The Eye of the Burning Night
[Rarity's Spooky Campfire Story]
Looking around at her circle of friends, Rarity took note of how their features were cast in the shadows of the camp fire, shifting as the flames turned one way and then the other. It was not like trying to read a face in the daylight or even by the indoor glow of a candle. Here, under Luna’s sky, one's vision bowed to the discretion of the elements.
She deliberately utilized this effect, on her own features, as she looked first into the starry night sky, taking a long deep breath to savoring the smoky smell of the apple wood pile burning before slowly casting her gaze down into the flame itself. She stared for a long moment before speaking.
“Fire.” She allowed her eyes to fall out of focus through the flame as she spoke, and her voice took on a wispy tone as she continued after a brief pause. “It's been used for so long and by so many cultures, in so many different ways. There has always been something that draws us to it. Some mystical half seen quality that no pony can really name. It's been used in the celebrating of weddings by the ponies of Camponila, as well as for sacrifices to the pagan harvest gods of the Vlaamperd herds. It is used in the funeral celebrations of the brave Yabusmae warriors an-”
“Funeral celebrations? Why would any pony want to celebrate a funeral?” Rainbow Dash's loud brash voice cut through the delicate narrative, as she completely missed the look of indignation that shot from Rarity's eyes.
“Well, the ponies of the orient celebrate a funeral in large parades, not to have fun, but rather to remember fondly their fallen comrades.” Twilight Sparkle cleared her throat as she sat up very straight to address Rainbow Dash first, then looked to her other friends, each in turn, as she continued. “In fact what Rarity is speaking of, specifically, is the cremation ceremony, known by several names depending on the region, in which the dead are burned and a majority of their ashes spread over the cemetery gardens of the family plot. However, after the ceremony there's always a small amount of the ashes that are kept, to be added to the family urn which holds the combined remains of all the ancestors of … um … uh ...” Twilight had, upon turning towards Rarity, found that her friend's expression was decidedly less than grateful at the oratorical outburst. “Sorry. I got carried away again ...”
Rarity held her look for a second longer before allowing a half smile to spread across her face, much to Twilight's relief. “No harm done Twilight. Now, to continue, WITHOUT interruption.” She cast a pointed stare towards Rainbow Dash who grinned sheepishly and shrugged. Rarity cleared her throat with a dainty cough before looking once more into the flames.
“Whenever I allow my mind to wander away looking into a fire, I inevitably find myself thinking back to my friend Shiny Brass. Most of you didn't know her, but we served together before I started my boutique in Ponyville.”
“Oh! Oh! Was she the red headed earth pony with an orange coat and the cutie mark that looked like a dirty copper pot?” Pinkie Pie shot her sentence in quickly, before the others could stop her.
Rarity only looked mildly annoyed this time. “Yes, she was, and it was tarnished brass vase actually. She always made sure that distinction was known. I'm actually a little surprised you remember her. She hasn't been around in Ponyville for years, and even then, it wasn't for any great length of time. Now, please, if I'm to finish this story I must be allowed to do so with no further interruptions.”
“OK!” Pinkie gave her a smile as she stuck a few marshmallows onto a pointed stick and thrust it into the fire.
Rarity glanced down at the puffed candy as it immediately caught fire. She arched her head up to the sky once again and sighed a short breath outwards, before looking toward her audience and continuing the story. “She was a procurer of antiquities from all around the world. She had made her living traveling all over to foreign lands and obtaining various articles of interest to bring back to her home in Maretropolis. The demand for objet d'art there is simply astounding, due to the amount of ponies there who have more money than they know what to do with. There's a large section there, you see, who belong to the elite of aristocracy, rivaled only by the likes of Canterlot, but who have all developed a taste for extravagant décor. Shiny Brass was one of three main competitors in the city who really went to great lengths to obtain the more bizarre items that sold for immense amounts of wealth. She was very good at what she did, and had managed to amass quite fortune. One of the perks of her job was that she was also able to collect a very nice private collection on the side. It was filled with things that had caught her eye during her adventures, and she usually only kept them for sentimental reasons.”
“She would rarely stay in her luxurious manor for more than a few weeks before going out again on one of her 'treasure hunts' as she called them. It was on these treks that she would send me letters of her adventures and to describe her findings. I was always amused that her cutie mark referred to her talent in simply finding the relics she sold, and not really having any in depth knowledge of them. She would write descriptions of such things as a 'pretty wooden box' that she had bought, only to later have it appraised by specialists as a priceless heirloom that dated back centuries. I suppose for some ponies the chase is what is most important. That was, unfortunately, what landed her in a great deal of trouble during one particular outing.”
“It was a little less than two years ago when she sent me correspondence concerning her arrival to her last destination of a month long jaunt into the Southern Sand Lands. It was the first in a series of letters that foreshadowed the doom that was to come.”
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Shiny Brass had just arrived in the bustling desert city of Pocarta as dusk began to fall, and, after inquiring on its location, she quickly made for the nearest inn. Even so near nightfall, the city was crowded with ponies coming and going about their business. Nearly all the ponies she saw wore either veils or keffiyeh, along with long robes that draped down past the fetlock. The first few days she had felt quite out of place in such a foreign environment, but as her trip had progressed she had learned to adapt to most of the cultural differences, and focus on the reason for her journey. Now though, after a long day's travel, that search could wait for after a good night's rest.
The next few days were filled with back alley searches, quick meals purchased from market stands, and struggles with the local dialect while trying to find directions to what ever certain road or shop she had been directed to by the owner of a previous shop she had visited. She had found some interesting items: an ivory statue of a raven god, a small silver case used to drain a specific type of berry juice to be used in personal pharmacology, and a ruby broach with strange intricate designs of monsters that walked on two legs. All of these were excellent pieces, of course, and would sell for a high enough price, but none stood out in Shiny's mind as anything particularly stunning.
It was two days before she was scheduled to return to Maretropolis when she stumbled upon a narrow back alley curio shop, that extended from the rear exit of a small, filthy cantina. The entire content of the store was the sort of standard storehouse of strange items that every city has at least one of, and, although curious in it's own right, held no real interest for a seasoned and skilled scavenger of rare and exotic goods. Shiny was about to leave when her attention was captured by an item on a dusty shelf against a corner of the wall.
At first glance, it was just a normal eggshell white vase with stylized floral blue patterns, nothing too extravagant to be sure, but there was an inexplicable draw to it. The simple design and elegant colors were, despite the obvious age, still vibrant and clear; there was minimal wear, with no cracks or chips in the piece. In short, the vase was in as good a condition as any she had encountered for a piece that old, and she could tell it was very old, possibly more so than the city itself. She knew she had to have it.
She tried to pay the shop keeper who, oddly enough, would not accept her money. He gave no reason why, only pushed a roll of brown paper and a length of twine towards her, telling her it was her responsibility to take it now, if she wanted it. She thought him rather peculiar, and more than a bit rude, but had that found it gave her an extra modicum of satisfaction to pack up the pieces of her collection herself, so she made no complaints.
It wasn't that she had exhausted the odd nooks and back alley crannies in her search - there was still over half the city she had left to scour through - but with the acquisition of the vase, she almost immediately felt the sense of purpose and satisfaction that comes with the completion of a long hard task. Even if she were to give just a running cursory examination, she knew she wouldn't be able to search through the other parts of the city in so short a time. The shops here certainly deserved more regard. She resolved to return a few months later to finish the job, but for now it was time to return home.
After a full day's travel by caravan to the Southern Sand Land's capital, Tajik' Lokai, she spent another half day on the dhow, sailing across the Southern Crystal Sea. In the bay city of Nez Perce she was able to obtain passage by hot air balloon back to Maretropolis. Five days after her return to her manor, the large wooden shipping crates arrived at the warehouse. This was her favorite part of the process after the initial search was finished: the unpacking, and with it, the reliving of her adventures.
The majority of the shipment was cataloged and repackaged to be sent to the appropriate section to await appraisal from experts in that particular field, a process that could take some time before such a scholar could be found for some of the more bizarre items. Shiny let the large work horses do their job as she gathered up the items she would keep to herself. A white-wooden handled gold blade with its ornate scabbard, a very smooth stone carving that closely resembled a rather large tooth, an ancient fresco reset into a modern steel cast frame, and the elegant white and blue etched vase all accompanied her to her manor on the outskirts of the city.
In those first few days everything seemed just as well as it had been after any her other adventures in those far off lands. Her buyers had been overjoyed at her findings, and were just as willing as ever to part with their bits. The cook had received her post-hiatus bonus, and was now happily rejoining the housekeeper in all the gossip they had yet to share with one another. The air was sweet, and Shiny Brass felt at peace with the world, basking in the glow of a job well done.
It was about a week later that she began to notice something strange. During the times when she was alone in the front hall, the shadows of the archways would bow a little deeper in the afternoon sunlight. The angle of the stairs in the western wing of the house would stretch at a length she didn't remember them having before. There was a time just before dusk that she felt a hint of subdued panic creeping past the corners of her mind, and she was not at all clear why it was there. She had been sleeping a little less with each passing night, and the sleep she did get was troubled by dreams she could never seem to remember. This would fade away with the dawn, leaving nothing more behind than a sense of relief; but as the day progressed into its later hours, she would find herself growing ever more conscious of the approaching night.
During these daylight hours she made effort to occupy her mind on such things as the business of selling to her associates and the attendance of the occasional auction, on the off chance that there might be something that caught her fancy. This was almost never the case, but it did lead to the introduction of new clients. More and more, however, she found herself gravitating to her trophy room, as she liked to call it.
She would walk through the well-kept aisles and glance over the polished glass surfaces of display cases. She would usually spend about a minute before abandoning any pretext as to what had actually brought her there. She didn't normally pay so much attention to any one particular piece, but it had captivated her from the start, and it's allure had not diminished over the days since brought to the manor. She would find herself staring for long periods of time at the beautiful white vase, following the blue etched surfaces slowly along with her eyes, until she had every small detail committed to memory. On several occasions she would find herself realizing that an hour or more had passed, and she had been so enamored with the object of her attention that she had forgotten to allow herself the luxury of blinking her eyes.
Days passed in this way, Shiny fixedly obsessing over what should have been, by all rights, an otherwise unremarkable ceramic container. She realized this, of course, that there was no cause for such an attraction to the thing, and at the beginning of every day she made a mental list of all the activities that should take her out of the manor for the day. She had a number of reasons for doing this, not the least of which, and which she would never have admitted to her housekeeping staff, was that she realized her focus was becoming, perhaps, a bit unhealthy. It was never more than a few hours after waking that her plans for the day were inevitably tossed aside as she was drawn into her display room.
As her days went by, the nights that followed became increasingly tense with an ill-defined unease which remained only partially remembered. Her dreams grew more vividly unsettling over the weeks, and she had recently taken to startling herself awake from some of the worst of them. Through dizzying thoughts and half-realized fears she could only remember fragments of horrors before the memories spun down into little more than a dull feeling of dread.
On one such a night, as she sat coated in sweat and staring out into the blackness of her room, trying to fit together what thoughts she could, she became aware of a presence poised just outside of the edge of the shadows. She froze, there sitting upright in her bed, not daring to move, not daring to breath, as she inwardly begged her eyes to close. She could sense that unknown thing, and she knew very suddenly that it was aware she knew of it. She was now beyond trying to convince herself that she was being silly and irrational, that there was nothing actually there, and that she was only further experiencing the emotions brought on from troubling dreams. She was was certain it was there. She could feel the heat of it's gaze boring through her, the intensely malicious intent that radiated out of the dark. She could feel it like a burning weight on her chest that wrapped around her and threatened to choke her life away. She waited there, staring off into the abyss of blackness, paralyzed by the thought of what it would do next, all the while her mind lay shivering against the onslaught of what might be. She was certain it would come for her, that it would step out to reveal itself, and she knew that in that moment, without a doubt, her mind would shatter and her heart would surely burst from what she saw. It would happen soon, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Any minute now.
As the sun beams broke through the partitions in the drapes, the birds began singing merrily into the sweet wind that flowed along the balcony. Inside the room Shiny Brass still sat bolt upright, staring towards the place she had not dare to remove her gaze from the night before. When the housekeeper arrived with the breakfast bell he thought it prudent to tidy his mistress up, wiping the dried blood from her eyes and cleaning the urine from her body, before calling the nearest doctor for a visit.
After performing a thorough examination and finding nothing physically wrong with her, the doctor prescribed Shiny with a sedative to take before bedtime, claiming that her adventures had most likely caught up to her and she was now experiencing a type of retrograde psychological exhaustion. Later that day, after she had regained her faculties, she would voice concern over the lack of competence of the physician, but in that moment all she could do was stare and nod dully as he spoke.
That was the very same day that she began to see things: the motion out of the corner of her eye that would vanish when she confronted it straight on, a shadowy corner of the room that seemed darker than the others to the point of perhaps hiding something until she moved closer and the effect dissipated, and other such little things that most would dismiss as illusions of light and shadow. She no longer had the luxury of pretending. She would move through the hallways convinced that something behind her was hiding, waiting for her to turn her back. She no longer took meals at the table for concern there might be something under it staring at her. The worst of it came after dark. She dreaded the shadows as they grew along the walls with the setting sun, and would lock herself in her room for fear of what might be lurking through the manor, even though she knew this to be futile.
All the while her only real comfort was to browse the confines of her trophy room. Specifically the one artifact that had, as of late, singularly captured her attention and occupied her thoughts during most of the day. It was during one of these periods of studying her beloved vase, that the assistant maid had found her fainted away on the floor. It was only later, as she lay in bed that afternoon, that she had realized she had neglected to eat both breakfast and lunch that day.
After another fitful nights sleep, the housekeeping staff had suggested that Shiny Brass venture a visit into the city, thinking it would do her some good, and she did not object. In truth, she had unintentionally sequestered herself in her own house for more than a week now, and thought it best to reestablish connections with other ponies of similar interests, and perhaps give respite to the growing unrest that had gripped her while she walked the halls of her home.
Unfortunately, her trip into town did very little to set her at ease. The ponies she frequently spoke to now seemed to regard her with strange looks, and the conversations she would engage them with included seemingly innocent comments or suggestions that would take on an odd and malevolent light when she stopped to think about them later. That day she discovered that even in the broad open daylight, away from the confines of her home, she would see them, always out of the corner of her eye. They were always present: the dark movements, the skulking shadow bending around a back alley corner, a shapeless shifting of darkness huddling under the shade of a bridge in the distance, or a lingering shade waiting high in the boughs of an ancient tree in the park. She was beyond trying to convince herself that these things were not connected, that they had not been somehow influencing each other.
She knew on that day, that whatever was with her would stay with her, no matter where she went or who accompanied her, and there would be no letting up. As she realized this, tears began to run down her face, and she slowly crumpled to the ground in the middle of the park.
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“That was the last letter I received from Shiny Brass directly. I sent numerous replies, and waited for more than a month without an answer, before I decided it was time to pay her a visit. So I packed my bags with the barest of essentials, and closed up shop for a time.”
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The once white marble walls now wore long black stains pulling upwards from the shattered out windows. The acrid odor of burnt wood and cloth was still noticeable despite the current rainfall. Upon approaching the entrance, Rarity found her way barred by heavy steel chain locking the door behind several long lengths of flimsy yellow and black striped tape. There was a notice posted on the door declaring the building to be the site of an ongoing police investigation. She circled the now abandoned mansion, and, other than the collapse of a moderately small section of the roof on the eastern end, the structure itself seemed more or less intact. As she looked through the windows she could even make out that the fire had not reached all the rooms on the ground floor. An overwhelming sense of foreboding crept over her mind as Rarity turned to leave the burned out husk of what used to be Shiny Brass's home.
Within the hour Rarity had made contact with the police station, and learned that a murder and subsequent fire had occurred in the mansion about a week after she had received Shiny's last letter. She could scarcely believe her ears when the police pony had told her that her friend had been charged with starting the fires. She nearly fainted dead away when he told her that the blaze had been spread from the thrashings of the head housekeeper in his attempt to squelch out the flame that spread over his mane and coat. He spoke in a matter-of-fact manner, saying that normally the ‘drop and roll method’ would have worked, if lamp oil had not been used to ignite the destruction in the first place. He was about to continue when he noticed the unicorn's complexion turning from brilliant white to a faded ashen gray.
After a few minutes Rarity had composed herself enough to ask the one question that truly mattered to her now. The police pony told her about the court case and the judge's rapid decision. She could find Shiny Brass in the old Rahvanhearst Asylum a few miles north, outside of the city.
The trip to the asylum was decidedly slower than the one that brought her to the police station, and Rarity found herself standing for some time, staring up at the huge iron gate that framed the front entrance to the ancient thirteen-story brick complex. The periodic screams the reached out to her from beyond the brick walls chilled her more than the rainy weather ever could. Taking a deep breath she slowly made her way to the guard shack.
The reception area had the stink of the mildew that grew from between the gaps of the tin panels lining the ceiling and of the grime that had not been bothered to be cleaned from the cracks in the tiled floors. Rarity waited more than half an hour, alone in that large room with cheap plastic benches that she couldn't sit comfortably on.
Upon arriving, a gray-maned unicorn wearing a lab coat quickly introduced himself as Shiny Brass's doctor. He made a short apology for the delay, muttering some complaint about the lack of available staff. He informed Rarity that he had gotten a call from the police station telling him to expect her arrival, and then quickly motioned for her to follow him. His hoof steps were rapid and Rarity found herself straining a little to keep up as they marched down the long, dimly lit, metal corridors.
As he moved along, the doctor explained that the staff would be pleased she was here. Shiny Brass had been in a comatose state for nearly her entire stay, and the doctors were having no success in communicating with her. Perhaps, he reasoned, a pony that had a deeper knowledge of her personality would be able to reach her. Rarity explained that she had absolutely no training in the area of clinical psychology, to which the doctor gave a passing wave of his hoof, as if to brush her comment away from his ears.
He rounded a corner and unlocked a nearby door. They both entered a nearly empty concrete room, and the doctor gestured towards the table against the far wall. He pointed toward a cardboard box sitting on the table labeled with Shiny Brass's name in thick magic marker. He explained that before the fire, Shiny had kept a journal and made a few notes and drawings on various things. These things, along with her mail - which had been forwarded to the asylum - had been collected into the box, and Rarity was welcome to look them over if they were to give her any idea of how to break the mental state in which her friend was now trapped. He told her the guard would be by momentarily to escort her to Shiny's room, and promptly left the room before Rarity had a chance to ask if this was a blatant breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.
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“So there I was, left alone in an enormous labyrinth of stone and steel filled with crazy ponies, still not knowing where my friend was, and having nothing to do but search through the papers my friend had written and received. I waited for a few minutes for the guard to arrive, but then decided, since I had no intention of simply wandering off down some blind dark hallway, that it might be a good idea to get any information I could from the papers I had on hoof. So I decided to start with the journal. It seemed the most logical starting point. For the first few pages it seemed to document the same things she had written about in her letters to me, so I only skimmed through those parts until I got to the day she broke down in the park.”
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Shiny Brass had always tried to abstain from medications, and had held off on the doctor's prescription for nearly a week, before the housekeeping staff had insisted she at least try to utilize the potion to get a good night's sleep. She agreed and took the allotted dose that was meant to provide a peaceful slumber. What it gave her instead was a distorted nightmare landscape of her own house, as she once again found herself sitting bolt upright in her bed after waking from perhaps the worst dream she had yet had, all the more so because now she could remember it.
As she stared out into the flowing expanse of black ink, the images ran through her mind so vividly as to nearly project themselves onto her vision. There was smoke and dirt and ash thrown into the air so thick that she could nearly feel herself choking as it blew up across the vision of her memory. Through the shadows and the soot she saw glimpses of pure black forms that scrambled over one another chaotically, biting and clawing, bleeding out anguish the color of the night, blending and forming into each other. They had begun frantically scrawling onto the walls with bits of the pieces they had torn from one another, a strange frightening glyph she did not recognize that dripped blacker than the shadows before blending into the walls and vanishing into darkness.
Then she felt it, so strongly it was nearly an audible sensation, low and reverberating, an almost tangible force creeping though the room. She could see nothing but the swirling black ink that made up the shadow in the back of her room, but she could feel a focus aimed directly at her. She felt her heart stop. The dark shifting forms began moving toward her, pulling at one another, scurrying in quick jerking motions as they made their way from the darkness up onto the bed sheets. There they waited, at the foot of her over sized bed, shivering and twitching, raking invisible claws across themselves while they gnawed on each others' ever changing shapes. They waited and watched as they lurched back and forth, and somewhere in the back of her mind Shiny Brass realized time had now lost all meaning and effect, and the monsters before her could take as long as was necessary to pull her sanity apart.
There was little else she was capable of recalling of that night, even if she had wanted to, which she very much did not. The following morning was a haze of torn linen, broken furniture, and shattered glass. Upon regaining enough of her awareness she was informed by the housekeeping staff that they had found her by following a bloody trail of shattered decoration and splintered wood out onto the balcony and down the terrace steps, out into the small garden. She had managed to shove herself into the small gap under an oak gazebo. The staff had a minimum of trouble extracting the dazed pony and carrying her to her room to have her minor injuries attended to. Upon hearing mention of the staff calling on the doctor again, Shiny's first action was to stand up, walk over to the sideboard of her armoire to grab the doctor's prescribed vial of sedative, and sharply smash it against the floor. She then gave the order, in no uncertain terms, that the doctor was absolutely not to be notified under any condition. Then she made straight for the display room.
It was then that she knew, almost instinctively, the knowledge coming to her as a reflex of the mind. Maybe it was a revelation she had been hiding from herself from the beginning, or perhaps some horrible key had been relieved to her during the night, it's source staying blissfully hidden in her subconscious, but she realized at that moment what the source of her torment was. She tromped through the halls toward her display room, ignoring the queries of the housekeeping staff.
She stood before it now, her object of disastrous affection. Her rage ebbed from her as she stormed toward the ceramic relic. Within the short time it took her to close the distance between the doorway and the artifact's display case, she had felt her emotions turn from maddening ruin to placid subservience. She realized this should have very much scared her, that it was unnatural to have such intense emotion melt away into its direct opposite, but she felt nothing save for peace in mind and body. It took every ounce of her will to tear her attentions away from the article and move from the room. She ordered her servants now: the room was to be sealed up and no pony to go near it. She would have had them smash the vase themselves, if she were not certain that they too would be held under the same affliction as she. She would take no chances. Steps would have to be taken now, and she would need help.
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“After that she made some vague reference to notifying a colleague on finding the previous owner and possible original source of her horrible item, but that was the last entry that held any semblance of coherent thought, and even then, what I've told you is more or less my own version of what I could gather out of it. I have, for obvious reasons, excluded the long paranoid rants and ramblings that would frequently crop up. A majority of the book was simply insane scribblings accompanied by periodic insertion of strange symbols I'm unfamiliar with.”
“There was however, late in the journal, a set of diagrams, intricate plans she had laid down for some machine. It looked like such an odd device that I really had no notion as to what she thought its purpose might have been. It struck me that she had, at least to my knowledge, no training in any sort of engineering or building of machines. After that there were a few loose pages that looked as if they had been haphazardly glued into the binding. They were sketches of things that I won't mention here, or ever for that matter. They were, in and of themselves, disturbing, but when framed with the rest of Shiny's story, well ... there are times that they give me nightmares, even now.” Rarity paused for a moment to take a deep breath of the night air.
“Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Seeing no further need to search for clues to Shiny's ailment in the journal, I decided to browse through the letters, hoping that they might be of more help.”
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Rarity looked through a few thick stacks of envelopes, separating out advertisements, utility bills, and several of the letters she herself had sent. She slipped those last ones into her saddle bags under the justification that their content had been meant for no pony except her friend. She was both unsurprised and disappointed to see that most of the stack had remained unopened.
She skimmed through requests to search out certain lost objects and offers to buy found ones, invitations to social occasions and reminders on when to keep them, until finding a few letters that seemed to have a very different tone from the rest. Rarity checked the return address to find that most of them had been sent from various locations in the Southern Sand Lands. She spread each of them out on the table and began to read the first one.
Mrs. Shiny Brass,
Dr. Brush made contact with me two days ago informing me of your situation, along with wiring the agreed upon payment into my account. I managed to track down the previous owner of your vase just this morning. He was a wealthy land owner named Grey House that came from the eastern province of Hirzai here in the Southern Sand Lands. He made his fortune by loaning out plots of land to local farmers. From what I could tell he was burned alive inside of one of his estates, but I couldn't get very much out of the locals here. They seem nice enough until I mention Grey, then they clam up. But I managed to get a lead that he had bought the piece from a dealer in Messara. I will write you again when I know more. Just for your information: any future bribes or clean up costs will be on your bits, but I think you can more than afford it.
At your service,
Deadeye Ranger
Rarity stared at the letter a moment, and it suddenly struck her that this pony was a mercenary. Her throat grew dry as she tried not to imagine what other sorts of work he would be willing to do for the right price. It also occurred to her that she had missed something. She turned the envelopes over to check the postmark date of each, and discovered one that had been sent three days before Deadeye's message. Rarity read through it.
Before losing her mind completely Shiny Brass had evidently corresponded with Doctor Dusty Brush, the head of the anthropology and archeology department of the Maretropolis University, and Rarity now held his response in her hooves. His letter made reference to a set of photographs he had received from Shiny, and noted his observations. He wrote that the floral patterns covering the piece were distinctively oriental in style, as well as the selection of pigment used to etch them into the ceramic surface. He mentioned that the particular design was very clearly depicting chrysanthemums intermingled with a species of lotus, both of which are widely used in funeral processions in the far eastern mountain regions. It was his professional opinion that the vase originated somewhere in that area, most likely along the coast of the eastern rocky islands, and he determined it to be at least three hundred years old, putting its creation near the end of the Akhal-Teke era.
One defect in the piece, the doctor went on, was the strange circular symbol etched into the one side. It was not of eastern origin, but instead looked to be of relation to the Sand Land Skrit of the deep deserts in the southern continent, except it was like none that he had ever seen before. He went on to mention that, judging from the difference in pigment shading, it looked like the symbol was added long after the piece had been completed. It had been done expertly enough, but to his trained eye the addition was readily apparent.
He continued with a few pleasantries before mentioning, towards the end, that he was going to get in contact with a friend of his who was an expert in the type of work that would have to be done to track down the previous owners and perhaps the exact origin of the vase.
Rarity looked down at the remainder of the letters from the hired thug, and took mental note not to underestimate depth of the low dealings that might frequently be made in the back halls of the university departments. She returned the professor’s letter to its wrapper and refocused on the remaining notes laid out before her, making sure to read them in order this time. As she read, she couldn't help being a little distracted by the poor hoofwriting.
Mrs. Shiny Brass,
I've found the final resting place of another of your vase owners. Regal Pattern was the owner of a trading company out of Messara, before he was crushed to death when the beams of one of his warehouses collapsed on him in a fire. It was a lot easier to track the vase with this one, he kept records of all his purchases. I've tracked it to a traveling caravan that should be making it's way back here within two weeks. When I find out more I'll let you know.
At your service,
Deadeye Ranger
Mrs. Shiny Brass,
Dealings with the caravan cost more than I had anticipated. We can settle up through Dr. Brush later. I have to admit that I'm curious about this one. Seems that the caravan meets up with a group of nomadic ponies called the Namib that they trade with every so often. After a bit of prying they've agreed to take me to meet them, saying that they got the vase off of them a few years back. They were supposed to meet with the Namib about a week from now, so after that I will let you know what I find.
At your service,
Deadeye Ranger
Mrs. Shiny Brass,
This is the last you're going to hear from me. I've gotten as close to the original owner of your vase as I care to, and I ought to charge you a significantly higher fee for what I've had to endure. However, seeing as how the matter has already been dealt with and there's been no permanent damage to myself, I see no harm in telling you the details of what I found.
The Namib aren't actually nomads at all, it's just that they don't stay in a normal city like normal ponies. Also, they don't tend to act like normal ponies at all either. They all have a habit of wrapping themselves from head to hoof in whatever rags they can find, and they wear goggles even in the dark. They move strangely and they talk all weird, and the whole of dealing with them was just unsettling.
Evidently they've spent their time (generations from what the caravan tells me) roaming about in a series of underground caves out in the middle of the desert. I was surprised that they were so eager in welcoming me into their home. A group as isolated as they were usually doesn't act like that. That was my thinking till their small welcoming party had guided me down into their caves and tried to attack me. Well, I'm no push over and I let them know it. After a bit of a tussle the small group ran off leaving me in the middle of that dark maze. I get the feeling there either aren't very many of them, or they aren't at all organized, otherwise they would have come back in a large group, and I wouldn't be writing this now.
I spent a little while staggering around lost in the caves, until I stumbled on a large, open, rock chamber with a wide crack in the ceiling that let in a measure of light and warm outside air. Later I used that to climb up to the surface, but now that I was able to look around a bit I noticed the structure of the cave had changed quite a bit. There was part of a building down there carved right out of the rock and in very fine detail. There were statues and stone murals, and the whole look of it reminded me of the cathedrals up in the Mozambi cities, only this was on a much larger scale.
Curiosity and the want for treasure hunting got the better of me then. So I hunted around a bit for something to make a torch out of. I managed to find a few scraps of cloth on the ground, but in the process I also discovered a large collection of skulls set on the shelves that were carved into the walls there. There must have been hundreds of them of all shapes and sizes, and some looked much older than others. After taking stock of my luck and the blade at my side, I bound and lit the torch before delving further into the ruins.
The rooms were mostly barren except for a few stray stones and broken pots, but the structure of the rooms looked like something from a palace. There were fancy tile pictures on the walls as intricate as anything I've seen in any museum, and they looked like they all joined together to tell a story. I'm not exactly sure what the story was, but it was narrated with an odd writing along side it. I didn't recognize it, but it looked a little like the written language of the ponies of the desert. What I did make out, however, were the pictures of horrible dark forms running all over. Some looked almost like a pony but most were terrifying monsters, and they were all shown as stealing little foals away from their parents. The pictures were damaged in some areas, but I could still understand enough to be able to tell that the little ones were killed in some horrible way. In another picture the twisted beasts were all gathered around an image of a great stone door with a strange symbol emblazoned in the middle of it.
Now, for a reason that I can't explain, that symbol gave me an awful fright like few things ever had before, and I decided it best if I leave as soon as possible. In my haste I managed to trip over something I had not noticed when I first came in. It was a ceramic cup. It was simple and plain but very much out of place there. That was what made me pause, and I found myself looking into corners of the room that I hadn't before. That's when I found the entrance to another room. This one was smaller but it had furniture, crumbling but mostly modern. There was a table, desk, a shelf with decaying books and a few other ceramic items. Against one of the walls there was a square hole with a very out of place metal door rusted into it. A few good bucks got it open, and to my disappointment it was not a safe, but was rather, judging by the amount of ash in the bottom of it, an oven.
After the noise I made getting the metal door off I decided I better hurry up and leave before any of the Namib decided to come to investigate. So I grabbed what little bits of ceramic treasure I could before going back into the main entrance of that cursed stone house and climbing up out through the ceiling crevasse.
It was near nightfall when I finally emerged, after which it took me a few hours until I managed to backtrack to find the caravan. They had apparently not expected to see me ever again, and we had a hell of a night getting reacquainted with each other. They were a lot braver and stronger than the Namib. Finally, we came to an understanding that I would forget where the Namib city was, and they would forget that I had escaped it.
So then we sat and we talked, real friendly like. I told them what I had seen there and showed them what I had found. They were silent for a moment before, to my surprise, they told be a story of their own. It was about one of the ponies they had brought to meet the Namib years before. He was an aging craftspony from a distant eastern land, a master at making the type of ceramics that I had found. He had been driven out of his homeland for reasons he didn't mention, and now he came here and deliberately asked to be taken to that place. He was stranger than the type that they were used to dealing with, and his cart carried a lot of baggage with it: books and crafting tools mostly, but there were also relics, ornaments, and other things inside jars or bottles that made most of them feel very uncomfortable. There were few other details to their story, but they sent him off with the Namib and never saw him again.
At dawn, after a sleepless night, I set out with the caravan. We rode all through most of the next day before reaching the next town, where I promptly abandoned them to checked myself into an inn on the far side of town. That evening I made my way to the local bazaar to sell off the bits of ceramic I had recovered from the stone room. After what I've been through, I am not about to take chances with those sorts of things. That is the whole of what I will tell you.
As I wrote earlier, I now consider my business with you to be at an end. Do not try to contact me again, unless ludicrously large sums of money are involved. Allow me to leave you with a bit of advice, from one treasure hunter to another: get rid of the vase.
No longer in your employment,
Deadeye Ranger
Rarity stood for a time looking down at the pages. It all seemed like some terrible fantasy. She was then overcome with the urge to rush to her friend just to see her again. Her mind cramped as she realized that the guard had not come for her yet, and she had no doubt been here reading this material for the better part of an hour. She began to panic wondering if something had happened. She rushed out the door to find a very fat stallion leaning in a wooden chair propped against the wall, just outside the door. His hat was pulled low over his eyes and he was snoring softly.
Rarity felt a wave of revulsion wash over her as she looked at him, and she woke him with all the gentleness he deserved. On the slow plodding walk to Shiny Brass's room the guard felt the need to talk at length about how he didn't want to disturb her, since Rarity seemed to be so engrossed in whatever it was she was reading. He was being a wonderful gentleman by waiting for her to finish in her own time, and there was no need to inform his superiors about this. She accepted his apology and said nothing more.
The guard unlocked the door to Shiny Brass's room and he informed Rarity that he would be right outside the door should anything happen. She took a deep breath walked through the door.
It stank. Not just of the mold that clung to the corners cement walls or from the dirty linen pile that had yet to be picked up by the janitorial staff, but of the pony laying on her side, held down to her bed with wide leather straps binding neck, torso, and each limb in two places. They had not told her that Shiny Brass had been injured herself in the fire, and now, looking down at her wounds, Rarity felt a mixture of rage, anguish, and nausea.
The place where Shiny's eyes should have been was wrapped in narrow bandages stained with the seropurulent discharge of whatever organs still lay beneath. Her coat had been burned away from roughly a third of her body. At the worst of the wound, her bare blackened hide was riddled with swollen red fissures that opened and closed as she breathed.
Rarity felt faint, and managed to lower herself to the concrete floor before the black twisting flowers of unconsciousness began to sprout in front of her eyes. She steadied herself there on the floor for a few minutes moving between stages of alertness. Just as she felt that she may be able to stand again, she heard a sudden sharp gasp of breath being drawn in. Her eyes shot open and she froze there on the floor, all her senses alert now as adrenaline coursed through her body. She craned her neck upwards enough to be able to see over the edge of the bed, and saw that, Shiny Brass was smiling at her.
It wasn't the warm friendly smile she had always known from before. Her cracked bleeding lips were pulled taught to reveal gums that had been stained gray, and her teeth seemed to have shrunk in their sockets to resemble crooked yellow planks of wood all standing side by side with gaps scattered through each row. Rarity could smell the fetid breath that now panted out in loud gasps from between the still clenched jaws of what used to be her friend, and she thought for a moment that she might begin to black out again.
Then, very slowly, Shiny Brass leaned forward towards her terrified audience. She strained against the leather straps as that horrid toothy grimace, millimeter by millimeter, continued to press forward. The remains of her mane, matted and encrusted with dried wound drainage, made a peeling sound as she lifted it from her pillow. Veins bulged from her neck, and the leather of the straps began to creak as more and more pressure was applied. The wounds on her face began to ooze as the turgor across her flesh increased, and her breath began to make Rarity's eyes water with the stench and the heat of it. Then, when Rarity was nearly paralyzed with fear, and all but certain the restraints would fail, Shiny spoke to her. Her voice was a low broken croak that made the air in the room freeze.
“I smelled you, friend.” There was barely emphasis put on the word, but Rarity was certain that Shiny had changed her definition of 'friend' since last they saw each other.
Rarity didn't move. She didn't dare speak and, unconsciously, she didn't permit herself to even breath. She only sat petrified on the floor, her face only a few inches away from the still grinning maw that she couldn't move her eyes from, even when it began slowly clacking its teeth together to the rhythm of an unseen clock. Rarity sat there a moment waiting for her to say something more, waiting for the straps to break and for her once friend to devour her face, waiting for the ceiling to collapse and crush them both down into a pit that would swallow up the entire horrible scene and erase it from existence. Nothing happened, and Rarity sat there watching the thing before her, teeth clattering together as they ticked away the seconds, yellowish discharge running down from open wounds to stain the grimy bedsheets, leather periodically creaking under the maintained stress. Then, very slowly, very gently Rarity felt something tug at the back of her mind.
Shiny Brass reared back suddenly and roared with sick braying laughter in a higher pitch than any full grown mare should have been able to reach. The abrupt change was enough to cause Rarity to spring upright onto her hooves and begin bolting for the door. That was when Shiny stopped laughing and began to recite a string of horrible disturbing words that froze Rarity in place and made her coat bristle. She couldn't recognize them, but she knew it was magic and very dark. Logically, Rarity knew that only unicorns could perform magic, but there, in that room, the unnerving quality that had built in the atmosphere must have shaken her more than she realized. She was almost certain she could see the colors of the already bleak room begin to fade slightly into shadow.
“Don't say those words, Shiny, please!” The plea came out in a squeal before Rarity could stop herself.
Shiny stopped. She bent her head forward again towards the white unicorn's voice, staring without eyes, before speaking in a parched but level tone. “It's still there. The foals are still there as well, Rarity. They always will be.”
“Shiny … I have to go.”
“Of course you do. Everypony has to go. All of them.”
Rarity left the room before she could allow herself to hear anything more.
After she woke him, the guard escorted her back to the entrance in silence. It was only after she was in her carriage halfway to her hotel, that she remembered she wanted to have a long angry talk with the doctors about cleanliness of a patient's dressings. That didn't seem to matter that much, anymore.
*************************************
“After a rather restless night, I bought a hot air balloon ride straight back to Ponyville the very next morning, and I've tried to put the whole thing behind me. In fact it was all so dreadfully awful that I haven't sat down at any one time to tell the whole tale to any pony until just today. My therapist says that these things have to be confronted eventually, and I tend to agree with her, so I figured this was as good an opportunity as any.”
Rarity fell silent after chuckling a little to herself, leaving all the rest of the ponies to stare, waiting for her to answer the next question on their minds.
After a moment or two, Applejack was the first to speak up. “So … uh … what happened to Shiny Brass? An’ the vase, what happened to that too?”
Rarity leveled her eyes to her friend. “I received word that Shiny Brass died two months after my visit. The doctors were apparently under the impression that she hadn't been able to move or speak since her incarceration there, and I saw no reason to try to correct them. As far as I know, she didn't have any heirs, which would mean that her house and everything in it would go up for public auction, so there really isn't any telling where it could be now. To tell the truth, I never actually saw the piece, so for all I know, I could have passed it in some shop window and not even known.”
“I sometimes wonder ...” Her mind trailed off as she left the thought unfinished.
She looked down now, her concerned stare dropping deep into the glowing embers. The shadows felt thick and oppressive around her, as if they were trying to bleed into her. She began to feel trapped. It was then that, very gently, a cool night’s breeze brushed against her cheek. As it danced through the group, it fed the fire’s coals to cast a new, brighter light on everything around the fire pit. Rarity looked up at her friends, illuminated now in the renewed blaze. Her concern slowly melted away, and she once again sighed deeply into the night sky, this time out of contentment. She looked again to each of her friends and realized that the night didn't seem quite so frightening. She smiled broadly at her audience, feeling secure enough to speak her mind once more.
“Thank you all for listening. I know I tend to drone on a bit, but it means a lot to me that you would listen.” She reached down to pull some of the candy from the marshmallow bag and impaled it onto the stick that had lay untouched by her side through the whole story. As she held the stick over the blaze, her voice changed to the more cheery tone her friends were accustomed to hearing.
“So then, who's next?”
