“There are horrors beyond life's edge that we do not suspect, and once in a while pony's evil prying calls them just within our range.”
Skirov looked down upon the decrepit, cyclopean walls of the city of Dunwall, in the fetid county of Innsmouth. It was an ancient city, built long before most other cities known to Ponykind. Surrounding it’s great stone walls spanned a wretched bog, full of creatures too polluted and foul to be found anywhere else in Equestria. The vines and sickly ivy which clung to the lower stones of the wall appeared as if they were claws, like the very swamp was trying to tear down this offense to whatever dark order it belonged to. In a few places, relatively recent piping broke through the ancient stone, spewing sewage from the city itself into the bog, and serving as the occasional entryway for the more nimble of the unsavory beasts which lay in the swamplands.
The city was a place of corruption, of decay, of a primeval force which, if allowed, could swallow all of Equinekind in it’s cold, dark embrace, which was what frequently brought Skirov to its cobbled streets.
Skirov was a Hunter. A hunter of the things which threatened to overturn the peaceful way of life that all in Equestria knew. But she was not hunting mundane threats. Petty warlords and foreign armies were beneath her concern. She was a hunter of horrors, of things better kept secret from the public. She fought the monsters that lay just beyond the perception of society so that the masses could continue living in blissful ignorance. Of all the places in Equestria to hold such horrors, Skirov knew they were most likely to be found within the walls of Dunwall and in the swamps of Innsmouth.
“One day I will stop having to come here. Not that it’ll come any time soon, but still, I can dream.” Skirov huffed as she made one last check of her gear. The leather-wrapped handle of her estoc prodded against her left wing, while the smooth, carved grip of her hoof cannon pressed against her midsection, firmly held in its holster. The pockets of her greatcoat held all her various necessities, from the silver bullets for her hoof cannon, to the most precious thing she carried with her on hunts; twelve crystal phials containing Blood. Precious Blood, a gift from her lover home in her castle in Coltsylvania. It wasn’t enough to completely sustain her for long periods of time, but in emergencies, it was more than she could ever hope for.
Assured that everything was where it should be, Skirov spread her wings, taking off into the night sky with a leap. As she flew over the walls of Dunwall, she was washed over by the strange feeling of something not being as it should. Something was off within the city, unlike any other time her hunts brought her here. There was fire, fire all over the city, not like the great fires which swept through cities in the past, but fires from countless torches. There were great crowds in the streets, violent mobs which, armed with their torches and crude muskets, mercilessly fell upon anything in their path. How she didn’t notice this from her perch unsettled her. Tonight was going to be different from any other hunt. Normally she worked to avoid having to deal with the locals, as Innsmouthians were known for being distrustful of outsiders, but something had clearly whipped them into fervor, and pushed them to open violence.
Moving silently, Skirov approached an area of the city with little activity, where the light was dim, coming only from the occasional gaslamp along the street. With a final flap of her wings, her hooves landed on the cobblestone with a soft rush of air. Before she could properly get her bearings, a voice cut through the silence, a soft, scared voice.
“M-miss outsider? Are you here to stop them?” The voice, likely belonging to a young filly, asked, the source being from a window that was slightly open. Skirov walked up to the window, craning her neck to peer down behind the sill. There, cowering beneath the windowsill, out of sight from anypony who didn’t get close, was a small filly, one so young she didn’t even have a cutie mark yet.
“Stop who, sweetie? What’s going on? Is somepony in there with you?” Skriov asked, both out of concern for the poor thing’s wellbeing, and to try and piece together what was going on in the city. She was here to hunt, something she couldn’t properly do if she didn’t know where to start.
“M-M-Mama and Papa are with the militia, they said the cult woke something up.” The filly explained, her voice filled with fear.
“The cult? But which one?” Skirov muttered under her breath. It was unlikely that the filly would know, but she might know where to find such information. “Do you know where the militia is, sweetie? I need to know where so I can help your parents.”
“Papa talked about going to the cathedral. Please, miss outsider, please make sure they come back.” The filly begged Skirov, even poking her head over the windowsill so that she could look Skirov in the eye.
“Could you tell me your name, sweetie? So I know who to find?” Skirov asked, taking a quick glance at the porch of the building to memorize the address.
“Somber Presage, miss outsider.” The filly answered quickly.
“I’ll make sure they come back, Presage. In the meantime, find a place to hide away from the window.” Skirov offered a reassuring smile, before taking off, running down the cobbled streets. She knew the city quite well from previous hunts, so knew exactly where she could find the Cathedral. There was only one problem…
As the courtyard of the cathedral came into view, Skirov was met with a grizzly sight. The gates leading in to the courtyard had been smashed in, and the immense wooden doors of the cathedral itself had been torn from their hinges, laying splintered over what had once been a flowerbed. Skirov could smell blood in the air, the metallic aroma wafting from the desecrated church, that meant whatever happened there, there was nopony left to tell her about it. Nopony alive anyway.
It was worse when she reached the entranceway of the cathedral. The bodies of ponies were strewn across the nave, some slumped over the pews, others lying in heaps against the columns of the arcade. The celestial imagery painted onto the altarpiece had been plastered over with blood, and not only there. The entire church seemed smeared with the reddish ichor of the ponies who died within. Had Skirov not long since lost the bodily functions required to gag, she would have vomited at the sight. But something else nagged at her, something was wrong.
“They left the guns? Why did they leave the guns?” Skirov walked up to a fallen rifle-musket, the firearm having been one of what must have been several hundred that were scattered about the cathedral floor. Not only guns, though. Skirov could also see overturned barrels of powder and smashed boxes of minie balls. These were the militiaponies alright, but what killed them clearly weren’t ponies. Nopony, cultist or not, would have just abandoned such a valuable assortment of loot during a period of violence, and any group large enough to massacre the militia would have no trouble collecting the fallen weapons and ammunition.
Then came the screech. A most unearthly screech, which rang out from the upper buttresses of the cathedral. It was unlike anything Skirov had heard, in any of her hunts, such an alien cry sounding like the chittering of some giant bat falling into the boiler of a steam engine or the gearworks of a locomotive. In the seconds before the creature fell upon her, she found that she did recognize it, just not from personal experience. A monster she had read about in the fevered scrawlings of that most dark of tomes; the Necronomycon.
It was of a huge size, easily larger than the largest Minotaurs in the far north, it’s rotund body covered in short, black fur, with giant, clawed feet and two immense leathery wings. Its head seemed to be three heads mashed together, with a mouth that opened with three jaws, filled with razor sharp teeth. In the center of the skull was a single, grotesque eye, made up of three bulbous nodules, which seemed to bore a hole into Skirov as it descended, attempting to disembowel her.
But it underestimated this new pony, for Skirov had far greater reflexes than any mortal mare. Before it could reach her, she leapt out of reach, drawing her sword and pistol in a roll. Her gaze met with the bulbous eye of the creature and for a moment, the two seemed enthralled, neither being able to break away from the other’s hypnotic thrall, until Skirov blinked, snapping both out of their stupors, and in that momentary pause, the roar of a hoof cannon rang out, sending a silver bullet deep into the eye of the creature.
The beast let out a pained roar, and began flailing about wildly, blindly trying to swipe at Skirov in retribution for the gunshot, but Skirov was faster. She took flight, moving above the thing, and leveled her estoc with the beast’s center mass. With a rapid dive, she drove the thin, silver blade of her sword through the creature’s chest, the end piercing clean through and coming out the other end. Before the creature could react to this, Skirov also snapped another bullet into her hoof cannon, this time punching a hole right into the beast’s brain. With that, it collapsed, twitching slightly as the Huntress pulled her sword free from its hide.
“You are a bad sign. No ordinary cult could summon a thing like you, at least that’s what the book implied.” Skirov frowned, pulling a small, golden orb from her coat, bearing a small triangle symbol, the icon alchemists used for ‘Fire’. Taking a few steps back, Skirov hurled the orb at the body of the creature, which quickly erupted into a bright, sickly green fire that consumed the beast before puffing out of existence.
It had taken some time for Skirov to find a section of Dunwall where life proceeded as normally as possible, settling for the far outskirts along the northern edge of the city, where the swamp-fishers of Innsmouth County brought their hauls in to trade with the city. The swamp-folk were a hardy, superstitious bunch, even more than the rest of Innsmouth, and weren’t going to let something like a riotous city keep them from selling their catches.
Skirov had haunted this particular area of the city before, it was a gold mine of potential leads during hunts, even if the information she got wasn’t always the most reliable. She settled back into the usual routine of Innsmouth culture, pushing and shoving her way through the streets, ignoring the gruff, barking voices of the Innsmouthians as they shouted at her.
The Zadok Tavern was a rundown, ramshackle bar built right at the edge of the city, so much so that it lacked proper sewage and just dumped its waste right into the swamp below. It was also one of the only places which was frequented by one of the few informants Skirov could count on more often than not, a swamp-plier by the name of Lush Inebriate. Lush was a drunkard, but had an ear for the occult workings of the city, and whenever Skirov could wet his throat, he was all too eager to spill the happenings of the hours to her.
“Ah, if it innit ma favorite enabler.” Lush laughed, banging the bar counter he was sitting at as Skirov approached. Skirov rolled her eyes, taking the stool beside him and motioning the bartender.
“Hoofan whiskey for myself and my friend here.” Skirov ordered, sliding a hundred bit note over to the bartender. “And if anyone asks, I was never here.”
“Ah, always so serious ain’t ya? Come on love, not’in’s gonna come to this dump lookin for ya. Ya’r just lining the bastard’s pockets.” Lush looked over to Skirov, his grin showing he only had a dozen teeth left in his mouth.
“You know my work, Lush. Drunkards like you don’t worry me, but the only other sober pony here should keep his head down.” Skirov shook her head, taking one of the tankards given to her by the bartender, passing the other to Lush, who immediately began chugging. “So, anything you want to tell me about what’s going on everywhere else in the city?”
“Ah, just the us’al cult work, right? I dun see ‘ow it’s any diff’rent than any other night.” Lush shrugged, putting down his own tankard as he spoke. “Why ya gotta be askin’ me about it?”
“Because whoever started this managed to summon into being a creature from the void. Not a demon, not a monster from the swamps, something only communion with a darker power could have allowed. If you have heard or seen anything unusual lately, I need to know, Lush.” Skirov scowled, putting her hoof on Lush’s shoulder. Lush took another swig from his tankard, thinking over the past few days.
“Al’ight I ‘ave ‘eard something weird from the other fisherfolk. Strange ponies in robes payin’ for passage to the old lake, where yer predecessors drowned all dem witches.”
“Lake Arkam? But why?” Skirov raised a brow. “What would cultists want with a stillwater lake? Even if it is filled with the bodies of those accused of witchcraft a millennia ago?”
“Cultists be an odd bunch, they are. Something about the Mother of Cos.”
“The Mother of the Cosmos? That’s a myth, a folktale told by you bumpkins to scare your foals into behaving.” Skirov began to get up. “If you’re going to waste my time, you’re going to start paying for your own drinks.”
“And ‘ere I thought you Witch ‘Unters were the suspicious lot. The Mother Cos is real, or she used to be anyway. Before we ponies ruled ‘ere, the knife-ears fought the Mother Cos, locking her away in these waters.” Lush grabbed Skirov’s leg, his expression dead serious.
“And how do you know this?” Skirov narrowed her eyes. “How would you know what the Elves did?”
“I ‘ear things, ‘Unter, you of all ponies should know by now. If I were to guess, those cultists woke the Mother Cos, and she’s driven those in the city to rage. Go to the lake. See for yerself.” Lush let go of Skirov, sinking back into his seat at the bar. “May whatever god you worship watch over ya.”
Skirov slid her tankard over to Lush and slipping him another hundred before she made her way out. She’d make one more stop before leaving Dunwall.
The fog of the swamp seemed to part before Skirov as she pushed through the muck, coming to an ancient wooden platform at the edge of a lake, most of it having been covered in vines and algae from many centuries of the lakewater swelling and receding. It, like everything else related to this lake, had never decayed from age, time having no grasp upon this particular area, since the witches of the old days found themselves hurled into its waters, bound in chains, by the first Witch Hunters from Canterlot.
Skirov took cautious steps along the platform, each panel creaking under her weight, but none snapping beneath her. At last, she reached the edge of the platform, and gazed out over the lake. She knew what lay in the cold depths.
Taking a deep breath through her nose to steel herself for what was about to come, Skirov produced from her coat a crystal phial, one which caused her great discomfort with it’s mere proximity to her, but which she often found absolutely necessary on so many hunts. It was a phial of anointed water, bathed in the most holy light of the Sun. Without saying a word, she tossed the phial into the lakewater, and with her lightning vampiric reflexes, blasted it with her hoof cannon just as it splashed into the lake, spilling it’s holy contents into the water.
The water began to froth and seethe, something unholy deep within recoiling in pain and fear from the blessed poison. Before Skirov, the water seemed to move in slow motion, a bulge rising in the center of the lake before exploding outwards, and from it rose a monster from primeval legend, formed from the bodies of all those who had been sentenced to death within the lakewater.
“Saurion! Halaiel! Ni Anarórienis!”* Skirov shouted to the creature, the ancient High Elvish words clearly enraging it, the ancient Mother of the Cosmos. It could remember when those speaking in that tongue, those that called it ‘Halaiel’ had tried to slay it, though the great warriors of old were nowhere to be seen, just this one mortal, so alike the countless mortals which now made up its form. It let out a deafening roar in answer, rearing back to strike at this impetuous mortal. Then a searing pain erupted below the mass of bodies that made up its head.
Skirov quickly reloaded her hoof cannon, sliding another bullet into the breach before drawing her estoc, the silver blade glinting in the moonlight as she leapt into the air, taking flight just as a tendril of corpses smashed the platform she had been standing on. She circled the writhing mass of the Mother, deftly avoiding every swinging tendril which attempted to swat her from the air. Flesh constructs were difficult to fight, but relatively easy to kill. In every construct, a single mass was used as an anchor for the spirit animating it, be it a single organ or a whole body in some cases. The problem was finding that single mass amid the thousands which made up the Mother’s form.
Another tendril came up, but this time not to swat at Skirov, but to hurl orbs of dark magic, which seemed to chase after her as they flew threw the air. Eyes widening, Skirov strained her wings, pushing herself as fast as she could go to try and outrun the orbs, hoping they’d run out of magical power before they could reach her. She could not and let out a gasping cry of pain as the dark magics seared into her very being. This was no ordinary magic, it shouldn’t have hurt.
Skirov lost her momentum, her wings giving out from the pain, sending her plummeting into the dark waters below. The inky depths greedily accepted this new corpse, tendrils of shadow curling around Skirov’s body, trying to pull her deeper into their clutches. Skirov desperately squirmed and fought against it, drawing forth her sword, the silver-bladed estoc sending the tendrils into a frenzied panic. Skirov let out a reflexive gasp as her head breached the surface of the lake, and found herself staring into the mass of the Mother of the Cosmos, Halaiel. Before the great beast’s maw was a giant orb of the same dark magic, one easily larger than Skirov’s own body. As the Mother reeled back to unleash its attack, another gunshot rang out, the arcane last of Skirov’s hoof cannon unaffected by the water, sending a silver bullet directly into the head of the Mother.
Sent reeling but the gunshot, the Mother’s dark magic dissipating as it collapsed, sending a great column of water into the sky as it fell. Seizing her chance, Skirov leapt into the air, clearing the water with a powerful flap of her wings, and diving down towards the Mother, stabbing into its form. The reanimated mass of corpses recoiled from the silver blade and Skirov drew forth something she had retrieved from the sewers of Dunwall before she set out for the swamps. A Soul Cage.
The grisly device was empty, which meant it could do what Skirov couldn’t, track down the spirit animating the Mother’s form. Green tendrils of unholy magic reached out from the cage, searching out the most powerful soul in the area, and Skirov followed where they led her. She had to hurry, because the longer it took, the sooner the Mother could recover, and she’d have to take another risk to knock it back down.
Before long, the tendrils discovered the source, the corpse of a witch towards the center of the mass. Using her sword to expose the body, Skirov drew her hoof cannon, and began pouring latent vampiric magic into it. She didn’t have time to reload. The cannon roared five times, her magic teleporting bullets into the chamber after each shot. It was a great strain, the silver affecting her magic as much as getting shot with the metal had affected the Mother.
As the corpse evaporated from the bullets, a furious soul emerged, a dark, evil color pouring out, taking the visage of a shapeless, primeval horror, which was exactly what Skirov wanted. Before the Mother’s spirit could let out a roar, Skirov opened the Soul Cage, the infernal device seizing the Mother, dragging it into its core, and sealing it away when Skirov slammed the cage’s latch shut. With the soul gone, the many corpses which made up the Mother’s body collapsed, being dragged back into lakewater from where they had been disposed of centuries past.
“I guess I owe Lush another drink. Now to figure out how to dispose of this, if the Elves couldn’t.”
Her hunt completed, Skirov collapsed on the shore of the lake, taking one of the crystal phials of blood, and pouring it down her throat. The lifegiving blood reinvigorated her, allowing her to stand up, her strength having been sapped by the foul magic hurled at her by the Mother. She looked down at the Soul Cage, its contents a dark malice even she was uneased by. The night remained young.
Author's Note
[[PREY SLAUGHTERED]]
1X: Cosmos Soul Cage
3X: Insight
*- Translation: "Foul One! Daughter of Shadow! I am the Bringer of Sunrise!"
Big thanks to my good friend, The Nurgling, for proofreading.
