That's The Night The Lights Went Out In Canterlot

Reggie woke in relative darkness and absolute silence. The cavern was very dimly lit in soft purple from a number of small glowing stones scattered about the chamber. The silence was deafening after the blaring his ears had been subjected to from the rave party just moments earlier.

The party was held in some Amerind caverns recently found by some kid from a nearby community, and Reggie, with a bunch of his friends from college had come down from the city to enjoy it. It was pretty loud in the cave and the light show hinted at some odd drawings on the cave walls that piqued his interest. Even though his major was electrical engineering, he had a class on anthropology, which got him to thinking about the symbols. They didn’t seem to fit any Amerind culture mentioned in the textbooks. Eventually the music’s hold on his attention faded as the technobeats started to sound repetitive, and he began focusing on the cave paintings. They showed a variety of symbols that looked like a form of phonetic or hieroglyphics, as well as drawings of figures, humanoid, fantastic animal-like imagery, as well as something that could only be fanciful if not outright mythic.

Wandering away from the main part of the crowd, he found himself walking alone down a narrow corridor. Eventually, he spied an image that just had to be fanciful: at first, it resembled a Chinese dragon, but the limbs were all fucked up, each being from a different creature, plus it had a set of wings that didn’t match. It was as if whoever drew it couldn’t decide what they wanted to draw, or maybe it was drawn by a committee that couldn’t or wouldn’t agree as to what to put up there other than agreeing to draw everything they could think of.

Absently, he used his right hand to hold a pendant he had recently bought at a local jewelry store, a Chinese dragon beautifully carved to curl and circle about itself, as he reached out with his other to touch the cave drawing. That was the last thing he remembered before waking up in this new cave.

Like the rave site, this cavern was unheated and Reggie was glad for the leather jacket, jeans and heavy boots he wore, even though he hadn’t ridden his Yamaha to the party. Getting to his feet, he looked about, surprised by the reflective surfaces in the huge crystal facets that made up the chamber’s walls, unknowingly dropping his wallet.

“HELLO!” he yelled as loud as he could and only heard the smallest amount of echo to his call. “HELLO! ANYBODY! I’M TRAPPED! HELP!” he yelled again. But no one answered.

Walking about the room, he repeated his calls but still got no replies.

He worried about how there didn’t seem to an exit, not even one in the ceiling that he might have fallen through, but on his fourth circuit of the chamber, he spied an opening. Evidently, it was hidden in shadow the first few times he passed it. He stepped through, but instantly realized the next chamber was pitched black; the only light about were those oddly glowing stones in the first room.

Stepping back to the first chamber, he looked for and walked over to the largest set of stones he could see and spent a few minutes checking them out.

“I sure hope these things aren’t radioactive!” he muttered to himself. After considering his options, he chose to use only his left hand to touch them. In the event they were deadly, he was willing to lose his off-hand if he ever needed it amputated. First, he moved his iPhone from his jacket’s outer left pocket to his right. Then he picked up the largest of the glowing stones and tapped it against the ground to shake off any dust and slipped it into the pocket before picking up the second largest and, after knocking off the dust from it, used it as a lamp to explore the next chamber.

Thankfully, the next room had similar crystal facets that reflected and magnified the light, giving him enough illumination to see with. Moreover, there appeared to be a way out from there, as well. Slowly, and carefully, he began to explore.

After a few hours of searching, he came across a chamber that had a huge volume. Unfortunately, a great chunk of its space was an inaccessibly deep chasm. But on the far side, he spied a faint glow of white light near the ceiling, indicating an exit. Furthermore, there was a narrow natural bridge crossing the chasm to the other side. Nervously, he proceeded his way over to it. From where he stood, it didn’t look too awfully wide.

Worse, it didn’t look any wider when he reached the near end of the bridge. In fact, it looked a hell of a lot narrower!

Nervously, he got on his belly and inched his way across, holding the purple glowing stone in his hand as he proceeded. He got halfway across when he relaxed, feeling the slope of the bridge change from its initial upward rise to level and now downward. But as soon as he took a breath, realizing he was almost there, the glowing rock slipped from his grasp and dropped into the depths.

Swearing under his breath, he cursed his shitty luck. Fortunately, he had seen there were no unexpected obstacles to the rest of the bridge, so he wasn’t about to try fishing out the other rock from his jacket. Taking even more care, he slowly made his way for the rest of the route before finally reaching the other side.

Once he felt he was solidly on the ledge, he scrambled on his hands and knees to the rock wall before collapsing on his right side and finally fishing out the other glowing stone from his pocket. Sighing in relief as the purple illumination lit up the chamber, he let himself drift off to sleep.

Reggie started awake, trying to remember the weird dream that shocked him. Blinking, it took him a while to realize where he was and for the disorientation to fade with the memories of the dreaming.

Remembering there was an exit still ahead, he picked up his glowing rock and got to his feet and began making his way to the exit he had spotted from the other side of the chamber.

The climb to the light source rewarded him with the view of an obviously worked mine shaft, although the ornate paneling with antique-looking lighting fixtures greatly puzzled him. Even weirder, was the fact that, while the paneling looked like wood, with various moldings, carvings, and filigree, it was in fact, made entirely from marble! Moreover, the lamps, while looking like old fashioned gas light fixtures, the glow elements were stones like the one in his hand, only they were glowing with a yellow-white light that gave off no heat whatsoever!

This corridor stretched on for about a hundred feet before he came upon a closed wooden double door. Fortunately for his sanity, this really was a set of wooden doors, with gold or brass door handles and hinges on his side of the door frame. He couldn’t see any sign of a lock on them, so he reached out and pulled the door handle.

It opened easily.

The space on the other side was a short stretch of corridor that ended when it joined another passage in a T-intersection. The short section was just long enough and with just enough extra width to accommodate a pair of strange looking statues without obstructing any traffic that would have existed for the original passageway he had just departed.

Thankfully stepping out of the cavern’s space and into some sort of civilized environment, Reggie snorted at seeing the figures.

“Whoa! Aren’t these the coolest things ever?” he muttered to himself. The statues looked vaguely equine, in that their forms had the general build of a small horse, but with vastly oversized heads and oddly shaped legs. Furthermore, they sported bat-like wings, as if they were some sort of mutated pegasi, wore dark barding and for some reason were each holding long shafted spears with an outstretched forelimb. He looked first at the body of one, then its mate, looking closely at its face. It had large eyes with thinly slit pupils and even had fangs sticking out from its lips.

“Whoa! Some seriously rich fuck had gone all out with you guys! That’s some serious imagination he put into you. And you look so bloody real!” He reached out to touch the statue.

The slit pupil eye he was looking at suddenly focused on him and widened, like a cat’s eye. But before Reggie could react, he heard a tremendously loud crack at the same instant he felt a powerfully sharp strike to the back of the head.

And everything went black.