw a grenade if you're gonna over do it like that."
"Did you see the size of that thing? Why can't we just use grenades?"
The earth mare had already begun pulling the hunting blind from their wagon, revealing the one-pony conveyance and all it’s stored weaponry. She spat the canvas from her mouth before saying, “because we're professionals."
"Amateurs."
"Competent amateurs who have a job-”
“It is more of a hobby.”
“We have a hobby-”
“And a pretty awful one at that," Lyra replied as she packed away the crossbow and swept the dirt from her body. Nothing to do about the sweat, though. "I’d feel better if we did something else. Like, I dunno, model painting. Or just walking in the woods.”
“We’re in the woods."
“Walking in the woods without trying to murder," Lyra stopped, trying to remember what she had seen, or, rather what she imagined having seen, because she certainly hadn't seen those veiny, immense hindlimbs, "what is that thing, anyway?”
"No idea. Get in the wagon," Bon-Bon gestured toward the wooden conveyance with a hoof. The wagon, their arsenal away from home, contained everything from explosives to ridiculously designed griffin throwing stars that even the most accomplished unicorn could find no use for. A shining light in the world of unneedful things.
"No," Lyra turned her head upward in a huff, "you get in the wagon."
"But if I get in the wagon who will pull it?"
"I will! I'll pull the damn wagon! You’ve been pulling it all day and I want to help."
"Well, I'm glad that you're trying to help."
"I'm glad that you're glad, because I think it is important we do things like this together," the unicorn spat back sarcastically as she adjusted her straps.
"Then I'm …I'm ..." Bon-Bon paused and rested her chin on her hoof for a moment. "I guess I'm glad? I really thought that was going somewhere, didn't you?"
"Yeah," Lyra replied as she began to trot down the road in the direction the thing had fled, "like, we were going to keep getting angrier and then you'd storm off into the darkness alone."
"The thing would find me when I was on my own and the last thing you'd see of me would be my hoof vanishing down its belly."
"No, Bon-Bon, no. I didn't mean it," Lyra confirmed what her last words of regret would be.
"All this damned harmony, just gets in the way of dramatic possibilities."
They continued along, the wheels creaking and turning in the mud, after about ten minutes, Lyra turned back, "it does, it does."
Hours passed and the sun at last vanished. The glow of Lyra’s horn and Bon-Bon’s lantern showed occasional snapped branches and patches of trampled undergrowth, indicating the creature, whatever name it might have appended to itself, was still nearby. The chorus of crickets and night fowl was broken by the sound of a deepthroated snarl, or a gargling choke. The wet fish slap of its distended ...
No, Lyra reminded herself, she did not get a good look at it. She didn't see that. Certainly hadn't had the image seared into her memory. Nope, just saw the vaguest sort of outline before it ran into the woods. The mint unicorn was glad she hadn't witnessed it, because there were somethings that a pony just has no interest or need to see.
It would have been listed chief among those things. If she had seen it. She didn't. She remembered imagining it.
"Bon-Bon, just what is it, anyway?"
"Monkey-pony," the earth mare grunted back, staring around her in determination, "the guy called it a monkey-pony. Or anthro, you can tell because of it's teats are huge and too high."
"Well, what does it do? Other than get shot at and run away?"
"They climb trees, well, some of them can.”
Lyra ceased pulling for a moment, looking up. There didn’t seem to be any monsters there.
“What do they do in trees?”
“They just scamper up there, and they wait in hiding."
"Ah?"
"Yes," Bon-Bon nodded her head, gaining strength in her suppositions as she explained them, "yes, they wait in hiding, and then, when you pass beneath them, they drop on you."
"Drop on you?"
"Drop on whoever is below them, not a specific pony. Not necessarily you." The candy maker could be reassuring when she had to be.
"Drop how?" It wasn't that Lyra was entirely opposed to the concept of tracking down a defenseless creature and murdering it in cold blood simply because it looked different than her--especially in the case of what she had not seen, but might possibly have imagined remembering imagining seeing--but it would be nice if there were some additional reason. She certainly had no intention of eating the thing, if the vein striped and bulging muscles she imagined remembering imagining were any indication.
"They drop." Bon-Bon held her front hooves in the air for a moment, and then lowered them to the deck of the wagon with a thud. "Drop on you."
"Then what?"
"Then they've dropped on you."
"After they've dropped on you?" Lyra cocked her head in questioning. Moving the glow from her horn caused the shadows to twist and distort into gruesome visages.
"Then you'd have been dropped on."
"Dropped on?" She considered the possibility of having been dropped on by the thing she remembered imagining remembering imagining seeing. It was not pleasant. Those muscular thighs were intimidating enough at a distance, the thought of them crashing through her ribs.
"Dropped on.”
"Dropped on.” The words had somehow taken the form of an incantation. To be dropped on. Was there any worse fate imaginable?
As if summoned by the thought, the branches above snapped. Lyra leapt in her harness, struggling to free herself in panic as the wagon behind her crunched to toothpicks. The thing, shifted its weight, shattering the axles of the wagon and sending the wheels bouncing off into the forest.
"I told you so!" Bon-Bon shouted triumphantly as about 2 tons of pony-monkey flesh cracked her spine. "I told you so," she gasped out with a mouthful of blood.
Because of the effort of freeing herself from the harness and the darkness surrounding her, Lyra was confident she missed the last moments of her friend's life. She could imagine remembering imagining remembering them, though. The way Bon-Bon’s forehooves had tried to scramble forward, tried to drag her body out from under it’s bulk. The weigh the flesh of one leg had pressed over that beautiful mare, rolling outward and flatterning.
The way it stood, two immense breasts swinging from between what should have been it’s forelegs. Towering over Lyra, each nipple the size of her head and adorned with a gold ring that swung back and forth against chapped flesh. And above it, above that stomach packed with flab that wobbled and swung with each step, above the hindlegs each as big around as Lyra’s entire body, above a corporal tumescence that could put even the greatest dragon to shame, the face of an angel. Smiling, bright blue eyes shining round in the dark, and a child’s cheeks.
The face of perfect joy and innocence did not darken as the beast grabbed Bon-Bon’s shattered body and placed it against the prolapsed lips of its flaring marehood. Slurping and sucking, sputtering and spitting it’s life’s elixir onto the ground, it began to pull the mare inside.
Lyra was in shock, of course. She would remind herself of that every time she imagined remembering imagining remembering this incident, as Bon-Bon folded in half, her face pressed to her flanks. Lyra was in shock, and so her mind was incapable of forming any recall as she helplessly pounded on the leg before her, reaching desperately for the hooves of her marefriend and trying to pull against the hideous suction. Lyra was in shock, and so she was spared any awareness of the dripping fluids, blood and arousal staining her coat and face.
Lyra was in shock, and so the only thing she could genuinely remember was Bon-Bon’s last words, spat out on a gout of blood.
"Avenge me."
"No. No. No. No." Lyra collapsed to the ground as the thing strode away, an unstoppable colossus of flesh.
Days later, Lyra would question whether it might have been better to say, "yes." She had every intention of avenging Bon-Bon, and was afraid that her friend had been sucked into the steaming dark thinking that her roommate had abandoned her.
Or perhaps she should have said, "anthrno." Assuming such a word was possible, it would have expressed her objection directed entirely at the immense beast that had ruined her life. The word would also, she thought, imply a sense of impending retribution.
Yes, that was what she should have said. “Anthrno.”
Assuming it would be possible to remember such. Or to imagine remembering imagining remembering imagining such.
Revenge, however, would not be as easy as she had hoped. Returning to town streaked with sweat and dirt, she had tried to tell the other residents of Ponyville about the gargantuan monster with the face of an angel, but none would believe her.
"That Lyra and her crazy stories," the world muttered, "that Lyra and her crazy stories."
She tried to explain it had to been Bon-Bon who had never let the matter drop, who plastered the walls with drawings of cryptids and had stored enough explosives in their basement to reduce half the town to ash. She tried to explain a lot of things, but no one really cared. Content, as ever before to so be in the future, to write over her face with their personal understandings.
It was probably better that way, she reflected as she stared at Bon-Bon's legacy to the world, a huge, sweating pile of semtex, piled grey and phallic under plastic wrap. What could possibly stop that creature? What could even understand it, the way it had just slurped an entire pony into it's flaring, mucus lined passageway?
No, it was her destiny.
And as she stared at the explosives, Lyra realized her plan.
"I need a dildo about this big," Lyra told the storekeeper holding her hooves about as far apart as her ribcage.
"Ten inches is pretty modest. I don’t think you need to place a special order for that."
"No, I mean, this big in circumference. It needs to be at least four or five feet long." Lyra spun a quick circle in place, indicating roughly the length of her body. “And hollow.”
The shopkeeper raised an eyebrow. "Sounds less like a dildo and more like a garbage can."
"Yes, exactly! I need a dildo the size and shape of a garbage can."
"Why not just get a garbage can, then?"
"Because it has to be a dildo." Lyra stomped her hooves in petulant anger.
“But you won’t be able to use it," The shopkeeper sucked on one end of his mustache, "why would you even want one?”
“Because I think having it sit in the center of my living room will add just the right amount of enormous penis to my decor. What do you care? I’ve got money.”
She did have money, having sold her lyre and most of the furniture from her house. Last night had been spent sleeping on the floor, legs stretched out in a nest of blankets after counting the pile of bits and the promise they held.
"Oh," the storekeeper paused, then added, "you do know this is a patisserie?"
Lyra looked around in confusion, suddenly coming to the realization that all the sexy food novelties she'd seen were just run of the mill miniature doughnuts with tightly clenched holes and canoli dribbling white creme. "Well, I'd also like a cheese danish."
The mint unicorn sat at a table in the corner of the bakery, reflecting on how it used to be Bon-Bon that would lead them into the bakery to buy a dildo. She'd become increasingly upset, arguing in circles while Lyra stood to the side, growing increasingly embarrassed until she finally pointed out that they were in the wrong establishment. The baker, rather than delivering the punchline himself, would have nodded his head or perhaps provided a tag.
It would have been something completely different, something to remember. Maybe even have a callback to it later.
Her heart turned another shade darker and another degree colder, withering just a bit to be more like a lump of hateful coal. Leaving the patisserie, she swept a hoof against the side of her neck, vowing to purchase a trench coat or some form of cloak. Something black and form concealing, yes, that was the sort of unicorn she was now. As packed with vengeance as the five foot long dildo would be packed with explosives and broken nails.
Spitting and swearing, because this was the new darkness she held close to her breast, the unicorn arrived at the edge of Everfree. The cart behind her bore the large, invitingly purple shape. Hours spent with the penis artisan had resulted in both mane tearing frustration and a greater appreciation for the arts of self-pleasure. The result was polished until it shined, illuminating each rib and the knob at the top, curved several degrees away from the base. The base itself was the greatest trick, twice the circumference of the body, designed to prevent slipping inside.
The offer to affix a leather strap had been tempting, but somehow Lyra had resisted.
It was also five feet tall and reeked of latex. Lyra shuddered in disgust at her proximity to it, but it wasn't for her. The fake cock was a key made to turn a single lock. That the two should come together was inevitable.
Or, so Lyra had thought. For days, she had walked the insalubrious pathways of the Everfree, turning back onto her steps as often as she made any progress deeper. Her greatest excitement in all this time had come from making a manticore feel weirdly self-conscious and awkwardly shuffle back away from the path.
“Well, of course, I don’t know how to find it. That was Bon-Bon’s bag, but I don’t have to find it. It will find us. Find you.”
The dildo sat quietly in it's cart.
“Look, I saw it. Well, I mean, I never really saw it, but I remember imagining remembering imagining remembering imagining it. And it was here, or at least close.”
Neither confirmation nor denial. The purple phallus was a lot harder to read than Bon-Bon.
“Well, I’m tired of talking about it, ok?”
Lyra’s huff disappeared as soon as she heard it. The noise, the hideous sound she would never forget imagining remembering imagining remembering imagining. The snuffling, snorting, the flapping of hanging breasts and jangling of chains and piercings twisting across flesh barely restrained by thick hide.
The unicorn ditched the cart and dived off the path instants before it appeared.
The face of an angel; an immensity of inner joy and peace that fairly glowed even in the moonless dark. Each staggering step drew it closer to the object of its desire, the phallus that could finally tame the beast, at least for a time. At least until it was absorbed as well, and the creature's body grown larger and more ravenous from the experience.
Each step drew it further out as Lyra watched. Now the stars glinted off the gold rings that pierced it’s every erogenous zone, and even some places that, until now, the unicorn hadn’t considered capable of bearing rings.
It snuffled briefly at the tip, giving it a hesitant lick before standing astride it. With a grunting and squealing like a herd of pigs, the creature lowered itself upon the artificial shaft. It’s wings, too small and pathetic to lift its weight, nevertheless quivered in expression of its impossible pleasure. If it’s face had glowed before, now it shined. Cheeks straining from the smile as it turned, looking to see the unicorn voyeur.
Were it a pony, the creature might have understood the look of grimness there affixed, but it could not. Nor could it comprehend the glow of magic igniting the explosive currently between it’s legs.
It had only an instant to scream as the blast tore it open, but it didn’t waste its last breath so. Only cooing in a divine pleasure that even complete physical destruction could not abate, and then that divine face and those pendulous breasts flew into the air, trailing intestines and blood. The rib cage, or at least the upper portion of it, remained together and wrapped around viscera propelled upward with such force they left from the still smiling mouth.
Each leg--burnt, twisted and shattered--leapt in a separate direction to dance freely across the ground, traveling with such force they tore themselves to pieces as they rag dolled across the ground. The rest of its body was just a faint vapor, bones turning to powder and riding on the tips of broken nails through the trees, the reek of burning latex.
Blood rained from the sky, covering Lyra in a delicate drizzle of life as she danced her victory.
It would be a story to tell her grand kids.