An Audacious Adventure by A.K. Yearling
Daring Do stared at a white page.
And a white page stared back at Daring Do.
The little adventure pony sat—lower legs crossed—on a wooden stool positioned squarely before a table and typewriter. A typewriter that wasn't typing. Due to a mare who wasn't creating.
And she sighed.
Again.
Daring Do flexed one wing and then her other.
She rocked back and forth in her seat.
She paced around the interior of her lonesome, rustic cottage.
She straightened a crooked rug in the middle of her office room floor.
She tapped a pen against a tabletop.
She twirled her pith helmet nimbly on the edge of her hoof.
And then she twirled it again.
And for the third hour into this malaise...
...she looked at the white page once more.
And the white page stared back at her, still.
Silence.
Another sight.
Daring Do leaned back in her seat. She learned further back. She leaned so far back that her body had become a mustard-and-gray noodle, bent limply in the fading sunset of an exhausted, unproductive day.
She closed her eyes. Snout narrow. Lids tense.
She breathed in.
She breathed out.
Then...
After a fidget...
And a squirm...
She tongued the inside of her muzzle, making a bitter face.
He mouth tasted dull. Dry. Unexciting—like her mind at that very moment.
With her head still hanging back, she squinted eye open.
Across the upside-down lengths of her cottage, inside the kitchen, an ivory-white refrigerator loomed.
Daring tongued the inside of her muzzle again.
Her nostrils flared.
Wingtips fluttered.
A tail flicked.
Then—a slight grunt escaped her muzzle.
Daring Do sat up straight in a blink.
She stood from the stool.
She walked across to the nearest bookcase in her office.
Running a hoof across the bindings, she felt for a book with a gnarled, bumpy spine.
When she felt it, she tipped the edge of it out with her fetlock and then grasped the edge of the binding with her teeth.
Once it was pulled from the shelf, she plopped it down in two forelimbs and examined the ancient tome.
Its binding was comprised of a very ancient—nearly petrified leather. The texture was both dappled and ribbed, resembling in no small way the naked leg of a turkey or chicken. There were scars across the tanned substance, and in a certain glint of light one might almost discern fractacls and circles formed with beautifully geometric precision.
Daring Do flipped the book open. Almost instantly, the air filled with a misty dust from its long-abandoned pages. The mare flapped the air with her agile wings, dissipating the particles with expert precision.
She craned her neck, glancing across the office.
A wooden wall of the small room stretched flatly before her, covered all over with hanging pictures of the places and sights and landscapes that Daring had been lucky enough to visit in her travels.
With a firm breath, Daring approached the wall.
She set the book down onto an end-table and went to work: lifting the pictures, maps, and landscapes off their fixtures and placing them in a neat pile in the far corner of the room.
Then—once all of the frames were gone—she got a hammer and used its forked end to remove all of the nails from the wall.
When she was done, she had a solid panel of ancient oak stretching barren and brown before her.
Daring Do went into the kitchen.
She returned with a pair of scissors.
Squatting down, she took the book off the end-table and placed it on the ground.
Then—with very little hesitance on her part—she took the pair of scissors and neatly cut the first page out from the book's binding.
When this was done, Daring do laid the sheet of paper on the ground.
And then she used the same scissors to cut the second page out of the book.
After stacking this sheet atop the first, she did the same to the book's third page.
And then to its fifth page.
And then to its seventh.
Then its eleventh.
The thirteenth.
The seventeenth.
Nineteenth.
Following this pattern, Daring Do flipped forward and sliced pages out of the ancient book until she got to the very end of its contents. When she was done, she had a neat stack of fifty sheets.
The mare stood up and went back into the kitchen.
She returned—this time with clear adhesive.
Daring Do took the stack of sheets and—starting with the first sheet and ending with the fiftieth—she pasted them across the wall.
This took the better part of fifteen minutes—as she had to make sure the pages evenly covered the wall from ceiling to floor.
When she was done, she had a perfect grid of paper covering the barren side of her office.
The words—originally written in an ancient civilization's codex that used to make sense—had now been butchered into an uneven splattering of syntactical regurgitation. Paragraphs ran into one another with chaotic nonsense, and even a few words were sliced in half completely from one sliced page to another.
Daring Do reached forward.
Her hoof ran softly across the paper mosaic.
She had interlaced the pages so perfectly that she scarcely felt the seams between the multiple, pasted sheets. It was almost as if she was brushing her fetlock against an enormous yellow'd eggshell.
The mare exhaled.
She turned around.
She walked out of the room.
The sounds of scuffling and rattling could be heard.
At last, Daring Do came back.
She carried six candles, a crucible, some straw, and matches.
Crouching low, the pony formed a half-circle with the candles—with the edge of the paper'd wall acting as the diameter. The wax cylinders made a crescent moon against the partition before her.
She placed the crucible in the focus point of the half-circle of candles.
Then she neatly packed in a bed of straw into the metal bowl.
Once this was done, Daring calmly took the scissors and snipped off the edges of a dozen of her own gray tail-hairs.
These fibers—she placed atop the straw in the center of the crucible, so that they stood out against the golden material below.
Placing the scissors away, Daring Do grasped a stick of chalk in their place.
She ran the chalk against the wooden floorboards of the office, interlacing a complicated pattern that threaded in and around the base of crucible, the candles, and stopping just before the edge of the wall itself. She added barbed motifs, so that the pattern resembled an elaborate bramble of thorns.
When she was done with this, she took the matches and lit the candles—one at a time—in a counter-clockwise direction from the wall and back again.
Then, once this was done, she reached forward... and lit aflame the lopped-off fibers of her own tail hairs inside the crucible.
The temperature of the room increased from the combined flames of the candle wicks and the tail hairs sizzling amidst the straw. A column of soot rose from the crucible, almost like incense. It was colorless and flavorless.
Daring Do inhaled it all the same.
And as she exhaled...
...she hummed a tune.
A melody that had not been instrumentalized or sung in over ten thousand years.
At first, nothing happened.
Then—one after another—the candle flames shook and flickered.
They rippled counter-clockwise from the wall, in the order that Daring Do had first lit them.
Then they rippled back clockwise, like a ball on a string bouncing off the wall and back.
The moment this pattern ceased, another one filled its place—one of glowing sigils and luminescent curves.
The chalk drawing that Daring Do had illustrated on the floor was strobing with a bright amber glow. Every circle, loop, flare, and thorn lit-up like a heated sword. What's more, tiny and near-indecipherable runes crackled to life, further filling up the spaces between the candles and the wall.
Daring Do continued humming loudly, consistently.
As she breathed more of the fumes from her burning tail hairs...
...more lines lit up, filling up the half-circle of candles, continuing up the wall, and issuing in meticulous patterns across the mosaic of ripped pages plastered across the edge of the room.
Sepia-toned circles and triangles and fractals formed brilliantly across the eggshell paper surfaces, ignoring the seams and words otherwise arranged randomly from ceiling to floor.
Soon, the paper sheets were so bright that it made up for the waning daylight outside the cottage, lighting up the hint of a forest beyond the outskirts of Daring's home.
And just when the patterns couldn't possibly become any brighter...
...there was a deep bass rumble through the floorboards...
...and the sound of what resembled a thousand swords being sheathed off in the distance.
The paper mosaic had changed somehow.
Daring Do stopped humming, but—somewhere—the foundation of the house was still vibrating.
The mare stood up.
She leaned forward and... ran a hoof across the once-flat surface of the sliced-and-pasted sheets of paper.
The illuminated lines and runes were raised now.
She could feel each tactile loop and swirl of the transformed material. The sepia glow of the lines rippled slightly upon contact, but otherwise remained solid—forming patterns and a recognizable lexicon to an educated touch.
Daring Do closed her eyes.
She ran her hand back and forth across the now-stenciled surfaces of the enchanted paper.
Quietly, she mouthed the ancient words that she felt the characters relaying to her hooves.
She repeated this once.
She repeated it twice.
The words were remaining the same, and soon she could almost memorize where the circular symbols were placed across the pages.
She opened her eyes again, smirking ever so slightly.
She walked briefly out of the room, only to come back with a length of twine.
Reaching down, Daring Do picked up what remained of the butchered old book.
She stretched it open wide.
Then—with use of the twine—she affixed the leather-bound tome to her face. It was a very awkward endeavor, but—thanks to her expert ropework skills—she was eventually able to fastened the makeshift blinders over her eyes so that the book stayed tightly put no matter how hard she shook her fuzzy head.
She now wore the book as a headpiece and—aside from a hint of light in her peripheral—she could see absolutely nothing but opaque shadow of head of her.
The blinded adventurer took several deep breaths. There was enough of her snout exposed to smell the scent of burning hair from the crucible.
Then...
...stepping carefully forward over the lit half-circle of candles...
...she resumed humming.
As she did so, she stretched her front hooves out.
She felt the curved, stenciled surfaces of the magical runes stretching and bending and looping across the paper'ed wall.
She hummed louder.
Daring's hooves spread outward, stretching towards the outer edges of the paper mosaic.
Then—still serenading the lengths of her office—she slowly ran both hooves towards the center of the sheeted arrangement.
As her fetlocks grazed the pages, she once again felt the ancient words and sigils.
She mentally mouthed the mantra that they painted, filling in the spaces between each hummed breath.
As she did this, her hooves continued moving towards the center.
But the words didn't spell what she had memorized from feeling the wall before.
Instead—from the outside to the center—they formed newer syntax... sprinkled with newer modifiers... increasing in complexity and nuance.
Daring kept running her hooves towards each other, but they never met. Her fetlocks kept brushing over more and more words that she was soon running out of paper as she was running out of reach.
So she stepped forward.
She felt more words. The pages were bending at an angle, moving inward towards the heart of the wall, providing depth and dimension that was not there before. Daring had to keep walking in order to keep up with it.
So she did.
Her tail flicked as it felt the heat from the candles recede. She was moving several feet forward now... and then several dozen.
There no longer was a wall in front of her. There were two, each splayed over with an innumerable alphabet of words and names and titles, all formed out of rapidly meandering tributaries of raised, stenciled patterns. Daring Do braced herself against them with her front limbs, sliding forward with each push of her rear legs, slowly and methodically.
The entire time, she kept humming. The air grew remarkably stale. And cold. Bone-freezingly cold. Her peripheral vision caught a hint of an unbelievably bright aura of swirling light beyond the edges of the dusty tome covering her face. She did not even dare look either left or right towards it.
This grew difficult as the walls of paper on either side of her began receding. The niche widened into a tunnel... and then a corridor... and then an enormous cavern. Soon, Daring could no longer touch the surfaces of the wall.
Which was fine—for when she lost grip and fell flat on the floor with her hooves—it was also now made of paper, and covered all over in the same swirling eddies of raised lines.
She followed these just as dutifully, moving forward and humming with just as much purpose as before. The paper pages felt cold as ice, and the fur on Daring's body sense a fine coat of frost forming with each progressive meter that she spelunked into that grand unknowableness.
Daring felt the urge to shiver, but she kept on moving.
Kept on feeling.
Kept on humming and reading and navigating...
...until—
—she felt a sharp spike brushing against her fetlock.
The mare expected this, and she caught herself before she could collapse from the startling contact.
Carefully... very carefully... she lifted a hoof off the paper for the first time and felt the spike. It was made of a smooth, keratin like substance and was so long that it could very easily penetrate the entire width of her body.
It was also moving. Ever so slightly.
Nevertheless, composing the music beneath her breath, she felt down the stalk of the barb until she found its base... and felt leather. A warm, bumpy skin, with narrow tufts of fur peeking out of every other folded seam.
Creeping forward, Daring Do felt up a gnarled leather surface. It was narrow and quivering, but soon enlarged into what could best be described as a tail. Soon enough, she felt the base of another spike—this one twice as tall and thick as the first one she felt. It was very little surprise that she felt a third spike... and a fourth. Each protrusion was larger than the one previous, and they formed the ridged border of a living spine.
Daring Do crawled forward with the nimble grace of a cat, weaving her petite little pony body in and around the forest of spikes as they increased in density. Each time she braced herself for solid hoofing, her fetlocks felt the warm leather of the flesh that loomed beneath the barbs. She could detect a slow, even pulse... and in time she could even sense the gradual rise and fall of a slumbering pair of lungs.
It was growing hard to hum the mantra—much less breathe. Something else was borrowing from the air of that places, and its respiratory system was so huge that Daring Do could easily drown in it.
Instead, she climbed over the unnameable creature, moving past the spines and now into a forest of ginormous octagonal plates that brushed sharply past her coiled wings and flicking tail. A new scent filled Daring's nostrils—one smelling of methane and oxidized moisture. She did her best to ignore her peripheral vision—which was sprinkled with crimson swirls from some place beyond.
At one point, Daring slipped—having to brace her jittery self against an enormous backplate.
The breathing of the creature momentarily shifted. Daring Do realized she had stopped humming, so she continued on the next bar of the song. Melodic. Soothing.
Soon, the leathery body resumed its slumbering breaths beneath her. When Daring was convinced it was once again safe, she continued her forward crawl.
She had scaled the virtual height of a windmill by the time she approached the boundaries of her destination. The smell of wax and mucus tickled hr nostrils as she shuffled past an enormous ear-shaped swath of cartilage. Moving past this, she hummed and shuffled her way through a rising heat of moisture and odorous exhales. The leathery plateau beneath her narrowed into a carnivorous snout, at the very teetering end of which was a pronounced sheathe of chitinous material that tapered skyward towards an unknown ceiling.
Daring Do would normally hold her breath for the sort of feat that was to follow, but the mantra did not allow for this. So—with considerable poise and patience—she scaled the sharp horn using all her limbs. She stretched her wings out for balance and shimmied up the sharp protrusion. At one point, the slumbering beast below shifted, and she was nearly thrown off with the force of a cannonball. She managed to hold on—keeping the song straight—and reached up with all her strength.
At long last she touched it—a sharp metal object fastened to a plate of metal that capped off the end of the enormous horn. It was curved neatly—a perfect hook that she could easily carry in her mouth. Such a strange punctuation at the end of a magical sentence, but now there was no more room for subtlety.
Daring Do clasped the hook in her teeth, and—with one swift twist of her strong neck muscles—she effortlessly snapped the metallic artifact loose. Within the next breath, she had leapt forward—off the horn—and into the blind air of the place.
Her wings stretched out.
She glided for a few hundred feet.
And she landed safely on a paper surface full of stencils.
Everything about the stunt was perfect—save for one thing:
She wasn't humming anymore.
Within seconds, an animalistic growl of frustration thundered behind her.
The entire hollow corridor echoed with deep bass anger like a hundred thousand lead pellets rattling off the surface of an infinite frying pan.
Daring Do quivered, struggling to keep the metal artifact in her mouth amidst all the shaking and rumbling.
She felt every mane hair, tail hair, and feather shifting backwards in the direction of the beast.
Then—once the beast was done inhaling—it threw a warbling current of sonic vibrations back at her in the form of a million screaming elephants on fire.
This was soon followed by the sound of redwood-sized limbs pounding towards the little pony thief at full meaty speed.
Daring Do ran.
She galloped forward as quickly a her hooves could carry her.
The beast gained distance, roaring and tearing and snarling at the narrowing space between it and its target.
Daring Do's peripheral filled with angry red vapors...
...but she faced forward, into the frost and paper.
The beast was getting closer, but she sincerely hoped that her lack of humming made up for it.
And—judging from the sudden brush of paper against her withers—Daring realized there was still hope. The corridor narrowed rapidly, and soon her legs and belly and abdomen were sliding across patterns and words unraveling in reverse. The friction made it difficult for her to gallop—feeling much like she was sliding her way swiftly through layers of duvets against a suffocating bedspread. A mattress that shook with each roaring thud of the pursuing beast.
It got so thin that Daring could scarcely breathe. Her rear legs kicked like a swimmer, pushing herself and feeling the scant hint of raised stencils bemoaning the end of a civilization dead and unmourned for eons.
The beast snarled. She could feel the swish of its swinging horn... could feel the hot breath nipping at her tail—until the paper closed up altogether, sealed by the words slathered against the wall.
Daring Do tumbled naked across the floorboards of her cottage.
She shot up in a gasp of air.
She loosened the twine and flung the book off her face.
Squinting, she turned around to see that the wall of paper and candles were now behind her.
The entire cabin rattled.
The thundering legs from beyond drew closer.
A horrible pair of lungs roared like a steam engine.
Sweating, a wide-eyed Daring Do did a brisk somersault.
While in mid-air, the pegasus flapped her wings straight down towards the candles.
All six flames were snuffed out in a blink.
In the next second, the runes across the floor and paper sheets dimmed.
In the second after that—
THUDDD!!!
The wall rattled.
Daring Do landed, wincing.
THUDDD!!
Flat pages fell loosely from the wall.
TH-THUDD!
A few more sheets peeled off.
There was a prolonged, aggressive scraping sound.
But the volume grew distant.
Daring Do squatted low on the floor, panting into her toothed-grip on the artifact.
More scraping.
More rumbling.
Then...
Silence.
Followed by a deep grunt of annoyance.
Followed by more silence.
Then...
...the beastly steps receded, diminishing deeply into the wall, growing as soft and still as the shadows of night that encompassed that lonesome abode.
Soon after, the office returned to the same uneventful malaise that Daring Do had left it in.
She could finally breathe easily.
Leaning back, she at long-last spat the plucked instrument from her mouth.
Holding the small onyx hook in her hooves, she took a moment to admire the finely-crafted runes of an ancient culture stenciled all over the curves of the item. No doubt it was deserving decades of study in a museum somewhere.
Daring Do sighed... this time with a smile.
She took the item.
She trotted briskly into the kitchen.
She headed straight for the ivory-white refrigerator...
...and after opening it up, she procured an aluminum can resting towards the back besides a half-eaten sandwich.
Clankkk!
Daring Do stuck the sharp end of the hook into the top lid of the can.
She gave it a little twist.
Pop!
The lid eased off, forming a narrow hole.
Daring Do raised the open can to her fuzzy nose.
She gave it a sniff.
Then another.
Finally, she tilted the can back and took a tiny sip of its contents.
She tongued the inside of her muzzle...
...and she liked what she tasted.
“Ahhhhhhhhh...”
And her wingtips fluttered with joy.
She soon tossed the little black hook over her shoulder so that it landed in some unobserved spot inside the kitchen.
Minutes later...
...Daring Do had poured the rest of the can's crimson contents into a tall drinking glass.
She placed this neatly on her office table.
She sat in her stool.
She scooted up to the typewriter...
...took another sip...
...and smiled again.
Within seconds, she was plinking and plonking away at the keys, forming the first few dense paragraphs of a long-delayed novel.
Tomato juice was just what Daring Do needed to get the creative juices flowing.
Smiling to herself—even giggling once or twice—the enthusiastic little pony spent the rest of the night and the morning after creating.
