Chapter 1. Up, Above, and Out!
Chapter 1, Up, Above, and Out!
“When the Pit lights with fire, burnt flesh fills the air, along with the Pegasi, laughing, laughing…
Laughing…”
Ever wanted to be trapped in a mine after a firedamp flashover? Well, me too. And do you know the irony in this annoying situation? Name’s Coal Dust… A fitting name for an earth pony enrolled at birth to be a miner. A fitting name when your instinct is telling you to dig your way away from a coal dust fire… Ordering you not to give ponies the opportunity to laugh! To tell my father that ‘his son sparked himself’!
[…]
My guts wrenched painfully as I woke up. My muzzle, half-buried between two big chunks of rock, hissed. My heart beat wildly, making my head and temples throb. My chest swelled in fit and starts, tearing at my flesh as the coal in the air burnt my lungs. My ears were ringing from numbness. My belly ached like a bad indigestion. Everything itched so damn much I wished I could skin myself! I was completely wrecked.
But worst of all, everything was dark. Shocked, I shivered and tried to roll over my back. I was stuck in a tunnel so tight it caught me in a vice. Sharp rocks chafed my skin as I moved. I coughed and spat saliva, smearing my face and coat. Tears started to drip over my cheeks. Stiffness bathed me.
I screamed agony and received no answer. I was alone. No miner was authorized to be left alone underground: safety measure.
Stinging bruises covered my body. Each movement was a torture. I breathed and jerked, hacked and whirled. I was a rat in a cage without exit, deep down an unknown number of meters below the surface. As I kicked to free myself, dust crawled over my face, slipping in my eyes…
I wanted out!
Struggling my way toward I don’t know yet, memories slowly came back, the blur gradually giving space to flashes. A massive panic. An explosion. The heat. The pain. And finally, darkness. Wails had rung, fire, and uncountable clatters… horseshoes grating on the walls, trying vainly to dig a passage far away from death.
Ripping the fur off my skin, I finally slipped through the vice catching me in. I fell forward and yelped. I hit down a steep and narrow tunnel. Breaking stalactites along the descent, my belly crashed against a sturdier point which sunk in my skin. My stomach churned with spasms, and rolling butt over head through the passageway, I vomited. I hit ground, biting in my tongue as my jaw collided. I coughed blood that tasted like iron. I saw light dancing in front of me.
Febrile, I tensed to stand up. Fighting back the pain from the open wounds and bruises was horrible. Hunger also made itself known: y belly growled loudly. I was definitely starving.
Ponds of water flooded the whole dank place, trickling from the ceiling. I rose and freezing cold water dripped over my eyes, running between the blood, bile, and murk. Everything reeked from stagnation but I lapped; thirst was too much to bear with. The taste was so disgusting I emptied myself once again. It tasted like stirred charcoal and sulphur. My throat burnt. My head reeled.
My hooves failed me. I closed my eyes, hung my head low, and I fell. My muzzle slowly sunk into the water, reaching a knee-deep level. The tightness around my chest became more pregnant. I still had my miner suit held tight around my body.
I prodded the shredded pockets, many missing their content. I discovered one small piece of metal, my last possession here. Flat, slightly curved, strapped on a thong of leather, I fixed clumsily it over my left forehoof. The contraption’s tip was a rusty mechanism I scratched repeatedly with my hoof. Once, twice… A series of sparks jerked off the tip and a small flame came to life. My mine lighter gave me light.
Darkness retreated, leaving me in a tight chiaroscuro bubble. The narrow corridor from which I had fallen from remained hidden, though. Being trapped. I couldn’t get over that feeling, like a talon clenching over my heart, messing with my senses.
As I stepped away, my hindquarters hit a wall with a muffled thump. I squealed and froze, fearful.
I turned and faced a massive wall of stacked rubble resulting from an old underground landslide. Such events often happened in mines. One badly rigged explosion and the retaining structure could collapse, often on the miners unlucky enough to be working at the same moment.
It would have just been another standard landslide blocking a potential exit route. If not for a flattened and shattered structure of wood, bricks, and broken slates sandwiched between the fallen rocks. An old, ragged cottage.
That was… unexpected to say the least… interesting even if I had not been trapped here in the dark, flying away from a coal fire, simply struggling to live.
I didn’t want to die.
But my heart was void, a cunning void and pain. A teasing tickle in my chest, never really gone, never really revealed.
I didn’t want to die.
I refused to, because above my head, back in Murmanesk, my birth city, I was anonymous… And in Murmanesk, every day was funeral day for the anonymous.
A kneecap sinking into the water, I pressed my forehead onto the brickwork, which tore apart a little more. I heard my tears drip. The images of fire and explosions haunted me.
I had thought about death much before. But as always, I had pushed away that painful truth, like hiding the dirt under the rug. Each time I would step in the elevator that would lead me to the depths of the earth, I had seen death. Each time I would manipulate arcs, a solidified or liquid blue substance meant for fulfilling everything in a pony’s life, from public lighting to high-end mining explosive, I had seen death. In Mumanesk, I could see death everywhere. Every time the blow to the gut was the same: corroding everything. Motivation. Will. Strength.
I wanted out… But, believing that above was where I wanted to go, I couldn’t. There, nopony seemed to care, nothing seemed to matter. We were hopeless, potential victims of the caprices of another. I had never wanted to die. Not now. Not here. Especially not here…
I curled into a small ball of fur, crying in the hollow of my shoulder, licking my wounds and bruises.
An hour passed, maybe more, spent watching wishfully the flickering light of my hoof-lighter. Soon the light died into in tiny puffs of smoke. Darkness claimed its territory and once again, I was swallowed by the cold, damp blackness. I clenched my sore hooves below my chest. I closed my aching eyes, saving me from the shadows. Another hour, who knows in that darkness, flew by.
I had procrastinated enough. I couldn’t stay there, alone, anymore. Ponies needed me up there. Family, friends… the few I really had, co-workers, my job… If I was going to keep it… I sighed and opened my eyes.
Accustomed to the dark, I focused onto something I’d missed in my hurry: a faint light glowing a pebble throw away from me. Curiosity settled in.
Stiff and sore, I crawled my way toward the beacon. Walking through the water sent shivers down my spine. Trembling, breathing mist, I reached an embankment of grinded rubble. Stepping out of the water, I dropped my hoof on something soft, and squishy.
I felt fur at the tip of my leg, brushing against my own.
Perplex, I wandered my hoof along the shape, rubbed over a set of ups and downs. I hit a flappy, wet shred with my left hoof. What I had thought to be a rock in the dim light was a body. I shuddered, a heavy, cold sweat rolling down my back. My hoof clattered against a set of small uneven dice-shaped solid bits. Any sensation of touch seeped out of my limbs.
Teeth…
The minuscule stream of light threw a few contours of the carcass into stark relief. My rump hit the sand. I was nauseous, my hooves splattered with a blood that wasn’t mine. A thick black blanket covered the body hiding its original colour. I first thought it was coal. The reality was far grimmer.
I had seen death before. This one was among the most banal and normal I had ever seen. Shrivelled, burnt, and petrified, its eyes had closed behind slit eyelids. Its cracked teeth showed beneath hitched up lips. My skin crawled at the sight. I had once witnessed an old buck kill a rabid dog. The creature had squealed, yelped, and battled over the spear slicing in its throat. The old stallion had not even waited for death to do its work to set the animal on fire. With the sizzling of the alcohol-induced flames, the foal I was had just avidly watched the scene.
The corpse I was looking at showed the same state as the dog once the fire had consumed everything. Withered and ugly, shining with its lack of any distinguishable item, its desiccated hooves covered with blood had folded beneath him, likely trying to hide from the fire. Only one difference remained, a long slash next to its neck. Something that couldn’t be natural. It reeked pain. Long and atrocious pain.
A small dot of light pierced through the body’s hooves, hidden beneath a cover of cracked blood. Pulling it out with a grizzly crack, I found myself holding a simple bit of rock a pony had probably broken off a wall. A kind of curved stalactite. Grating off the cover, it revealed itself to be a translucent crystal glowing with a bright blue light.
Contemplating this stream of light pouring out, I found myself filled with a new feeling: An irrepressible warmth that finally sparked a meek smile on my wry face. The pure light blanketed the walls with a blue glow, twinkling in the droplets half-frozen on the rocks. Funnily, an isolated object shone among the rubbles of the derelict house.
Curious, I stuck the crystal between my teeth and walked up to the ruin. I was still wondering how a house could have ended there. To my disappointment, nothing was there to save anymore.
Leaning over the fallen rocks, I discovered a small piece of brass slipping through two large masses of dirt. Digging it out, I unearthed a strange rectangular-shaped box. Split into one larger part made of brass, it also displayed a relatively large window of glass. The tinker had wanted it to be resistant apparently. The whole was encaged behind a series of brass bars. Gliding the tip of my hoof between the tubes, I wiped two clean marks off the glass surface. A strange black disc mounted on one iron cylinder lay beneath. The whole apparatus looked fragile to say the least. And what did a miner like me do? I simply shook it. Something clicked inside, a broken screw or something.
Biting my lower lip, I put the contraption on a rock and sought a way to open it. As I drooled over the glowing crystal stuck in my mouth, the item slipped away. I threw my hoof to catch it. Clumsy as I was, I punched the crystal away. It ricocheted on my discovery, bounced on a rock, and finally dived in the water below. A thousand reflections sparked on the surface of the pond, beautiful. Yet, what caught me was the brass rectangle. Something happened. Something that should have never happened.
The contraption sparked with blue light, clicked on the inside and…
“Hello, Coal Dust. I…”
The crystalline, soothing, and creepily slow female voice died in a shriek.
“Hello, Coal Dust. I…”
Died again.
“Hello, Coal Dust. I…”
Eyes shot open, I watched the black disk turn within the thick, smeared glass. The voice repeated its message, over and over again, each time with an ears-splitting sound… The joints of the brass item kept glowing the same blue pulsing out of the crystal lying at the bottom of the pond.
My name. The voice had said… My name.
“Hello, Coal Dust. I…”
“Shaddup!” I yelled.
I took the contraption between my hooves and bashed it on a rock until the glow vanished and the voice stopped.
“…Coal… Dust… am sorry.”
How did this… thing know my name?! How could this be possible?
I tried to calm myself. I gagged.
Breathing heavily, I glared at the bits splattered over the rock, and others sinking rapidly in the water. Unable to move, the hissing in my lungs died a little. I pondered what to do. This… had said my name.
I…
The earth roared. The walls shook under a tremor that detached stalactites from their bases. Chunks of rock fell over my head. Heat washed over me. I smelt fire reaching far. I saw fire… reaching far. Crawling from a hole in the ceiling, the fire spread like a devil’s tongue displaying many forks. it weaved around the stalactites like water around the relief, tainting the whole cavern in shades of blood.
Running away!
I shoved the bits of the item in my tackle and bit in the crystal, pulling it out of the water. I started running. In seconds, I reached the farthest folds of the cavern. There were no exits for me. No fateful tunnel. Nothing. Everywhere, a wall of rock was waiting for me, blocking the way, sentencing me to death.
Breathing burnt. Opening my eyes burnt. Everything burnt!!! Like hot embers in my throat and acid in my eye.
“Let me out!”
My lungs gasped for breathable air. The walls shook. The tongues of fire emptied the room of oxygen. The quake cracked open the walls. The fire-flooded ceiling started falling apart, the fire itself looming dangerously in my direction. The water flood started bubbling. The cadaver across the place burst again in flames. Trying to cover myself in water and mud, I dived in the overheated pond, hit my muzzle on the bottom. Panicked. I don’t know. I was just trying to live, maybe. A flame sparked over me and licked my left side, melting my fur over my flank.
I saw one wall crumble. And with it, an escape appeared, a thin corridor.
Trickling with water, I thrust myself through the open gate. The fire in my back… the Fire everywhere!
As I leaped through a wall of fire, a violent wave of clean air licked my face. Deliverance.
The stream of black dust wandering before my eyes said otherwise. The stench, acrid, warned me from the danger.
Oh, my father, I would tell him that I ran like Tartarus.
I hadn’t even crossed fifty meters of the tight tunnel that fire engulfed completely the cavern I had just left. I wasn’t ready for another deadly flash point.
Oh, Tartarus indeed, I ran.
Scrambling up the dark passageway, the light of the crystal stuck in my mouth lighting the path, I forced myself further and farther. I heard the mighty breath of a conflagration at my back. My rump felt like it had caught fire.
Head first, I smashed myself into a boulder barring my way. The flames whirled dangerously behind, nearing quicker than I was as they consumed oxygen at a speed I couldn’t match. The boulder cracked and rolled over, myself in its stead.
Before me a path I had taken many time. Carts full of coal and crystal rested unattended on a dusty rail set in the middle. On my left, at a hundred meters, a metal lift. On my right, a long cavity going deep down in the darkness. Everywhere… smoke, slowly vacuumed by the hole made for the lift… and everywhere, of course, ponies moving around buckets of water, wounded, and dead comrades.
“FIRE DAMP!” I barked. Heads dashed in my direction and panic settled.
Screams everywhere, again, as the path in my back suddenly tainted with the grim colours of lava. I threw myself away from the opening, and ran to the lift.
Survive, survive!
I looked back and saw a pony younger than me try to throw water in the tunnel. With a filled bucket harnessed between his teeth, his fur was the first thing to catch fire, instantly followed by its mane. In the red soaked darkness, I never knew what colours his bore… The fur was already long gone, flowing drop by drop over his skin as the colt scream. His scream changed to a muffled gurgle, then stopped. His skin turned black and cracked before he touched the flames-flooded ground.
I looked away toward the life-saving lift. Ponies had already taken place in its compartment, pulling crazily the lever, trying to urge the lift to go faster.
I wished to scream at them to wait for me. The air was too hot, forcing my mouth shut.
The elevator cracked up and started ascending. Wait, please. I ran and jumped. I had to reach the cockpit of the lift.
I missed and fell on the ground, miserable.
The fire leaped on me, avid and cruel.
Unable to scream, I let myself sink in despair. The flames, a lid of lead that would shush me forever.
[…]
Though the fire lit the place with a cacophony of screams, suffering, and death, I remained untouched.
Quivering, I opened my eyes and, febrile, I saw her.
A mare with a dirty white coat stood over me, prancing over with a hoof stretched toward the fire. Her mane flowed with the colours of fire, crawling over her large brown and seared hood. A glow inhabited her eyes, an eerie light that was for sure not natural…
Flames crawled slowly above our heads, an invisible dome between us and that yearning and deadly furnace.
“Please be quick,” she murmured.
Believing in such situation was hard. The fire was there, at a hoof-reach from gobbling both of us, and yet we had just been saved by some unknown mechanism. I kept my eyes riveted on the girl, kinda young as far as I could tell. She wore dark rings around her eyes. Her hooves were splashed with murk and blood… her blood.
“Don’t wanna die. I don’t wanna die,” I whimpered.
She smiled at me.
I slowly gave way to the blackness of unconsciousness, I saw the space in front of me twist. Dots of light danced around my head. Dizziness everywhere. Pain.
“Bear with me!” the mare told me with her enchanting voice.
She coughed, the soot in the air burning our lungs. Despite the pain, she hauled me between her hooves. Soft.
The air cracked. From behind the mare appeared another hooded figure, blackness hiding its features. The mare, oh she was beautiful, her lock of fire dangling in front of white glowing eyes… The mare looked back, a wicked smile on her face.
“Finally you’re there,” the mare sighed in relief. “What should I do?”
The hooded figure hung his head next to the mare’s ears and whispered a few sentences. And the hooded figure vanished. The mare’s smile was gone too. She looked at me with sorry eyes.
“It might hurt a bit, but it will be quick.”
I hear another loud crack. The fire roared.
In the couple of seconds that followed, burning pain blitzed through my bruised and burnt body. I yelled. Pain. Burn. Fire. I cried, holding me head between my hooves.
I caught a glimpse of light and the whole world went fuzzy and weird. My mane crawled. I felt like I was dragged on the ground, through a black tunnel with no light at the end. The sensation of movement stopped. I was stuck in a corridor again. Where was I?
Somepony hurriedly grabbed my limbs, lifted me up, and pulled me somewhere. We reached a noisy area, orders were shouted at ponies.
“Close the way!” the marish voice ordered. “FLASHOVER INCOMING!”
Screams and grunts filled my ears. I heard rocks being pushed in an entrance. Water being splashed. The sounds of an explosion. The earth shook. A gust of reeking wind and coal.
I opened my eyes and saw my reflection in those of the magnificent mare. The glow in her eyes was gone, replaced with tears. The colours of her mane remained. Fire. A light in the darkness.
“You’re safe now,” she comforted me, embracing with her hooves the contours of my burnt shoulders. “You’re safe.”
I never thanked her.
I just sobbed and cried in her shoulders. Pains and sorrow filled me with sleepiness. Sobs and tears took hold of me as I knew that the horror… the Pit… would begin tomorrow again. As always.
Chapter 2, Discharged
“When a miner’s got nothing to do… he’s got some laws to screw”
“Get your ass out of the way!” a voice roared. “You ain’t authorised to do this!”
“He. Needs. Help!”
“And here, you’ve got no power, fallen! So move out of the way, bitch!”
[…]
I lay on my back, sore and stiff, a blinding light hung above my head. I was alone. The room I wake up in was entirely covered in white tiles. Its cleanliness put to shame my own hide, the light itself throwing every stain into stark relief.
The light itself, overwhelming and powerful, poured from a single lamp screwed to the ceiling. An arc crystal, as always. They were everywhere, so useful. Sometimes I did understood why we, the miners, were sent to death to retrieve those along with the coal. A jewel of refinery. So sad I had to put my life on the line to enjoy this warming light.
Shaking my head, I stared at my surrounding, desperate to find something to focus on. The wall on my left had a massive mirror mounted over a series of clean basins. The right wall only displayed a thick, white door.
Where was I?
Bending my back in a violent jerk, I sat up… or rather tried to. My whole body shuddered with spasms, pain bursting through my flesh as I moved.
Calming myself took a few minutes, trying to tame the pain, taking in little puffs of air to lessen the ripping sensation in my lungs. The cold air flowed over my dried lips as I inhaled. My one or two broken teeth stung so much.
I steadied myself, forcing myself not to cry. I still shed a single tear.
I tilted my head forward to take it my physical state. My chest, swelling up and down imperceptibly, was covered with oozing burns. My skin showed taints of rosé and burnt brown in many places. My left flank was scarred, splattered with large patches of blistered flesh. My left hip was a complete mess. Where my cutie mark should have been… there was nothing, but a mess. Stretching my hoof, I tried to reach where my cutie mark should be. Leather restraints barred my movement, tying it to the bed where I lay. A hospital bed.
I forced on the bind, to no avail. It wasn’t the only one.
Hooves and hindquarters trussed up, I writhed about in the free space the ties gave me. My scars scrapped on the binds. The pain sparked fear. Fear triggered panic.
Eyes shot-open, squealing, I sought to escape in spite of the tremors of pain, too strong for me. I give in, miserably. My hooves pounded on the side of the bed. Hissing and unable to stop the tremors crippling my limbs, I cried.
“Wow, calmos, child,” a mare advised me as she entered the room, closing the door behind her with a push of her rear end. “Don’t reopen the wounds.”
She had a rather loose nurse attire, a mask, and that cold disk of metal with two earplugs which I couldn’t remember the name. Going to the doc’ was too expensive for me. She had tied her dark brown mane into a bun, giving to see her deep brown eyes like two stains on her coat of cream white.
“Let me go.” I begged, pulling on my ties only to trigger a new wave of pain.
“And risking a paddlin’, hun?” she scolded with a smile. “I’m not going to make that mistake again.”
She took a piece of white tissue out of her suit and started wiping off my tears, then the pus dripping off the wounds.
“Uh?” I looked at her, perplexed.
She stopped, her smile dying a little, swapping place with a hint of surprise. She raised an eyebrow and walked up so her head was above mine, her hooves clattering rhythmically on the tiled floor. Her lips pinched together and she buckled up a small laugh.
“You don’t remember, hun?” Her voice, as sweet as honey, fell silent as she bit on a pen pointing out of a pocket.
Methodically, she picked up a notebook hanging on the end of the bed, and read its contents. Mumbling, going through my records, she focused for an horribly long minute.
She put the notebook back on its rack and returned her attention to me.
“Oh, sho’y, yesh,” she chewed over the pen, stuck in her mouth before spitting it back in her pocket. “When you were brought here, you were in shock. You broke another nurse’s jaw.”
She sighed and pointed to my ties with a jab of her muzzle.
“We bound you to that bed for safety. It’s not the first time we’ve gotten some irate patients.”
She prodded my skin with a savant hoof, sliding its tip over my scars and burns, giving me nothing but tickles.
“You’re lucky the flashover didn’t damage any vital parts or organs,” she huffed in relief. “You’ll survive. With minor scars, mostly.”
“Mostly?” I blabbered, fear gripping my heart to the thought I would live with more than scars.
“You’re a miner, right?”
I nodded, gulped, and kept silence while she observed me from her dominant position. Couldn’t she untie me? Her eyes followed the lines of scars marking my hide and crawled up to my cheek.
“I can only speak for myself. I don’t know the field in which you work in the Pit,” she stated, overbearingly neutral, “but the mines aren’t a good place for cicatrisation.”
I looked down, and grunted, “Well, I’m sorry about your co-worker, but can I be untied? Like... now.”
I gritted my teeth as she giggled at me. It wasn’t funny.
“Uncomfortable, hon?”
I huffed. the playful nurse was wearing a golden chain around her left forehoof. Gold… Haven’t seen that in a while. Lifting my head up, I tried to take in more of her features. I stopped on her wings, sprouting out of her suit through two sewn holes.
For the first time since I had awoken, I let the silence settle. A knife rubbing in an open wound. I tensed, felt a drop of sweat roll over my forehead and slide behind my right ear. It fell and hit the floor in a heavy drip. Her eyes and mine met. Every ounce of her playful mindset was gone, she just huffed and shook her head. Colours left my face. We gauged each other. To be honest, I was the first to break contact.
“Where am I?” I asked.
Her eyes, cold and dark pierced through me like a spear. Her wings fluttered softly.
“In the hospital of Murmanesk’s prison,” she answered, neutral.
I scoffed at her.
“There is no hospital in that jail. I know that. I’ve already been there!” I deadpanned, trying to grasp the best out of my situation.
And… I knew I should have shut up. She grinned, showing a row of white teeth that made my own, yellowish and uneven, look like shit. She turned around, whipped her tail on my burnt flank and walked by the door. The massive chunk of reinforced wood creaked on its hinges as it closed.
“Unbind me! Where I am!? Please!” I shouted, to no avail.
Now, that was getting ridiculous. Really…
I knew of no Pegasus that would help an earth pony like me. They were too mechanical for that. Too evil for that!
Did they understand the word compassion? Impossible. It was not in their twisted nature to do so. I knew it! I had seen them do the most monstrous things. I knew they were monsters.
And what do we do with monsters?
Nothing, but hide.
“It’s not a jail. It’s not a jail,” I repeated to myself. “Where…?”
A shy laugh.
“Somewhere safe. At least.”
My mane stood on end.
The deep, calm, and inquisitive male voice petrified me. A cold sweat trickled down my brow as, for the first time since I had opened my eyes, I heard that simple, low breath break through the ambient silence. Right behind my head.
“Well, I guess you dislike that situation as much as I do,” the stallion confessed. “But you know the rules. ‘The culprits…”
“… must be punished,” I finished. That’s what the posters were saying, nailed everywhere in Murmanesk. “Steal a pick axe. Steal a friend’s life.”
The sayings were right. They always were. I had known co-workers who’d died because of somepony else’s lies or mistakes. the punition, if not brought by the Pegasi, was always carried by the earth ponies you’d made into enemies.
“Good, good, you learnt your lesson.” His hoof brushed over my mane and crawled down to my shoulder. Painful. “You can be proud.”
I whimpered, pulling on my bonds to see who my interlocutor was. Those bonds were too tight, biting in my skin.
“Who’re you?” I squeaked.
“One thing at a time, would you?” he countered. “What’s your name?”
I froze. He was right behind me… but I still couldn’t see. A hoof whacked the side of my head. The pain snaked in my teeth. Cold. I hiccuped. I was not fast enough.
“What’s your name?”
“Coal Dust.”
His hoof hovered over my face, and dropped. My muzzle scrunched under the strength of a hammer-like punch. I screamed.
His fur was a clear blue. A rare colour to see to be honest. Blue…
Star danced before my eyes. Focusing was hard. Ears ringing, the stallion’s whispering, inquisitive voice crackled once again behind me.
“Who are you?”
A stiffening coldness spiked through my body. My belly wrenched and my mane crawled with all that stallion could do to me. Could and would get away with it. Bathing in fear, my body contracted painfully. My heart, beating wildly, forced a chilling gag up my throat. The dreadful voice was playing with me. I was trapped within his hooves. A void opened in my chest. I was simply nothing.
“Coal Dust. Excavation team. Eastern wing of the pit. Matriculate, 009PSQ-EP90-07-64,” I said in one raspy breath and begged, “please, don’t kill me.”
“You see. When earth ponies want, earth ponies can… when they’re not doing a mule from themselves. Stop crying, It’s unbecoming of an adult like you.” He paused, probably grinning. I heard him clack his tongue in his mouth a few centimetres next to my ears. “You’re still young though.”
I was crying indeed. The pain from his hooves pressing my shoulders, unbearable. I knew I needed medical attention. I knew he should stop. But when Pegasi do, earth ponies look down and remain silence. Rules. The rules! Don’t break them, or it’s a promised new shift in the pit. Don’t break them again, or you get discharged. Then you’re taken far in the East, to fight the war. And, if by any misfortune you couldn’t fight, just hope they won’t throw you over the cliff. The cliff… I had seen it once. Frightening.
“Oh come on, young one,” he fatherly said, tapping his hoof on my shoulder in a gentle way that still made me grunt. “I’m not a monster. I just want to understand.”
The bed creaked dangerously as the stallion threw it sideway.
“To understand how stupid…”
I finally faced him, my eyes shot-open in terror. A rather slender, nonetheless impressively muscular, beige coated stallion grinned back at me. His groomed black mane stretched behind his ears, giving to see a large barren forehead. His eyes, two grey diamonds, looked down at me with no animosity whatsoever. He was wearing a thin black jacket sewn with gold and silver, contrasting greatly with his two wings falling on his sides.
“...and dangerous you are!”
he walked forth so that his muzzle nearly touched mine. The clatter one of his hoof produced as he made his move caught me off-guard. A sound of metal.
“Look in my eyes,” he ordered.
Where his right hindquarter should be shone with a unnatural reflection, but when a Pegasus order, the earth pony obeys. So did I. I looked into his eyes, no matter how uncomfortable it made me. To see myself in those two irises where I could read nor hatred, interest, anger, or anything.
“You were in the Pit, three shifts ago, weren’t you?”
Was it already three shifts? For how long had I been trapped down there? How long had I been unconscious?
Answer!
Answer fast. I didn’t want to be beaten.
“Y- Yes!” I nodded.
“Good,” he smiled. “You were the arc specialist of your shift, am I right?”
I nodded even harder, swallowing the saliva remaining in my dried mouth.
“So tell me.” His eyes pierced my soul. “Why did three hundred and forty seven miners died in the wing you supervised?”
“Three hundred and…”
That was bad.
Terribly bad.
“I’ve killed nobody,” I interjected.
“But ponies died,” he spat back. “So tell me, why?”
“I- I was down there. Was an flashover. Everything’s fuzzy. Can’t say! Body everywhere.”
He smacked my jaw with the back of his hoof.
“I want answers! Not gibberish.”
“I- I…” I sobbed. “I don’t really remember, okay.”
That ‘okay’ was going to cost me a lot. Prancing over, he dropped his two forehooves on my chest. I bent under the weight and pain. I even puked. a few drops stained his suit. Trembling, I meekly looked away, biting in my lower lip to give up the least amount of squeak that could make him happy.
“Stop… Stop, ple-e-ease.”
He growled. “So tell me, what happened!?”
“I don’t know!! I woke up in that cave. Was a body. He’s been killed for sure and burnt after that.” I gurgled. “Didn’t kill him though.”
He remained silent. And so did I.
I slowly looked up in his direction. His eyes fixed the nether before him, in deep thought. I swallowed hard.
“So you’re telling, somepony killed another underground.”
I couldn’t say for sure. The cadaver had that slash around the neck. Could have been a bad landing on a rock. But because it was burnt in a place filled with water… Anyway, the stallion was a Pegasus. No earth pony was to contest a pegasus. I nodded as hard as I could.
“Yes,” I hissed. “Yes.”
“Do you know what ponies do to the liars?” He wishfully asked.
I drifted my eyes away and gulped. My throat hurt from being sore and dry. I wished I could drink. I had that horrid taste of soot still present on my tongue.
“You don’t know?” He gritted, feigning surprise.
“First they cut out the tongue,” I began, pressing my own against my teeth to check it was really there, “then they cut open the hoof with a hook. And they hang the pony with it to a pole. So that everypony can see. The liars.”
“Yes, that’s it.” He smiled. “Now you know what happens if you lie.”
I prefered not to think about it.
Sniffing, fluttering my eyelid to wash off the blurriness from my tears, I look at his hindquarter. One of his leg was made of metal, shining with a small blue arc encased in a glass cylinder. Cogwheels, valves, and pistons activated together as he walked up to me. the movements of the mechanisms was fascinating, making no real noise as it moved up and down. He crossed his hooves on the side of my bed, looking at me with a playful smile. the closer he was, the more uncomfortable I got. A ball of fur formed in my throat. I wanted to puke.
“You know what’s worse?”
I shook my head.
“Right now. I am your only friend. Remember what ponies say. The culprits must be punished…”
“...Steal a pick axe. Steal a friend’s life,” I ended again.
He patted me. “Good, good.” And smiled the most horribly. “So now, tell me. What happens when somepony stole the life of another…?”
I never answered. My lips quivered. Tears rolled, heavy on my cheeks.
“What will happen when your friends will learn that you failed your job. That you may have killed their family?”
He took my hoof in his own.
“I didn’t…” I tried.
His grasp tightened.
“Maybe you didn’t. But what will they think of you? You lived. Their relatives didn’t.”
He was right. So damn right.
“And what’ll happen when you can’t defend yourself?”
“Uh?”
He giggled, “Well, they’re going to be pissed at you. And what about you giving away that you did kill your co-workers… by having nothing to defend yourself with?”
“Defend m’self with what?”
“Evidence.”
I looked at him, eyes-wide. My heart skipped a beat.
“Ah won’t go down,” I interjected.
He laughed, “Not your choice, piece o’cake. You’ve got no choice in this affair.” His stare fell on me like a boulder. “So tomorrow you’ll present yourself to the pit. And you’re gonna be part of the cleaning team. You won’t like it. None of the ponies will like cleaning that mess you did.”
I didn’t… I knew I didn’t. But what could have I said? He was the Pegasus. I was, definitely, nothing.
Nodding was the last thing I had.
“I will… I will.” I acquiesced.
“Good.” He sighed. “Would be a shame that your father lose you?”
“My father…”
He scolded at me. “Your father, while still being an earth pony, has some good strings to pull. He knows you’re alive. Haven’t been told where you are yet.”
I was reassured somehow.
“How good is it to have a father that can pull you out of the shit like that?” the Pegasus dropped. “Many must envy you… to have such position in the Pit.”
I said nothing. There was nothing to say anyway. Ponies were indeed jealous of my father. He was… powerful regardless of his earth pony condition. He was the one who ruled within the Pit, as much as the Pegasi ruled above.
“I’m going to let you go now,” the pegasus said, unstrapping me from the bed. “I’m sure you won’t be stupid to go against your father?”
“Against my father?” What had he told to save me from an expeditive punishment?
“Yes, he’s the one who asked you to prove you aren’t responsible for this mess.” He shook his head apprehensively. “You don’t know how much damage you may do to your father’s reputation with your mistakes. Your father put up some measures to delay the announcement of the adventures of his ‘prodigal son’.” He chuckled as I dropped, my legs cheesy, from the bed. He tended me his hoof, waiting for me to shake it. “Name’s Pureblood, and I’m sure we will make a great partnership together.”
[…]
I opened my eyes on a wet, stinky antechamber of death. The wall reeked, marred with brown and dark trickles of murky water dried from the heat coming from the hissing bodies lying around me. The ceiling had bent across the decades and, in its middle, among moss and putrefied stains of black, a single lamp switching off from time to time was balancing slowly from the loud hoofsteps from one stallion a floor above.
To my right, patchwork mattresses had been lain on which rested ponies, wounded, crying, murmuring, pleading… An earth pony stallion whose face had severe burns loudly breathed a retching air onto my nose. One of his forehoof was twisted and, my eyes following his features down to his hindquarters, I saw his linen had only torn bulge. Amputation.
A needle of fear piercing my heart, I instantly checked my legs and let out a sigh of relief. I was even given the privilege of a blanket with my two remaining legs. I was intact, yet not deprived of wounds and burns. Lifting the blanket, I saw unclean scars seeping with pus on my belly. My head hurt and reeled. My hooves were sore and bloody. However, I was alive. Pain, a simple tick on the checklist.
“Eh, lad, ye’re alive?”
I leaned my head on the left. I was sharing the poor excuse of a bed I had with an old stallion. Pressing his hoof on the gauze strapped to his left eye, he was looking at me, smiling, showing two range of yellowish and uneven teeth. Lying on his back, I was given to see his cutie mark… or to be honest were it should have been. A large gash, burnt and seared to black and a gruesome green and red, covered his flank.
“Yes, it hurts,” he told me through gritted teeth. “But at least I’m not the one on the other bed.”
I nodded silently.
“You too you’ve seen the mare?”
I glared at him perplexedly.
“You know, the white one who carried you here.”
I spoke, or at least tried to. My tongue licked where some molars had broken. Growling, trying to fit in my tongue in this new and eerie empty space, I took a few seconds to muster my words. Once I had left Pureblood, a masked doctor had knocked me out, not even to stitch me up. So technically speaking the mare hadn’t brought me here. Yet, she’d saved me.
“No, I don’t know. She just… happened.”
The stallion shrugged.
“She brought many of us, here. Too beautiful for the Pit.”
“Maybe.”
The stallion sighed. “You ain’t really talkative, are you?”
I was thinking about the mare, wearing her blackened non-flammable cape, shouting around.
I looked at my torso. There, between the coal and muck, remained the mark of two hooves pressing on and on. At least, she had left me with a souvenir, painful ribs.
“Yeah, beautiful…” I breathed.
“Eh, you!” an ice-cold voice spat above me.
Snapping out of my reverie, I found myself towered by a pony wearing a blood soaked pinafore, a red-dripping saw hanging at his belt. He only needed a white ivory mask to be a monster that had escaped of one of my weirdest child dream.
“You can see?”
“Yes…” I hesitated.
“You can walk?”
“I think… so,” I continued.
“You can leave?”
“eh, yes…”
“So stop wasting my time!” He kicked me in the side, cracking the thin layer of mud that had dried over my fur now falling below me on the stinky mattress.
“And take your… scabs with you!” he shouted as I made my way to the door, not listening to his stream of swear words.
I needed rest, but most of all I needed was directions to go back to my family’s cottage. To be honest, I had never been to the doctor, the dudes from the healthcare asked for a price I couldn’t manage to afford in one year of hard labour. Thus, I went on the tangent, hoping the old pony who’d just kicked me out wouldn’t chase me for a meagre payment.
“Hum… guy,” a rattling voice called from behind. A nurse, an old one this time, and an earth pony. “You’ve got to pass the aptitude test after each visit.”
Oh fuck me, that test. To be sure that I was still mentally okay for the mine…
Piece of cake.
[...]
“I… didn’t pass?”
I sat down the room stool, looking at the nurse rubbing her bleeding cheek. She shot me that kind of stare, wondering whether I was stupid… or really stupid.
“So, nurse… Am I ill?”
She pondered a second her answer, giving me a dark-ringed glare as her eyes rose from a paper report. Folded on the top, I could see my name written in black on the yellowish parchment. Pushing a lock of white mane aside her butter yellow face, she cleared her throat and sighed.
“Trauma,” she dropped like a hammer on an anvil.
That was one big word. She caught my dumbstruck look and let out a deep breath.
“To put it in lay-pony’s terms, your body has developed a fear of narrow spaces.”
“Uh?”
She showed me the fold she tried to blind me with. I had her blood on my hooves.
“I’m sorry.”
“I will have you discharged from any mine work.”
“You can’t!” I yelled.
She gave a step back, my bloodshot widened eyes fixing her. Then, biting my lower lip I slowly brought my stare down to the cracked marble blanketing the floor.
“I…” I stuttered, the same shakes that had numbed my senses in the cavern crippling my hooves. “I’m a miner.”
A long silence settled between the two of us. Fillies and foals were playing outside, kicking a probably deflated ball down the street. The nurse slowly raised her hoof to her face, letting out a long sigh, wrinkles folding on her features.
“Why did you have to tell me that?” she grumbled.
I gulped as she walked around the makeshift bed I was sitting in toward a small furniture. Opening it, she took out one single sheet of paper with a round shape blood red stamp on its bottom.
“Wha… what’s that?” I muttered.
She gave me the stare, filled with annoyance as it was clearly not the first time.
“Spare me the whining, please,” she berated. “You’re, just, getting discharged. I’ll send your case to the politburo. You’ll get recruited in the army. You’ll see the world and get some pay apparently.”
Father once told me what he thought about it, chilling.
“Nurse,” I said, my voice febrile. “How many don’t return from the battlefield? In the mine it gets sometimes up to twenty percent.” I slowly rose my head, my count was at three hundred forty seven... A tearing lump in my throat made its presence known as I struggle swallowing the saliva I was chewing on. “Please…”
“You don’t…”
“Please,” I begged, still sat onto the makeshift, stained mattress.
The nurse looked at me, her eyes watering as she bit on her lips, desperate not to tell the truth. Her front hooves trembled as she constricted over her scribbled bloc note. She avoided my curious stares. Her voice slowly rose, crystalline and stuttering.
“None returns,” she spat meekly, her eyes shut as she feared any of my overreaction. “Not that they all die… Just… Murmanesk is not where ponies wanna stay to die.”
She looked at her hoof. “You’re an groundbound like me… You know th’city is our prison.” She was right.
I was just stunned, prostrated. There had always been rumour of those gone beyond the rift… but getting the truth from a rather competent mare was something else than wrestling the words out of one of the chronic drunktards of the nearby tavern. My muscles tensed. I curled up on the bed, locking my knees with my forehooves in a foetal position. The nurse departed.
“Lady,” I called her back, my voice broken and raspy. “How long before you send my case to the administration.”
She stopped in the threshold of the room, the parquet creaking below her hooves. He saw her tail wriggle swiftly. Without a glance back, she sighed.
“Three days,” she muttered with a gruel high-pitched voice. “Three days before the hospital sends your discharge to the politburo.”
She lifted a hoof, ready to go on her fare but stopped. “By the way, there is a letter in the drawer behind you. Letter’s for you.”
Her hoof clattered outside the room.
“Wait”, I yelled. “Please… Can you read me the letter. I… I can’t read.”
She fell back in, ripped off the letter from the sole furniture populating the room, opened it and read, clearly annoyed. She cleared her throat.
“Hi little Coal,
Hope you’ll recover well. I hope to see you again tomorrow. Well, when you get this letter read to you, I guess it will just be one shift in the Pit from our meeting. As I asked the nurse who’s read…” the nurse stopped, grunted, nearly quitted, but kept going on, “...reading this to discharge you so that you can focus ‘properly’ on what I’ve ask you to do.
Hell I know you won’t like that. Neither do I. But it’s something we all have to go through. Proving oneself. So prove to me and your dad, who’s already pissed that you weren’t home as I paid them a visit. You’ve got a beautiful mother and sister to be honest. So, I told him what I suspected you did. And he was pissed. Like Tartarus.
So I expect you to come in handy tomorrow to find out what happened. I found you friends to investigate so far.
By the way, you should really check who your friends are right now. I’m always surprised by how solidarity flow through earth ponies’ veins. I got the nurse reading this ten days of ration for…”
“RAAAh!” she screamed and tore up the paper.
She left in the following second, a tear in her eye, leaving me no time to say something. grasping the two pieces of shredded paper at the feet of my bed, I tried to decipher the paper.
“f… f-or her doh… daughter…
S-See y-ou t-t-tomorr-ow.”
He had signed the letter with his name, Pureblood, and left it with a post-scriptum.
‘PS: Interesting stuff you got in your suit. Did you really tried to smuggle Raw arcs out of the Pit? An arc I haven’t seen yet? And the record… Really interesting. I wished you’ve heard it with me for the last time.'’
I just cringed below my smelly, wet blanket and wept. It sounded like a death penalty. three days and I would be dead… or a wannabe-dead. Either dead on a rope under Pureblood’s order… either in the army, taken far away from here.
“Three days,” I hiccupped.
I had Three days left and I should have hurried. Instead, I just buried myself deep beneath the bed cover and tore up, leaving all my tears trickle over my cheeks in a low, unbearable silence.