When I was younger and grander and prettier and purpler and better known, I began to dig.
It started, like most things in my life, with a nervous habit I was unable to suppress. In this case, the need to tear my horn through the loam of a hill.
As an alicorn I had little need for sleep, so hours could go by each night after everypony was in bed and the stars were set in place without any reason for me to be. It was in those hours I’d find myself out by the hill with dirt collecting around my horn and sliding down into my eyes. Just tearing away at the ground with the tip of my horn until eventually exhausted I fell into a couple hours of quick, invigorating sleep.
The next morning, I’d think it was stupid to have wasted myself in such a way and wonder about the potential long-term negative effects of my nocturnal behavior. In the rational light of the morning, it was easy to know that there were better uses for my time then sneaking out to the hill and digging away, but as I brought on the night and sent everyone away, I’d again feel the need to be back there again at the side of my hill digging my horn into the soft earth again tearing my way forward again through the thin roots of shrubs and tiny trees that grew in my hill and shaking the fallen earth from my face.
At first, it was an off and on habit. For a few days or even weeks at a time, I’d stay inside at night and busy myself with papers and books and anything else to distract from the fact that I wasn’t tearing my way into my hill just outside town.
But my hill and my habit was always there waiting for me to return to it.
I’d think at first, I could dig for just an hour a night. Just one little dig, I’d tell myself. I’d read stories in which characters had such little, controlled rituals. And who could imagine going through the whole rest of their long, long, long life without ever again digging into a hill with their horn? Certainly not me. It was so relaxing and so invigorating. The feeling of the earth giving way, the feeling of the dirt clinging to me and then the relief when a huge clot of it came off. It was like peeling free a scab that never ended.
And so useful! How many nights did I have some problem in mind and realize exactly the solution while digging my burrow? How many times had I felt, as I dug, that trill of a perfect word or idea that I had somehow been seeking unconsciously?
Even at my best, I knew I was only taking a break from digging my burrow and that sooner or later I’d be back at it straining my neck muscles against the clay as I dug further and further into my hill once more at the habit no matter how much I swore I wouldn't or what penalties I threatened myself with should I start digging again.
I wasn’t always alone digging my way into the hill. Pinkie Pie would appear sometimes from wherever she came and paw away at the ground with her little hooves beside me.
I could never bring myself to tell her she was doing it wrong.
I should have said something.
I should have told her that for every minute she spent digging I had to spend two minutes correcting what she’d done as I scoured the ground out properly with my horn. Instead, we just dug in silence and I gradually came to resent her more and more as I dug against her efforts. When she finally disappeared back to wherever she’d come from, it was always a relief and I could spend the rest of the night fixing what she’d done while trying to help me.
I should have said something to her once, but one night she quit coming.
It is shameful to say that it was a relief that I never saw her again.
It is shameful to say that I never missed her. It is shameful, but it is true: better to dig alone and do it right than be distracted by help I didn't want or need.
Not long after that, I dug far enough into my hill that stability had become a problem. Each gouge dislodged earth above and caused the ceiling and walls to fall in upon me. Fortunately, I was also far enough in that I could bring my wings to bear against the problem. I beat my wings against the roof and the walls, feverishly pounding the dirt into a firm foundation around me as I continued carving away before me with my horn.
One night, not long after I’d dug out an initial chamber just inside the hill, Applejack was there to greet me as I left my burrow. By then I’d quit sleeping in the castle and just remained under the hill when I finally dozed off.
The nights of not digging were long behind me by then.
I didn’t see Applejack at first as I exited my burrow. She was sleeping in the dark until I raised the sun over my hill, but quickly rose and opened her eyes after I rose the sun.
She said nothing for a long time, only stared at me and my burrow behind me.
Then she said, “so this is how you spend your nights?”
She looked around and shrugged.
After that, she started leaving apples and small kegs of apple sauce and apple cider outside my burrow, which I always brought back in with me and stored in my expanding antechamber. The earth above kept the inside of my burrow at a stable, cool temperature and the giant centipedes kept the mice away from the apples. Those were the beginnings of my carefully managed stores as my burrow truly became my home.
I do not remember when I started thinking of it as my burrow. My burrow, where I had begun digging out my own space. My space scented with apples and dirt and the crawling insects that I had joined in the dark. My space with my walls beaten and packed tight by the action of my wings.
My wings which were gradually losing their feathers and becoming fleshy, paddle-like appendages fit for packing the earth as I became a creature fit for living under the earth. I don't think I could fly anymore, but I know I don't need to down here where I live.
Sometimes as I dug, I upset the insects and vermin beneath the earth and they would bite me, but even the fiercest venom was little more than annoyance against my immortal liver, and in time even that annoyance faded. I could impale a foot-long centipede on my horn and allow it to spend the whole night biting the thick callouses that covered my face as it died and not be bothered at all.
The apples are still left outside my burrow, or at least they were the last time I was able to find my way to the outside. I do not think it is Applejack who leaves them anymore.
I’m not sure who would still leave them. Or would have left them, the last time I was there.
I have skipped ahead, I’m sorry. I hate it when my stories do that.
Yes! I still have stories and books in my burrow, and they are stored as carefully as my apples and barrels of cider.
Rainbow Dash brought me books. We would sit outside my burrow together, and she would talk for hours about what she had last read. It was always Daring Do at first, but her taste in literature branched out a bit as she grew older and her time opened up wide and forbidding as mine had. Long nights without sleep, long days without reason as she ungainfully flopped into retirement.
Books are the best way to destroy vistas of wide-open time. You turn your head down away from the world and focus on a single tunnel of words winding about before you and follow without questioning the direction or meaning. Always forging ahead without complaint as if reading some absurd story about a mare digging herself into a massive, pointless warren of tunnels.
So, Rainbow Dash and I would sit outside my warren. Me covered in dirt and worms and centipedes and other crawling things and her talking for hours and hours and hours about some book she was giving me to read.
It was a very comfortable time.
She would describe everything that had happened in the book, then I would read it to confirm that she had not lied to me, then I would confirm for her that it was exactly as she had described it. Then the cycle would repeat.
It was very comfortable and fortunate, because it was becoming difficult for me to talk by then, so my share of any conversation was limited. My neck muscles had been strengthened by years of tunneling, and their bulk pressed against my vocal cords in strange ways that no medical manual had ever described.
LaMare once theorized that a species developed traits by each generation’s striving. Reaching up toward the tops of trees caused giraffes to stretch their necks, for example, and each giraffe inherited the triumphs and self-mutilations of their ancestors as they stretched toward the sky.
He was completely wrong of course, but it seems alicorn bodies do work that way although without the need for generations. If I stretch out my neck enough it grows longer, and if I beat my wings against the walls they become strong and featherless like an extra set of limbs. If I strain my neck enough, the muscles grow so huge to compensate that they crowd out my vocal cords.
I am infinitely malleable.
I don’t think this is much of a blessing. It certainly seems dangerous.
Celestia didn’t use to blink very much, did she? I don’t think she did, although I have trouble remembering her now. Perhaps she was afraid that if she blinked too much, her eyelid muscles would have gotten so powerful and huge that they would squeeze her eyes shut forever. Perhaps that will one day happen to her anyway.
Perhaps it has already happened to me.
I can’t remember the last time I was above ground to check.
My neck muscles certainly had grown bulky enough to block off my voice by the time I was standing there and listening to Rainbow Dash ramble on as she handed me a new book to read.
I haven’t read in so long.
I am growing impatient.
I am hungry.
I will wait a little longer, but not much longer. I will wait.
I will—
Rainbow Dash would talk and talk and talk and I’d agree and then she’d fly off and I’d return to my warren. There were so many tunnels by then, so many strange places to go.
I didn’t read as much as I used to. Just a few pages before I’d need to be off again back at my addiction and tunneling new passages to store her books.
And my books too, the ones I had written.
I started writing in the heavy dark far in the warrens where I couldn't see. If I couldn't see the words to read, then I could imagine them, write them. and know what I'd written. That's just as good as reading, really. I started simple, carving words into the walls with my horn when I was too tired to move forward or backward or tunnel further. I'd lay, exhausted, surrounded by the product of my labor but unable to sleep, and I'd write little jokes like “This end up” or “Exit” beside an arrow that pointed nowhere.
I didn't actually need signs in my warren. I knew where every apple, centipede and book lurked at any moment.
I still do.
I feel their vibrations through the walls, smell them through the ground, and when those senses fail, I can know anything I want about my warren by just making it up. The facts of my world down here beneath are nothing more than my interpretation of them, and I can change that interpretation at will. I eat my way through walls, collapse tunnels, and rewrite it all. All I must do is imagine it, and the facts are remade to fit me.
I even remade the books.
I profaned the bindings first, then the blank pages at the fronts and backs, then the scraps I tore from the bottom and top of every page. In time I began to scrawl across the text of the books themselves. It was a delicious new heresy for me.
Always writing, always scribbling, about Luna’s time lurking in the moon and Celestia’s time lurking in the hallways of Canterlot Castle and their time before lurking in the Castle of the Two Sisters and Cozy Glow gradually falling away down a hole that goes a long, long, long way down into the dark and Twilight Sparkle digging herself a warren far away beneath the earth and always, always, always filling her warrens with new books.
Yes, they were warrens now. They had been for a time before I’d realized it. A sprawling subterranean complex of twisting passages filled with dead ends and false exits and sudden drops and other traps.
Traps like the one you’re in now, deep down here with me.
It is uncomfortable to smile now. The muscles in my neck and jaw just don’t like it anymore. I don’t do it intentionally.
The traps were not intentional at first. It was simply an accident as I carved my looping, insalubrious way through the earth.
By then, I had been digging for so many years and the muscles around my neck had grown so strong that I could measure my progress in meters per hour, and I was reckless as I looped back over my own work. Plowing away without a care in the world until the ground gave way under me.
I had discovered counter-mining.
I don’t remember what book I read about counter-mining in, nor did I think about counter-mining before I did it to myself.
It was just something I thought as I collapsed my own world down around myself.
I’ve done it! I thought, as I lay there in shock inside a collapsed tunnel pinned down by fallen earth. I've done it! I’ve counter-mined myself! What an incredible discovery!
After that, I started deliberately creating such traps, to ensure that nopony other than me could navigate my labyrinth.
I do not think nopony is the right word. I mean no ponies, yes, but also no yaks, no griffons, no hippogriffs and hopefully no changelings although they might be at home in a place like this. That's an unpleasant thought, but, other than changelings, no sentient creatures, but not no creatures. There are many small creatures that join me in my tunnels. Centipedes and mice and worms and millipedes and other creeping things who find the earth that my horn had freshly turned to be beneficial to them.
Fluttershy brought many of them when she came down here to talk to me. She was the only pony who would enter my labyrinth. Pinkie Pie hadn’t been around since before it was a burrow, and Rainbow Dash and Applejack always remained outside.
Fluttershy would brave the twisting darkness.
Perhaps it was the bat in her.
Perhaps it was her love of all critters.
Just as Rainbow Dash had brought me books, Fluttershy brought me critters who needed the dark, damp environment I was making. Giant millipedes and worms and centipedes and the most ferocious and brave among her mice who sought the new frontiers far from the world above where they could be themselves just as I could.
Fluttershy always talked to me in such a gentle voice, slowly introducing me to—
Ah, I understand now.
Introducing us. Introducing two feral animals to each other. She wanted us to understand that we could be friends with each other because we were both her friends. Even if we didn’t understand each other or occupied different places on the food chain.
Fluttershy wanted us to get along, even though I was so much larger and more dangerous than even the cave sows and hydras.
A danger you understand first hoof now.
I ate some of the mice she brought. And some of the centipedes and hydras and other things as well.
I don’t think that would have offended her.
She probably would have understood.
She was friends with a bear after all.
She was friends with me even after everything I did down here in the dark.
Still do down here in the dark.
I eat the critters more now than before, since I’ve been so long without going outside. Outside where the apples would be left as sacrifices to a secret underground god. Outside where the sun and moon still move as I command them, now knowing by rote when it is time to turn the world I will never see again.
I don’t need to see it like that, with my eyes in the hateful sun. I can see just fine through the earth all around me and know what has happened far away. From here I can see where I wrote “Twilight Sparkle is dead” in a wall as a joke.
When I don’t know something, I can just create something I know. It is day above because I have made it so. I don't need to eyes to observe that. I don't need to learn anything when things become true simply because I invent them as such. When I was a child, I listened as a child, I understood as a child, I read as a child, but when I became a god, I put away childish things.
Some nights, I sense Discord standing just far enough away to be safe from me. Unlike Pinkie, he never tries to help me. (I do not think I can be helped.) Unlike Applejack or Rainbow Dash, he never offers anything. (I do not want anything anymore.) Unlike Fluttershy, he never says anything. (I do not hear anymore. Not words anyway. Not anymore.)
Unlike you, he—
He only watches with that look on his face like he understands exactly what this means.
Each visit is shorter than the last.
If they could even be called visits.
He is just there sometimes, watching in the distance with those long yellow eyes of his sliding out at me from the dark. Once his gaze lingered, but now he will only glimpse at me and leave as if confirming something that he’d already known for a long, long, long time as I scrawl, “poor Scallop barely resembles a pony,” across the pages of book Rainbow Dash left me back when she still came to visit me.
It has been so long since I’ve had a visit.
I’m so hungry.
Neither Starlight nor Rarity ever came to see me. I can’t blame them for that. They had horns too, and maybe they understood well enough without seeing it. Maybe they knew that if they saw me digging into the earth, they’d realize they could join me, and their bodies are not so strong as mine and their lives are not so long as mine.
What I can do and survive, would be the end of them.
It may be the end of me anyway.
Aside from cave-ins, I have noticed that the dampness and constant rubbing of the earth has made my hooves start to flake and fragment. Sometimes I’ll feel a long crack along the side of a hoof and start to slowly pull the splinter off, but as I peel the crack goes further and further back until a whole huge chunk pops off and drops to the ground.
The scattered fragments of my hooves surround me as I dig my labyrinth deeper and deeper and deeper into the dark.
My hooves are larger now, and the slivers of keratin are the size and shape of a foal's ribs when they come off and litter the ground like a carpet of bones.
There may be some actual bones in there as well.
There certainly are some actual bones in there. This is another fact I know because I made it up. Because I made it so. Because I ate them, because I was so hungry.
Sometimes, I peel a hoof fragment back so far that it reaches my skin and a little bit of blood begins to trickle out when the fragment pops off.
That can’t be healthy, but it is oddly satisfying. Do you find it satisfying? Bleeding into the dark? All alone except for me breathing down on you?
Yes, ah yes, my legs. Hoof bone is connected to the—
Do you know the song?
I know the song.
I learned the song once. I know I learned it, although I might have learned it when I made it up and carved into the walls around me.
I had to learn how to stretch my legs out so I could crawl over and around my pits and traps and counter-mining and the carpet of bones. With careful balance, I can use the tips of my wings and the tips of my hooves to grip the walls around me like a water bug resting on the surface of a still pond or creek.
Viewed from a distance no doubt I appear to hover in the center of the tunnel with my immense jaw hanging low and open and drooling.
Losing the keratin has made my hooves to much softer and more flexible.
“I'm becoming something that can live in a hole, that can only live in a hole,” I carved into the walls with my digging horn while suspended between the walls on my six delicate limbs with my powerful skull-crushing jaws working idly beneath my permanently shut eyes and face a plate of callouses left from years of centipede bits.
Then I set to work cleaning my labyrinth.
Yes, I do keep it clean as best as I can. Which isn’t very well.
There is an underwater lake I found many years ago, and I carry my shed keratin and shed hair and dropped pages and throw them onto the foul-smelling water. Onto the water, because the lake is covered with a thick layer of scum so the rubbish doesn’t break through immediately. It takes time, but I have plenty of time now. Plenty of time in the dark to delicately step across the scum with my six broad, strong limbs like a water bug walking across the lake of decay and rot and death.
Not that the cleaning helps much.
Much like your struggles, it is all in vain and coming to an end soon.
When a hot iron is transferred into a room temperature barrel of water, the iron rapidly warms the water while the water cools the iron until the water and iron are equally warm, but if ice is added to the barrel then it will lower the temperature of both the water and the iron further and the ice will begin to melt.
Do you understand me?
If sugar is added to water until the water becomes syrupy, and the water is then evaporated slowly the sugar will remain and collect at the bottom as it falls out of solution.
Do you understand me?
If a sugar cube is dropped into this saturated water it will remain solid, but if more water is added the sugar will begin to dissolve.
Do you understand me?
The amount of space commands that things should fill it just like my legs and wings stretching out to reach the walls so I can scurry in the air safe from the uncertain ground. Thus, when I clear out the collected peelings from my hooves, it causes my hooves to grow back faster and become more fragile and prone to peeling, and when I destroy a great quantity of books, I must write a great deal more to fill the space. And as I grow my labyrinth more prey are drawn into it and I grow larger and the space is filled.
The equilibrium maintains itself!
Another marvelous discovery of mine down here in the dark.
I can find so many scraps flowing out when words are destroyed. Here a scrap about Luna living inside the moon and digging her way through it to build an immense city in the shape of her castle in the Everfree and believe she has never been banished, there a scrap about Celestia and me as ants, there a scrap about Cadence banishing herself and the Crystal empire beneath the earth for a thousand years to wait out an ice age that destroys all life in Equestria.
Sometimes instead of fiction, I make up facts. Like this area of the labyrinth. I made it up once and here it is. Like this trap. I made it up with someone in it and here you are.
Like Twilight Sparkle who I imagined to be down here in this labyrinth.
It is truly amazing the things I have learned living alone down here in my labyrinth since I last saw anypony.
I still hear some of them sometimes I think maybe. Sometimes, I can hear movement in my labyrinth, and noises that I can’t identify. Like the noises you made.
Unless I made those noises up.
You do seem rather real, though.
When I hear these noises, I press myself tight against the dirt walls so that I can hear them with my whole body. My teeth feel the sound of fear and my broad feet feel the sound of foreign breathing and my chest feels the sound of intruding hooves and my guts feel the sound of fresh prey succumbing to my clever inventions.
And you have done just that.
Not that I am worried about what anycreature might do to me here. The traps started as a fun game and a joke for me to fill my time with and prevent my labyrinth from being just maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I don’t need to worry about what anycreature could do to me here in the deep, stupid darkness where I make my home. The muscles along my neck don’t just enable me to tear through the dirt at a speed measured in kilometers per hour, they also enable me to bite with a force measured in hundreds of thousands of kilograms per centimeter.
Easily enough to crush any skull that happens to be between my teeth.
To be honest, I’m mostly concerned about what somecreature might say to me.
I have written and destroyed many words in my time in this labyrinth. I have written about Luna burrowing in the moon and Twilight Sparkle burrowing in a hill outside Ponyville and Cozy Glow sliding deep into a hole that goes a long, long, long way down into the dark. I sometimes don't remember which is me. Sometimes, I worry that I might have gone mad, or that I have always been mad.
I think I was Twilight Sparkle once, but can I remember being Twilight Sparkle? If someone saw me and told me I was not Twilight Sparkle and never had been, what would I do?
Disbelieve them of course.
I know the difference between fiction and reality. Fiction is what I carve into the walls and scribble on papers and pour out into the underground lake with my clippings. Reality is—
Reality is that what I choose to believe becomes true down here where I make reality.
Reality is that I was Twilight Sparkle once.
I may still be Twilight Sparkle.
I was Twilight Sparkle once.
I think I might like to be so again.
I can’t be sure.
I can’t say any of this to you, since I’ve long since lost the ability to speak, so this whole time I’ve just been looming above you in silence. My six limbs stretched out like a spider holding me above you and my immense, muscled jaws hanging open and releasing a waterfall of drool upon you.
That is unfortunate. You’ve probably become scared, trapped there like that looking up at me.
I can smell the fear on you.
Fear spoils the meat.
I am so hungry.
I would have loved to hear what you had to say about all this, but I can’t hear pony voices now anymore. Not in a way that makes sense. If the noises a pony makes ever made sense.
It is for the better.
You’re probably just screaming for help.
You might be telling me I’m not Twilight Sparkle.
If I heard that I might believe you.
I won’t fret it.
Don’t you fret too much either. My neck muscles allow me to tunnel through the earth at a rate measured in kilometers per hour, and they allow me to bite with the force required to crunch straight through a skull.
I might have said that before.
I’ve certainly written it before.
I’m distracted by hunger.
No more time to waste.
It is time for me to lower the sun and raise the moon in the above world I can never return to.
It is time for me to eat.
It is time for you to die.
Goodnight.
Author's Note
Oh, no! You walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue.
Would you like to try again?
