Undertown

A rickety wooden cart rolled up the narrow road, stopping just in front of a small cave, and a pair of ponies hopped out.

The clearing was flanked by sheer, jagged cliffs. The place the two needed to reach was deep in an unnamed mountain range in the unexplored west of Equestria. The guide, a weathered old stallion with a thick beard, had barely spoken enough Equish to confirm he knew of the place they were looking for.

The first to hit the ground, an orange earth pony mare with a blonde mane, seemed all too eager to march up to the entrance of the cave and examine it. The second, a white unicorn who was somehow still scrupulously clean despite a long ride through the mountains, paused to brush the snow from her curly purple mane. “I think this might be the farthest the map has ever sent us. Are you absolutely sure we’re in the right place, Applejack?” she asked, looking around. The stallion with the cart had said he knew the place they were looking for, but the Horseshoe Mountains were a big place, and she highly doubted the sign was as big as the map had depicted it.

The pony who’d walked up to the cave entrance lifted her battered brown stetson to get a better look at their destination, the hat nearly being blown off her head as her long blonde ponytail whipped in the wind. It wasn't exactly a cave, and wasn't quite a tunnel. It was more like a hole at the base of the mountain. Above the hole was an old wooden plank, with a single word written on it in white paint; Undertown. “Yup. This is the place. Same spooky cave and wood sign that popped up on the map. You got that pass Twilight gave us, Rarity?”

Rarity stepped gingerly over to the cave entrance, passing Applejack a sealed scroll from her bag. “Well, at least we’ll be able to get out of the snow.”

Applejack took her hat off to brush the snow from the brim. “Can’t disagree with that. We better head inside before the storm gets any worse.”

Right from the entrance, the temperature went from unusually cold to unusually warm, and it wasn’t long before they came across a thick metal grate barring the way forward. Applejack banged on it with a hoof. “I don’t see a door,” Applejack observed as she continued to press around it for some kind of handle or doorbell.

Rarity looked at the side of the grate. “It looks melted into the rock around it. I highly doubt we’ll be able to budge it.”

Applejack looked like she was about to argue that fact, when Rarity shushed her, ears pricking up. Had those been soft hoofsteps she just heard?

Both were quiet for a moment. From beyond the grate, there was a crunch of gravel being stepped on, and a soft swear. “We can hear ya!” Applejack called. “Come on out!”

The unseen pony didn't step out of the dark, but he did speak. “Who are you?” The voice was gruff and gravely, as if the speaker had a very dry throat.

“Name's Applejack. This here's my friend Rarity,” Applejack replied.

“We're here to solve a friendship problem,” added Rarity.

The voice was quiet for a moment. “A what?”

Rarity fumbled for a way to describe what they did to someone who didn't know about it. Fortunately, Applejack came to her rescue. “You know any way we can get in? We got a letter from the princess to let us through.”

“If you have royal permission, just show it to the gate and it should open for you,” the voice said slowly. “If you’re looking for some kind of problem in town, go and see the Lady in Silks. She has ears everywhere.”

Looking rather confused, Applejack took the scroll from Twilight in her mouth and unrolled it, holding it up to the big metal grate.

Both of them took a startled step back as the grate started to glow a bright, almost neon orange. It then promptly melted into molten slag, before soaking into the floor of the cave and disappearing.

Rarity cleared her throat nervously. “Um… thank you!”

The voice didn't reply. They walked beyond where the grate had been and peeked around the corner. Nopony was there. The speaker was gone.

To make matters worse, there was a loud hissing noise from behind them. When they turned around, the gate had reformed behind them, every bit as solid as before.

Applejack and Rarity shared a worried look, but they didn’t have much choice other than to soldier on deeper into the cave.

Any light from the entrance quickly faded away, leaving them in pitch-blackness and forcing them to feel their way. The path wound and twisted, but was always going down. “At least there only seems to be one path,” Rarity observed. “So that’s a bright side, right?”

“Yup,” Applejack replied. “It’d be pretty hard to get back out if there wasn’t. I remember this one time in the west orchard when I- Whoa! I think we’re gettin’ close to the end!”

Indeed, as they rounded yet another curve, a circular blue glow could be seen, as if light were coming through an opening.

As they emerged into the light, Rarity’s jaw dropped. With the name of the place on the sign outside, she really shouldn’t have been as surprised as she was, but the sheer size of the cavern Undertown was built in was shocking. The village itself wasn’t much bigger than Ponyville. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary town, just built deep underground. The blue glow they’d seen came from glowing blue mushrooms set on the cave and building walls. They made it roughly as bright as a night with a full moon The houses themselves were more like cottages, with wooden or stone walls and simple, thatched roofs.

“Nice enough place,” Applejack remarked.

They strolled down a narrow dirt path, into town. Up close, the buildings were less inviting. Some of them were crumbling, with kudzu and moss slowly crawling over them. Others had indecipherable graffiti coating their walls. The whole place was uncomfortably muggy and warm. Rats. My mane is going to be a mess. Rarity thought to herself.

Unfortunately, they had bigger problems. “You feel that, Rarity?” Applejack asked, subtly looking up to the rooftops of a nearby row of houses.

“Like we’re being watched? Yes. I absolutely do.” The feeling was present everywhere they went in town. It had started almost as soon as they passed the first building.

Curiously, Rarity followed Applejack’s gaze. As soon as her eyes reached the roof of a thatched-roof hut that would have been horribly out of fashion even a hundred years ago, a brief flicker of a shape caught her eye as it ducked behind the peak of the roof.

“It’d been lookin’ at us ever since we came in,” Applejack informed. “Looked like somethin’ with a lot of legs.”

“I see.” Rarity closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. “I don’t suppose a loud, piercing scream will help our situation?”

When she opened her eyes, a look of realization had come over Applejack. “Did I say something wrong?”

Applejack scratched her chin with a hoof, thinking. “We gotta find this Silky Lady, or whatever the guy at the gate called her, right?”

“That’s our only real lead, so I think it’d be a good idea,” Rarity replied.

“And it’ll be awful hard to find her if nobody’ll talk to us, right?”

“I suppose so. What are you getting at?”

“Somethin’ I did while fixin’ another problem. Watch this.”

Applejack took a lungful of air, and yelled at the top of her lungs. “DOES ANYPONY AROUND HERE KNOW WHERE THE-”

Rarity stuffed her hoof in Applejack’s mouth, but it was too late.

Figures started to come out of the ruined houses.

Thankfully, they looked like normal ponies, albeit very sickly ones. Many of them stared at Rarity and Applejack with almost catlike eyes that glowed in the darkness, but all of them looked as if they were nothing but skin and bones. If some of them weren’t muttering what at least sounded like very irritated words, Rarity might have been convinced that they were being approached by an army of the living dead. Luckily, it was too dark to make out much more detail than that.

The ponies of Undertown didn’t move further after revealing themselves. They simply sat and watched.

Applejack prodded Rarity’s hoof, still frozen in fear after trying to silence her before. Embarrassed, Rarity pulled her hoof out of her friend’s mouth with a murmured “Sorry.”

Giving her a slightly miffed look, Applejack stepped forward. “Howdy! I’m Applejack, and this is my friend Rarity. We’re lookin’ for the… what was her name again?”

“The Lady in Silks,” Rarity reminded, trying her best to keep a polite smile on her face, but absolutely not succeeding.

The muttering got louder, sounding more angry, but there were too many of them talking at once for Rarity to make out what they were saying.

“Now what’s with all the ruckus out ‘ere?”

From inside one of the larger houses, another figure stepped. The speaker was a stallion, with a lantern full of fireflies hooked to his side that made him much easier to see. At first, Rarity was sure she was looking at a diamond dog. Both his face and his tail were unsettlingly wolf-like. But the clop of his hooves as he came closer confirmed that he was indeed some kind of pony, and judging by the patchy top hat and cloak he wore, while several of the others he passed wore only bandages or tattered rags, likely one in charge. He had a grizzled, light gray coat, coal-black mane, and a thick, dirty beard that reminded Rarity of an old sea captain who’d fallen asleep on a trash barge. He had no horn or wings, so Rarity assumed he was an earth pony.

The muttering quieted when the wolf pony stepped out. He greeted Rarity and Applejack with a surprised look. “New folk in town? You look too clean and fat to be from down ‘ere.”

For some reason, those words set the townsfolk to muttering again, but the wolf pony silenced them with a glare.

Rarity cleared her throat, stepping forward. “Our apologies for disturbing you, sir. My name is-”

“‘Eard your names a minute ago. Mine’s Nail. I’m the mayor ‘round ‘ere. Why are you ‘ere?”

The rude interruption caught her off guard, but she quickly recovered. “Yes, well, we were sent here by the princess to solve a problem that is supposedly going on. The gentlecolt at the gate said that the Lady in Silks could help us. Do you know where she is?”

Nail scratched his chin, eyeing them with an unreadable expression. “Aye. I know where the Lady is.” He paused for a moment, then grinned. “If you like, me an’ some o’ the boys can take you there.”

Rarity brightened. “Why thank you! That would be very helpful.”

As Nail walked away, Applejack whispered in Rarity’s ear. “Somethin’ don’t feel right, but I can’t put my hoof on it…”

“We don’t have much of a choice, I’m afraid,” Rarity replied. “He’s the only one around who’s offered to help us so far. And this was your idea!”

Applejack didn’t reply to that, looking incredibly nervous as her eyes shifted around the village.

Nail gathered up a few of the ponies who had been watching, as the rest retreated back into their homes. In the light of the lantern, she could see that many of them were far less well-dressed than even the patchwork cloak and hat that Nail wore. They wore tattered bandages and rags over most of their bodies, even covering most of their faces. What little she could see of them was somewhat unsettling; their eyes looked wild and scared, their mouths on occasion dripping drool. Rarity shivered as five of them gathered around her and Applejack and started to walk.

To help dispel some of the tension, she decided to try and engage Nail in conversation. “So, Mr. Nail, why don’t you tell us a bit about your town?”

He shook his head, looking like she’d startled him out of a stupor. “Eh? What about it?”

“Well for starters, what are all of you doing down here? It’s not exactly the kind of place one would normally choose to live.”

“It’s not so bad a place,” he replied, looking straight ahead onto the narrow path they trotted down. “Not a lot of food down ‘ere. Lady ‘as most of it.”

Rarity shook her head, perplexed. Well, that was an effective dodging of the question. It’s like he didn’t even hear me!

The other ponies Nail had gathered seemed to be oddly transfixed with them. Whenever they thought she wasn’t looking, Rarity often caught them openly staring at her.

She and Applejack shared a look, wordlessly speaking the same thought; Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.