Four Yellow

Lying on her back, Diamond Tiara stared up at the ceiling above her bed. Nothing about it was unordinary or strange; in fact, it was the same ceiling that she had spent so many sleepless nights staring up at, wondering just what exactly the next day might bring.

Everything had been fine. That whole day, apart from the incident at the boutique, everything had been ordinary. The streets of Ponyville had been filled with happy, cheerful ponies. There had been mares and stallions shopping in town for the freshest of fall produce, colts and fillies jumping into piles of leaves knocked loose by the wind, and foals swaddled in ridiculously overstuffed coats as a protection against the chill of the season. Everything had been bright and sunny and happy- -but Diamond Tiara had still jumped at the sight of every unicorn, waiting for that one freakishly tall one to appear again, somehow feeling its eyes on her, watching, even when she could not see it.

The day had been normal, but Diamond Tiara had not. Whatever it was she had seen had left her shaken. She did her best to hide it, but Silver Spoon seemed to notice. So did Pick to a lesser extent, although he might have been more in tune to how angry Diamond Tiara had become. Her anger was derived from her fear, and how she seemed to be cracking up at the worst possible time.

So now she lay in her bed in her family’s old house in Ponyville, unable to sleep. Down the hall, she could hear Silver Spoon mumbling in her sleep. Outside, she could hear the gentle but chilly wind of the moonlit night.

Pick rustled beneath the blankets beside her. “Diamond?” he said, looking up at her. Even in the moonlight, his eyes were bright silver, set at the sides of a wide mouth filled with pointed teeth. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said, pulling him closer. He had removed the external plating from his armor, but retained the internal framework. Without his full clothing, he was actually substantially smaller than Diamond Tiara. In a few places, his soft pale green coat poked through, but much of him was still covered in metal and glowing machinery linked to the slowly revolving dial in his chest plate.

“You know, I don’t mind if you take that off,” said Diamond Tiara.

“At these temperatures? I could die.”

“You did it with Silver Spoon.”

Pick groaned loudly. “You’re not going to let me forget that, are you? I was eleven. ELEVEN.”

“How do your people even reproduce if you have to wear those suits all the time?”

“Carefully.” Pick paused. “Wait…are you saying you want to…you realize I just ate, right? I don’t really feel like losing my dinner- -”

He squeaked as Diamond Tiara pushed him toward the edge of the bed and clung to her hoof. “No, wait! I was joking!”

“You better have been,” snapped Diamond Tiara. “There are literally lines of colts who would give every cent they own to be where you are right now. I’m the hottest pony you’ll ever know!”

“But I know Silver Spoon,” noted Pick. “Also, are you implying that you would accept money to- -”

Pick braced himself, expecting to be fully thrown out of the bed and have to sleep on the floor again, but Diamond Tiara just sighed.

“Diamond,” she said, “do you love me?”

Pick cringed. “You know I don’t feel comfortable answering that question.”

“Not the right answer. Try again.”

“I’m trying to be honest,” said Pick, somewhat annoyed. “You and Silver Spoon are the first ponies I met who were not members of my family. You’re both my best friends. And, well, my only friends. I love you both, I guess.”

“So you’re saying you really do like her better?”

“She is more attractive than you are. But no. I love her, but differently. She’s like a sister to me, except not arrogant, conniving, political, cruel and porkheaded like my real sister. Unfortunately, as a morlock, I am predestined to appreciate those properties. Hence why, although you resemble a pork, I am actually far more attracted to you.”

Diamond Tiara turned to him, her hair billowing on the pillow around her. “You are really terrible at talking, aren’t you?”

“And yet we’re in the same bed.”

“Only because the heater is broken. You’re just here for warmth. And if I feel a hoof go anywhere below the waist, I will beat you so hard your own mother won’t even be able to tolerate your ugliness. Although I don’t even know how she already does.”

“Aww,” said Pick, pulling himself closer to Diamond Tiara. “Your threats of violence make me feel so secure. Which is probably a psychological issue on my part.”

Diamond Tiara reached out and put her foreleg around Pick, pulling him up next to her. He put his head on her chest. He really did feel warm, but the real reason he was there was because Diamond Tiara could not bear the thought of being alone. She knew that there was nothing in the shadows of her old house, but she was not so sure about her mind.

“Would you still feel the same way about me if…if something were wrong with me?”

“Other than your unfortunate color scheme?” Pick looked up at her, and seemed to realize that Diamond Tiara was being serious. “You’re hearing the voices again, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” lied Diamond Tiara. “They’re getting pretty bad now.”

“What are they saying?”

“I don’t know. They’ve never been this bad outside of the desert. Diamond, I think it might be getting worse. A lot worse. And I think it’s going to keep getting worse. It might just be the stress of the Prom, but…if it’s not…I’ll understand if you don’t want to stay.”

“You’ve heard them as long as I have known you. And you are far from the first. You’re not insane, Diamond. Even we do not understand the plants well, but they chose you.”

“But what if it’s not the plants? What if it’s me? What if I’m broken?”

“If something is broken, we fix it. And if it cannot be fixed, we do not part with it easily. That is the way of the technetium miner. I would sooner be fed to the cactuses than to leave you. And I know Silver feels the same way.”

“If only she did…”

“She does. Frankly, I’m actually surprised that you didn’t end up with her.”

“Don’t be gross.” Diamond Tiara shoved Pick’s shoulder playfully. He smiled. It was not a pleasant sight, but Diamond Tiara smiled too. That day had gone badly, but now she felt just a little bit better.

From the quiet peace of the void arose the voices. Diamond Tiara tried to resist, to stay in whatever comfortable nothingness she found herself in, but the voices only became more insistent in their whispering. They were nearly deafening, and yet so close to silence that every word was only just unrecognizable both in origin and in content.

Then her eyes opened. She found herself standing in a river. It ran over her hooves, splashing in absolute silence over the slippery stones below. Even without sound, Diamond Tiara suddenly felt panicked. There was too much water, and she was on the verge of being swept away. She looked hurriedly downstream, but could not see where it went apart from cutting between two banks of ashen, leafless trees. Diamond Tiara knew that if she were to slip and fall, the river would take her away, and there would be no return.

She turned back to where she had been looking, trying to find a way to the shore- -and immediately found the tip of her nose inches from a gray, ghostly face. Diamond Tiara cried out and stepped back, nearly slipping into the rapids, only to nearly bump into another. They were surrounding her now, all speaking silently, all standing in the water with no apparent fear of the current. The water below them, in fact, seemed to be oddly calm- -save for drip of dark fluid from the ponies’ bodies into the river below.

“What do you want?” demanded Diamond Tiara. “I gave you what you wanted! I gave you the water! What do you want from me now?!”

As if in response, the air seemed to hum and buzz. The noise quickly resolved into a female voice, one that Diamond Tiara had not heard in its entirety for over six years.

“Four,” it said, as though that had some meaning.

That voice was familiar, but for some reason, Diamond Tiara panicked. She tried to run, and the river vanished from below her. Now, instead, she was moving sluggishly through a strange and dark hallway. Even running her fastest, she was still not able to move more than the speed of a slow walk. The gray, faceless ponies marched in the opposite direction of Diamond Tiara, progressing toward the thing that she was fleeing from.

Ahead, Diamond Tiara saw a door. She tried to run toward it, but it seemed to only grow farther away.

“No!” she cried. “I have to- -I have to get out!”

She felt her hoof fall on the metal handle, and she flung it open. Almost immediately she spilled into Ponyville- -and cried out, grabbing back onto the door when she saw the yawning black void below her.

There were no ponies, and the buildings of the town seemed to be rotting as though they had suddenly become ancient- -the few buildings that remained, anyway. Most of the town was filled with a ponderous pit, a whole of pure blackness that twisted and roared with an invisible and deafening tempest.

The edges of the town began to crumble and the graying, abandoned buildings collapsed into the void. Diamond Tiara watched as the world she was supposed to know and love collapsed into this gaping mouth, and she saw the edge slowly closing in on her own door.

“There are only four,” said the female voice. “Remember. Remember!”

“I don’t understand!” cried Diamond Tiara.

She looked back into the pit, and suddenly saw something move. Logicall, she understood that the pit was meant to consume. That was what it did; things fell in, and she knew whatever went would not return. But now something did.

A pair of appendages grasped the sides of Diamond Tiara’s face. She could neither scream nor escape as she stared into a pair of glossy red eyes.

Diamond Tiara burst awake. She would have jumped up, but two pairs of hooves tightened around her in response to her sudden motion. Looking down, Diamond Tiara saw Pick clinging to her side, just where she had left him. On her right, however, Silver Spoon grimaced slightly before smiling against Diamond Tiara’s soft coat. It was actually not unusual for Diamond Tiara to wake up with Silver Spoon in her bed, especially when Silver Spoon was afraid. Although she was the type of pony who somehow looked adorable and perfect in her sleep- -unlike Diamond Tiara herself, who looked like a lethargic mess- -but the wet fur around her eyes indicated that she had been crying in her sleep again.

`For a moment, Diamond Tiara just lay in her bed embraced by her coltfriend and her best friend. They may not have known it, but they were exactly what she needed. If she had woken up alone again, she probably would have awoke screaming.

The sun was just barely rising, and the room was filling with dim gray autumn light. Diamond Tiara was not sure what made the light gray like that, but she did not like it or the cold it always seemed to bring. Despite this, she knew that there was no way she would be able to go back to sleep. So, as gently as possible, she extricated herself from her friends.

Neither of them awoke as she stepped out of bed, but they did react to her departure by immediately moving closer together and embracing each other in her absence. That made Diamond Tiara unduly angry. She realized that they were asleep and could not control themselves, but they just looked so adorable and happy together that she wanted to throw cold water on them. Especially Pick, for daring to touch Silver Spoon when she was being so cute.

For a moment, she contemplated just pushing them off the bed, but decided against it. She was a jerk, but she just could not manage to summon that level of vindictiveness this early in the morning. Instead, she quietly crossed the cold wooden floor. She took a robe from the closet and tied it around herself with her teeth, and then approached one of the room’s windows. She picked up a watering can that sat on the floor beside it in her teeth and sprinkled the water on a bulbous, swollen potted cactus.

The cactus squirmed and revolved slowly as it absorbed the water, and Diamond Tiara heard it whisper its thanks. Diamond Tiara sighed and leaned back, looking out at the start of a chilly overcast day. Nopony was out this early in the morning, save Pound Cake on his paper rout delivering the latest copies of the Foal-Free Press along with out-of-town papers to those who ordered them.

Then Diamond Tiara nearly fainted. Standing at the far edge of the one of the buildings in the shadow of its alley was a unicorn, staring up at her, watching. She almost screamed and tried to wake Pick and Silver Spoon- -until the unicorn jumped out and revealed herself to none other than Lyra Heartstrings, once again sneaking away from Bon Bon’s house in the wee hours of the morning.

Diamond Tiara breathed a long sigh of relief, but realized that she did not at all feel relieved. Her hooves were shaking, and her body felt far colder than it should have. Worse, she could still not shake the feeling that she was being watched. She was not sure by what, or from where, but something was out there.