Venus Transcendent

It's been a long time coming for me to continue this story, and now I think is the best time. Enjoy the chapter.

Scootaloo wandered down a hallway in Melody's castle, unable to remember when it was. There weren't any clocks on the walls and she couldn't find a window to tell if it was day or night. Time didn't pass right here in Seamus' memories. Things were strange, ponies moved at the same speed as they naturally did, but everything else was fixed in place. She'd tried multiple times to get a pony to notice her by pushing something over, but what she found was that anything that wasn't a living breathing organism didn't have the ability to move an inch. The same place over and over, for what felt like the same time, just happening many different ways.

Overall, the filly was a ghost to the inhabitants of the castle. She tried pushing them, shoving them, she even tried stabbing them with her dagger, but nothing had worked. The only thing that registered to the ponies was the thing happening in the memory. By now the flightless pegasus knew every pace of the castle, every nook, every cranny and niche. Every room and hallway. Or so she thought. But now, after looking at nearly every inch of the fortress, she decided that she'd get down to business. She knew that she wanted to go someplace that Seamus couldn't. Since in the memory he was confined to his room, she would be his eyes and ears to whatever was happening at that moment on that day.

Nonchalantly kicking aside a piece of paper, Scootaloo made her way to the place that she'd wanted to see but was admittedly too afraid to. Far in the Northern wing of the castle, the turret suite directly parallel to her royal friend's, was Lady Melody Firenze' Amore's chambers. The filly couldn't get over how that part of the castle felt. It made her skin crawl and itch, and the pit of her stomach felt like it was being lit on fire. Every horror movie she'd ever watched was nothing compared to his awful place, with its blue and black pallet and dim lighting, the suits of armor and the torches that never flickered. The haunting blue flames that never went out. All of them made the filly want to turn tail and run.

But Scootaloo had more guts than any other pony in her town, and she wouldn't hesitate now. Not with her only friend counting on her. Her mind set on her self-assigned mission, she opened the door to Melody's suit. Just then did she realize what time it was. It was late, the moon was high in the sky and the torches on the wall were the only source of light on the narrow, winding staircase. Admittedly, stairs are a pain. No matter where you're from, excessive amounts of stairs are always frustrating. And these were a long, long set of steps. So long in fact that the physically fit filly had to stop twice on her way to the top. After finally clawing her way to the top step, Scootaloo opened the trapdoor to the corrupt ruler's suite.

A massive, three-hundred and sixty degree open room met the young filly's eyes, floors of marble on one end of the room , then dark blue carpet on the other, all leading up to a massive bed that housed a sleeping mare that could only be one pony. Melody, in all her power, lay there, dozing for a little while as Scootaloo began to pry into her things. Scootaloo wanted to get into all of her things, but then she remembered her unfortunate disposition of not being able to touch anything. She cursed under her breathe, words that were unknown to other filly's her age and words that even grown ponies would cringe towards.

The intrusive filly decided that sure, she couldn't open cupboards or drawers, but she could do something that rendered that unnecessary. Approaching the desk of the ruler, she eyed the locked redwood drawers. She then proceeded to reach her hoof through the hardwood and fish around for anything that she could actually grab. Fortunately, somepony in the memory touched the papers in the file recently, rendering them movable. Scootaloo scooped up the paper and began to read. It was a report from the guards on...

Scootaloo threw the medical records back into the desk in disgust. A record of ponies born, ponies culled at birth, those neutered, those submitted into slavery, those burnt for 'treason', and many other statistics made her want to tear up the paper and burn it. But she was here to fix things, not rage at how unfair the past was. Looking for other things, she came across many such records, including personal transaction receipts from a shady doctor dealing in young colts. Scootaloo was about to throw the file away, dismissing it as more things that she'd have to forget, when a name came up that interested her. Seamus' name was on the paper.

Reading farther in, she saw that originally Seamus had lived on a tiny island off the Northern Counties, but when Melody had them forcibly grafted the islands into her territory she'd found that crime was abundant there. Of course, the leader took her time to indulge by buying multiple slaves from the place before finally clearing up the organized crime. She found that the alicorn wasn't even a legitimate birth, as he had no birth records, no parents, nothing. All that was said on it was that he'd been sold to the tyrant when he was roughly one year old. By ponies standards that was coming up on adolescence.

Fascinated, Scootaloo read into it further. After a bit of skimming she came across some rather intrusive facts about the colt's body and more than a few things recorded that she'd rather just not read. Skipping over that portion she found that the whole reason Melody had kept his was as a trophy pet, something that she could bring with her around to other kingdoms and show off as a display of wealth and power. It didn't say much after that, but a neatly scribbled note at the bottom of the paper caught the filly's eye.

'Bottom drawer; left'

Figuring it must be a continuation of the already extensively lengthy file, the filly reached into the location designated and found another file, just as thick if not slightly more so. Except this one didn't have the alicorn’s name on it, but another familiar name that held just as much of a place in Scootaloo’s list of ponies to know about. Sky, or, as the filed indicated his real name, Indigo Sunset, was the subject of this near encyclopedia of information. The filly rolled her eyes at his real name; no wonder the colt preferred the name Sky. She'd heard Seamus once call him Sunset but she knew that was a pet name between them, and that she wasn't to use it. Moving on, she started into the pegasus' past.

The first sentence on the page set the mood for the past of the colt. 'Branded by his mother at the age of two and a half-' Scootaloo stopped reading, thoroughly afraid of what she was going to find. Just the first few words made her reconsider this. This was an invasion of privacy, and desecration of Sky's good name. But, unable to control herself, she read on. The more she read, the worse it got.

'- he was later on that year disowned by his family and kicked out into the streets. Not even a week later did he find himself in the hands of criminals who used him for everything from testing out new drugs to being their personal toy. Luckily he was taken back into the hands of the law and placed in an orphanage where he stayed for another year. The colt then proceeded to run away into the night, convinced that he'd make it out of country where he could be taken in by a country less stricken by poverty. Inadvertently, he ran right into the Northern counties where he was taken in by but another orphanage that later had him 'donated' to Lady Melody's daughter as a gift.

He was received at the exact weight of twenty-nine pounds and seven ounces, spells to halt aging already in place and already effectively neutered by means of cauterizing the flesh around his reproductive organs. Mane length, ten inches long. Height, four feet. Eye color, bright blue. Coat, pale blue. Mane, silver-aquamarine. Hooves, intact. Tail, four inches long. Sex: Male. Genital len-'

Scootaloo cut off there. The rest was either things she didn't want to know or things she already knew. Throwing aside the file, she decided she'd seen enough. Making sure to hurry, she galloped downstairs. She couldn't wait to tell Seamus all the things that she'd found out. But not a moment later did she trip and start to do flips, headlong down flight after flight of stairs, feeling things crack and snap as she just kept going until she came to rest at the landing over four-hundred feet below. The filly opened her eyes to see that, shockingly, she wasn't hurt. Then, with a sudden epiphany, she laughed. This was a memory, one that she wasn't a part of. You can't hurt a pony in a dream.

But just as soon as she started to walk out of the tower did the door open and a pony she'd never seen before walk in. He was gaunt, and his cheekbones jutted out of his muzzle. He looked emaciated and angry, charging towards the brick wall in front of him with no plans on stopping. He moved his hoof from under his cloak and began tapping the bricks in order, muttering an incantation to himself. Scootaloo leaned close to him, but not too close, just enough to hear what he was saying and memorize which bricks he was tapping. The wall folded open, and, as if everything was normal, the red-eyed pegasus strode through.

Scootaloo almost didn't catch what happened next, but just as suddenly as he appeared, the strange pony disappeared. Only after the wall was nearly closed did she see that there was a hole in the floor there. She had to make a decision, fast. Follow this strange pony into this strange place and hopefully she wouldn't find anything she couldn't un-see, or play things safe and head back to her friend. Forever the risk taker, she dove through the gap in the wall just as it closed, thinking of what adventure might await her down in the bowels of the earth.

Leave a comment or I won't write another chapter until Easter.