Hours into the darkness, Rainbow Dash was still gnashing her teeth. She heard her every panting breath echoing back at her, dense and muffled. A claustrophobic metal sarcophagus rubbed constantly against her shoulders. Every now and then she'd buck at the walls, hearing the dull reverberations of her anger rising and settling like limp thunder. She kept her eyes wide, not that it mattered. A cold metal helm wrapped around her face and muzzle, wearing her skull down.
Eventually, she felt a tug on her backside where a heavy yoke had been fastened. With a rattling noise, the tiny compartment around her shook. Rainbow heard a rapid sliding noise as air rushed into the chamber. Seconds later, the floor tilted, and she stumbled forward on tingling, aching hooves.
She fell, landing on a flat metal surface. Metal gears groaned and retracted. Her tail flicked freely, no longer confined by a tight space. Boldly, Rainbow attempted breaking into a full gallop. She made no less than five inches of distance before being violently yanked back by a taut weight attached to her yoke. Pain wracked her body upon collapse, but she refused to yelp in pain. As a loud buzzing sound echoed across a moderately sized room, she stood up straight with a proud, scowling expression.
The buzz turned into a low crackle, then silence. Not long after, the sides of her helm hissed... then shattered completely. Two halves of the blinding headpiece landed beside Rainbow's hooves with cacophonous salvos. Rainbow squinted as her vision came into focus. A small compartment with gray slatted walls stretched dimly around her. Before she could gather her bearings, a bright spotlight illuminated a stained patch of floor. She gazed down, twitching only slightly upon seeing what caused the irregular splotch.
A headless pegasus lay on its side, its legs limp. A thick metal cable ran from the rear of the room and attached to an iron yoke fitted around the corpse's shoulders.
Wordless, Rainbow glanced at herself, seeing an identical yoke fitted to her spine. She gave her body a little shake, and her ears heard the tell-tale vibrations of an identical umbilical cord anchoring her to some spot in the back of the compartment behind her.
Just then, the crackling sound returned, this time rumbling with a deeply-toned broadcast: "Do you understand the price of disobedience?"
Rainbow stood stock still. Only her eyes wandered back to the corpse. Squinting, Rainbow could see that the dead pegasus' head wasn't missing. Rather, it had completely shattered, spilling its pulpy contents all across the immaculate gray floor. Rainbow exhaled heavily out her nostrils, but she didn't say a word. Her eyes wandered down to the pony's flank, spotting several translucent bubbles splashed against a gray coat.
The speakers screeched louder: "Do you understand?"
This time, she felt a tug to the cable attached to her yoke. Quietly, Rainbow closed her eyes and nodded.
Almost immediately, the compartment shook through its very foundation. The spotlight above the dead pegasus faded, and several lights now shone forward, illuminating a wide wall with a thin horizontal crease across the middle.
"Find the pieces. Retrieve the pieces."
There was a low whirring noise from behind, accompanied by the sound of dull gear shifts. Rainbow's muscles somehow relaxed. Looking back, she understood why. The thick cable attached to her yoke was being fished through a notch in the rear wall of the compartment. The cord was gaining an incredible amount of slack. She could now move her legs and body comfortably.
Just then, the crease in the wall in front of her expanded. With an enormous hiss, a gust of bitter cold air rushed into the compartment, chilling Rainbow to the bone. As the horizontal doors yawned open, she saw nothing but infinite blackness.
As if she wasn't shivering enough, the speakers beyond the walls of the compartment once again blasted: "You have two hours. Do not disobey."
Immediately thereafter, a pair of bright electric lights flickered to life on either side of the yoke attached to Rainbow's shoulders. The pegasus took a deep breath, facing forward into the abyss. She trotted forward, stepping over the bloodied corpse. She approached the lid of the compartment's gaping mouth. Then, with wings spread, she leapt out into the darkness, dragging the loose lengths of the cable behind her.
Within seconds, Rainbow had become a victim of weightlessness. The mare gasped, legs flailing as she struggled to upright herself. It took her a full minute to realize that there was no "up." Flapping her wingfeathers in gentle motions, Rainbow Dash pivoted to the left, then to the right, and finally evened out—or at least as much as the fluid in her ears was willing to tell her was "balanced."
She drifted icily forward, her eyes darting left and right. As brightly as the lights fitted to her shoulders shone into the inkiness, she could see no texture, no surfaces, no hint of any shapes whatsoever. Quietly, Rainbow flung a look over her shoulder.
She had gained more distance from the compartment than she had thought. The room and its open doors hung perpendicular to her vision, nothing more than a rectangular sliver of pale gray light, suspended in eternal blackness.
Rainbow's jaws clenched. She was about to flap her wings again when a jagged limb snaked past her peripheral vision.
With a start, Rainbow spun about to look. The jerking movement flung her body in an awkward twirl. Her swirling vision nonetheless caught sight of the limb... and then another limb... and finally a dozen more. The leafless branches of a rotting tree drifted past her, smooth and soundless like a ghost. She spotted its gnarled brown bark solely through twin halos, courtesy of the electric lights fastened to her yoke. As the base of the tree drifted past her field of light, she saw naked roots dangling into nothingness, with tiny clumps of dirt breaking off and flying in every direction.
Rainbow tilted her head up, watching as the weightless tree finally drifted out of the penumbra of her light. Quietly, she flapped one wing, pivoting her body in a gentle circle. All was darkness for the space of several minutes until Rainbow's lights caught the edge of an upside down thatched roof. Locking onto the sight, she flapped opposing wings, rotating her body until the roof was no longer upside down. Drifting towards it, she ran the light down its cobblestone surfaces, its wooden window panes, and its loosely dangling rain gutters. All the while, the cable attached to Rainbow's yoke snaked loosely behind her, occasionally launching tight metal vibrations into the echo-less void.
At last, Rainbow Dash found the front door to the floating cottage. She stood all four hooves against the building's front face, reaching down with her mouth to tug and yank at the doorknob. With only a little bit of effort, she yanked the entrance open, and immediately a dense vomit of interior decorations spilled out. Rainbow Dash waited for the debris field to clear, and then she snaked her upper body sideways through the doorframe, peering her yoke-lights into the cottage's hollow.
She saw sofas, hoof-stools, tables, bookshelves, and clumps of carpet—all floating around in random directions, colliding ineffectually with one another. Undaunted, Rainbow kept sweeping the lights left and right, casting phantom shadows that bounced and snaked across the pale walls of the place. At last, she caught a sight of flaring mane hair. Her lights trained on it, and she squinted. The corpse's coat was dry, mostly colorless, and even missing in several places. As the head of the pony rotated around, Rainbow's light shone into its hollow sockets. It was a face that she recognized, but only barely.
Rainbow's nostrils flared. She backed out of the doorframe, standing quietly on the floating buildingface while the metal cable dangled behind her.
All of the sudden, she heard a loud thud. Immediately, she tilted the lights straight up. Rainbow caught two buildings colliding with a limp splash of fragile brick and mortar. The smaller house suffered more from the impact, and its exterior clattered in several places from all of the loose debris colliding with the inner wall. Rainbow even spotted the emaciated body of a dead pony colliding full-force with a window, cracking it, and then drifting out of the range of her lights' glow.
Wordless, Rainbow twisted about, shining her light across the increasingly cluttered abyss. Her halos waxed across floating wagons, twirling street signs, and quietly gliding fence posts. In between the larger clumps of clutter, streams of dirt, grass, flowers, and leaves trailed at random.
Kicking off the building face, Rainbow Dash found herself sailing through the weightless mess. She spread her wings, twitching her feathers every so often with minute movements to pivot her flight and strategically avoid any floating obstruction in her path. In such a manner, Rainbow threaded through the heart of the debris field, with nothing but fathomless darkness to frame the silent sojourn.
Tilting her yoke left and right, Rainbow illuminated loose sidewalk panels, swaths of tent fabric, and quivering globules of lake water. As minutes rolled by, she spotted vaguely familiar landmarks—now reduced to dull edifices floating lifelessly through the ether. She saw the post office, its windows shattered and spilling veritable currents of stationary into the nothingness. The town hall structure spiraled by like an icy drill, its front doors brimming with dried out corpses that floated outward in a necrotic stream. At one point, Rainbow's spotlights caught a bright clockface, and she had to flap her wings to avoid the rest of the brick-laid tower as it savagely soared by her tiny figure.
This carried on for the better part of an hour. Rainbow's hooves quivered, and she felt the gnaw of time just like she felt the twisting tugs of the cable swishing behind her. In no way did she decelerate her glide—not until she saw it.
Spreading her wings with a few flaps, Rainbow slowed her forward movement. Her mouth hung agape as she stared at its branches at first. Then, with a slow turn of its trunk, the upper windows of the treehouse loomed before her. Within a minute, it would drift away from the glow of her lamps. Rainbow Dash was severely tempted to let this happen, but she flapped her wings at the last moment, propelling herself forward so that she threaded her way into one of the upstairs windows.
Crawling across the walls, Rainbow stared into a dense sea of books and paper sheets. The library interior had a musky smell to it, piercing the bitter chill that otherwise permeated everything. Shimmying down the wall, Rainbow climbed over several bookshelves, having to worm her way through the gaps in loose furniture so as to give the metal cable room to slide behind her. Eventually, she made her way down to the front foyer. A wooden stallion carving twirled past her muzzle. Rainbow's gaze followed it, and it was not long after that her peripheral vision caught a hint of lavender.
She fought the urge at first. It didn't last long. Rainbow kicked off the wall, scaled the ceiling, and pulled her body up and around a floating desk. Perched there, she looked down upon the petrified figure. Her facial muscles softened, and the yoke's lamps brought a glisten to the corners of her eyes. She reached a hoof down, lightly tapping the corpse's shoulders. The body only had to turn around once, and then both ponies were staring face-to-face.
Rainbow's breath sucked inwardly. She clenched her eyes and jaws at once, shaking from head to tail. Her wings coiled tightly at her side and the tiniest of squeaks escaped her gritting teeth. As quickly as the convulsions began, they stopped, she relaxed with a soft sigh. Reopening her eyes, she gazed once more at the hollow face and its even hollower eyes. She reached forward again, toying with the bangs, then grimacing slightly as several of the stiff violet threads came loose from the scalp, dancing off towards the pitch-black corners of the library.
Rainbow Dash perched atop the desk, stretching her neck and looking in every direction. It took a liberal amount of light-shining, but she spotted a glinting stretch of purple scales. A tiny body with green spines floated on its lonesome, bouncing listlessly against wooden floorboards and window panes before gliding in a lazy drift across the spacious heart of the library.
With a flap of her wings, Rainbow Dash glided towards the figure. However, she ceased flying about halfway, coming to a dead stop in the center of the interior. The library rotated slowly around her for several moments, during which Rainbow fidgeted in mid-air, gnawing on her bottom lip. All it took was one pass of the cable's length across her vision, and she suddenly frowned, her eyes hardened.
Minutes later, Rainbow had flown back along the length of the cable following her into the library. Threading her way out the treehouse, she perched along its outer side and reached in, fishing out two bodies. Gripping one hoof around each, she stared up into the abyss, shining her yoke-lamps about. At last, she found a wagon drifting overhead. Kicking off against the tree bark, she shot towards it, dragging the weightless corpses along with her. Once she reached the vehicle, she turned it over until the wagon compartment was within reach. She pulled the two bodies and placed them into the space. Then, pressing her belly against the corpses in order to hold them in place, she gripped the edges of the wagon and flapped her wings, propelling them forward across the dark expanse.
It wasn't long until she found another wagon of identical shape and size. This, she effortlessly clamped symmetrically against the first one, caging the bodies inside the conjoined wagon space. After several more minutes, Rainbow Dash found a hardware store floating across the nether. Anchoring the wagons in place, she swiftly ducked inside—cable worming after her—and reemerged not long after with two black jars, a bundle of rags, and several lengths of rope. Shoving the tools inside the wagon space along with the corpses, she fastened the two wagons tightly together with the twine. Once they were securely held together, she hitched herself to the front and flapped her wings, dragging the vehicles with her across the soundless derelict sea.
In regular left-and-right swaths, Rainbow shone the light everywhere she could. Her heart skipped a beat when she found a round building rotating out from the shadows, its elegant porcelain ponyquins glinting from her bright lamps. Steadying the wagons against the outer structure, she slithered her way through a shattered window. Minutes later, she flew back out, carrying a pale white corpse along with her. Loosening the rope around the wagons, she unceremoniously shoved the body inside with the other two and clamped both vehicles back together.
Kicking off the boutique, Rainbow shot like a blue bullet across the darkness, carrying the wagons along with her. Her heart pulsed thickly through her neck muscles. Time was oozing by, pulling the sweat straight out from Rainbow's pores, one bulb at a time.
To her relief, she found the hauntingly bright surfaces of Sugarcube Corner. Hooking the wagons in place around the rooftop's plaster candles, she snuck into the upstairs bedroom, emerging later with a petrified fluff of pink in her arms. Minutes later, after gliding past dozens upon dozens of structures, she stumbled upon a stone cottage that was falling apart at the seams. Not bothering with the doors, she simply reached into the stonework—grunting—and tugged the antique exterior apart. A wall of molting feathers and fur clumps immediately poured out. Holding her breath, Rainbow swam through the dead animal particulates and came bursting back out with a dainty yellow figure draped over her yoke.
Kicking off, Rainbow dove deep, deep into the nebulous nothing. She sniffed the frigid air, following the scent of earth, the musk of topsoil, and finally the tickling scent of rotten fruit. Apple peels wafted past her in ectoplasmic streams. She and the wagons spiraled around a rickety wooden fence, finally coming upon a blood red barn halo'd with threadbare trees and farm equipment. Forcing the front doors open with a creak, she shone her light inside. A thick sea of hay made visibility difficult. Holding her breath, she dove right in, fishing around with anxious hooves. After much toil, she found a clump of emaciated bodies, their limbs wrapped around each other in a rigor mortis embrace. With much struggle, she pried the red fetlocks off a pale green body, then wriggled her way deeper to grab an orange figure. The corpse was still holding a yellow figure against its chest as Rainbow pulled it out of the center. She didn't bother detaching the two, instead propelling herself back out of the barn before she could drown in haystalks.
She shoved the last body into the wagon—but that wasn't all. Rainbow swung her legs out into the ether, scooping up as many clumps of hay as she could and shoving them in as well, burying the corpses beneath the dry yellow heaps. She snapped branches off of the barren apple trees and tossed them in as well, along with fragments of paper that she fished out of the floating farmhouse nearby.
Once the wagon compartments were completely full, Rainbow fished out the other tools that she had gathered from the hardware store. She popped open the first of two jars, giving the end of the bottle a sniff. She instantly grimaced from the potent kerosene smell. Before the liquid could fountain out, she stuffed one of several rags down the opening, then tied more rags to the end of it, forming a miniature tail of fabric. This she also did with the other bottle, wedging it between the opposite end of the converging wagons. Finally, she reached into the thick of the wagon and grabbed the last item: a book of matches. It took several swipes against the coarse surfaces of the wagon, but she successfully lit a few of them and lit the rags at the end of the bottles. Slowly, the flame ate their way towards the neck of the jars.
Grunting, Rainbow pressed all four legs against the wagon and kicked off. Her breath came out in a limp wheeze, and her eyes twitched as she watched the vehicle glide swiftly away, carrying the tightly-packed bodies along with them. Rainbow gritted her teeth, clasping her forelimbs together as she floated in place.
The wagon flew out of the range of her lamps, but soon it wouldn't be an issue. Within seconds, the lit rags caught up to the kerosene inside the jars. The wagons erupted in twin plumes of flame, burning all over with a glorious pulse of light. There was no smoke, no crackling sound, just the icy drift of a gentle conflagration as the wagons drew further and further away. As they glided into the dark, the lapping flames illuminated swaths of weightless earth floating on all sides, like an uneven tunnel of once-emerald fields and vibrant pastures. There was grass, flowers, the hint of cattails swaying by empty lake beds in an invisible breeze, and then the pulse of light carried off into the ever-dark, a blinking stare that gazed warmly back at Rainbow.
That's when she felt the tug of the metal cable. Time was up. Rainbow hissed, her teeth clenching as she stared and gazed after that distant light for as long as she could. All the while, the dim shells of a village swung past her, cruising faster and faster as the cable pulling her yoke increased in speed and strength. The flame was a single speck now, infinitesimally small, but just as real as the moment when Rainbow struck the first match.
Then, with a gasp of warm air, she was thrust backwards into the gray-lit compartment. The horizontal panels groaned together, slamming shut and sealing her once again within the dull walls of that place. Rainbow Dash found herself bound to gravity, anchored to the wall behind her with a cable now tighter than it ever was. Rainbow hung her head, and in so doing noticed that the corpse of the pegasus before her was completely gone. Even the blood had been swept away.
Gears groaned. Her lamps flickered off. And, once more, the speakers crackled to life: "Did you retrieve the pieces?"
Rainbow took a deep breath. Her facial features tightened, frowned. "No," she said.
Another hiss: "Did you even find them?"
Rainbow's brow furrowed. She stared millions of miles through the grayness. A lasting glint hung in her moist eyes, like a bright spark floating away in empty blackness.
"No," she breathed.
Silence.
A panel swung open in the ceiling directly above her.
Rainbow didn't bother looking up. Thunder rolled. When the projectile flew through her skull, her brains splattered in three separate directions, but her legs didn't. They kept her body upright for sixty courageous milliseconds, before the rest of her finally toppled forward. The ends of Rainbow's wings twitched, and there was a jerking motion to her left rear leg, but it was all over before her lungs could even empty completely.
Her corpse lay there for several minutes... for as long as it took for the crimson puddle to spread around her dormant limbs.
Then, at some point, the ceiling opened again—wider this time. A metal sarcophagus swung down with a cable fishing its way through the back. Then the tiny box opened, dropping loose a winged stallion with a dark coat and a teal mane. The pegasus shivered, panting for breath as a metal helm consistently blinded him and weighed down his skull. Within seconds, the headpiece popped open, falling loosely to the floor. At first sight of Rainbow's body, he flinched, hopping backwards with an anguished yelp. The cable held him in place, and not long after the speakers crackled across the blood-stained room.
"Do you understand the price of disobedience?!"
The stallion nervously gulped and nodded.
"Find the pieces. Retrieve the pieces."
The cable went slack. The doors before him groaned open to a bitter chill. There was nothing but blackness.
"You have two hours. Do not disobey."
