Send the Pain Below

        Party Favor groaned as the chilling cold inside the cave licked at his exposed coat. Successfully roused from his restless sleep, the party pony flexed his stiff limbs and was quickly reminded of the gruesome state of his left forehoof as hot, searing pain tore through it.

The stallion arched his back and ground his teeth together as he fought valiantly with the the pain. Double Diamond — who had been sleeping soundly up until that point — shot up beside his injured friend, looking panicked and breathless.

        “What are you doing? Don’t try to move, you need to conserve your energy.” A single tear slid from the corner of Party Favor’s eye, an airy whine escaping his maw.

“It hurts.”

        “I know. But it’s only gonna get worse the more you move around.” Double Diamond danced anxiously on his hooves, glancing toward the mouth of the cave and back at his injured friend. “Just sit tight, I’m gonna go see if I can find something to make a splint out of. Probably see if I can gather up some firewood too.”

        “Wait!” Party Favor exclaimed in a breathy huff just as Double Diamond reached the entrance. “Don’t just leave me here by myself.” Double Diamond came to kneel beside his friend, placing a warm, comforting hoof on his forehead.

        “Don’t sweat it, Party Bro. I’ll be back before you even know I was gone.” With a firm determination knit into his brow, the snow white stallion got to his hooves again and made his way toward the mouth of the cave.

“Diamond…”

“What is it, Party Bro?” Double Diamond looked back over his shoulder at his friend just in time to see the party pony grimace in pain.

“Promise me you’ll come back safe, okay?”

Double Diamond smiled as genially as he possibly could, given the conditions.

“Promise.”

Darkness met the stallion’s tired body as he exited the cave and stepped out onto the mountainside. It had been close to mid-day when they’d started their excursion, and with Party Favor’s accident and the pair’s brief rest, what little light he had to work with was quickly dwindling. However, despite his rapidly diminishing light source, Double Diamond remained explicitly focused on the task at hoof, his experienced eye scanning the area for any materials he could use to better dress his friend’s egregiously wounded foreleg.

To his left he could see the slope the two had planned on skiing that evening in the distance. Every other conceivable direction peppered with dense brush that darkened the already dim atmosphere further. Double Diamond reasoned that he could gather up a collection of branches, twigs and tree bark to fashion some sort of makeshift splint to better support his friend’s wounded leg — a trick he’d picked up from a friend who lived almost entirely off the land.

 A savagely cold wind howled as it ripped its way across the peaks, kicking up errant snow and shearing effortlessly through Double Diamond’s coat, chilling him to the bone. The stallion shivered, pumping his legs to keep himself warm as he traversed the clearing and ducked into the dense, wooded brush surrounding their enclosure.

The athlete quickly went to work, tearing off loose pieces of bark and gathering up an assortment of twigs and branches. Satisfied with his haul, he removed his helmet and placed the debris inside, taking just two steps back toward the cave when the rustle of a bush a few paces ahead caught his eye.

The stallion stopped in his tracks, easing his payload into the snow and crouching down behind a fallen tree branch. He grabbed a decently sharp stick from his bunch and squeezed it tightly in his hoof, bracing himself for an encounter with some sort of ferocious wild animal. A tense moment of waiting happened and just as Double Diamond figured his heart would beat itself still, a tiny, snow white rabbit hopped out from the bramble.

Double Diamond immediately felt himself relax. He returned his stick back to the pile and prepared to stand up when a sharp pang of hunger and the noisy rumble of his empty stomach made themselves known.

Double Diamond clutched his stomach with a hoof, a breathy moan escaping his muzzle. He realized that between Party Favor’s injuries and them having to wait out the earlier blizzard, neither of them had eaten a thing since that morning. Another particularly painful jab of hunger stabbed him in the stomach and his eyes immediately turned to the rabbit who was aimlessly chewing on a root not ten feet away. Without a second thought, Double Diamond rearmed himself with the stick and dropped to the snow in a low, predatory crawl.

The snow was absolutely frigid to his already chilled body, but he had to keep himself as low to the ground as possible if he wanted to avoid being seen before he was even close. Forcing the now nearly bone-chilling cold out of his mind for the time being, Double Diamond steadily crept closer to his quarry, his every muscle tense and his breath almost completely silent.

He was no more than five yards away when a rustle in the brush to his right caught both his and his prey’s attention. Double Diamond went rigid, hoping to Celestia that the rabbit didn’t suddenly become aware of his presence. A deathly still nothingness transpired before the rabbit’s guard dropped and it went back to munching on grass. Double Diamond exhaled a staunchly held breath and continued his advance.

Double Diamond had covered no more than two yards before another rustle — louder and more insistent than before — shook the brush to his right again. Immediately, Double Diamond froze, remaining absolutely still while his mark’s ears swiveled atop its head. Then — after what felt like hours to the starving athlete — the rabbit’s guard dropped and Double Diamond once again resumed his approach.

He’d traversed another two yards and was finally close enough to strike when something tore out of the bush and slammed into his side, effectively scaring away his bounty and sending him careening into a nearby tree. The athlete blinked the stars out of his eyes just in time to see the snarling visage of a wolf meet his gaze. Double Diamond sucked a gasp through his teeth, his muscles becoming tense as an entirely different kind of chill shot up his spine.

The two hunters took a long moment to size each other up, the wolf  looking angry, vicious, and starving while Double Diamond seemed on the verge of passing out from fear. However, somewhere amidst that very same budding fear, there was a stark realization. The realization that If he were to die there — gutted and ripped to unidentifiable shreds — then Party Favor would surely perish as well, and there was no way he was about to let that happen.

Swallowing down what little of his dread he could, the sports pony did a quick survey of his surroundings. Noticing the stick he’d been carrying moments prior lying on the ground not two feet away, he made a move to grab it. However, the wolf’s predatory instincts were sharp and the second he saw Double Diamond twitch, he growled low and threatening in his throat which cowed Double Diamond firmly back against the tree.

Feeling out of options, Double Diamond theorized that his best bet was to make a mad grab for the stick and hope that he could take out one of its eyes so that he could get away. But it seemed fate had other plans as another wolf — equally as menacing and hungry looking as the first — stalked out of the bush and went to stand beside its pack mate.

Double Diamond offered the wolves a wry smile as he tried to rationalize that his situation couldn’t possibly get any worse. However, it seemed fate had decided to deliver him one last particularly hard kick in the balls as a third wolf — who just so happened to be carrying the same rabbit Double Diamond himself had been hunting in its mouth — came to join its compatriots to bring the total of rabid, bloodthirsty killing machines to three.

It was at that moment that Double Diamond became startlingly aware of his own mortality. Jarringly conscious of the fact that if he didn’t do anything within the next few moments, he would surely be gored to death by the three savage beats standing before him. So, confident that he couldn’t fight the three hunters, he did the only other thing he could think of.

Utilizing the exceptionally toned leg muscles his many years of skiing had granted him, Double Diamond took off; the terror he’d been trying his best to stave off being effectively muted by a massive outpouring of adrenaline. However, he hadn’t expected to get away so easily, and, true to form, the wolves were hot on his hooves not a second later, so close that he could practically feel their breath on his flanks as he ran.

The muscles in Double Diamond’s legs burned and strained as he pushed himself to his absolute limit, vaulting over a fallen log and swerving in between the trunks of some particularly large trees. But no matter how hard he pushed himself and no matter what dexterous maneuvers he employed to try and throw them off, he could still hear the trio of hunters as though there were right on top of him.

Nevertheless, Double Diamond continued to run, so consumed by the need to survive that he hadn’t even realized their heated chase had come full circle until he exploded out of the dense underbrush to meet the now terrifying openness of the clearing that housed the cave he and Party Favor had claimed earlier in the day. Feeling winded and desperate, the athlete briefly considered ducking into said cave until flashes of a gravely injured Party Favor blinked into his head and he was forced to pull away, leading his pursuers away from the cave and back into the darkness of the brush.

Double Diamond could feel himself growing more and more out of breath as his life or death sprint continued, causing his breaths to shallow and dulling the edge on the adrenaline that continued to push him forward. He knew he couldn’t run forever and that it was only a matter of time until one of them caught up.

Feeling hopelessly out of options for the second time that day, Double Diamond decided then and there that he had to try something bold if he wanted to shake the mangy hunters. Steeling himself, the sports pony locked eyes with a bulky looking tree a few yards ahead. Flexing the aching muscles in his legs, he shut his eyes and made a dive for its trunk, wrapping his hooves as tightly as he could around its base and scrambling up it as quickly as he could.

Unfortunately for him, this is just the opportunity his pursuers had been waiting for, and before he made any significant progress he felt the sharp, jagged teeth of one of the wolves come down hard on his right hind leg, shearing easily through the skin and sinking themselves into the soft flesh.

Double Diamond let out a pained cry as he was ensnared, but the adrenaline still coursing through his veins offered him a crystal clear sort of presence of mind even in such a dire situation, and right as the wolf began to try and tear him away from his perch, he reared up his other hind leg and brought it down hard onto the wolf’s snout.

        The canine let out a noise somewhere between a yelp and a whine as it was struck, immediately releasing Double Diamond’s  leg and stumbling back into its pack mates. Double Diamond wasted no time reveling in the sweet revenge, shimmying up the tree as far as he could as fast as he could, all but collapsing on the first branch he came across the looked sturdy enough to hold his weight as the exhaustiveness of his life or death sprint finally hit him.

        As he lie there trying desperately to feed his starving lungs, he could hear the recursive scrape of claws on bark as the wolves tried to climb up after him, only to realize they weren’t exactly equipped to climb trees. Perturbed, but not dissuaded, the canines opted to instead station themselves around the base of the tree and wait patiently until the earth pony stallion made a move.

Double Diamond sighed as he realized that, even though he was temporarily safe from the looming jaws of certain death, he was also well and truly stuck without any sort of viable escape route. Not only that, but as the sun continued to dip lower and lower behind the mountains, it graced the already freezing landscape with an absolutely gelid touch of cold; and without the potent mixture of fear and adrenaline surging through his veins, the severity of it hit him in full force, making him shiver harder than he ever thought possible.

        As he hugged his hind hooves as close as he could to his chest to try and conserve his body heat, his thoughts idly drifted to Party Favor and the promise he’d made earlier that evening.

        “S-sorry, party bro,” Double Diamond mused through chattering teeth, his eyes settling on the bloody mess of a limb that was his right hind leg. “I guess I won’t be back as soon as I thought.”