Everdream - The Foals

I sat slipped through Canterlot’s underground tunnel system in silence, my paws padding along and currently lacking in claws to click on the stone. Behind me, my two companions had wrapped their hooves in rags, achieving the same result. Their coats were purposefully covered in dirt to dull out the colours. Dull coloured dyes were rare to come across, and we saved those for when the entire group had to move our base. My own coat was currently a dull grey, though it wasn’t dyed.

I had abilities that normal ponies didn’t, and that let me cheat on the need for camouflage for the most part. My father had been a changeling and that had given me a gift of transformation. One that had only grown since the Twilight had begun.

Now, I used it to properly blend in with our surroundings and keep perfectly silent as Snapshot, Nomalanga and myself worked to avoid the detection of the creatures that stalked within the shadows of Canterlot. Sometimes quite literally.

For whatever reason, the tunnels beneath the city didn’t have nearly the same number of creatures, or creatures of the same levels of danger as above. Unfortunately, we always had to do at least a little above ground travel with every trip away from home.  Supplies were getting harder and harder to find in the city, and sneaking onto the grounds of the local noble manors for their gardens had started at ‘way too dangerous’ and slowly made their way to ‘outright suicidal’.

Soon, though, we’d have no choice. Which brought us to our current mission. The building my family—because blood or not, that’s what they were—and I currently called our home was a warehouse. Whoever had owned it had used it to store, and possibly smuggle, illegal weaponry and military airship components of all sorts. Among that weaponry had been explosives. Lots and lots of explosives. With the supplies we had gotten from it, if we could sneak onto a noble’s manor, we should be able to blow a hole to the sewers from on the grounds of any noble’s manor.

Sneaking would be made easier and we’d have a more reliable food source. Currently, though, we were only doing the scouting. It would definitely take more than just three of us if we wanted to pull off making a new tunnel entrance. At the very least, we’d need Steel Armour, as that colt was really good at shields.

So for now, we were prioritizing stealth as best we could without actually compromising safety.

“Three hundred metres, a left, we’ll get to the surface twenty-five metres from our goal,” I whispered back to Noma and Snapshot.

They both nodded towards me and Snapshot dimmed the light of her horn even more. She was the only one that really needed the light. I really wished there was some nightvision spell, but she was far better to have than not.

My other companion, Nomalanga, was a zebra shaman's apprentice. The filly had gained an unusual, and large, power boost from the Twilight.

“Winter,” Noma hissed suddenly, her voice barely loud enough for me to hear, even with me having hearing far better than the average pony. Instantly I froze. She didn’t usually speak on mission unless she absolutely needed to, either to answer, or to warn.

I looked back, questioning look on my face. “No lights,” she said softly. Snapshot instantly put out her light, not bothering to question the little filly. I stepped softly back towards them, keeping close as I watched Noma pull out a piece of chalk and draw a quick series of lines and glyphs, enclosed in in a shape. I didn’t look too hard, as they generally either gave me a headache or sort of shifted until I was nauseous.

She then touched it and I felt power surge around us before I felt nothing. Not in the sense of being unconscious or dead, but something else. I couldn’t feel myself, I couldn’t hear my companions, their shapes were wavering outlines, and their smells vanished. It gave the entire situation a suddenly very foreboding feeling.

Ahead of us, in the intersection less than twenty metres ahead of us, one of them came from the left. I had no name for the creatures. It was like they were something directly out of my nightmares. Three years ago, the sight of one of those would have sent me straight for my aunt, or my mom if she was home.

Now though, now I had seen a lot. More than any fifteen year old should, and I felt far older than I was. The creature still caused a bones deep, primal sort of fear, but it was no longer enough to send me running. Sometimes I wish it still was.

This one looked like a wingless dragon, not the juvenile bipeds, but a fully adult dragon of about the size of a stallion. Like all the nightmares, its skin seemed to be made from shadows made solid, and its eyes were the blackest of voids.

It didn’t seem to notice us as it moved across the intersection, its tongue flickering out searchingly. It glanced towards us and I tensed, ready to fight it should it actually approach.

It never did. After a long look down the tunnel we were in, it looked back forwards and continued on at a slow lumbering pace. Noma didn’t drop our cloak for another five minutes.  I don’t think I took a breath for at least two of those.

When Nomalanga finally released the cloak, she slumped against a wall, breathing heavily. Not just from the effort of the magic, but also from the adrenaline I knew to be coursing through her veins. She’d probably been the one that had changed the least of us. Zebrica, her original home, was a hostile land full of predators, monsters, and hardship, so when the Twilight came, she wasn’t unready for the tartarus on Equestria.

But that also meant that she’s seen this enough before that she had a good idea of what to expect. Thankfully, very few of the rest of us had even seen a pony killed by the shadow creatures. I’d been… unlucky enough to see it once and it still gave me nightmares. “We need to keep moving,” I whispered after a moment. “We can’t stay here for long.” They already knew that, I knew, but somepony had to be the one to get us moving again.

The rest of our trek, all three hundred metres of it, went without any more incidents. I looked up at the grate above, the one things standing between us and the surface right now. The surface and the much higher number of monsters.

I sighed. “Ready?” I asked my companions softly, receiving nods in return as Snapshot once more killed the light atop her horn. I took a breath and changed. My legs and body became thicker with muscle and my wings went from those similar to a humming birds—my natural ones—to leathery and larger. My canine-like paws became claws, and in moments I was a mare sized dragon.

A hungry mare-sized dragon, but hunger could be dealt with later. Right now we had twenty-five metres of extremely dangerous surface world to cover, and we needed whatever advantages we could get.

I reached up and firmly grasped the grate at the top of the short ladder. My claws dug into the wall, I tensed, pushed, and there was a scraping, crumbling sound as I ripped the grate free of the ground and pushed it to the side, scanning what little of the alleyway I could see before I even thought of sticking my head out. I’d learned that lesson the hard way.

Once I was reasonably certain the coast was clear, I poked my head out onto street level. For whatever reason, the majority of the creatures didn’t take well to the underground. Taking another long look around, I slid out fully onto street level, keeping low and crouched in the long shadows case by the building beside me. The sun hadn’t moved in three years, now, making it extremely easy to predict just where and how the shadows would fall in any given area of Canterlot.

I glanced behind me to make sure that Nomalanga and Snapshot had made it out of the grate before slowly, carefully sneaking forward towards the main street from the alley we were currently taking shelter in, my ears constantly listening, even if they were currently immobile. Not that hearing was even the sense that gave me the warning most of the time, anyway.

With great care, I poked my nose out onto the main street area, keeping low as I could as I checked out the street for any obvious threats. The bright sun shone down, lighting the street up well, but casting long shadows at the same time.  Long shadows that potentially hid more nightmares.

That was one of the worst things about the surface. You could never truly tell if you were safe. Every shadow could hold a nightmare, stepping into the light revealed you for all to see. There was simply nothing good about the surface outside our warehouse anymore. I looked across the street at our goal.

Ignis Estate had stood in its place for as long as Canterlot had been on the mountain. Longer, if what some ponies said was true. It was old, stout, and above all, built like a damn fortress. It also had a peach grove that would do wonders to sustain myself and my family. All we needed was a safe way to get to it. Well, safe-ish, considering what a loaded word ‘safe’ really was.

Still, just beyond the walls was Ignis Estate’s peach Grove. Our hopeful new food supply, if only we could get to it.