Juniper Breeze leaned glumly against the counter, her green eyes staring outside at the light snow dusting the rest of the Herdsville Train Depot. Fluorescent lights bathed the snow-covered concrete of the station with white and yellow light that gradually transitioned to an icy green near the edges. The wind gently howled against the door of the general store, occasionally stirring up some of the freshly fallen snow outside. It looked to be another boring night shift, ponies rarely traveled during the long and dark winter months. Even fewer would bother coming to Juniper’s backwater town during this time, with the weather spoiling any park-going experiences.
With nothing else to do, Juniper sighed and let herself slide off the counter and onto the laminate floor. She had only one customer come in so far, a poor stallion by the name Candy Cane. He had stood out in the cold darkness of the night, waiting for a train that never came. Why it hadn’t come, Juniper couldn’t say. The stallion walked inside, warmed himself by the radiator, bought some hay-fries from the hotbar, and left. All without making a peep more than necessary. Reminiscing on her encounter, she walked around and ‘tidied up’ the immaculately organized shelves for the fourteenth time this night.
She had more to do than trot in place, she had brought a book or two to read along with some homework that needed to be finished. Though, she wasn’t quite in the mood to do the two of those yet. Boredom had not yet sunk its teeth that deeply into her mind. Finishing up her patrol of the store floor, Juniper made her way over to the window to watch the snow once again.
What she saw, however, piqued her curiosity immensely. A display on the other side of the depot had come to life, displaying a message announcing the earlier train cancellations and delays before switching to a new message:
“BIG THINGS ARE COMING”
Now, Herdsville was no stranger to weird occurrences. Heck, their little town was a locus for weird and often paranormal phenomenon. Princess Luna had even seen to it that a branch of the Equestrian Occultism Agency was opened in the town, to study and perhaps abate some of the strange things that happened around the town. Like the mare with the upside-down body that showed up in photos or the Revenant of Moonhollow Library that dissuaded crammers. She had seen those two herself, but both paled in comparison to the creature they called Pink Cow. She didn’t even want to think about it, about how eerily quiet it was when it crept into her home.
This, however, was unusual. They hadn’t had many electronic phenomena around the town. Was this just another occurrence, or was it trying to signify something else? Juniper thought about it and blinked, and with that motion, the message disappeared entirely. She sat there in silence for a few moments, wracking her brain to decide whether or not she had been seeing things. Trusting the feeling deep down in her gut, Juniper worryingly looked off to the sides of the sign. Her pitiful equine night vision failing to spot anything in the murk that lay beyond the station and before the dark woodline in the distance.
Stepping back from the window, Juniper swore she could feel a slight tremor run through her body. Her hackles stood on end as she swallowed a bit of bile that was surfacing in her throat. Was that her, or was that coming from the ground? Another tremor rippled through the area, lightly crinkling some of the bagged goods of the shop. It definitely wasn’t her, although she shivered in anxiety all the same.
Trying to calm herself, Juniper turned her attention back towards her job, trotting over to a whiteboard behind the register that displayed the tasks her boss wanted her to do for the night. Having already sorted the shelves and cleaned the floor, there weren’t many left. One of those scant few, however, stood out more than the others. The trash needed to be taken out, and Juniper’s heart sunk in her chest. She hated the dark, she hated nighttime. What innumerable, horrible things lurked in the shadows just out of reach? What leering, sharp-toothed predator waited in the dark corners of her vision?
Still, she was a fully grown mare. It was silly for her to be scared of the dark like a schoolfilly, she had to be brave and get the trash out to the dumpster before running back into the safety of the store like Nightmare Moon herself was chasing her tail. Wrapping up the bag beneath the counter, she took it over to the main trashcan and dropped it into the larger bag there before securing it much the same. Levitating her phone off the counter and dropping it into her shirt pocket, Juniper dragged the bag over to the door and steeled herself by taking in a deep breath.
She pushed open the back door and was met by the familiar concrete expanse covered in white powder. There in the distance, just at the edge of the platform next to the road, sat the puke-green dumpster, its lid slightly ajar. Nothing stood between her and it, only what felt like miles of illuminated snow and an ocean of black beyond the edges of the platform. Stepping a hoof outside the door frame, Juniper froze as she heard a deep rumbling on the wind, followed by two quick tremors that were more powerful than the ones before. She stood there motionless, her heart thumping in her chest as her ears pivoted to catch any trace of that awful sound.
When nothing more came of it, Juniper let out a sigh of relief and briskly walked out and onto the platform proper. Leaving the warm safety of her workplace behind, she ventured into the dark. The dumpster felt so, so far away. When she finally reached it and threw the garbage into the metal box. She let out a sigh of relief and turned around to make her way back.
An ear-splitting wail came from her chest pocket and Juniper leaped into the air in shock. Panicking, she attempted to run on the snowy platform, only for her hooves to catch the ice and send her plummeting to the floor. Her phone spilled out of her shirt, displaying a message that only added to the overwhelming fear and anxiety Juniper was feeling.
“EMERGENCY ALERT
Paranormal warning in this area until further notice. Shelter in place and turn on all external and internal lights.”
Gulping down the frigid air, Juniper grasped her phone in her mouth and scrambled to get her hooves under her before she galloped to the safety of the general store, jumping through the frame and slamming the door shut behind her with her magic. By now, she was wheezing with fear as she began to lock every conceivable entrance she could think of and flicking on every single light that the store possessed. Feeling dizzy, Juniper scrambled into the back room and collapsed in the employee lounge.
Pulling out her phone once again, she attempted to dial her roommate. As the phone rang, a terrible tremor ran through the ground, rattling her teeth and knocking a few loose things off on the sales floor. A deep, almost pained moan echoed throughout the air, its volume such that Juniper could feel it rattling her ribcage. The dial faded away, replaced by static. The signal bar at the top of her phone had gone empty, something had knocked out her service. There was no guard to come and help her now, she was well and truly alone.
Sitting in the employee lounge, Juniper pulled up a book and tried to calm herself down by escaping to the world trapped in the ink of the pages. And for a while, it worked. As she read, there was no great tremor or sound to bother her. Her heart gradually settled down and she was feeling hopeful about the rest of the night.
A loud crash brought her out of her delusion and sunk the icy knife of fear back into her heart.
Something was beating against the door to her shop, something loud and screaming. It screamed in primordial terror as it batted against the wood loud enough to make Juniper flinch. She felt tears welling in her eyes as she struggled to keep from bawling. Her legs were locking up, but she managed to inch her way over to the lightswitch, careful to keep from making a sound, and plunged the lounge into darkness. Then, she felt her way over to the janitorial closet and slunk into that tiny, cramped recess. All the while the entity at the front of the shop caterwauled and beat with increasing ferocity.
A loud crash came from outside, along with a deafening roar that rattled the glass in the store. Whatever was pounding at the door let out a horrid scream, and with that, the noise coming from the front of her store had vanished. The faint light that had trickled through to the closet had ceased, along with the hum of the refrigeration unit on the other side of the wall. The power had gone out, and yet, Juniper did not emerge from the closet. She didn’t feel safe. She choked back tears in an attempt to keep from crying as she huddled in the corner of the closet, buried beneath mop heads. Trying desperately to hide from the view of whatever might come through that door.
Silence reigned; horrible, suffocating silence. There was not the faintest hoot of an owl or howl of a coyote in the distance. Only the caterwaul of the wind as it blew past the general store. The weather had evidently gotten worse, as winds buffeted against the side of the building, making the old timbers groan and heave with every gust.
The tremors returned, growing louder and stronger with each passing second. There was a rhythm to them, like the gait of some great beast. Just entertaining the thought of a beast that big romping its way towards her took all of her willpower. Juniper prayed that she would live, that she could feel the warm embrace of her mother just one more time. She wanted to be back home, away from this dark, cold, and windy store that felt more and more like her tomb.
The tremors grew stronger and stronger, now accompanied by the deep, rattling breaths of something in the distance. Juniper squeezed herself into a ball so small it was hard for her to breathe. Fear and indecisiveness gripped her, and Juniper was torn between her instinct to bolt out of this store as fast as equinely possible and her smarts telling her to obey the emergency alert. She shakily rose up and onto her hooves as she reached out to the doorknob and prepared to open it, only for a powerful tremor to knock her onto her haunches.
It was too late and even if she got outside, what hope was there? She couldn’t outrun something that big, and it being nighttime, she wouldn’t be able to tell where she would be running. There was nothing she could do anymore. Juniper sucked in a deep breath and stuck her head outwards, closing her eyes. She wasn’t ready to die.
A massive crash deafened her hearing as wood splintered, cracked, and groaned. The walls around her shook violently and tremors threw her on her belly. Then the world went silent, save for a high pitched whine as her chest rattled so violently that she couldn’t breathe. Juniper brayed, at least, she thought she did. She whinnied loud and defiantly at whatever was coming to kill her, only for the tremors to start slowly fading in intensity. She had not died and so she collapsed into a sweaty, fear-soaked pile on the floor.
The tremors continued to grow fainter as her hearing slowly returned, the splitting pain that had made her yell out in terror was fading, replaced instead by the sensation of something warm and salty running down her throat. For whatever reason, she didn’t feel scared anymore. With no more fear clouding her thoughts, she shakily rose up onto her legs and opened the closet door. The lounge outside looked to be intact, save for the furniture that had been displaced and made askew by whatever terrible impact had befallen the store. Juniper could hear the howling winds from earlier clearer than ever, followed by the icy touch of the air upon her sweat-soaked body. Something had happened to open up one of the doors or something.
Walking through the lounge and into the hallway, Juniper simply stared in awe at the sight of the storefront. The walls and ceiling had been ripped away and reduced to splinters. The metal shelving pancaked and torn apart. Blood caked the entirety of the floor and walls, along with what looked to be a massive piece of skin that was soon spirited away by the frigid winds. Juniper walked into the middle of it in disbelief, staring at the pulverized remnants of the register’s stone countertop.
A rumbling groan pulled her away from her observations, and to the horizon. As the lights outside came back on, she could see a massive footprint in the snow. A strange crescent with five dots at the end. That, however, was not what had initially caught her attention. There in the distance, she could barely make out a figure from its contrast against the cloudy sky. Sticking above the treeline, was what looked like a roughly circular head atop a short neck. Past that, she had trouble telling where the creature ended and the treetops began.
Ignoring the questions racing throughout her mind, Juniper simply stood in silent disbelief as she watched the massive creature walk away. She was a big mare, bigger than most stallions in fact, and yet, she felt like such a little pony.
