This door was new, Mayor Mare was sure of it. She had worked in the Town Hall for years and she knew every in and out, nook and cranny, stairwell and storeroom from the top to the bottom. She made it her business to know where everything led, where all the records were stored, where all the filing and paperwork happened, and even where the janitor kept his mop and bucket. She knew them all and even kept a copy of the original blueprints for the building in her office so she could find things easier.
That was how she was certain this door was new.
It was an average door, but it was placed in between an empty bathroom and an empty storeroom they had yet to utilize for anything other than boxes they ‘might’ end up using for excess files. The door had no label on it, the placard on the side of it empty, and it had nothing to indicate what it was used for. The most confusing part of it all was that it was locked, though. Such a door that was unknown should have been open, waiting for somepony to make use of it for something, but this door was locked and shut tight, and wouldn’t open even with energetic jiggling.
Mayor Mare had even gone back to her office to look at the blueprints, and when she found the location where it should have been, there was nothing. In fact, it should have faced an empty stretch of road, but when she went outside to investigate, there was no indication that a room was even there. It was possible she was over or underestimating her measurements, but she doubted it. There should have been no room there, and there certainly shouldn’t be a door where there was no space. It was puzzling and confusing, and she intended to get to the bottom of this mystery.
Unfortunately, it would have to wait until after her appointments.
She put herself to work with a fervor she hadn’t felt since she began her work as mayor. She signed, stamped, dated, placated, disagreed, conferenced, mailed, and notarized throughout the day until her appointments were all cleared up and she had no time left to speak with a locksmith about the door. She grumbled as she passed by the closed locksmith’s building on her way home. Tomorrow would be different. She would certainly get a look at it then.
She wrote a note to her office asking someone to bring her a locksmith during daylight hours the next day, then promptly forgot about it the day after when she had appointments all throughout work. She even signed it and stamped it and sent it out in triplicate to ensure that a locksmith was called. He was brought in, but she had asked to speak to him and was busy, so he was sent home without any work getting done. The day after that was similarly frustrating, and she never had time to speak with him. She could have had another pony investigate it, but this door was mysterious and if she was perfectly honest, she wanted to be there when it was opened. Call her foalish, but it was one of the most exciting things that happened to her in recent years.
The next day was a holiday and the locksmith wasn’t going to come in, so Mayor Mare found herself sitting at home wondering what was behind the door when she remembered a box of old keys she had inherited from the previous mayors of Ponyville. It wasn’t a day she needed to be at work, but by Celestia, she was the mayor! She could go into the office if she wanted!
She marched back there and into her office, alone in the empty building save for an office budgie they all kept, courtesy of Fluttershy. It tweeted at her and she checked its food, satisfied somepony had stopped by to feed it, then turned back to the work at hoof: The keys.
She opened cabinet after cabinet, hunting down the box of quaint keys that had been used in the office over the decades. Many of them were for old doors that had passed into disrepair and had to be replaced. The keys were kept as a reminder of ponies long past and the work they had done to make Ponyville into the great town it was today. She pulled one of them out, smiling at it. It was an old bronze key that had been used for the front doors before they had been destroyed by Big Macintosh and a runaway wagon he had been too confident about pulling. It was a recent change, but like other mayors she had kept the key as a memento. Many of the keys had been labeled (by herself) after research had been conducted into what years they had been used and what they had been used for.
There was a key to a safe in the Town Hall and a key to nothing more than a bathroom. There was a key to an old desk that was still somewhere in the building but nopony knew exactly where. Maybe it was behind her door she had found, which is why they couldn’t find it? Mayor Mare sifted through the pile of keys, looking for any that were unlabeled, but none were. Instead, she dumped them all out and began looking through the labels, cursing her careful and detailed work. She looked at the labels until she found two that were labeled but had no purpose. Just labeled: Unknown.
Mayor Mare grinned triumphantly and pulled them out. She held them in her hooves and looked them over, trying to deduce if there was anything special about their shape or size. There didn’t seem to be, but one was made of silver and the other was made of bronze. If she had to guess, it was going to be the bronze key, but no matter what, she would find out soon enough.
The door was where she left it. She had half expected it to up and disappear before she could come back to it, but thankfully it had stayed put over these last few days. The hallway she was in was empty and devoid of mess or pony. The janitor had done his job and done it well, so the floor was squeaky-clean. Her hoofsteps echoed as she walked down the hall, stopping when she reached the door.
She tapped her chin as she looked at. It was unlike the other doors in the town hall, looking quite a few years older than the others and bearing a handle that was tarnished bronze instead of the carefully-polished brass of the others.
“Where do you come from, friend? You don’t belong, clearly, though I couldn’t say where you might belong instead. Are you magical in some way?” Mayor Mare asked. The door didn’t respond. She hadn’t really expected it to.
They bronze key glinted in the low light of the hall and Mayor Mare held it up to look at it. There was no writing on it anywhere, nor insignia of the smith who had made it. She reached out to put it in the keyhole. She almost inserted it when she had a thought: Magic wasn’t uncommon and this was undoubtedly a magic door. Opening it alone without knowing what was inside was a foolish stunt. To that end, she pulled the key away, bent down, and peered inside the keyhole.
Within the hole she could see nothing but darkness. A small breeze issued from it and played upon her eyelid, making her blink. She thought she saw movement, but in the darkness she couldn’t be sure.
“Hello?” she called into the keyhole.
There was still no response. Instead there was just silence, broken only by a small whistle from the budgie at the front.
She chewed on the end of the key, agonizing over her decision, then decided that if this door was magical, it had been in the Town Hall far longer than she had, so whomever put it there knew it couldn’t threaten the place…
…unless they were trying to threaten the place with it.
She pondered a moment longer before deciding that keeping the key would have been a foolish move if it had ever been opened, so without further deliberation she jammed the key into the lock and twisted.
It didn’t open.
She made a disgusted noise and took the other key and jammed it in, twisting with all her might.
That one also failed to open the door.
She yanked the key out and grunted in frustration. Both keys and still the mystery taunted her! She’d never find time for the locksmith at this rate! She shoved them back into her collar and stepped away from the door.
*Knock knock*
A rapping sound came from behind her. She turned around and looked at the door, then past it to the bathroom. She hurried back to her mystery door and peeked into the keyhole. There was still nothing she could see within, but the breeze had stopped. She didn’t know what that denoted, but she was feeling much less comfortable alone in the hallway than she had before.
*Knock knock*
The knocking came again, this time with her face right next to the door. She yelped and scrambled backward. She stood up straight and shuffled a distance down the hall, turning back time and again to look at the door until she was out of sight. She dashed back to her office, jammed the keys back where they had come from and slammed shut her desk, then left, not looking back at the building.
The next day when she came in to work, she was disheartened to see that the office budgie had died. It wasn’t injured, but it was lying dead in its cage when she and others had arrived, the janitor and a couple of other workers next to it.
“It was fed, I swear it was fed!” the janitor said.
“We believe you. It still has more than enough food and water, and I was the one who discovered it,” an office mare said.
“It was cold when you found it though, right? That means it was dead quite a while,” the other said.
“I came in yesterday for some extra work. I can confirm it was alive when I left, which was around two in the afternoon,” Mayor Mare said, interjecting.
“Oh, Mayor Mare. We’re not sure what killed it. It was just lying here dead when I arrived,” the first office mare said.
“Have you spoken to Fluttershy? She would probably know if there are no visible injuries,” Mayor Mare said.
“Not yet, I’ll do that, if you don’t mind me running off.”
“Not at all. We need to know if there’s something in the air. Birds are more sensitive than ponies, so we should probably get somepony in here to test that. I’ll let the office know.”
“Of course, Mayor. Good luck.”
“I’ll go get a mask and check around for anything unusual, Mayor,” the janitor said.
“Thank you,” she answered. “If you could let everypony know we’ll be working outside the office today, I would appreciate it. I don’t think it’s anything to be alarmed about just yet, but better safe than sorry.”
“Of course, Mayor.”
Mayor Mare watched the three ponies as they ran off and the entire office evacuated the building. She wanted to believe it was something as easy to understand as a strange gas, but she had the sneaking suspicion it had to do with that door and whatever was behind it.
She waited with the rest while a pony came to investigate. He had been a miner and was used to the lethal gases that could be encountered underground and might seep up from below, but he said he detected nothing. There had been no excavations nearby and all of the equipment in the building was in proper working order so there should have been nothing in the building to cause such a leak, from either equipment or from the ground itself.
Despite reassurances, Mayor Mare encouraged everypony to only go inside and grab the essentials for the day and do what work they could from home just to be safe. She promised to personally assure them it was safe upon the morrow. They all took what they needed and left, leaving Mayor Mare and the miner alone at the office.
“I have your assurance that there is nothing poisonous in the air?” she asked.
“I been workin’ caves m’ whole life ma’am. There ain’t nothin’ in there that’ll kill a pony fer breathin’ it.” He hocked and she glared at him. He swallowed whatever he was bringing up and grinned an old pony’s toothless grin, trying to look innocent.
“Thank you, then. As you make your way home, could I trouble you to kindly stop by Twilight Sparkle’s library and tell her I’ll be coming by to visit her tomorrow?”
“Y’cain’t do it yerself?”
“I’m not yet going to be making my way home. I have business to attend to.”
“Well, I wouldn’t wanna be in this spooky old place alone all night. Don’t y’be stayin’ up too late now, y’hear?”
“Thank you. You have a good night, sir.”
“Y’too, ma’am.” He walked off, whistling a jaunty tune to himself as he went. The song echoed off the empty walls of the Town Hall while Mayor Mare watched him go. When the door shut, she turned and marched off down the halls to her mystery door.
She approached the hallway leading down to her favorite private bathroom and the ominous door from before. It was still sitting there, quiet as could be and shut tight in the darkness. She approached it carefully, half expecting it to jump out at her or make more noise, but it was silent. There was no knock, no rattle, no anything. Just her. She went up to the door, looked it up and down, then tried the handle.
It opened.
She gasped and jumped backward as if burned. The door swung open, pushed from behind by a cool breeze that swirled around it and brushed over her fur with a delicate touch. She shivered despite it not being cold and waited, sliding slowly along the wall back toward the front of the office. It slowly pushed itself open until she could see inside, revealing the mysterious secrets within.
An open field lay before her through the door, with long, waving grasses as far as the eye could see in the twilight of wherever this location was. Rolling hills could be seen in the distance to either side, and a clear black sky, twinkling with swaths of bright stars filled the sky above. But all of this was not the most unusual part of what she saw. There, on the other side of a medium stretch of this pastoral view stood another door, similar to the one she stood behind, and similarly open to the inside of a building.
There was no pony on the other side of that far door, thankfully. Mayor Mare didn’t know if her poor heart could have handled seeing somepony staring back at her. She was having difficulty processing what she was looking at to begin with, so a pony would have sent her over the edge in panic. It was certainly not Ponyville she was looking at and she could see nopony around, so that raised the question: Who had knocked?
She crept closer to the door and poked her head inside, getting a better look at the landscape around her. She kept a hoof pressed against the doorframe to block the door from trying to close around her neck. If it was going to try to swing shut, she was ready to block it and pull back. Magic was unusual and alien to her, but she wasn’t unfamiliar with it. This was clearly magic and magic was fickle, that much she knew. She would really need to bring in Twilight Sparkle for this one. If a protégé of the princess herself was good for anything, it would be matters of magic.
Out of everything, the door on the other side was the real problem. An alien landscape was harmless enough depending on what lived in it, but that doorway indicated that somepony else, harmless or otherwise, knew about this door and was unafraid to open it. The room on the other side appeared to have a rug and fine wooden walls which meant it was the house of somepony who was well-to-do. They weren’t poor, that she was sure of, judging from how clean it all was, and that rug was quite fine. They were either a scholar or a pony of business.
Mayor Mare pulled her head back and shut the door. It clicked shut without any effort and she tested the handle. It opened easily, clicking open and shut without effort. That meant that somepony had also managed to figure out the trick, and it wasn’t her. It was somepony from the other side, and likely the one who kept it open from his door. That pony knew the trick, had the key, or had the magic to create all this, and that was worrisome. They had access to the Town Hall of Ponyville if they were from Equestria, and that alone was bad enough. Documents and secrets were kept here, and they had just been compromised magically. Mayor Mare had a big problem on her hooves.
She looked around the building for something to block the door with and ended up jamming a chair under the handle. She jiggled it several times trying to make sure it was solid, but she shook her head when it became apparent it wasn’t going to be much of a prevention if anypony behind the door truly wanted in. She would have to figure something permanent out and soon, before this breach in security got any bigger. She moved toward the front door of the building, eyes swiveling left and right. When she arrived she pulled at the latch only to find that it didn’t open!
“What in Equestria?” she said as she yanked at the handle, shaking the door in its frame. When she stopped and kicked it, she could hear a sound coming from further back in the building, as of a door shaking in its hinges.
The door shook once more as she rattled it, trying to get it to open, and half a second later the sound came from further back in the building, down the hall she knew housed the mystery door that had dominated her attentions for the past days. She let go and walked back into the building until she could see the hall that held her mystery door, if not the door itself.
Hesitantly, Mayor Mare stuck her head out further, trying to get the door within eyesight. It wasn’t possible from her current position, as the angle would require her to get further out into the room among the desks before she could see down it. At this point, with the noises and the locked front door, she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to, but whatever was causing it probably wasn’t going to wait for her.
One of whomever or whatever had come through the strange door had caused the poor budgie’s death and was probably still hiding out in the office. Nopony had come in except to pull files and check for gases, and so there were plenty of places to hide whilst the miner had looked for the source of some strange, unseen threat. Now she knew it hadn’t been a gas at all. She didn’t know how the pony had decided to kill the bird, likely snapped its neck when it hadn’t shut up. Celestia knows she’d entertained the thought herself sometimes. Why it had remained inside the building once it was done was anypony’s guess, though. She supposed it had a mission of some kind and it wasn’t quite done with her and the building yet.
Mayor Mare pricked her ears and twisted them about, listening for anything unusual, refusing to move until she was sure there wasn’t going to be any sound. When no sounds came from elsewhere she crept forward across the wooden floor, hooves clacking louder than they ever had before as she moved. She stopped in the middle of movement and listened for anypony else or even any shifting or scuffing of hooves. When she heard nothing, she kept going until she could see down the long hall to the door in its place on the wall.
The chair was still in place, meaning that the pony that was inside the building either wasn’t aware of the fact she had placed it there, which was small comfort, or the pony wasn’t a pony at all and was unable to move it for some reason. She didn’t know which, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Either the entity had been following her and didn’t care, or it was hiding somewhere waiting for her to make a mistake, such as exposing herself in a bid for the door. Mayor Mare wasn’t sure which it was, but she couldn’t stay in here hiding all night. Whatever it was had her at a disadvantage, and her assumption was that the blockage she had placed on this door had blocked her front door as well, the two having been magically connected.
Magic was unusual and confusing, but it followed very specific rules, like laws, and if you were clever you could understand them, even if you couldn’t explain them. She looked around, eyes barely picking up anything in the gloom, then tip-hoofed her way out of her hiding place, skirted along the wall, and headed for the blocked door.
When she got to it she looked behind her down the path she’d taken. She saw nothing, but she had the impression of being watched nonetheless. She was nothing if not meticulous in her work, so she was sure to check the roof for a pegasus floating above her, but there was nothing above. She double-checked once more, looking left, then right, then up, and down again, and then pulled the chair out from under the handle of the door. When it was out of place, she stepped backward, watching it and waiting.
She held her breath and waited. She wasn’t certain for what, but she had imagined it bursting open and spilling fire and ice into the Town Hall, burning it to the ground in a swath of flame, or maybe a swarm of twittermites or parasprites, consuming everything in their path. Neither of those came out, but the door clicked open once again. It swung a few inches and stopped.
Mayor Mare watched it again and waited. She wanted to turn her back and run for the front, but then she would be leaving this door open for whatever was inside to come through, and that was irresponsible. She needed to see it shut while she had the chance. Twilight was coming upon the morning, and they could solve it permanently then, but she had to hold the line until that time came.
Hold the line. She chuckled. Like it was some kind of battle. It wasn’t, but she didn’t want it to become one. It was her responsibility as mayor to be sure this problem was taken care of, so with careful steps and pricked ears she inched forward toward the door, then reached out to grab it and swing it open. She peered through the door into what was on the other side and was unsurprised to see that it was the same barren expanse of prairie as before with a door sitting some distance away. She was glad to see that the door still existed, but in that same moment she also felt dismayed upon seeing that it was open, but now dark inside.
She kept her hoof in the door’s path just in case, but she could see that the opposing doorway opened into a now dark room. She couldn’t make out much within it, but it didn’t look nearly as tidy as it had when she had first seen it. There looked to be objects strewn about on the floor inside, and a rumpled thing that might have been carpet or it might have been an article of clothing. She pricked her ears and listened, but she couldn’t hear anything, despite clearly seeing a bit of wind brushing through the grass, then tickling through her mane.
She couldn’t see anypony about, despite having heard knocking and having the door rattle. Whoever set it up might have connected the door to the front door of the office somehow, so it might have been her own movements causing the door to move, but somepony had killed the budgie and she wasn’t going to be so foolish as to hope they had left after killing it so heartlessly. It was here for more than that, she was sure. It had a purpose.
Mayor Mare pulled her head back through and swung the door experimentally. She had half expected somepony to come push her through into the grasslands. The fact that they hadn’t meant they weren’t here for her, they were likely here for the door. She took a glance around the hall but saw nothing. There was no movement inside the building beyond her own, and no movement through the door. She wasn’t sure what the purpose of it was beyond having the door here if there was indeed a pony, so she opened it wide, moved away from it to the other side of the hall and waited, pressing her back up against the wall for protection and glancing left, right, up above and straight ahead through the door. If somepony was going to make their move, she would be as protected as she could be until help could come.
Staring at a bunch of unchanging surfaces was dull work, but Mayor Mare was familiar with such activities. She made it automatic, like filing or signing documents, and left her mind to freely wander, thinking about pleasant things such as beach vacations and delicious cakes. It was during this reverie that something caught her eye within the door and she snapped back to reality to pay better attention.
Something had moved.
All her attention was focused on the door and within it, but despite casting her eyes over the surface of the door itself and the landscape within, she wasn’t sure what had changed, only that she knew something had.
She looked at the grass just inside. That was normal. It was swaying in the breeze that was crossing the empty plains. The door on the other side remained much the same as well. It was dark within and the ruffled fabric sitting just inside the door was still the same shape it had always been. She’d bet her tie on it. No, whatever had changed wasn’t there.
Something moved again and Mayor Mare felt a rush of adrenaline. It was there! She was looking right at it, so why couldn’t she identify it? She stood up and moved closer, then balked. She checked left, right, then up above her just to be safe and ensure the pony that was in the building wasn’t going to jump her from behind. Only once she was sure it was safe did she move closer, squinting at the door and what was within.
She looked around, past the door and over the grass at the landscape itself. The dark skies loomed overhead with their swollen clouds, threatening but never quite delivering on the threat of a storm. It was past these clouds, pinched between the land and the sky, far away on the horizon that she finally saw it: A pony, standing on a hilltop far away.
The sight of it sent a shiver through her. It was just a silhouette; a shade plastered against the dark clouds, but it was unsettling, probably because of its presence in the previously empty landscape.
She saw it sink down and she lost the sight of it as it dropped below the hilltop, only to catch sight of it once again. It happened several more times and she realized what she had been seeing was this pony climbing up and down the hill.
She watched for a moment longer, one hoof ready on the door to shut it as soon as something strange happened, when she noticed something strange. While she had been watching, she had never actually seen the pony in profile. She had seen the head as if it were looking at her straight on, but she hadn’t ever seen it from the side, it was far too slim.
She watched for a moment longer, staring into the darkness and squinting as she tried to make it out a little bit better, but all she could see was a pony-shape in the distance climbing a hill, then descending. She had to assume it was coming in her direction, but it wasn’t making any headway. At least, not very quickly if it kept going up and down that hill.
Some movement caught her eye over to another side as a flash of dry lightning illuminated a portion of the landscape. She glanced over to it and saw another silhouette on another hill. It, too, was walking in her direction and appeared to have the same basic head shape and speed. It came up the hill, then descended, then repeated the motion time and again.
There was another flash of light and another movement. Mayor Mare looked to that flash and with a sinking feeling saw yet another pony. There was another, then another, then another! Each flash brought with it an image of a pony climbing over the distant horizon, moving toward her.
There was an army of them! If they ever reached her and came through the door, they could cause some serious damage. Add to that the fact she didn’t know what skills they had, or even if they were normal ponies, and it was a hostile takeover of Ponyville, then maybe even Equestria!
Mayor Mare pulled her head back inside the door and swung it shut. It banged closed and latched, and she put her back to it, looking around the room. There was definitely nothing in here that she could block the door with that could stop an army of strange ponies. Enough bodies and an entire house would collapse. A simple door stood no chance.
She stomped a hoof, then dashed away to the front door of the Town Hall, heedless of whatever pony might be hiding in the building watching her. She needed to get Twilight and come back here quickly enough to stop them from coming. She was reaching out her hoof to grab the handle when a loud knock came at the door.
*KNOCK* *KNOCK* *KNOCK*
She stopped with her hoof just inches away from opening the door. “Who is it?”
There was no answer.
If the doors were truly connected, she couldn’t open this one without the other one opening, and she had no guarantee it was going to shut when she stepped outside. Magic was fickle and doing anything in the wrong manner would leave things open for those strange shades to enter with impunity.
She asked again, “Who’s there?” but there was still no answer. She had to assume it was either the one pony that had gotten into the building or it was the ones she had seen. She left the door shut, and even locked it again, though she doubted that would help, and moved to one of the windows.
Mayor Mare peered out of the window, trying to see if there was anypony standing in front of the Town Hall. She couldn’t see much with how dark it was, but with her vision accustomed to it at this point she didn’t see anything that looked too threatening. It looked like Ponyville. She fiddled with the window lock, unfastening it. It took only a little finagling before she was able to unlatch it and twist, then pull up on the window.
The moment she did a black hoof swung inside. She screamed and smacked it, slamming her own hoof into the limb, punching it against the wall. It pulled back accompanied by a keening whine and was replaced by two more. She hammered at those and punched down on them, trying to give herself room to close the window before any more hooves could try to come inside! What was happening? What were these?
She looked up and could see that outside this window had been replaced by the hilly landscape she had seen inside the door. The other windows next to it had not changed and she could still see Ponyville, but this one showed her a mass of bodies all clawing and reaching forward, trying to get into the window she had opened!
They didn’t appear to have proper faces, just mouths devoid of teeth, or at least lacking white teeth. They opened and wailed in confusion and fear as their blank, unfocused eyes led them to the open window she was trying so desperately to defend. She punched, kicked, and shoved them back outside, struggling to keep her window safe from them and kept trying to slam it down. Eventually, she succeeded, and when the window was closed she latched it shut, sobbing into her aching hooves.
She didn’t understand what had caused any of this or why and being alone inside the dark building with these strange creatures waiting outside every exit was swiftly getting to her. She needed an exit, or she needed to be rid of them. Either one of those two things or she needed help.
It was then a thought came to her: If she couldn’t keep the door shut, would destroying it ruin the spell on it? It was a horrible thought and she almost dismissed it as soon as she thought of it, because damaging magic was usually bad, but she was running out of options. Another knock came at the door, followed by rattling, and she knew she needed to act!
Mayor Mare peeked out the windows, seeing only Ponyville outside once more. She looked at the door, its handle rattling up and down but never quite opening, and decided she had to take the chance. She couldn’t trust everything to remain intact until morning, and she was just one mare against an entire army of... whatever those were. If she couldn’t hold the door, she’d destroy the door! She just had to hope to Celestia it would work.
She ran back through the building to the other door. She raced down the hall, hesitated only a moment, then slammed her hind hooves into it with all her might. There was a loud *BANG* from the impact, but no sound of splintering wood. She did, however, hear a low hiss coming from further down the hall near her secret bathroom. She frowned and glanced over at the sound, then did it again. There was no crack in the door, but the hiss from the bathroom came again, angrier this time, and much lower, like a threat.
Mayor Mare reared up to kick again, and a pony unlike the others that had tried to swarm in the window came skittering out of the bathroom. It was low to the ground, moving at a pace quicker than she had expected and caused her to yelp in surprise even though she had known it was coming. It careened across the floor and leapt at her. She turned and bucked it square in the face, the impact giving off a sickening *crack*. It flew backward and landed on its back, but curled up and over, back to its hooves and came at her again. She put her back to the wall and swung out with a forehoof, prepared to sock it in the jaw when it jumped at her again.
When the inevitable attack came, unfortunately, it came from underneath the pony, its tail whipping out from between its legs and slashing her across the stomach. She shouted in pain and stumbled backward, trying to put some distance between her and the pony-thing. It followed, black eyes focused on her and mouth wide open.
She feinted forward at it, and it lunged, then came up short. She reared up and forward, then stamped down, crushing its skull against the floor. It broke into chunks of black as it was squished against the wood, but there was no blood, just chunks of some unknown substance that it seemed to be made of, held together and animated by unknown magicks.
Once the pony seemed finished and still, she took one last look then turned her attention back to the door and the incoming threat to Ponyville’s safety. She dabbed a hoof against the wound on her stomach and was satisfied to see that it was merely a surface injury. A little blood, but not a lot, meaning it hadn’t made it to anything vital. She was happy with that and looked back at the door, which hadn’t rattled or made any sound or motion while she had been there fighting.
There weren’t even hoof marks from when she had kicked it, and not even the sign of any dirt from her hooves having stuck to it. She decided that if she was going to break it, it wasn’t going to be from this side. This side of it, as far as she understood magic, was the portal. It wasn’t a physical object in the same sense as others, and thus wasn’t subject to the laws of the realm it made its home in. No, if she was going to destroy it, she was going to have to do it from the other side. The side with the visitors.
Mayor Mare put a hoof against the base of the door to block it from opening any further, then quickly dropped the latch and cracked it open, hopefully not giving anything on the other side enough time to notice what she was doing. When she opened it, she could see the same lightning flashing in the distance, and the swarm of dark shapes marching across the landscape, but there were oddly no ponies immediately outside the door. She cracked it open a little bit further, poking her head in to look around.
There weren’t any ‘visitors’ (as she had decided to call them), immediately around her door. There were some marching past some distance away in both directions, but they weren’t around her specifically. Mayor Mare decided she wasn’t going to have a better chance than this and tried to kick the frame of the door now that it was open. The door on her side, inside Town Hall, didn’t react to her attack, but the frame inside the dark prairie got scuffed by her hoof! She lit up with delight: This was her chance!
Mayor Mare kicked, flailed, and hammered at the door with her hooves from the ‘inside’ of the prairie, but she found herself in the difficult position of hurting her hooves on the invincible side inside Town Hall. She just wasn’t getting enough oomph to deal significant damage beyond a few cracks, and now some of the visitors had noticed. She kicked and assaulted it, but it still wouldn’t give, and she had blown her surprise moment. She ripped her tie off from around her neck and dropped it inside the door as a memento for everypony she might be leaving behind, then stepped inside onto the prairie grass, and shut the door behind her. She reared up for a kick just as the visitors started galloping toward her.
Her hooves slammed into the door and she could hear a satisfying *CRACK* from the wood. She reared up again and this time splinters flew. She reared up as one of the visitors swung its tail her direction, and as her earth pony strength split the door in half, she took a painful swipe across her left eye. She cried out in pain and fell to the side as she was tackled bodily to the ground. She struggled with the visitor and exchanged blows, bashing it to pieces like she had done with its friend inside, only for more to come at her.
During the scuffle she got a glance at the door and was pleased to see that it had been blown off its hinges. Where it once opened to the Town Hall, it now showed the other side of the prairie. To her alarm and surprise, in the brief glance she had through its open frame she could see a city far off in the distance. It looked massive, at least as large, if not larger than Canterlot, with spotlights pointing in all directions, sliding across the clouds above. Light glowed in it, and what looked like explosions illuminated the sky above it as the visitors marched endlessly toward it. She had to tear her gaze away as she kicked off another visitor from her and limped toward the other open door nearby.
She fought off another one, taking a hoof to the side of her face as she stumbled through into the darkened hallway she had been so afraid of. She shut the door behind her and almost immediately heard the handle rattle. She knew it probably wouldn’t hold them for long, but she didn’t care. Ponyville was safe. If she was going to have a chance, it was in here, wherever here was.
She stumbled down the hall, the pitch black causing her to bump into things as she went. She eventually found a staircase and climbed upward to another door, which she pushed open. It opened to a broken roof, still smoldering from whatever had hit it. Up above her was a stormy sky filled with black clouds veined with lightning. She felt her blood run cold as she looked up. In each flash of light she could see a great silhouette smothering the sky. It looked down with great white eyes the size of moons and immense black pupils. Despite its size, she knew it saw her. It was only a matter of time until it turned its efforts toward her, but for Ponyville, she would kepe running. It was her duty, after all.
The End.
