Dust
It was time to go.
He contemplated that fact while laboriously gnawing on a desiccated carrot.
It was time to go.
The icebox he had taken it from was now empty of anything edible. As were no doubt any other he would find around town. It wasn’t that he had emptied them himself, but rather that whatever food to be found had long since decayed. That carrot had been a desperate test; the container was filled to the brim with rock-hard, dehydrated food. Whatever sustenance remained in town had likely become as dry and inedible as this.
It was time to go, to try to find food elsewhere.
He cautiously opened the bottle he carried around, careful not to spill any of the precious fluid within. It was practically mud, but he savored the liquid nonetheless. He only took one sip; he had to make this last as long as possible. Every drop was worth preserving.
The dust was greedy.
He strapped the bottle to his back and exited the dusty kitchen through his network of burrows. He had dug a criss-crossing web under the streets in his quest for anything to quench his thirst or sate his hunger. The surface wasn’t safe anymore.
The dust had taken it.
The tunnels were more comfortable. They still held traces of moisture yet to be robbed by the dust. His scurrying finally led him to his central lair. He plopped down on his bedding of dried hay and rested for a bit in the dim light. It should have been much darker than this, so deep under the earth, but the dust glowed in the dark and some of it had found its way down here.
He examined his lair, absent-mindedly, his mind more focused on examining his options. The bare earthen walls stood all around him, pierced by half a dozen tunnels reaching in just about every direction. The only objects in the lair that weren’t dirt or dust were his hay bedding and a small stockpile of food. The bottles were all empty. The one he carried with him was the last moisture to be found. He hadn’t seen another intact, sealed bottle in days.
It really was time to go, wasn’t it? He should have left weeks ago.
But even though the dust had taken Her, She was still here. So he’d stayed just a bit longer.
He curled into a tight ball and slept a little, just a short nap.
He dreamed about the past, about the beautiful days where it rained, the nice feeling of a warm bath or a cool swim in the pond.
He woke up gently, savoring the sweet lingering dreams. He smacked his lips, trying to get rid of the taste of the dust he had inhaled in his sleep. He was so thirsty.
It was time to go now.
He took the bottle and set it on his back again. He looked around and located the tunnel leading to the basement of the town hall. The first order of business was to find a good vantage point to plan his next move, to spot anything in the distance that would give him a goal, an objective to reach.
There had to be somewhere safer than here. The dust couldn’t possibly have taken everything yet.
The winding tunnels would have confused anyone else, but he knew them perfectly. Left, right, left, left, middle and up through the final sloped passage. He emerged in the harsh glow of the dust.
The dust was almost blinding. He looked up, directly overhead between the old, thick beams and rafters of the dried and eroded frame of the tallest remaining structure in Ponyville. Though the ground was bathed in a glow rivaling daylight, he could see how the sky was shrouded in the darkness of night. The stars were almost entirely blotted out by the dust’s glow, bleaching the horizon up to halfway through the sky.
He cast no shadow, for the dust tolerated none on its sickly shining surface.
He carefully set the bottle in the tunnel entrance. It would have been perilous to bring it along on his climb. Too dangerous for the glass lifeline. He would not risk breaking it.
He started scaling the hard, sanded wood of the half-collapsed frame. Any angle the beams once had had been smoothed out, leaving only rounded poles and thinned pieces of lumber. The dust had already robbed them of almost half of their weight; they wouldn’t hold upright much longer. Most of the structure had already tumbled down and collapsed on itself. The rest swayed in the wind.
His paws found little purchase on the smooth wood, but a careful pace let him progress up the structure without a fall or any major slips. He took a moment to catch his breath, lying on the shadow of a horizontal section of the wooden skeleton.
He stood back up, clinging to the last vertical section of the frame to scan the horizon.
Canterlot was invisible at this hour; it was high enough to be bathed in the darkness of night, and its shadowy form was entirely obscured by the dust’s glow. The tall pony city could perhaps offer salvation and sanctuary, but he remembered the dust had swallowed Ponyville from that direction. He’d have nothing but dust in his path until he reached the mountain, not to mention the possibility that the dust might have actually come from there. The city might only be his grave.
The rest of the horizon was just as blank, smothered by the combination of night and the visual pollution of the dust’s glow.
Except…
Squinting, he could see a darker blotch to his right, a spot where the dust’s light was subdued by a distant yet massive shape. Checking his bearings, remembering the town’s layout and in which directions the barely-visible paths used to lead, he realized what it was.
The Everfree forest.
Was its innate strangeness protecting it from the dust? Was it simply too massive and impenetrable to be taken so easily? Was it some magic at work? It didn’t matter.
It was time to go, to take refuge in the forest.
Which meant he’d have to take the tunnel leading back to where he used to live. Where he used to be happy with Her.
His gaze traveled downward, scanning between the half-eaten, half-buried carcasses of houses, among the withered wood and crumbled plaster. There She was, standing in Her usual spot. He didn’t know why She stood there. As far as he knew, She had no reason to be attached to this location in particular.
Yet there She was, standing still, the few remaining strands of Her flowing pink mane blowing in the twirling winds that ceaselessly rattled Her bones. Her posture the same as always, an uncharacteristic stalwartness of quiet attention. The dust rolling on and scraping Her bare skeleton, carried by the constantly blowing vortex within Her frame. The friction emitting an endless rasp which seemed to echo Her voice as it rolled over the dunes and towards him.
Her eyes were no more, the sockets little more than springs from which a continuous stream of dust flowed like tears.
She never was one for tears, really. She used to take everything in stride, quietly accepting everything the world threw at Her. He had even subjected Her to much dismay himself, yet he knew that She still loved him, always. Some of Her kin called it a weakness. He now knew that it had been a virtue all along. She had always been perfect. Her quiet serenity, Her boundless love, Her gentle touch and Her scent of tea and autumn leaves.
Why did She have to suffer?
Why do you miss those you lost, even more so than you loved them in life?
A single tear ran down his cheek, pausing for an instant before taking its final leap. He watched it go down, sparkling in the dust’s glow. Anything to take his eyes off Her. The droplet landed in a small puff, an inaudible impact. The dust swallowed it greedily, in an instant, drying the stain before the wind could blow the disturbed dust even an inch further.
Her head snapped in his direction as soon as the dust tasted the moisture. She turned, frighteningly fast, suddenly facing in his direction as dozens of others like Her erupted from the ground where they had lay buried under the dust. The winds of Her vortex swirled with savagery, emulating a rasping cry of fury as the grains of sand and dust shook Her frame with countless impacts.
The dust had tasted the waters of his life. It craved for more, and now knew where to find it.
It was really time to go.
He scrambled to climb down as fast as he could, trying to reach his burrow before any of those things could block his path. The skeletal former ponies raced in his direction like a pack of ravenous wolves, coming from all directions and howling their hollow cries.
They would make it there before him. He knew that at the speed they were going, he would only find them waiting for him once he reached the ground. He had to climb down faster.
Throwing caution to the wind, he began leaping down from beam to beam, hoping he would be fast enough.
The creatures’ movements and agitation had caused the dust to rise up from everywhere in billowing clouds, a rapidly thickening haze almost hiding them from his sight. He could still catch glimpses of their windy swirls and of their slender, rattling silhouettes in the dust.
He was almost there, now just on what used to be the roof of the town hall’s veranda. No more than two or three jumps separated him from his haven in the earth, until he slipped on a loose mound of dust that had accumulated on the structure.
His leg shot back wildly as it slipped, and instead of being propelled forward, he simply plummeted straight down.
He landed on the loose ground with a squeaky yelp and a soft puff of dust. Though the sand and dust had cushioned his fall, the impact had still knocked him breathless.
He could hear the creatures approaching as he fought through the dazing pain. His breathing was almost as labored as their slow, continuous hissing. He stood back up, shaking his head. He had to keep going. The entrance was only a dozen steps away now.
He ran to it as fast as he could, rounding the corner of a crumbled wall to finally see the darker depression in the ground promising safety and calm. In his panic, he leapt towards it, only then noticing the roiling mound of dust next to it. He watched in horror, in mid-air, another bone pony erupt next to the hole with its hollow skull already facing him. He tried to back away, flailing wildly in the dusty air, to no avail. He landed mere inches from the bony revenant, who silently took a single step forward.
The burrow was directly under it. There was no way to slip past the abomination, to slip back into the safety of the earth’s embrace. He stumbled backwards, his back gently scraping the sand and dust beneath him and leaving a small furrow.
The pain, the horror, the fear, the stress; they all congealed in his mind, forming a dreadful gestalt of emotion for which there is no name. It was death, it was oblivion, it was darkness and void, gripping his heart and mind and leaving room for nothing else than the pure urge to flee, to survive. It birthed a moment of unspeakable clarity: a single second stretched to minutes as every single bit of knowledge in his mind was reviewed and analyzed for a way to escape alive.
There was another burrow just down the street, two houses away.
He rolled to his stomach and dashed away between the ruined walls.
The creatures were everywhere, all of them converging in his direction in a single-minded charging swarm. He swerved between them, his instincts kicking in and making him leap in a wave-like pattern; left, right, left, right, to confuse his pursuers, to dodge their lunges.
He had to reach the next burrow before they reached him.
A group of these creatures stood in front of him, those that had woken up the furthest and were only now reaching the pack surrounding him. He dodged their legs, swerving between them and through the dusty vortexes that seemed to animate them. When he opened his eyes on the other side, he could not see any more in his way. The path ahead was clear.
A quick glance behind showed the closest arid creatures turning around after missing him, while the rest simply kept advancing with frightening speed. He turned back and resumed his run forward. There was still hope. The second burrow’s location was approaching. He could even see it now through a crack in the eroded plaster of the crumbling wall.
Just a quick jump over some debris would take him into the ruined house and from then only a few steps would stand between him and safety. As he rounded the final corner, his eyes caught movement just inside the ruins.
Yet another skeletal pony stepped forth from the dust and stood in his way, plunging a bony hoof in the hole to block his passage. A guarantee that he would not find refuge there.
His mind was past the point of even registering dismay. He immediately corrected his course, away from the creature.
There were other entrances.
He ran towards the nearest uncompromised one. This one was much further away. The dust, his usual thirst and the panicked sprint were making his every breath a chore, a challenge, but he could not stop now. Stopping meant death.
The dust would take him if he stopped.
Soon he saw the next hope of salvation: the withered shell of the large tree. His tunnels led to the deepest basement of what used to be a library carved within.
He watched numbly as the bones of a unicorn crawled over the large dune which blocked most of the doorway. Her empty eyes staring at him under the mostly-lavender point of her bleached horn. How were they waiting for him? Had they planned this?
Was there no escape?
He didn’t even slow down this time. His leaps took him away from the dead tree, in the direction of the next burrow in line.
Which was also guarded by a creature. And the one after as well, and the two after that, and the other one he had had to make a detour to reach. The creatures were everywhere and had anticipated his every move, blocked his every way of escape.
He found himself on the edge of town, the shadow of the Everfree forest looming in the distance in front of him. The creatures hounding him with their howling hisses and their scraping non-breaths, hidden in the cloud of stirred dust blanketing the town.
His own breath was agony, a wheezing, coughing torture of drying flesh and inhaled dust. He could not go on much longer. He was so thirsty.
There were no more burrows between him and the forest, and only the creatures between him and everything else. They had herded him like cattle. He was their prey.
He had to run.
All the way to safety.
His legs pushed once more despite the pain it brought. His only recourse now was to hope that he was able to outrun them.
The dunes rolled past him, the almost alien landscape nearly masking the memory of what it had once been. He remembered the lush grass that once grew beneath his steps, the soft, moist dirt he could only long for now. The small, eroded stumps he saw sporadically marking the graves of the bushes he wished he could hide in.
Every breath split his lungs in half. Every hop stabbed his legs with pain. The soles of his feet were raw from sprinting in so much coarse sand and dry dust. He could feel his throat lance with every excruciating inward breath, the dusty air scraping his flesh all the way down inside and then all the way back up. He could taste blood on his tongue, in his throat, in his lungs.
A forest of eroded stumps came into view, hundreds or even thousands of soft, rounded wooden spires shooting up like a sea of teeth. An image of the multitude of apple trees they used to be flashed in his mind. He hadn’t eaten an apple in weeks. He couldn’t remember their taste now, with all the dust clinging inside his mouth, tasting like nothing at all.
The dust was so empty, so greedy. It didn’t even give away such a simple thing as flavor.
Their windy howls echoed all around him. They were getting closer.
The Everfree as well.
He peeked behind him, to see how close the creatures were.
She was there. Right behind him. In a howling tornado of dust and sand and wind, She was galloping straight towards him. Her entirely skeletal wings spread wide to Her sides akin to claws, outstretched slender hands ready to grab him, take him in their deathly grip. Her mouth open in a toothy grin, calling his name,
hissing Her windy howls
as She pursued him.
He returned his attention in front of him. He tried weaving between the stumps to buy some time for himself, but he felt it didn’t make much of a difference.
He had never been in so much pain before. Breathing had never been so difficult, so agonizing. He was suffocating with his mouth wide open. Droplets of blood stained his muzzle, flying out with every breath. Black spots clouded his vision, his head was swimming, his vision blurred.
He blacked out for a second.
He came to his senses just in time to see one of the stumps heading straight for his face. He hadn’t stopped running.
He tried to dodge, tried to sidestep the obstacle, but his shoulder still impacted it. Pain shot through his entire side, sending him tumbling head over heels in the dust. He landed flat on his belly, coughing out a mouthful of bloodied sand.
As he struggled to rise to his paws, he saw the Everfree forest no more than fifty yards away. Through the pain, the tears and the sweat, the dark green, crumpled leaves loomed in the distance. They were dried but still somehow clung to the branches. Beyond the first few dead trees everything was shrouded in complete darkness. The dust had yet to enter the wild forest. There might be hope within.
He knew he would never make it.
Before he could take another step, She pounced on him lightly,
She slammed a bony hoof onto his back with a howl,
pinning him down.
He felt ribs crack.
He was flipped over, coming to a rest on his pained back, his face forced to look at Her own smiling face.
his face forced to look at the bleached grin of her exposed jawbones, her entire form shrouded in a raging twister of sand, wind and dust as ever more dust flowed from her eye sockets.
She smiled and told him to calm down, that everything was fine. That he didn’t have to run anymore.
She hissed Her hollow howl, sand and dust rubbing and rattling Her bones.
He wondered how She was still here, how She was still alive and well. Had She found a way to hide from the creatures?
The entire pack of whirling dust-skeletons circled them in every direction, howling their empty, windy cries at them.
Did She have a hidden supply of water somewhere? He was so thirsty. She lifted him from the ground, held between Her soft yellow hooves.
clutched, squeezed in the iron grip of her bones.
He coughed a little, out of breath after his run.
Blood spilled from his mouth as he choked on the sand and the dust flying everywhere around them, filling up the air itself.
Seeing his unease, she brought him closer to Herself, hugging him tightly as Her wings
the slender, withered bony claws upon her back
wrapped around them both.
clasped shut around him like a cage.
He looked up into her sweet aquamarine eyes, as comforting as the bright blue sky beyond
into the empty abysses of her sockets, as black as the starless sky beyond
and took a deep breath, filling his nostrils with Her sweet scent, the familiar smell of tea and autumn leaves.
and gasped for air as his lungs were constricted, filling his throat with tasteless, suffocating sand.
She giggled lightly, moving him a bit in her embrace to kiss his forehead. He closed his eyes and nuzzled her in bliss.
Her mouth opened inches from his face, a rush of wind whipping past him to enter the gaping maw. His eyes widened, rolling back behind their lids.
He had missed Her so. He thought She had been taken by the dust, that She was d-… gone. That She had abandoned him. He hugged Her, never wanting to let go.
His weakening limbs, wracked with spasms, gripped her bones whichever way they could.
But She had been there for him all along, waiting for him in the middle of town for the day he would come back. It was only a minor drought; there was nothing to worry about. She always knew best. He had panicked, over-reacted, and exaggerated the danger. He had spent weeks making a big fuss out of nothing, and She had been so wonderfully patient as to wait for him. She loved him so. He had been so inconsiderate.
She eventually released him, gently putting him back on the dirt. He wanted to keep hugging her. He felt so tired, so heavy. He felt as if he was wearing a thick coat in the midday sun. He was so thirsty. She beckoned him to follow her as she began trotting back into town. She had sworn it was just a temporary drought, it would pass. He trusted her fully.
The skeletal creature glided back towards the ruins, its swirling vortex appeased and diminished.
In the meantime, She would help him find fresh food and water. He knew She could care for him, as She always did. He only had to follow Her. He winced as he took a step forward; it was strangely difficult. His muscles ached and he was still so thirsty. Suddenly, a soft breeze blew from behind, and walking became easier.
The dried skeleton looked back at him, hissing softly.
It was time to go.
The rest of the creatures scattered away, wandering in every which direction.
His every step made him feel lighter, as if he was tossing away a heavy burden with every bounce. He was still so thirsty though. If only he could have just a tiny sip of water. Even the grass around him looked parched, dried and yellow.
He began to follow Her. She would find water for him. She had always cared so much for him. It was only a drought, it wouldn’t last long. There had to be some water left somewhere, right? There had to be some water left untouched by the dust
yet.
She
The dead, dried pony skeleton
kept advancing, heading back
kept advancing in the dust, heading back to its usual spot
to the middle of town.
In the middle of the ruins.
He
A smaller skeleton followed,
Hopped after her, smiling
Its desiccated flesh cracking, crumbling and flaking away with every bounce, turning into a fine dust which got caught in
in the cool breeze.
the diminutive vortex of sand and dust carrying it forward.
She would find water for him, and they would drink it together, and they would keep finding more and sharing it until this drought passed.
sharing it with the dust.
Author's Note
A little thing I whipped up ages ago, that I decided to post now because reasons.
It seemed fitting for ~~Halloween~~ Nightmare Night.
