Soarin trotted merrily through the chilly night time mist of the Everfree with a small pack on his back and a torch in his wing. He felt pretty energetic munching on some dried apples and washing it down from his flask. Somewhere around here was supposed to be a spooky magical cave that never appeared in the same place twice and was allegedly built by some stupid ancient civilization obsessed with blood...or something. He wasn't really concerned with it, but he'd heard rumors. Rumors that sounded like a Daring Do novel. The whole point was to take a scary little night stroll through the Everfree as a substitute for pie-based...self-medication, which coincidentally didn't cure insomnia as well as chilling in monster-infested woods.
For a second he thought he heard a noise in the bushes, so he went to investigate. Whatever it was had left by the time he arrived and left some strange claw marks on the rocks and trees. As a Wonderbolt he was quite confident nothing from the woods could out-fly him, so it was rather unfortunate that the monsters weren't as interested in him as he was in them. Where do all the lizard monkey wasps go when you wanna find one? He sighed and rose into the air, tossing the torch to his hoof. Going up the exotic, twisting, evergreen tree - one of the tallest in the underbelly of the woods - he perched on a thick branch not far from the top.
Here the moon lit the swirls of fog stretching over the majestic purple mists of Everfree valley, broken occasionally by the crowns of unusually tall trees; primarily evergreens with branches covered by bends of short, fuzzy foliage. The dark silhouettes of reclining mountains that rose sharply out of the forest shielded everything to the right from air currents, with another small mountain formation far ahead and a little to the left. The place felt remarkably cozy for all of the stories Soarin heard about it. Why were ponies scared of the Everfree? The mountain to the right might have been a nice place to sit and watch the stars, but it was probably too windy at the top.
Soarin felt pretty lonely all of a sudden. None of the other bolts ever wanted to do anything. None of them had ever finished a single game of Ponopoly with him. He had to wrap all the games up playing with himself, and it wasn't that fun after about 50 play-throughs. Perhaps they just didn't understand the thrill of acquiring currency and crushing your competition to conquer a make-belief two-dimensional reality. Bastards. What was his life, even? Just one long, unfulfilled wait to play a single amazing game of Ponopoly with some other ponies all the way through? A few more apples were consumed.
A bright sky blue light flickered between the tree branches far below. Curious. What could be flickering sky blue in the Everfree this time of night (aside from just about every unicorn that could use magic and occasional zebra, of course)? He swooped down lazily from the branch to investigate.
᷈ ᷉
After a small maze of tall prickly things, the source of the light became clearly visible. It was nestled comfortably at the bottom of a slope between two large stones on the edge of a small clearing, and it was coming from a cave opening. The winged pony settled on the ground and considered his options.
He could ignore any of this had ever happened, fly home, go straight to bed, and get some good sleep for the show tomorrow like every other day leading up until now, or ... he could look inside a scary, blindingly bright hole in the ground of a well-known nightmare forest where he might not ever come back from ... just this once. Even the Wonderbolt experience gets boring after half a lifetime of the same thing over and over. Soarin shielded his eyes from the light, put out his torch, and made his way into the opening. As he did so the lights began to recede. Behind the brightness was a small rectangular opening in the side of the rock, just big enough for a pony of his size to walk through without scratching the walls.
Inside the structure the stallion was surprised to find a well-kept dark orange-brown tunnel fashioned with large, flat stone blocks, closely packed. The walls at the entrance had multitudes of unique shapes carved into the stone, painted different shades of red and black. The sky blue glow was coming from the very air of the place; where the tunnel dove deeper the light disappeared altogether. He turned around and examined the entrance.
"What's the matter, not gonna slam shut on me?" He tapped the walls with his hoof, then turned around again and gave the wall a buck. Nothing happened. For a second it felt like something in the air was trying to seep into his head, but he shook it off, turning his attention to the curious pictures he had yet to examine.
The first thing he noticed was a red moon in the center of the wall. Before that, to the left, were a number of pictures showing how the world slowly filled up with red water until even the moon became red. To the right of the moon, that one line was left empty. Before the world filled up with blood the pictures showed how the cave itself slowly filled up with blood, and before that it showed a pony entering the cave and going down to the deepest parts.
The pony had curious markings over it that reminded Soarin of his flight suit. Coincidentally, the suit was on. He looked carefully at what appeared to be the center of the cave, but couldn't really make anything of it. It was just a pony standing on a black square surrounded by darkness.
He carefully studied the path the pony took through the apparent labirynth of rooms and traps, knowing full well that he probably wouldn't remember most of them later. By all accounts most of them didn't make sense anyway. Two triangle saws above a circle, pony leaves the three rectangles and goes to the square. Absolute nonsense. The only remotely interesting parts were where the pony ran backwards through half the maze for some reason and where there was a premature sea of blood manifestation. Soarin took a swig from his flask.
That was all for the first wall. The other wall looked similar, but had a whole bunch more monstrous looking things in between the room shapes and shape shapes. Most of them depicted the horrible stuff they would do to ponies when they greeted them. Terrible, awful stuff that made Soarin feel really good all of a sudden. He couldn't tell what most of the monsters were or what they were doing to the pony's insides, but it all looked deliciously brutal - sort of the way he dealt with his pie when he got his hooves on a fresh one.
The only monster he could legitimately recognize was a hand-shaped blob sort of thing with a single long middle leg or ... finger. He'd heard of the things before, but always thought somepony had made them up. They were some sort of fat-legged spider that ate eyeballs and planted themselves into the eye socket of the victim instead.
They were told to be excruciatingly painful to pull out, and the buzzing "I want you blood." sort of feel inside the head often drove victims insane. There was a legendary story of an explorer who got one lodged in his eye, pulled it out, then had another one crawl into the same eye. He even got that one out, but by the time he was rescued the third one had gotten pretty fat and had to be juiced before extraction; not that easy to accomplish considering the juice didn't necessarily want to flow out of the socket when pressured.
For unknown reasons the stallion was widely respected among Equestrian relic guilds. Which was odd, considering the circumstance; wasn't it his own fault for bucking up? He probably wasn't even that good of a relic hunter, but at least the universe gave him the respect he wanted.
Come to think of it this story probably confirmed the existence of eyeball spiders, if you could consider that sort of proverbial rubbish fit for confirming anything.
Soarin looked at the narrow little entrance one last time. There was a barely perceptible draft of cool air coming from it that gave a tiny feeling of melancholy. He decided to ignore the warnings and proceeded into the tunnel. When the next best thing in life he had to look forward to was finishing a Ponopoly game it didn't feel like such a gamble after all. When the tunnel became darker he threw a few more apple slices in his mouth and lit his torch.
"Have fun explaining where Soarin went, Spitfire. And kiss my flank."
