Like an Eel Over My Heart
“So let me get this straight,” Rarity asked, primly arranging her slender fingers into the sort of contemplative, interlaced posture one used when one was being very serious and thoughtful. “Adagio’s gone.”
An undulating wail shivered through the air. A sound surely drawn from a lightless abyss or stygian waste some thousand miles beneath the surface world—which for all its problems, seemed positively elysian in that instant. The sound shook the rafters above, raining dust upon the floor. Cracks spiderwebbed through a window to Rarity’s left.
“Yup,” Aria said.
“And the reason that she is gone,” Rarity continued, raising her voice slightly, “is that she turned into a—” she cleared her throat, lifting both hands in preparation for air-quotes, “—‘motherfucking eel’ and flopped ‘like a greyhound on acid’ into the ocean.”
“Yup,” Aria said.
The ground quaked beneath them. The table at which they were seated—a rickety, ancient thing that teetered like a twig in a storm at the slightest of touches—groaned like it was about to crumble into splinters. A deep, low bellow like that of a whale gyrated catatonically in the air. It was suffering condensed into a sound; it was a million hearts bleeding dry from anguish and screeching unmetered poetry of their woes; it was Gjallarhorn announcing the coming of Ragnarok and the trembling of the heavens; it was—
—cut off sharply when Aria kicked the source, which was sprawled in a messy puddle-shape under the table.
“Ouch.”
Rarity peered down into the aforementioned under-the-table-space. “… She’s not turning into an eel too, is she?”
An instant of silence, and then the soft scritches of a pen on paper, and then a note appeared from under the table, clutched in pale blueish fingers, wiggled purposefully in Aria’s general direction.
“No,” Aria said upon taking and reading said note. “But she has ‘made peace with the inevitability of decay’ and wants to ‘achieve, in her last few days, enlightenment through suff’—” Apathy fell over Aria’s face like a falling boulder; she crumpled up the note and flung it disdainfully over her shoulder. “Basically, she’s being a pain in my ass.”
“Because Adagio turned into an eel,” Rarity said.
“Because Adagio turned into an eel,” Aria said.
“And I suppose you wanted me to go looking for her?”
“Hey, I just want Sonata to shut up,” Aria said, raising her hands palms-out. “No need to get so extreme—I’ve got duct tape and nails, I just need someone to hold her down.”
Rarity peered under the table, where Sonata lay quivering in a ball, mindlessly nuzzling a photograph of… what might have been an eelified Adagio before a dozen or more instances of “She’s so cuuuuuuuuuuuute” were scrawled in glittery marker on it.
“Do you have a boat, by any chance?” Rarity asked.
“You’re already taking this waaay too seriously. Nails, boom, problem solved.”
“Darling.” Rarity gazed solemnly into the distance. “When I first met Adagio, I told myself that one day, before I am old, decrepit and ugly, I would brush that hair until it was the most gorgeous thing in existence. I cannot do that while she is in the ocean; so, you see, it would be the most heinous sort of betrayal to myself if I did not go at once to fetch her.”
She paused, then cleared her throat. “That Sonata promised an exorbitant sum for anyone who brought back Adagio… doesn’t hurt.”
When Rarity had gone to the seaside shack the sirens now called home, it had been a bright, sunny day. When she went down to the beach, the sky turned grey and hid surreptitiously behind a wreath of mist, weeping torrents of rain far off in the distance. Some of the clouds vaguely resembled winding eels slithering into the distance.
“I assume,” Rarity said, “that she went that way?”
She didn’t get a response right away. It took Aria a few minutes to limp her way up next to her; Sonata clung to her calf like an anchor, shivering uncontrollably and glooming the air around her as she gazed with broken, glassy eyes far off into the distance.
“Dunno,” Aria said. “Probably. Boat’s over there.” She turned and started lurching back towards the house. “Lemme know if you ever come back. I’m about to set somecunt up with a hot blind date with a crowbar.”
The boat in question was a darkly-colored chimera of planks, a graveyard for trees that had crudely been given purpose with hammer, saw and a plethora of nails. Rarity assumed Aria had built it herself, because it reeked of nihilism: if life was devoid of meaning, who needed a boat that would keep you afloat?
But it would have to make do.
The water was surprisingly calm, given the unapologetically wicked skies overhead. When Rarity saw a dark, jagged silhouette in the distance, over which the eel-shapes in the sky converged, she knew she was getting close.
What she arrived at was a large rock jutting harshly from the waves, with a tunnel—shaped like an eel’s mouth, of course—plunging downwards.
Rarity stepped cautiously from the boat. Which collapsed into a pile of planks and was swiftly swept away by the sea, as if the wood celebrated its long-awaited release from dreary duty.
Rarity sighed, then proceeded into the tunnel, which struck her at once with its dankness; the floor felt slick, and peculiarly eel-shaped drops of water dripped and blipped down from stalactites above her.
The tunnel went on for a long, long ways, but then the walls spread outwards and a larger chamber revealed itself.
It was a horrid sight. The walls were decorated with colors that didn’t clash so much as wage brutal war, with disembowelment and dismemberments and gratutious exsanguination aplenty. Orange tore Purple’s throat out, while Lime Green cackled from afar in effervescent delight. Dreadful.
There was also a big vat of glass, lit from beneath by shimmery lights of many colors, filled with water that was filled with eels.
Like
So many eels.
The eels came in as many colors as there were colors. Here, there was a pale purple one with streaks of darker purple and bright, minty green, gazing with maudlin delight at a placid grey one whose smooth, eely skin was pockmarked by spots of darker, rocky grey. There, there was a blue one holding itself afloat with an air of pompous puffery, and wore a broad-brimmed pointy-tipped hat balanced precariously upon its rounded eely brow. A frumpy, planty-green eel wriggled happeely in the background—and Rarity promptly forgot about it, because what could only have been an eelified Adagio poked her dainty eel-snout out of the water.
Rarity’s heart melted a little.
Adagieel batted her eyelashes—which were totally a thing she still had. ‘Twas with guilty delight that Rarity contemplated whether she’d had a new fetish thrust upon her.
It was an Adagio fetish. Obviously. Not an eel one—that would be weird.
“Hello there,” she said, drawing closer to the vat. “Are you who I think you are?”
“No,” Adagieel said. Her voice spoke to loins as easily as it did to ears. “I’m better than that trollop. Wanna get me out of here?”
“I would love to,” Rarity said. “How did you end up here?”
Adagieel pointed with her cutely stubby eel-tail towards the far end of the room. Rarity nodded quietly, moving around the vat in the direction Adagieel had indicated.
And there, at the end of the room, was a throne of glimmering basalt, carved in the shape of a mass of eels balancing a slab of stone on their heads. And seated upon this throne was a looming figure, cowled in billowing black fabric, face shrouded behind a great black hood. The figure’s shadow took the form of a hydra-like shape, a dozen eel-silhouettes gyrating sensually on the wall behind it.
“Oh, hey, Rarity!” The cowled figure snapped fingerguns. “How’s it going?”
“… I beg your pardon?”
“Hmm? Oh, sorry. One sec.” The cowled figure peeled back its hood, at last revealing its tannish face and spiky, bright blue hair and oh goodness it was Flash Sentry wasn’t it?
Yes, Rarity decided after a moment’s inspection. Definitely Flash Sentry.
“Flash, darling,” Rarity said, “why, in the name of all that is fabulous, are you dressed like that, and what in the world are you doing here?”
A nervous chuckle clattered awkwardly out of Flash’s mouth like an elephant in stilettos. “It’s, uh… it’s a long story,” he said.
Rarity arched an eyebrow.
Flash squirmed in his throne like an eel on hot coals. “I guess it all began a few weeks ago…”
Some days, there was just nothing like a relaxing walk on the beach—the sun was shining, the breeze was cool and refreshing, the oceans crested lazily in the background, and Flash stared at an ancient eldritch artifact so evil it turned the sand sickly green for about ten meters or so around it.
It was a disk, about as wide as both his palms put together, of some unnamable stone that looked a bit like obsidian but had an uncomfortable softness to it and an odd texture very much like the skin of an eel.
On the outer edge of the disk, there were symbols. Symbols that hurt the eye to look at; they seemed to be of a peculiarly blasphemous language, damning themselves just by existing. But as Flash stared at them, those profane sigils etched themselves into his vision until he saw them everywhere he looked.
And then they started to make sense.
“So if I’m understanding correctly,” Rarity said, inspecting her fingernails cooly, “you discovered an ancient evil artifact, and now you’re compelled to seek out objects of your heart’s desire and turn them into eels?”
Flash rubbed awkwardly at the back of his neck. “Y—yeah, I guess when you say it like that…”
“It sounds quite diabolical, darling.” Rarity gave a toss of her hair. “So. What’s next in your fiendish scheme?”
“Oh. Well, um, about that…”
“... You do have a fiendish scheme, do you not? Concerning the eelifying of the—ahem—most ravishingly beautiful women you know?”
Flash cleared his throat and made a flacid gesture. “Well, I was running out of space in my tank, so I kinda… threw the disk away.”
“... I beg your pardon?”
“Yeah, see, over there? In the corner?” Flash made another gesture.
Rarity followed the motion, and sure enough, there was an insultingly nondescript waste bin in the corner. Which rattled and clattered an awful lot—it was as though the bin was both sentient and in agony, afflicted with harboring an anathema to purity and rest.
Rarity made a cautious approach, peering into the bin. Her mouth gaped, horror turning quickly to confusion. “Are you… quite sure it’s this bin you put it in, darling?”
“Oh, yeah, sorry. It’s buried a bit.” Flash shuffled over and rooted—in most garish fashion—through the trash. He pulled out paper plates, plastic bags and cutlery, a limp, disheveled Sunset Shimmer, empty boxes of frozen appetizers—the list went on, and a pile of discarded items grew ever-larger behind him.
Until, at last, at the bottom of the bin, there it was. The disk.
“So what you’re saying,” Rarity said, slowly swiveling her head to face Flash, “is that you were not, in fact, planning on eelifying anyone else? Not even, oh, I don’t know… astonishingly charming maidens, that sort of thing?”
A bead of sweat rolled down the side of Flash’s brow. He tugged at the neck of his tenebrous garment. “Uh, well… tank, full…”
“Oh, no no no, that is quite alright, darling.” A few strands of hair sprang loose from Rarity’s once-immaculate coif.
“… And he wasn’t in much of a state to resist after I stuffed his scrotum with needles, so I hauled all the eels out into the ocean and they made a raft to carry me back to shore,” Rarity explained.
Things had calmed down considerably. She lounged alongside Aria on the steps of the sirens’ suspiciously convenient oversized saltwater pool—which was now filled with so many eels Sonata was resting on top of them instead of sinking—with a fruity cocktail floating close by, cradled by a bobbing, inflatable eel, and a quiet, happy eelified Adagio curled up in her lap, half-submerged so she made little bubbly bursts when she breathed in and out.
“That is the dumbest story I have ever heard,” Aria said.
Rarity sipped from her cocktail and affectionately petted her new favorite eel. She gestured to her side, where the profane disk Flash had used floated unnaturally on the surface of the water. “You could read the inscription, if you’d like. I think it sums it all up rather nicely.”
“Ugh, no. I don’t know why you even bothered keeping that thing.” Aria turned up her nose with a sniff, but then her eyes shifted between the disk and Sonata and an eyebrow lifted. “Unless you were going to throw it at someone? Because I’d be down for throwing it at someone.”
Rarity rolled her eyes, sipping again from her cocktail and staring ahead in calm silence. Truth be told, she wasn’t entirely sure herself why she’d brought that disk along; it just seemed too important, perhaps.
After all, without the disk, she would never have had an Adagieel curled around her thigh. She thought back to the inscription that had started the whole mess: Whosoever fondles this disk, if his penis be sufficiently miniscule, shall be endowed with the sacred powers and duties of the Waifu Eeler.
