“Our means of receiving impressions are absurdly few, and our notions of surrounding objects infinitely narrow. We see things only as we are constructed to see them, and can gain no idea of their absolute nature. With five feeble senses we pretend to comprehend the boundlessly complex cosmos…”
—H.P. Lovecraft
This isn’t really my thing, writing and stuff. I know vocabulary and decent grammar from living in a library most of my life, but this is more like Twilight’s shtick. Yet... she couldn’t possibly understand what I’m about to recall. This is something three friends of mine and I experienced, and yet I may be the only one to ever tell this if something doesn’t change soon. I may as well get this done with now, while it’s still totally clear on my mind.
I doubt that I will ever forget this though…
I should introduce myself. My name is Spike. I am a young dragon, almost twenty years old (which technically still makes me a toddler at most among my kind) and I am the assistant of Princess Twilight Sparkle. A lot of ponies call her “your majesty” or “Princess Twilight”. She stopped minding that after a while but insists that her friends and me simply call her Twilight. But I… digress? I think that’s the word…
My usual job is to organize the Golden Oaks library in Ponyville, where Twilight feels right at home, or to “take a note” for her. I’ve gotten good with lists and stuff through that. I always liked it here, but lately the cheerful atmosphere of the town has become… depressed. Oh, you get the usually bright days, courtesy of Rainbow Dash’s weather team, but ever since last week it’s just been...
I don’t think it’ll ever be truly the same. There’s going to be this scar, forever, and it will always hurt, me more than others.
A week ago, I was strolling by Sweet Apple Acres. It was late in the day, the sun was shining, and Twilight had given me the OK to have a day to myself. I swear I heard my writer’s cramp breath a sigh of relief. On this day, I focused all my intentions on having a great time on my own. If Fate truly exists, then I despise it. Because of it, I would have something beyond the exact opposite of a great time, and I wouldn’t be on my own. It started with a wagon being dragged by a scooter almost flattening me.
I barely got out of the way of Scootaloo’s maniacal driving. Up ahead, she swerved, tipping her scooter and the attached wagon and almost managing to buck Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom out of it. The three looked relieved; I, on the other hoof, was furious.
“Jeez, Scootaloo!” I yelled. “You wanna try that again? I don’t think you were going fast enough!”
Maybe I should introduce these three before I get to our conversation. Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo were these three fillies that formed a “secret society” everyone knew about called the Cutie Mark Crusaders, for the purpose of getting their Cutie Marks. It wasn’t too long ago that the group officially spread beyond the three of them, with an entire new branch being created in Manehatten by Bloom’s cousin, Babs Seed (why her name isn’t Apple Seed, I’ll never know). The three of them were infamous for getting into all sorts of trouble for the sake of earning their Cutie Marks. Apple Bloom was the youngest of the Apple Family on Sweet Apple Acres; Sweetie Belle was the sister of the most beautiful, lovely, and graceful unicorn fashionista, Rarity; and Scootaloo was a Pegasus who had been learning to fly from Rainbow Dash, but until then could only use her wings to propel herself on her scooter. I secretly wondered what their Cutie Marks would look like... I regret things I should have said. It was painful to see them get so close to matching themselves with their special talent, then blissfully disregarding it because they weren’t interested in it. Anyway, back to that near-hit.
Scootaloo shrugged. “Well, you should’ve opened your eyes.”
I could feel a furnace in my gut – sometimes I can literally feel the “fire in my belly” when I get angry. “Do you see eyes on the back of my head? Huh!?” I yelled, pointing at it. The other two didn’t seem to be in the mood for a confrontation.
“Aw, come ON, Scootaloo!” Sweetie Belle said in an urging tone. “Just say sorry so we can get going already!”
My curiosity kind of twitched then. “What are you guys up to? Trying to get your Cutie Marks in something like box racing? Or maybe catfish wrestling? Or maybe making baby dragon pancakes?”
For a second after I mentioned the last one, I swear they all glanced at their flanks.
“Naw, not today,” Apple Bloom said. “Besides, we’ve tried box racing before… didn’t work out so well…”
“And don’t remind me about catfish wrestling!” Sweetie Belle said, looking ill.
“Today we’re doin’ some explorin’! We’re goin’ into the Everfree Forest!”
I folded my arms. “Look guys, I think it’s safe to assume that most of the Everfree has been mapped out, thanks to Zecora, Twilight, and yours truly.” Zecora is a wise zebra who live in a hut in the Everfree Forest. She knows a lot about some strange sort of magic not even Twilight is entirely versed in. Speaking of verses, she speaks in rhyme. I’ve never heard her say anything that wasn’t a rhyme unless it was in her native tongue, and then what she says in that language is usually some sort of nursery rhyme. She’s kind of intimidating, and the town thought she was a witch at first, but we’ve grown a lot more accepting of her.
Scootaloo laughed. “You… ha! That’s rich!” She composed herself after laughing for a few moments. “Anyway, you’re right, sorta.”
“Y’see Spike,” Bloom started, pulling a piece of paper out of a bag of provisions that was in the wagon with her. “I found this when I was visitin’ Zecora the other day! It’s a map of the Everfree forest, and it’s almost complete like you said, but take a look!” She tossed the map through the air for me to catch. I just let it land at my feet before picking it up.
The map was somewhere in between a rough sketch and a final version. It looked neat and solid, but there were some spots around blank areas that weren’t straightened out. One such blank area had a crude sort of X over it. This spot wasn’t like the other blanks; to put it simply, it was in a place where the area should have been mapped – there was no reason for it to be blank. At the bottom of the map was that X again, except it seemed that whoever made the map had a note there, but it was faded with age (and boy, this thing was AGED). When Apple Bloom told me she had gotten the map while visiting Zecora, I sort of assumed she had stolen it (trust me, it was something that wasn’t beyond her), but while I looked at the map, I started to doubt that it was Zecora’s making; The faded writing, while I couldn’t really make it out, didn’t look like it could have rhymed. I asked her if she got it from the hut.
“Yeah, but not inside,” she told me. “It was a kinda weird place for a map. It was in a tree hollow nearby, along with some strange stuff… but I didn’t take that with me.”
“But that X on the map might be marking some treasure!” Sweetie said. “We wanna see what’s there!”
“So we decided to check it out!” Scootaloo finished.
The alarm bells should have gone off, but the most they did was jingle like wind chimes. I didn’t ask about that strange stuff Apple Bloom found with the map. Instead, I did the first thing I regret doing: offered to come along with them, saying that I was suddenly curious too, and that I could be of some help. “Besides, Twilight’s given me the day off,” I had said. They told me I could if Scootaloo was able to drive her scooter with my added weight. She managed it, and I now wish she couldn’t.
We wasted no time on the trip into the depths of the forest, not even stopping at the edge to think about what we were doing. The trees above us obscured the sky to the point you couldn’t make it out. The deeper we went, the darker it became. It’s a strange place, the Everfree forest. It has it’s own weather that sometimes creeps into town in the form of very bad storms; Plants grow despite the fact there is little to no sun, and if you were to cut them away, some unseen force would grow them back just as quick; and the creatures in there are… well, you won’t find a bunny rabbit in there anytime soon. Scootaloo slowed down just a little, so she didn’t end up sending us into a ditch of Poison Joke. Apple Bloom kept an eye on the map, telling Scootaloo which way to go.
I began to notice that the trail we were on was becoming less and less solid. Wild plants and such creeped in, narrowing the path until it was little more than a vague, twisted line of dirt. Bloom said we were nearing the location marked on the map. As we got nearer and nearer, the trail finally disappeared, and it got noticeably darker. Sweetie cast a light with her magic to compensate for the lack of it otherwise. It was around this point that we, or at least I, noticed a strange aura to the entire forest around us. The Everfree forest is normally teeming with life and is pretty spooky, but in this spot something had changed. Anywhere else one would hear the sounds of all the animals – it’s hard not to notice them, they’re so noisy – but in this spot it was still. Aside from the slight rush of wind in our ears as we moved along, there was no actual breeze, and the plants… how do I write this? It was almost as if they were beckoning us to turn back. I swear I could see trees with faces full of fear. I heard from Twilight that one of the obstacles Nightmare Moon put in their way on the night of her return took the form of trees with frightening looks, but that was a curse. Could there have been trees with faces near that spot? The alarm bells finally started going off, but not nearly as loud as they should have been.
“Look at that!” Scootaloo called, pointing at something in the direction we were going. “Is this the spot?”
There was a clearing ahead. That sounds like a source of relief, but this clearing was far from relieving. I knew it was off the moment I looked at it over the heads of the others. There were no plants in the clearings, not even grass. The ground was hard dirt, but there was also gravel of some sort. It wasn’t like the random mix you see near a construction site; this gravel had little shiny black stones making most of it up. I recognized it as obsidian, which made this clearing all the more strange. Obsidian is a kind of igneous rock – it’s made near volcanoes. What was it doing in piles in the middle of a forest? Then I saw it.
A large black boulder rose out of the center of the clearing. For the most part, it looked like it had always been there; except for the fact that it was carved to give it four sides, which explained the piles all around. As we entered the clearing, we could see, in Sweetie’s casted light, that there was some sort of lettering around the walls, but nothing we could understand.
Apparently, I wasn’t the only one with alarm bells going off. Sweetie spoke up, saying that she was getting an uncomfortable feeling, and that we should go back.
“You were the one that said you wanted to see if there was treasure here!” Scootaloo argued as she slowed us to a stop. “This is it, right Apple Bloom?”
It was. We jumped out of the wagon, and Scootaloo stepped off her scooter as she took her helmet off. When we stepped onto the ground, that feeling of something simply being wrong jumped. I think now that the four of us may have been feeling it in various degrees depending on our magic. I’m a magical creature, and Sweetie Belle was a unicorn, so we could sense this “problem” more. Bloom and Scootaloo weren’t so sensitive, but I knew they could feel something. If anything, I would guess that Scootaloo felt the least affected. Apple Bloom would have felt something was wrong with the land, given her Earth pony magic.
We all stood in place, looking at the sights around us that were bathed in the glow of Sweetie’s magic. “Wow, it’s… kinda creepy here,” Scootaloo said, her voice shaking a little.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “Hey, can we–“
“Let’s check that thing out,” Apple Bloom suggested. She prodded the ground a couple of times with an uncomfortable look on her face, like she had been forced to wear something ridiculous. “Then… we’ll leave. I don’t think there’s any treasure here...”
I couldn’t really argue with that, since she did promise we would leave after we checked it out. While I did have a feeling we shouldn’t have been there, I was nevertheless curious about the rock.
As soon as we started getting closer, the three of them jumped at something. “Y’hear that?” Bloom said, looking around before staring at the ground.
The other two said they did, and started talking about what it was. “What did you hear?” I asked.
“You can’t hear that?” Scootaloo said disbelievingly. “It’s kinda loud, and it’s coming from… that!” She pointed at the ground under the thing.
“It’s like a rock being dragged on a piece of rotten wood,” Bloom said. “’cept it’s… kinda… throbbin’? Like a…” She shook her head. “Let’s just hurry up and check this thing out and git!” I’m still not sure why I couldn’t hear it, but then there are a lot of unanswered questions.
We hurried along to the rock. That thick, alien feeling telling me that we needed to leave got denser until it felt like being suffocated by a blanket when we reached it. The letters were as indecipherable as ever, but a new detail was present in front of us. There was a sort of incision in the shape of a large square in front of us, with a notch at its center, surrounded by a ring of those foreign letters. After a moment of trying to figure out what it was, I put the pieces together.
“It’s a door…” I whispered, as if I didn’t want to be heard by anyone else, despite there being no one there. “Maybe… there’s something inside it?”
“Treasure?” Scootaloo asked, approaching it. “Maybe that sound is like a hidden mechanism, like in the Daring Do books!” But then why couldn’t I hear it?
The alarm bells in my head were blaring now. I wanted to run. I wanted to get them back to the wagon. I wanted to force Scootaloo the take us back, or else I would do it myself. I wish I did all of those things.
“Scoots, what are you doing?” Sweetie Belle asked, with some panic in her voice. “Let’s just go!” Scootaloo was trying to reach the notch and trigger the door to open.
“Let’s just take a quick look inside and we’ll go! But… I… Can’t… Get… This… To…” She tried again and again to get her hoof to open it. It was clear to me that whoever – or whatever – designed this had done it in a way that made it so ponies couldn’t open it with their hooves.
In our group, I was the only one able to do it. It could have ended there. I could have just had us turn around and go home. I didn’t.
“Here,” I said fatefully. I went next to Scootaloo in front of the notch, lifting my hand. “I can do this.” I slipped my claws in and triggered the door.
What happened next isn’t totally clear. I guess that’s merciful, given what I did see will haunt me until the day that I die, hundreds of years from now (not as soon as I hope). What I saw was so terrible up close that I doubt you would begin to understand what I felt while you read this.
The door slid down, and I saw a blinding light… only it wasn’t a light. There was something in the thing and we simply didn’t know what it was. There was a shape to it, but not a set one, and certainly not a solid one. It acted like a liquid, but moved like a solid, but appeared like a gas. What I mean to say is that there was something in there that we couldn’t get a grasp on. I don’t know any other way to describe it other than utterly inconceivable. My head felt like it was in a vice because of how strange this new thing was, but I can safely say this: whatever it was, it was alive.
Just looking at it meant forcing my mind to try to wrap itself around it, which was like trying to swallow a giant rock: it just got stuck, and it was incredibly painful. I had to focus on something else, so I turned to Scootaloo. That’s when the true impact this thing was having on us came to me. When I turned, I saw Scootaloo staring, her eyes wide and bloodshot, and her mouth frozen in a silent scream. No, she was screaming, but the creature in the thing had made such a mess of me that only after I had averted my gaze for a few seconds that I could hear… everything.
All three of them were screaming at the top of their lungs, and that sound that they heard was blasting in my brain. What I heard is… I can’t stop hearing it as I write this! It’s forever in my mind! It was like Apple Bloom said, but she didn’t say that it was a terrible mimicry of a heartbeat! I have no idea if this was something it was putting into our minds or if it was it’s version of a roar, and it’s terrifying to try to guess!
What happened as I watched Scootaloo almost blew past me, as the moment after it my body would seem to move on my own. Her eyes became more and more bloodshot until there was no white to be seen before they completely rolled to the back of her head. She jerked into such an unnatural position that made her crack and squelch as she crumbled to the ground. Her hind legs were folded backward to the point her hooves could touch her snout. Blood poured out of her mouth… and she never stopped screaming as it turned into a sickening death gurgle. There was no hope for Scootaloo. In that instant, I knew that she was dead.
But the others were still screaming in fear. I had to do something, and in that moment my body took over. I rushed in between them and covered a pair of eyes with each hand. A second later, I made the foolish decision to look back and then…
Blackness. I was shrouded in darkness for what felt like an eternity. Was I dead? I didn’t know. Was this the real afterlife? That was answered when I woke up.
I was in the Ponyville Clinic. Twilight and Zecora were at my bedside. I was so comfortable for a moment, so glad that it was over… but the memories flooded back like a punch in the snout. My screams filled the room that day. Twilight managed to get me to calm down to the point I could tell her the whole story. The two of them listened with mixed looks of shock, sadness, and understanding. I had questions when I finally finished.
“Where did… who found us?” I asked.
“Zecora found you on her doorstep,” Twilight said.
“You were quite distressed, my dear; I found you blubbering, shaking with fear,” Zecora explained.
The scooter and wagon were later found at the rock, so I couldn’t have taken them. How we got there is anyone’s guess.
“How long have I been here?”
“You had passed out holding Sweetie Belle’s hoof; it has been a day since you came under this roof.”
“What did I say? While I was on your doorstep, that is.”
Zecora looked sullen for a moment, as if at a loss for words, before she turned to Twilight, who answered.
“You were saying a lot of things, Spike, and kept repeating them until you were out of breath. You… you kept saying ‘Help us’, and something about ‘having no shape’, and… and you kept saying ‘I’m sorry’. Even in your sleep.”
I thought for some time, when I finally remembered a certain little thing: the thing that caused all of this.
“Was the map yours, Zecora?”
She looked thoughtful. “Never have I gone to this place which you speak; but of this tree hollow, yours truly will seek.”
I nodded. There was really nothing else to say. I learned that Scootaloo’s funeral would be the next day. Rainbow Dash was distraught to say the least; she understandably made accusations as soon as she heard me talking in my sleep. I would attend the funeral, where we would get to talk. She forgave me, I think. She’s been awfully quiet since then, and she’s even stopped doing stunts, shockingly. Pinkie Pie has been having a hell of a time trying to cheer her up, but it’s really hard to cheer somepony up when you’re no better off yourself. It’s easy to see with Pinkie; She puts on a smile, but it’s not real. It just adds to the pain, seeing her like that.
At the time I was told about Scootaloo’s funeral, I realized that we had really avoided talking about Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle. No funeral was planned for them.
“Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle are alive?” I asked hopefully. The looks that my question was met with dashed that hope.
“Spike… Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle are… still unconscious. It’s like they’re in a coma.”
***
Not anymore. I visited them the other day after writing to the point where we arrived at the spot, and fell asleep, hypnotized from watching Sweetie’s peaceful breathing. I woke up to the sound of Nurse Redheart screaming beside me, and I saw Bloom and Sweetie convulsing in their sleep like Scootaloo had. I tried to do something. There was no way it was going to take them away from me, too! So I grabbed Sweetie and tried to hold her down and keep her as straight as I could. Nurse Redheart did the same for Apple Bloom while yelling for someone to help.
The machines that kept track of their vital signs were going crazy, their frenzied beeping filling the room like an orchestra of death. I looked over my shoulder, towards the door, for an instant and saw Rarity and Applejack being held back at the doorway, panic lighting up their faces. When I looked back, I saw Sweetie’s eyes staring up at me. They were frightful, not the green eyes I had always known, but they were grayish, bloodshot and… hollow. Those eyes trained themselves on me, but her convulsing never stopped.
There was a sickening series of snaps, the sound of a flatline, and an exclamation behind me, followed by Applejack crying out Apple Bloom’s name. Tears almost blinded me as I desperately tried to keep Sweetie from suffering the same fate.
“Ssss… ssss…” I thought she was hissing as part of her convulsion at first, but then she continued. “Sss… Sp… Spike…” Shock hit me like a buck to the chest. She was conscious through this.
“Sweetie! Just hold… on! Please!” I begged as I tried pinning her to the bed to get her to stop.
I remember the next words like my own name; They’re etched into my brain, right next to the sound of that thing and the sight of Scootaloo bent in half.
“I…” Sweetie choked out. “I… al… ways… l-liked y–”
And right before my eyes, her neck twisted awkwardly and I heard a snap. I thought to myself at the time that she had finally stopped for some reason, and that she was only knocked out. I tried waking her up, shaking her, yelling her name, I even tried slapping her lightly once. When it finally dawned on me I… despaired. I threw myself onto her and started flinging my arms, hitting the bed, her, anypony that got close, all while screaming the truth – how it was all my fault, how it should have been me instead of her… instead of them. I begged whatever I could to make that happen: Twilight, Celestia and Luna, even it. Nothing changed, and it still hasn’t.
The Cutie Mark Crusaders are dead.
***
Well, that’s really it. The whole story, as I had seen it. Now you’ve read it, but you’re probably wondering about a few things. So here to wrap up loose ends, I’ll put everything I’ve learned about the spot since I woke up.
First, about where Apple Bloom found the map. Zecora looked in the hollow and found the other stuff: Little medallions of some kind, a journal, and the jawbone of a pony. Apparently, these had been placed many years before she arrived at the spot. Most of the writing in the journal was faded, save for the last entry. I have it here with me:
‘It’s waiting. Nopony must know. It must be forgotten. Nopony will know… NOPONY WILL KNOW...’
The rest of the page looks like it would have continued repeating ‘nopony will know’ until the bottom, but halfway down the page it’s covered in what looks like blood. You’re probably thinking what I am: somepony discovered the secret of the rock and took extreme measures to ensure its secrecy. Cutting out their tongue I would get, but taking the time to hack off their jaw… it sounds like they did it so even if they survived they would take their secrets to the grave.
Twilight went to the spot and inspected the rock. She detected old magic on the inside, as well as hints of something else. She knew the language of the writing. They were warnings, ‘Do not open’ or something along those lines. The two things that weren’t direct warnings was the writing directly above the door and that around the notch. Around the notch were the words ‘A Bane to Ponykind Is Within’. Twilight couldn’t get a solid translation on the one above the door. The word could be interpreted as many things along the lines of ‘The Unknown’, ‘The Other’, ‘The Twisted’, or even ‘The Inconceivable’.
What have I done? Because of me, they’re gone. Why did they die and I didn’t? Well... I don’t know for certain. Maybe the ‘Bane to Pony Kind’ warning is literal, and it just doesn’t kill dragons. I wish it did.
How it works or what it actually is I may never know, nor do I know who or what sealed it away. I know this though: Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo were all killed by the inconceivable thing when we opened its “container”.
It’s free, and it’s lurking somewhere here in Equestria.
Fin
