Author's Note

Edit: so hopefully that didn't send out notifications again. Sigh. Mobile can be a real pain.

Forgive me for the delay.
I help admin an EU ArmA 3 Unit, so at the moment, and especially due to quarantine, my paperwork has been especially heavy recently. In addition, I've been playing around a lot with writing Astral due to a growing anxiety of "but it doesn't feel as good as it could". I think I've identified why, and hopefully you all should be able to read and not get bored, if that was happening. The difference probably won't be noticeable in this chapter, but later ones should hopefully "flow" better.

As always, if you have critique or encouragement please do share. I always enjoy improving or having my ego stoked :)

Anyways, I'll let you get to reading.

22. Windmill

The windmill was just as dilapidated as the rest of the village.

Large sections of wall, all the way up to the top of the structure had fallen away, either into the inside or outside of the windmill itself. It's central mechanism had long ago rusted and fallen apart, the wooden floors were rotting away, and flora had grown over a considerable portion of the rest of the building that was left.

"Dilapidated might have been too kind," she noted as she carefully stepped onto the first floor, the plank creaking painfully beneath her weight. She cringed, taking a second look around herself.

Aside from the wind that howled through the gaps and damage, nothing seemed noteworthy.

Yvonne stepped up from behind her as soon as she'd cleared the doorway, being the lighter of the two, and took the lead from Astral. She did the same as she'd done, and looked around as she walked out further towards the edge of their platform.

Astral kept herself close to the wall as she circled around the platform, going towards a set of stairs that led down towards the foundation level. Yvonne peered over the edge, but quickly recoiled, backing away from the edge.

She turned and gave Astral a vigorous head shake, jerking her head towards the edge.

Astral nodded, motioning for Yvonne to come and join her again. Instead, though, she got another head shake as she sat down and mimed out walking down stairs at her.

She rolled her eyes. Of course, she'd be the one lumped with exploring the creepy, abandoned mill.

She carefully walked towards the stairs, the planks creaking despite her as she moved. Eventually she came to the top of said stairs, and perplexingly, she could see just the dying glow from a light somewhere below her.

"So someone's here?" she thought, becoming simultaneously more wary and curious. She put her first hoof on the stair, immediately regretting it as the wooden plank screamed under her weight. She pulled her hoof back, before putting it back again. Instead, she used a little spell to partially suspend her weight, almost like a telekinesis spell but not quite.

It was a crude spell, and one very seldom used, but it served her needs. As she stepped down the first stair it still creaked, but at least it didn't sound like the voices of the damned. She went as quickly as she dared, and heaved a silent sigh of relief as soon as she'd cleared the stairs.

She looked back up, seeing Yvonne at the top of the stairs as she herself had been before. She stepped away from the stairs and dispelled her weight reducing spell, feeling herself fully settle into the board beneath her. She was tempted to ignite her horn due to the greater darkness of the lower level, but refrained. Instead, she focussed on the light that she had seen.

She walked around the grindstone in the center of the structure using what little light she had, hearing Yvonne come down the stairs behind her. As soon as she came out on the opposite side of the grindstone that she'd been on when she'd descended the stairs, she got her first clear view of their light source.

A figure, not quite as tall as she was, stood in a hallway that led off to the side, back underneath their entrance. It stood on two legs, unlike anything she could think of. This particular figure wore a long robe, but it was evident that it's build was lanky and unnatural.

But that wasn't all that was evident.

She stopped after she drew within speaking distance of the thing; it hissed, low and quiet. It did not move, staring at the same spot it was before.

She blanked mentally for a moment. "That's not what I was expecting," she thought, inching herself even further behind the thing and out if it's peripherals. She looked back over her shoulder and pointed her hoof at Yvonne, who'd followed her steps almost to a T. The mare stopped, giving a small nod and a poorly hidden smile.

Astral didn't care. She approached only a few more hoofs before she spoke out.

"Hello?" she said, audible and clear. Her voice echoed slightly, before being lost to the wind in the upper levels of the windmill. The creature stirred, the hissing growing louder as the thing turned to face her.

She had been expecting something, but it certainly wasn't the face of a corpse. A pony's face with hollow eyes and slack jaw faced her. She didn't consider herself squeamish, but Astral jumped backwards as she fully registered what she was seeing.

It took it only slightly longer than her reaction before it began to shake violently, it's back hooves barely keeping it standing. The hissing grew quieter as it's shaking intensified, before it resurged alongside the 'crack!'of its skull bone splintering as dozens of snakes burst from every orifice and every spare inch of its skull.

Astral didn't give it much chance beyond that.

On instinct, she threw the first spell that she'd had drilled into her head by her combat instructor - a thunderbolt. Except, this time, she wasn't just a little unicorn, she was a full size, startled and thoroughly disgusted Alicorn, and she threw everything she could into the spellform without it blowing up in her face.

The spell issued with a tremendous thrak, blinding all of them for just a second, but that's all it took. By the time either of the mares had blinked away the flash, all that was left of their enemy was a smouldering heap of cooked snakes and flesh.

"By the Blood, what in Tartarus was that!?" Yvonne said, slowly making her way up to Astral. "Is it dead?"

Astral blinked once and didn't say anything. Truth being told, she didn't care what it was, where it came from, or how it came to be. Why? She hated snakes. With a passion. They made her anxious and nervous and sweaty, but this?

This was nightmare fuel.

But, despite herself and her own intense revulsion, she couldn't keep her now awakening curiosity down. She hated snakes, but had she ever seen a corpse controlled by snakes? Had anyone ever seen a corpse controlled by snakes? She was pretty sure about the answer...

She took one tentative step forward, trying her best to stow her emotions and instead assume some kind of scientific impartiality. She took another as her eyes narrowed at the thing, watching the body carefully for movement. She took another, and another and another, until she was right next to the smouldering corpse.

She leaned forward over the charred remains, watching as more snakes emerged from the corpse's head, writhing around and dying after escaping from their host. Soon, they stopped coming, and the bodies of the dead snakes piled high around and on the dead pony's head. She could hear Yvonne shifting anxiously behind her.

Astral wasn't much better. She shifted nervously, unsure of why she was even still here. As much as she wanted to just move on, she just felt... unsatisfied. Her curiosity hadn't been sated, and as she looked at the body she couldn't help the questions of "why?" and "how?" from forming every time she took in a new detail.

She sighed internally, resigning herself to fulfilling her new compulsion.

With little regard to the stomach of the only other pony around she arced a powerful slicing spell through the corpse from head to haunch, splitting it in two bilaterally. She gently removed one side from the other, careful to keep whatever was inside as close to "natural" as she could. What she found rather shocked her.

The "pony" was more snake than pony. Laced throughout the entirety of its musculature were dozens, maybe even hundreds of tiny serpents, and where there were supposed to be bones were instead large, thick snakes, attached to one another by way of biting their tails. Where there were normally brains she instead saw an empty cavity that connected by way of another cavity to the chest and abdomen, where yet more snakes remained, flash cooked by Astral's spell. Behind her, Yvonne took one look before gagging and excusing herself from the sight.

"So, it is a colony of parasitic snakes?" she thought, disgusted but almost laughing at the sheer absurdity of what she was seeing. She kept poking around it with her magic before yanking one of the smaller snakes from amongst the muscle tissue. Spines lined its side, probably to keep it in place, and its mouth was little more than a sucking apparatus. "How terrifying. Must be a horrible way to go…" She tossed the specimen aside and gave one pitying glance at the corpse before she turned around and left, her curiosity finally fulfilled but her stomach certainly feeling the opposite.

"Ugh," she groaned, feeling the other nasty feelings come flooding in as she lost her nerve. She didn't know why she had to do it, but she certainly wasn't about to introspect about it now. For the time being she just stored what she'd learned about the accursed snake-thing, she was sure it'd come in useful. Probably.

She looked around for Yvonne, who was tapping her hooves by the grindstone and very pointedly avoiding her general direction.

"Sorry about that. How are you holding up?" she said as she approached the earth pony.

Yvonne glowered at her. "Oh, great! Just, next time, tell me when you're about to do something horrible and gross?"

She didn't reply immediately, but she did look away. Even she had been grossed out, snakes aside, and she was known for being made of sterner stuff than most of her contemporaries. She could imagine how she'd made Yvonne feel. "Sorry, Yvonne," She said, scuffing her hoof against the stone floor, "I'll try to, but it was hard to resist."

Yvonne sighed. "Yeah, I guess - I mean, you've always been like that. I shouldn't have expected any different, right?" She gave a small laugh. "Looks like memories won't stop you from nearly making me puke. Anyways, where do we go now?"

Astral nodded, glad to focus on something else. "Further in I guess?" She looked behind the grindstone, seeing another doorway that both of them had apparently missed.

"And looks like I know which direction to take, come on," she told Yvonne, who fell into step behind her.