The Tale of Grant Half-Horn

This form is weak, sister.

Oh I’m sorry, were you expecting a beacon of power like the other Gods created?  I would have thought so long in this void would have hardened your naiveté.

The man is of an inferior stock, sister, inferior upbringing, and inferior knowledge.  This was not what I had hoped.

Damn your hope and damn your expectations!  We are lucky to even have a pawn on the board whilst others have bishops, rooks, and knights.  If a Cloven he must be, then so be it, there are worse things to carry our legacy.

Quiet, both of you.  It is true this one we’ve pulled through is not powerful enough to change the world quickly, but that was never our way.  Power must be gathered before it is expended, you both should have realized that when we pulled him through.  He carries the vial yet, and until he falls, there will be no need for a replacement.  This conversation is over.

Of course, mother.

As you wish, mother.

This is the story of how I grew to hate 4-H Fairs.

Okay, that’s not the entirety of the story, but it’s a detail…a small detail. I’m petty.

I’m also Grant, hello, now that we’ve got introductions out of the way, allow me to pay for wasting your time with the lovely little tale of my time in this candy-coated hell.

It’s a tale of adventure, suspense, camaraderie, magic, and tragedy.  Believe me, the amount of that last one can NOT be overstated.

It was a lovely summer’s evening in the idyllic little scrap of land called Crawford County, Indiana.  The 4-H Fairgrounds across from the High School were alive and kicking with the crowds of people, rickety rides that should’ve been dismantled one or two decades ago, stalls selling everything from cupie dolls to sugar-coated fried chocolate (I’m exaggerating of course, but I wouldn’t put it past us), and a small dirt arena that would hold everything from the amateur rodeo, to the demolition derby, to the ‘Ms. Crawford County’ pageant in the coming weeks.

As for me, I was hanging around the outskirts, nibbling on a funnel cake and trying to calculate the exact force and angle a dart would need to be thrown to pop one of the balloons at a game stall that had been vexing me the entire night (so far I had to down to ‘Really really hard’ and ‘The Best Angle’).  That’s when I saw what would eventually become the source of my grief for a very long time.

It was a tent, black with a pattern of red lines, the only hint to its purpose was a small wooden sign marked ‘Fortune Teller, $5’ stuck haphazardly in the ground next to it.  This brought a frown to my face, backwards as this county was, it was in equal parts god fearing and lord knew the presence of an Ouija board anywhere within someone’s eyeshot was going to lead to nothing but dirty looks and muttered curses.  Still, with everyone giving the thing a wide berth, no one would notice me slipping in for a peek, it’d certainly be a better than tangling with my arch nemesis, the rubber balloon, for the millionth time.

What awaited me inside was near darkness, save for a single black candle illuminating the inside, perched on the side of a table that dominated the center.  The woman on the other side of had a wide brimmed hat over a couple of long red pigtails that went down over her shoulders; she had a bone-thin figure covered by a black robe that I swore had denim overalls underneath.  I was beginning to think this whole affair was some kind of trap by the clergy when she looked up from her table and regarded me.  She had a typical country girl face that made me feel like the Wendy’s Girl and Pippy Longstockings had done the Fusion Dance before I walked in there.

“Ah, hello dearie, what can the wondrous Madam Samantha do for you?” She said in a quivery voice that still made me question whether or not she was older than me.

I shrugged and took a seat opposite of her, if Pastor Frank was going to scare anyone straight, might as well be me.

“Yeah, I’m looking to get my fortune told and unless I’ve gone insane, the sign outside said you’re the perfect person for the job,” I grinned, leaning back a bit.

“Oh but I am, dearie, I am!” The ‘witch’ smiled, good lord she WAS a hayseed, I could count her teeth on one hand, “I can find your one true love, I can read your palm, I can tell you your past, your present, your future all in a deck of cards!  All you could ever want told to you for a mere five dollars!”

I shrugged, if there was one thing the improv portion of my high school drama class had taught me, ruin the flow, ruin the fun.  I forked over the five dollars and told her, “Tarot me up.”

She began stacking, restacking, shuffling, re-shuffling, and whole bunch of other petty tricks with the deck, grinning at me as though she was expecting applause.  I rolled my eyes before allowing them to wander, examining the things on the table, there was the candle, a Ouija board off to the side, an obviously plastic human skull with a tacky raven perched atop it, and something that made me double take: a small yellow plastic pegasus doll with a mane of pink fibers smiling up at me from the table.

‘Fluttershy?’ I thought to myself in disbelief at the tiny model’s presence in the otherwise macabre setting, my mouth must have formed the word (a bad habit of mine), because the fortune teller laughed.

“Like it, huh?” Her voice dropped its mystique as her hands continued to needlessly shuffle the deck, without the fake gypsy accent, she had a voice like Harley Quinn after about three balloons’ worth of helium, along with the kind of tone a soccer mom would have, “My sister and I watch the show, we think the little horses are adorable!”

I gave a small chuckle, I was always one to reserve my ‘hnngh!’s for youtube comments and message boards, “Yeah, it is kinda sweet.”

“Have you seen the show, it’s the cutest thing!” She giggled, somehow her regular voice was more unsettling than her ‘acting’one.

“Eh, I babysit, the tykes usually have control of the remote, so yeah, I’ve seen an ep or two,” I lied, I had been introduced to the show early in my freshmen year of college about ten months before, since then I’d studiously watched the whole first season and followed the second, examining the memes, watching the animations, reading the fanfictions, I was a Brony and proud of it…online, where my crippling fear of awkward situations wouldn’t make me look like a doofus.

She giggled, then blinked, as if remembering her job, “Oh fiddlesticks! I mean, BEHOLD YOUR FORTUNE, YOUNG MAN!”

She flipped three cards on the table and pushed the deck to the side, closing her eyes and humming.

“Young man, the cards have foretold all, for the cards know all…” She said ponderously, “First, THE PAST!”

She flipped the first card, depicting a smiling young man, his portrait ringed with black swords.

“Aha!” She said triumphantly, “The Page of Swords!  Yours is the beginners path towards seeking knowledge…you are an academic?”

I blinked, “Kind of, I just finished up my first year of college.”

Her eyes twinkled, “Ah ha ha ha, the cards know all, as I have said!  Now…THE PRESENT!”

She flipped the middle card, and it wasn’t a pretty sight, a thirteen showed on each corner of the card and the center depicted the Grim Reaper, his skeletal form raising a scythe.

The witch clicked her tongue, “Oh my…Death!”

She looked at me to add to the drama, fluttering her eyes slightly, “My boy, you are not long for a great change, a change that will redefine who you are and what you stand for!”

I gulped slightly, this whole thing was taking a turn for the worse, of course I’d known from one of my extensive Wikipedia binges that Death didn’t mean what it said, but still…change?  I liked things as they were, sure my family could be a tad Puritan every now and then, but they were good people, I didn’t need a change, I didn’t WANT a change.  It was all bullshit anyway, right?

“Finally…THE FUTURE!” She crowed, as though expecting a ‘dun dun duh!’ to follow her words, she flipped the final card to reveal…

Another young man, standing on a cliff, one foot on solid ground, the other out in the air, a small dog at his heels, his face looked serene.

The fortune teller chuckled, then giggled, then outright laughed, “Oh my my my, we ARE special indeed!  The Fool foretells that you will be as like a child, innocent, a stranger in a strange land.  It may be a portent of a great journey you must take, safeguarded by powers beyond your reckoning…heh…heh heh…YOU!”

She pointed a finger at me, her face was changing, growing near-transparent as she stared at me with her grotesque near-fanglike teeth.

“You are who we have been searching for!  You will be our chosen!”

“I…what?!” My eyes were wide, I stood, trying to back away, but something kept me standing there, looking at the table.

The witch continued to laugh with maddened glee, the eye sockets of the skull began to glow, the raven atop it sprang to life and cawed loudly along with its master’s shrieking sound, as a now skeletal hand flipped another card from the deck.  My eyes were drawn to it, and I saw that it depicted a mighty tower rising forth from a desert, casting a shadow as the sun set behind it.  My body began to be pulled forward, it felt as though my entire being was grains of sand being sucked up by a vacuum, the tower grew closer and closer, the laughing was farther and farther away.

I felt…cold.

And then I felt nothing at all.

The floor was cold on my skin, the texture and feel of it made it clear to be some form of stone.  My eyes didn’t want to open, aided by a large part of my brain that expected to see an operating table and my open rib cage when they did.  I overcame that fear and rolled onto my stomach slowly, getting to my feet, nothing fell out so whatever the hell had just happened certainly wasn’t organ theft…yet, at least.  I pushed against the hard ground and stood unsteadily, there was something up with my legs, were they supposed to bend the same direction as my arms?  Speaking of which, I felt a chill.  With one final stern effort I forced my eyes open and…

“What…the…shit?”

I rubbed my eyes and examined the sight that so gamely met them.  I was in a circular room of extremely tarnished and cracked sandstone, ringed by columns that held up a roof that looked like it was about to collapse at any moment.  There was a raised dais in the middle, holding something I couldn’t quite make out on a pedestal.  I made a mental note to examine it after I got a good idea of my surroundings, specifically what was on the other side of the column I found myself braced against.  I turned and found myself staring at a vast expanse of desert far as the eye could see, the likes of which I’d only seen on the discovery channel (specifically the ‘How the fuck did I survive being here five minutes?’ shows).  There was a small landing jutting from the side of what was now quite clearly a tower, more than likely the same from that card, which extended downwards in a staircase that (with all hope) went down to the dunes below.

I turned away from the gap and fell back against my column, letting out a breath and running my hand through my hair and felt a couple of rigid bumps from my mop of hair.  I blinked and ran my hand up and down the strange new outcroppings, they felt almost like…horns.  I took a step forward and was given pause at the audible clop that sounded against the ground, making my eyes snap open further, I looked down and found myself taken aback at what I saw.

My jeans and underwear were in tatters, ripped apart by a set of massive haunches covered in a coarse dark brown hair which bent forwards before thinning down to a set of cloven hooves.  The fur ended at my body which retained a hairless humanoid appearance (and had likewise ripped Degeneration X t-shirt right down the middle, ironically in a Hoganesque manner) but had changed to a sandy brown color that continued upwards until it…well I couldn’t maneuver my head well enough to see it.  I needed a mirror, stat.

Taking a few shaky steps on my newfound legs, I began making my way towards the raised centerpiece of the room, trying to balance on feet that held just enough surface area to keep me vertical.  As I climbed the steps to the center of the dais I found the top was ringed with a pool of water.  Seizing my chance, I lurched forward to examine my features and…wow.  I was a goat, no other way to describe it, a muzzle full of flat teeth extended from my face covered in fur the same color as my upper body, my eyes…hoo boy, if you’ve never seen a goat or sheep’s pupils before, you will have some nightmares.  I did indeed have horns, puny little things that poked out of a moppy dirty mane atop my head, I scratched at their bases absently, grimacing at just what had occurred to me.  Then a further realization hit me with the force of my semi.

“Why do I look like someone drew me?!” I said in a voice that I swear sounded like Phil from Hercules had a switched a few of his vocal chords with mine.  My colors were bright and it looked as though my entire being was encapsulated in a black outline.  Quite frankly I was getting Duck Amuck flashbacks as I looked around nervously for a pencil or paintbrush to work some Lovecraftian magic on me.  A few minutes of silence told me my fears were unfounded and my –I believe ‘fugly’ is the proper word- appearance was merely another feature of the world.  Resolved, I continued my climb, curious as to what awaited on the pedestal at the top.

There was a small length of stone bridging the gap between top and the last step before the reflecting pool, a chunk was taken out of the middle, but I found it easily crossable even with my inexperience in hooved walking.  As I made my way to pedestal, its occupant revealed itself as a vial of glass topped and bottomed with a sort of engraved jade, the inside filled with a purplish pink liquid that sloshed and flowed without any sign of stopping within it.

“Well, that’s new,” I grimaced and reached out for it, my hand grasping around the vial and bringing it up to my face to examine it further, “Now just what is this supposed to be?”

My answer came in the form of a small eyeball materializing out of the goo and regarding me curiously.  I reacted with a surprised yelp and a stumble back that stopped just short of sending me splashing into the shallow pool.  The vial went flying out of my hand and came to a rolling stop at the base of the pedestal, I managed to recover myself take a step forward, tentatively picking up the vial.  The eyeball swirled around inside before fixing its gaze on me again, nonplussed.

“Erm, sorry about that,” I said awkwardly, “Uh…hi?”

The eye blinked in acknowledgement, doing a quick lap around its container (prison?).

I grimaced putting on a friendly grin, “So you can understand me then, great.  You wouldn’t happen to have a mouth in there, would you?”

The eyeball shook from side to side, bobbing absently.

I sighed, “Of course not, there goes any chance of knowing what this tower’s supposed to be.”

I examined the vial closer, frowning as I inspected it, the eyeball following my every movement.  There was no discernible way to open it, and the jade top and bottom had engravings of…ponies?  Ponies being enveloped in a great flood, writhing in misery until some kind of pony…butterfly…hybrid thing stopped the flood.  I arched a fuzzy eyebrow and regarded the creature inside.

“You do that?” I asked.

The eye gave a noncommittal roll.  I backlogged the interrogation for now, due to the other glaringly strange detail about the carvings.

“Am I…in Equestria?” I asked aloud, looking out at the wasteland beyond, then down at my less than normal character design.

The eye, helpful as ever, bobbed up and down in confirmation.

“I don’t exactly remember THIS in the show,” I sat down, hooves in the water, the vial standing next to me, “But then again, a world isn’t just a country, hell, that’d just be impractical-whyamIinfuckingEquestria!?”

I stood, pacing around the reflecting pool scratching the base of my nubby little horns as I reviewed the facts.

“Ok, 4-H Fair, fortune teller lady that looked like a moron, actually accurate tarot reading, crazy Stephen King nonsense, tower in the middle of nowhere in a cartoon…I am not picking up a common thread here,” I groaned in frustration and sat back down beside my little companion.

Again my eye was caught by the vast desert beyond the tower’s columns, the sun had begun to set on the horizon, ushering what I would assume to be Luna’s night on the planet.  I sighed and stood up, looking over my tattered clothes and coming up with a plan.  If I was going to find answers to how I’d got in this mess, I’d have to traverse the desert, to traverse the desert, I’d need to have some form hydration.

I shrugged off the remnants of my DX tee and tore them into strips, laying them in the pool to let them soak up water.  Next I turned my attention to what remained of my jeans and underwear, frowning.  Further examination of my new lower body revealed that I wouldn’t exactly be needing either.

Well duh, this is a kid’s show. I thought to myself, You were expecting, what, an actual goat-badthoughtsgoaway!

I shook my head and discarded the jeans and underwear, the latter of which I pitched out of the tower completely, dehydration or no, I was NOT drinking water from my boxer shorts.  The jeans, however, they presented opportunity.  I wrapped them around my waist in a makeshift sort of belt/loincloth that I experimentally tucked one of my shirt strips into.  I grinned at my little invention and set about tucking the now drenched strips of cloth into my new belt.

I took a step towards where I’d seen the stairs before stopping and turning back to the vial, its occupant looking as pathetic as an eyeball floating in a container of purple pink goop could be.  I frowned, remembering the Blob meets Noah’s Ark imagery on the top and bottom of its prison, and yet, what if the little tube of demonic silly putty was important?  I bit my lip and knelt down next to it.

“Okay little guy, I got a proposition,” I began, drawing a look from the little creature, “It’s obvious from your prison you did some extremely bad things in the past, but I’m willing to believe you’ve learned your lesson considering how ancient this place looks, am I right?”

The thing bobbed up and down furiously, drawing a small smile to my face.

“Here’s the thing though, I can’t guarantee that I’m going to make it across that desert out there, and this-“ I indicated my shirt strips, “-Isn’t going to tide me over for an extended period of time, so odds are, if you DO come with me, you’ll be buried up to your glass in sand while you watch my body roast in the sun.  You willing to take a risk?”

The eyeball floated for a moment, before ‘nodding’ again. I grabbed the vial and tucked it into my new belt before walking towards the stairs.  Soon I’d descended them and made a few tentative steps across the still warm sands.  There was a whistling in the wind that caught my ear and made me turn, in time to see the ruined tower disappear in a swirl of sand, leaving no indication it had ever been there at all.

I chuckled and shook my head, frankly I hadn’t been expecting anything less.  I looked down at my new and only friend in my journey.

“Well buddy, there’s a saying where I come from, something along the lines of ‘The Journey of a Thousand Steps Begins with One’, what do you say to a little traveling music?”

The eyeball swirled around in its prison, I took it for a yes.  Soon my voice mingled with the whistle of the wind on the dunes and the far off cries of buzzards.

“Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, take one down, pass it around, ninenty-eight bottles of beer on the wall…”