Horizon

Horizon |~| Chapter 3

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With Erod's house two days journey behind them, our intrepid duo had only a few more hills to cross before they would begin to see the outlying farms of Brinsaddle. The short trip over was often uneventful, but this is not one of those times. A band of woods ran between the land around Erod's home and the hills of Brinsaddle, connecting two larger forests to the north and south. Before this tale can be continued, we must first revisit the events that transpired in the forest, for it was here that the dullness of the pair's trek met its ominous end.

"Have you got that tinder lit yet?" Wren asked, dropping her load of firewood onto the damp litter of the forest floor.

"Just give me a minute," he shot back, a bit frustrated. It was starting to get dark and it was already rather cold.

"Almost," she remarked encouragingly as his pile of fluffy, almost dry wood shavings began to smoke and the first coal of the fire began to form.

After a bit more work, the stallion managed to get a small flame to sprout. With a fire crackling under the darkening sky, the two prepared to settle in for the night. Erod had his bed roll spread first, over a layer of pine needles to hopefully hold the cold and wet from the forest loam at bay. A glance over to the fire prompted him to search for more fuel. It was bad enough that nearly everything within eyesight was soaked and damp, but having the fire die in the gloom could easily leave them dead by the morning.

"I'm going to gather some more wood, Wren," he said, rising from his bedroll.

"Alright. Don't wander too far," she reminded him.

"Yeah," he said, although too quietly for her to hear.

Moving out into the growing darkness, Erod strained his eyes to locate anything flammable. It was slow going in the thick brush and the small camp by the road was becoming fainter by the second. He was just about to give up his search when the softest of sounds struck his ear. He had difficulty following the sound, distant as it was. Had the silence been any less absolute, he'd never have caught it. His body reacted with instant suspicion, but his curiosity got the best of him.

As he pressed onward into the deepening pitch of the night, the sound became less and less vague. Tracking it with more ease, his ears tensed forward, the earth pony came into a clearing. With a canopy of leaves no longer overhead, the moonlight was able to shine down, not that it helped much. Under such meager lighting, he could just discern a myriad collection of angular, worn shapes in the open area. It took him a few moments to decipher the moonlight-drained colors and barely visible shapes, bordered all around by malicious darkness, but he soon came to the realization that he was standing in a graveyard.

"Why in the name of Orion's Belt would anypony put a cemetery in these woods?" he mumbled. The air was cold, damp in the moist moonlight, and left him shivering in its breezy wake. The darkness was tightening in around him, choking off his sight, leaving him claustrophobic and cutting him off from the warm world he knew. The world he once knew. The more he thought of it, the more he became aware of a terrifying silence that came down like a heavy blanket, smothering his perception of the world in fear and terror.

Silence.

He once again sought out the noise, his mind jolting back to what had lured him out to this graveyard in the first place. Looking about shakily, he found that,  no matter how hard he strained, his ears instinctively swiveling about with each fresh wave of fear, the sound had ceased to cut through the night air. His initial confusion over this was quickly replaced with a creeping trepidation. The thought of something in this horrible, seething darkness that knew he was there; could hear him breathing in the still cold; could hear his heart pound against his ribs; could just reach out and pluck one the hairs rising along his back was quickly swallowing him in the depths of terror it created.

Panicking now, he turned to exit the clearing and leave, urgency flowing freely from instinct. In his wild dash for the edge of the cemetery, he stumbled over a broken headstone and sprawled into the dirt and rotting moss on the ground. The fall, combined with the malicious darkness and heart-chilling dread, left him dazed, unable to convince his body to crawl out of the dirt and to keep moving.

As Erod lay on the soil, trying his hardest to get his mind and body back under control, he heard that sound again. Still reeling from the turmoil in his mind, he had trouble sorting out from where he'd heard it. It was much clearer and closer than it had been as of yet, neither of which was helping his mind recover. With it so close, it was much more distinct. It was a sound that he would have a very hard time ever forgetting; a crumbly, shifting, gravelly sound. Erod could only drum up more confusion when he eventually identified it as the sound of dirt and rocks being moved.

Rising a little, shaky from adrenaline and fear, the stallion looked about himself. Dark as it was, his searching gaze struck upon no possible source. His eyes, nervously darting left and right, found that there was nothing in the clearing of headstones, dead trees and thick darkness that could be making such a sound.

Just as he was regaining control over himself and making to flee from that dark place, the dirt beneath him exploded upward, showering him with rocks and dead vegetation. A hoof punched upward through the surface, ripping through the upturned soil and scraping at the ground. A bony, half-decomposed snout was soon visible, tumbling Erod over again as the beast hauled its shoulders to the open air. Its free hoof thrust outward, tearing at the ground in an attempt to free the rest of its body, with raspy, dead grunts accompanying its flailing.

His surprise and close-up presentation of the monster propelled him off the edge of sanity, his mind reaching out for security as it dropped into a pitch black hole of desperation. His own legs kicking and driving at the dirt, Erod only managed to scramble away from the churning grave enough to pin himself against a nearby statue, chunks of concrete showering him as he impacted the old figure. Fear allowed him only short, panicked outbursts of a breathless scream, his lungs trying to cope with both his sheer terror and instinct to run as they expanded and contracted faster and faster.

The decaying mare's wrenching and struggling was paying off as she tore her other foreleg from the ground, sending more of her earthy prison sailing. With two hooves on the surface and her previous resting place significantly emptied of both soil and corpse, she managed to extract her midriff and hips. She bucked a few times, trying to free her hind legs. They came free, however one did so with a sickening crunch and a crack that split through the night air. A guttural, hoarse shout of pain escaped her throat, bone protruding from the rotting flesh of her left rear leg, just below the knee.

The undead mare, an earth pony herself, turned to Erod. Seeming to have forgotten the pain of her broken leg, she limped over. She could not put weight on her broken leg, but it seemed to simply give out rather than cause her any more pain. Standing over Erod, she gazed down upon him. Her eyes were white, glazed over and empty; cold and lifeless. She raised a hoof, intent on ramming it through his skull and churning his brains and blood into the dirt, when a low, whistling moan slipped through the trees, carried further than was natural by some vile magic. It was cold, greasy, dead; it swallowed Erod's mind, pushing out all semblance of hope, leaving behind only thoughts of torment and despair. With a tremble, his vision darkened and he slumped to the ground, his mind drifting among torturous nightmares.