“...and just when the last pony thought she was safe, there, standing right behind her, just inches away was — The Headless Horse!”
Diamond Tiara shrieked as Rumble finished his story, and he laughed and pulled her closer, giving the mare a quick peck on the cheek.
“Aww, sorry babe, I didn’t mean to scare you too bad… But the rest of you, I sure did!”
The freshly graduated ponies sat around a crackling firepit, resting their hindquarters on quickly felled logs underneath shimmering stars. The moon was bright and full and right overhead, a prerequisite for both Diamond Tiara and Sweetie Belle to agree with the idea. Otherwise, the two had argued, they would not be out in the middle of the Everfree forest overnight.
The ghost stories had been Snips’ idea, and the unicorn was rocking back and forth giddily where he sat, his coltfriend’s hoof on his leg gently urging him to stop.
“Pfft,” Scootaloo said, blowing her mane out of her eyes with the admonishment. “You think the Headless Horse is scary?”
“Scoots,” Apple Bloom said, raising an eyebrow and opening her mouth to say more.
“That’s a story to scare little fillies and colts,” Scootaloo said quickly, catching Apple Bloom’s eye and winking. “But we’re all grown up now. Done with school! Free at last, able to tread the earth and soar the skies at our will!”
“I gotta tend the farm soon as I get back,” Apple Bloom sighed.
“I’ll be working at father’s store,” Diamond Tiara said proudly. “Rumble’s got his whole vtuber thing going on, too, that he’s gonna work full time at.”
“Making more than you,” he whispered loudly, earning a playful smack on his thigh.
“I don’t think either Snips or I could soar the skies, but treading the earth sounds fun. That’s where you dig up valuable stuff and sell it, right?” Snails said, still rubbing Snips’ leg.
Scootaloo sat slightly deflated, her eyes searching amongst her friends for anypony to agree with her. Their faces were slightly obscured from where she sat, obfuscated by flickering firelight and wavering smoke, and it was hard to see their expressions all that well. She felt a little dizzy, though figured it was probably all the cider they had brought along to celebrate their graduation.
“How about you, Featherweight?” she asked, nudging the scrawny Pegasus next to her. “You going straight into hard labour or gonna live free for a bit?”
Featherweight rubbed the back of his neck. “I got fired again right before we came out here, so I guess live free.”
A round of sympathetic sighs passed over the little campsite.
“Nah, it’s okay,” he said, smiling wide. “I hated that place anyways. I might go to Cloudsdale University. The factory’s got a neat little deal for some of those engineering courses, guaranteed employment for a bit.”
Scootaloo nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. Better than sticking around in Ponyville, anyways. Cute town, but too small. That’s a scary story, you know, spending your whole life where you grew up.”
Apple Bloom picked up a large brown mushroom and threw it at Scootaloo, who ducked it and laughed.
“You get a pass! I think like, if your family left, the place would vanish off the maps.”
“Sounds like a ghost story,” Snips said, raising his eyebrow and grinning cockily. “Like one you’re gonna tell us.”
“What? Why me?”
“You don’t get to trash-talk a spooky story and then not tell one! If it’s better, you win. If it’s lame, you’re an egghead.” He took a drink of cider and leaned into his boyfriend. “Go on. Scare me. Unless you’re…?”
“I will hit you with this bottle,” Scootaloo said, finishing her own drink. “You want a scary story, then I’ll give you a scary story. Shut up and listen, everypony, cause it’s the last one you’ll hear tonight, after I scare the shoes off your hooves.”
“Get on with it!”
Scootaloo smiled and then hunkered down low, letting the whimsical shadows dance across her face. Her friends followed suit, quieting down. It seemed the forest itself had gotten into the atmosphere, as it too fell entirely quiet, save for the gentle snaps and pops of the fire.
“They say there’s a monster that haunts these woods,” Scootaloo started, speaking hardly more than a whisper.
“Uh, yeah, duh, it’s the Everfree.”
“Shut it, Tiara. This is a particular monster, one they say is more dangerous than all the other creatures and plants within these ancient groves. They call it… The Wendigo.”
As if practiced, the wind gusted hard then, sending dead dry leaves skittering across the clearing and into the dark undergrowth beyond. Sweetie Belle fixed her mane after the gust, snorting.
“Do you mean Windigos? Scoot, this isn’t a bucking Hearth’s Warming pageant—”
“Sweetie Belle I will uncurl your mane so help me Celestia. It’s different! They’re totally different things!”
“Who named them, then?”
“Probably some dumb Earth Pony. Let me tell my bucking story!”
The rest of them quieted down, listening. Far away, a timberwolf howled, its longing call to the moon carried far over treetops to reach the circle of ponies.
“Now,” Scootaloo continued, “the reason none of you have ever heard of a Wendigo, is because they’re summoned by their story. Be it a bright, sunny day, or a warm, moonlit night just like tonight, they come when this story is told. To speak these words in the Everfree is to meet certain doom… But it’s just a ghost story, right?” she added, bringing her voice up loud and friendly. Beside her, Featherweight twitched, and Diamond Tiara had started to shiver a bit, but the rest of her friends rolled their eyes at her.
“Before it was known not to log in the Everfree, the lumberjack ponies would come deep into the weald just like we are right now and cut away at the trees. But the Everfree, being alive, didn’t like this. One night under a full moon, when eight loggers had settled down for the night after a long day of chopping wood, it finally got its revenge.
“The Everfree sent a spirit in the body of a timberwolf to their camp after their fire had been put to embers, a thing of evil and malice and hatred. It moved stealthily and slipped into one of the tents, where it found the foreman, a single Earth Pony, sleeping all alone. It walked over him, bit his shoulder, and then collapsed into pieces overtop him as he woke up in pain.”
The fire popped loudly, causing Diamond Tiara, Featherweight, and Snails to jump. It echoed back at them, the noise of snapping wood bounding back from the darkness behind the storyteller, and they all leaned in closer.
“But the foreman didn’t shout, nor did he make any noise,” Scootaloo said, her voice lowering again as she finally seemed to find her audience. “Instead, he slipped quietly into the next tent, bit the throat of the pony sleeping there, and then ate him entirely over the course of the night.
“The next day, the loggers woke up to find their companion missing, and traces of timberwolves all over the camp. The foreman had blood on him, but when they inspected him they found it had all seemed to come from the wound on his shoulder. They patched him up, mocking him for being such a deep sleeper, and then continued to work on the forest, cutting down logs to haul back to the quickly growing Ponyville.
“That next night,” Scootaloo paused, catching the eyes of her friends again. Rumble, Apple Bloom, and Sweetie Belle all still looked bored, but the rest of them were at least entertained, and she continued. “With no sign of their friend, they went to bed with the fire still roaring high, stoked with lumber cut freshly that day. The smoke from it rose and wafted over the foreman, and as he breathed it in, his stomach growled, and he quietly rose from sleep.
“By morning, when they got together to make breakfast, only five of the loggers could be found. Two more had gone missing in the night, all without a sound or even a track in the dirt. A couple of them wanted to leave, but the foreman overruled them, arguing that they only had one more full day of work left, and they could leave the next day. When his coworkers objected, he volunteered to stay up in watch over night, and satisfied by this, they got back to work chopping trees.
“That was the final night for the loggers,” Scootaloo said, letting the words hang in the thick air as another gust of wind pushed by, causing the fire to flutter and spurt. “Scared and worried for his friends, one of them had not slept well, and when he heard an awful noise of smacking and ripping and gnashing and slurping, he jumped out of his tent with an axe in his magic, ready to confront the beast. And that’s when he saw… The Wendigo.”
Scootaloo grinned deviously, happy to see all eyes finally on her. She was enraptured in her own story, some dusty fairytale she found amongst the textbooks and bestiaries her parents had hidden away in their attic, and pushed on, eager to reach the conclusion.
“It was a terrible monstrosity. It wasn’t quite there, but at the same time, it was; shimmering in the night and almost see through. It was tall, extremely tall, three times the height of a pony. It had the body of a wolf, with bulging muscles and thick fur, but stood on its hind legs. Its claws extended from its paws like thick knives, and they were covered with blood from the carcass they punctured through. But the worst of all,” Scootaloo paused, looking up at her friends.
Every single one of them was shaking, leaning back from her, their faces pale and eyes bulging wide. Scootaloo smiled even wider, proud to know she had actually found a real scary story for a campfire.
“But the worst of all was the face, where instead of a wolf’s head there was a deer’s skull, with eyes that glowed with hatred, and strips of flesh and felt hung off of it in bits. Upon seeing this terrible thing consuming the last of his friends, the last logger fled back to Ponyville, and we’ve never sent loggers in here again.”
Her friends fell backwards, screeching and screaming and scrambling over each other, leaving all their things behind as they bolted down the blackened trail towards Ponyville. Scootaloo blinked, surprised. She didn’t think it was that scary.
Featherweight was next to her, rubbing his forelegs together. “Huh,” he said, watching them with the same curiosity as Scootaloo had. “I thought they’d be braver than that. I mean, I’m still here, right?” He laughed nervously, and Scootaloo turned to speak to him before freezing.
On her shoulder, she felt a slow, steamy breath.
Her hoof gripped Featherweight’s leg tightly, and using every ounce of courage—or every ounce of fear of looking afraid—she turned her head.
Behind her was a monster.
It was tall, extremely tall, three times her height.
Her eyes met with bulging muscles bound by rough rotting fur, and she traced her gaze up from the canine groin to the chest, where thick, knife-like claws jutted out from paws the size of her head.
“Scootaloo?” Featherweight asked, looking at her hoof on his leg.
She didn’t listen or respond, because by the time he had finished saying her name she had reached the face, where instead of a wolf’s head was a deer’s skull, adorned with maggot-ridden chunks of meat and shadowy eyes that glowed black with hatred.
“R-real funny, g-guys. Sn-Snips, I mean, you’re really g-good with illusion magic, but th-this is a bit too far, don’t you think?” Her legs were numb, her brain empty with fear. Featherweight had turned by now, too, and was gawking at the monstrosity behind them.
Scootaloo noticed the moon shining through the back of the skull, causing its slavering teeth to glow ethereally, and thought perhaps it wasn’t a fantasy book she had read the story in, but a history book.
“What the f—” Featherweight said before a paw shot out from the Wendigo, and three blades of keratin punctured through bone and breast. He gurgled, still looking at the gargantuan creature that had killed him, and sobbed breathlessly as the Wendigo lifted him up high and flung him far into the woods with merely a flick of its paw.
Scootaloo’s legs remembered their purpose then, and she launched up from the log, running straight over the fire in her panic to escape. Her wings beat hard while she cantered, desperately trying for once in her life to lift her off the ground and far, far into the air. She reached the next log where Snips and Snails had sat and jumped, sailing above it and ready to hit the ground running, before a searing pain ripped through her back.
She screamed, feeling hot fire in her feathers as two claws pinned the wings together and yanked her backwards. The Wendigo was still silent, its movements sounding nothing more than the rustling of leaves in the wind and a deep, infrasonic growl of detestation. In her struggles, she slipped down as more of her wings were sliced by the hooks within them.
The Wendigo slammed her onto the ground and roared, still silent yet louder than anything. Her eyes exploded with stars as the back of her head connected with the log bench, the blackness edging in from her vision and eking out into her ears, where all noise seemed to die for but a moment.
She blinked her eyes as a new type of pain spread up her spine, and found her hindleg was pinned to the ground by a hindpaw, almost bending under the weight of the Wendigo. Scootaloo cringed back, covering her head with her hooves, waiting for the inevitable stab of jagged teeth into her forelegs.
Seconds passed, an endless eternity while Scootaloo shielded herself and prayed to the stars above for help, but no carnassial end came to her. The heavy weight of the Wendigo stayed put on her leg, and she felt no other sensation except for a slowly growing radiation of musty heat over her head.
Whether it was some primal curiosity or simply confusion as to why she was still alive, she slowly spread her forelegs apart and glanced up, and with a wave of revulsion she immediately regretted the action.
Before her, between the Wendigo’s legs, a glowing blue, veiny appendage was snaking out of a huge sheath, menacingly expanding towards her quaking body. She shirked back down between her legs, silently whispering over and over for the prank to finish, for her friends to come back and laugh at her, for her to wake up from her cider-induced nightmare, anything.
A massive paw grabbed her forelegs and lifted them up away from her face, and she found herself presented with the Wendigo’s full erection. The canine penis twitched in front of her, reeking like wet, molding leaves, and she twisted her head away, slamming her eyes shut. A second paw smacked the back of her head and the claws tightened around her neck, the Wendigo pushing her closer to its member, still silent.
She felt the hot flesh mash against her lips and she whimpered, clenching her jaw shut tight as the paw forced her into it. It slipped and slid over her face, a sticky precum staining her fur, but still she fought against it, desperate to get away.
There was a shifting of weight and a wet crunching noise as the Wendigo stepped down hard, shattering her hock and snapping her tibia backwards. Scootaloo screamed in agony, the cry cut short as the throbbing cock quickly filled her mouth and reached the back of her throat, the heavy paw still forcing her down as the Wendigo thrust forward into the now open muzzle. It let go of her forelegs, content to keep her pinned to the forest floor by grinding its footpad into her now useless leg.
Abhorred, Scootaloo fought back, biting down onto the cock in her mouth as hard as she could, throwing punches into its thighs and then straight into the massive, fur-covered ballsack as it swung closer and closer to her chin with each thrust. The Wendigo took no notice, unfazed and unharmed by her attacks. The ineluctable assault continued, forcing Scootaloo’s jaws and lips open wider than they could span as the base of the shaft reached her nose, the swinging testicles smashing into her throat against the bulge caused by the tip. She tried to scream again, but no noise outside of the wet squelching of saliva escaped her muzzle as the foul meat in her esophagus sucked out and in, over and over and over.
Her stomach churned in terror and disgust and violation, and as the Wendigo thrust completely into her throat she vomited, a spray of cider and stomach acid exploding into her cheeks and out around the sides of the cock, splattering against the scratchy fur. She felt her cheeks start to fill again, this time with the expanding, rank flesh of the Wendigo’s knot, and she vomited again, completely emptying her stomach of its contents. With no escape past the engorged member, the bile pooled back into her lungs, and her eyes stung as she tried to cough. Her lungs seared in complaint and her eyes watered as she tried to breathe in air and sucked down only canine girth instead.
She ceased her relentless pounding against the Wendigo’s privates and opted instead to simply clutch at the fur around its thighs, pressing back with less and less strength as more time elapsed with her throat full of cock. The Wendigo growled its haunting, shifting noise of leaves and sand, and Scootaloo felt the member pulse and throb, bulging as what must have been buckets of seed deposited themselves directly into her stomach, until blackness finally overtook her vision.
She didn’t know how long she had been out, but her eyes fluttered open as the invading penis slid out of her muzzle and air rushed in. Her stomach ached, and a weak hoof rested upon it told her that it was distended, bulged out from the massive quantity of cum she had just been forced to swallow. The giant paw let go of her mane, letting her drop limply to her side on the log, the movement shifting the mass in her gut. She heaved, hard, and then again, hooves clamped around her belly as her body fought to evict the unwanted substance.
Nothing came, however, and she tried again, her body wracking in pain as her stomach tightened around the cum that refused to move. She smacked her lips together, noticing the trail of seed left on her tongue also seemed stuck in place. Her eyes came into focus to find the Wendigo still standing on her shattered leg, its erection still raging, dripping with a heavy, ghostly white substance.
A pair of claws came down around her, wrapping around her barrel and putting force on her distended abdomen as it lifted her off the ground. The movement sent slashes of pain through her torso, and once again she tried and failed entirely to vomit any of the shining spunk from her body. The Wendigo flipped her over and then smashed her onto the log, putting more pressure on her punished stomach.
Scootaloo slid forward onto her face, her destroyed leg scattering any dreams of using the chance to run away, and she sobbed. She tried to pull herself forward by her exhausted forelegs, only to find those same two paws wrapping around her and pulling her back again, setting her hip upon the log.
She felt a familiar sensation of heat and hatred rub against her asshole, sliding up and down it slowly, lubricated only by her spit and vomit.
“No…” she whispered, eyes going wide. “No! No, please, no, no no no, don’t! Let me go!”
The Wendigo could not or did not listen, but simply lined the tip of its cock up with her clenching asshole, and Scootaloo started to scream, shifting her hips as far as they could go, wriggling and writhing on top of the log, trying anything to get away from the impending assault.
“Get the buck away from me! No! No! NAAAAAAAUUUUGH!”
She spasmed and shook as her shoulder was pierced by a claw, the creature’s blade separating flesh and ligament and bone like butter, all the way through to her front where it tore her fur like fabric and sunk deep into the dirt. She tried to breath, but the excruciating shocks from her back stunned her diaphragm. Scootaloo tried to writhe away from it, only sending more streaks of pain into her overwhelmed brain. A wave of hopelessness overcame her as she realized that beyond the fire in her spine, she could not feel nor move her right foreleg, and her resistance stopped entirely.
As her asshole was spread wide by the massive cock, she could only manage a sob. She felt it force deep inside her, her eyes filling with tears as dull stabs of pain spread out from her guts. The Wendigo did not start slow, quickly burying its bone as far inside the mare as it could. Her asshole was almost immediately destroyed as it spread wider than it ever should have been, the stinging complaints of splitting skin nothing compared to the puncture through her back or the rearrangement of her intestines.
It did not take long for the Wendigo’s pace to quicken, and Scootaloo gasped waveringly with each gaping thrust, pawing at the ground with her good forehoof in meaningless effort to escape. Her ears were filled with the sickening squelching of the shaft’s strokes in her stomach, her belly bubbling and gurgling as the volume of spunk dumped in her earlier shifted with each thrust and pull.
The Wendigo hilted his tool within her, the huge sack swinging forward to smash into her clit. This new soreness inspired Scootaloo somewhat, and she cried out weakly.
“No… ow, please… ow… it hurts, stop, no more… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have… ow… please… no, no more…”
The cock pulled far out of her ass, leaving only the tip in the bleeding hole, letting the oozing blood lubricate it before pushing forward again, slowly this time. Scootaloo twisted in place, trying to accommodate the girthy shaft to no avail, and she gasped as it stopped shorter than it had reached before, a meaty smack sounding out from her rear as the Wendigo’s knot connected with her flanks.
“...no,” Scootaloo whispered. “Nooooooo!” she shrieked next, trying to stand up with her one good leg, letting the claw carve more of her ruined shoulder as she shook and fought to get away from the tumescent organ.
Her eyes crossed and she breathed in deep, her scream cut short as the gargantuan knot forced her asshole apart. It ground in slowly, the skin skipping as it caught and released the mainly dry flesh. She felt like she was going to explode, like her spine was trying to leave through her skull, like all her innards were being squished to the side.
She went to resist, to beg for mercy yet again, but two loud, dull cracks, like logs being snapped in half, issued from her hip bones, and again blackness started to fill in from the edges of her vision. Her pelvis cracked loudly again, and the knot shot easily into her gut, the sudden release of tension rocketing her back into the crotch of the Wendigo and thrusting its cock up into her stomach.
She did not pass out this time as the Wendigo orgasmed, but instead lay half dead, half conscious, as audible glurks and gurgles issued from the member inside her, each groan a receipt of a heavy load of hot cum. It continued while she lay there, longer than any orgasm she had ever seen in her life, stretching her already tortured belly out to new, uncomfortable levels.
Her bleary eyes blinked out of sync as the Wendigo came, and violet irises came to land upon the full moon high above, still shining through the malice-infused skull down upon her.
“Please, Luna… save me… wake me up… Celestia… Twilight… anypony, please…”
The claw in her back dragged out slowly, the hooked tip bringing up more ligaments which snapped outside her skin, and the Wendigo’s paws wrapped around her torso again. Each claw tightened into her just a bit, just enough to puncture the hide, but Scootaloo didn’t respond, didn’t feel it, her brain drowning in electricity and violation, until one final plea escaped her lips.
“Please… just kill me…”
In a single go, the Wendigo jerked her off its knot, and three more ropes of the white, glowing substance splattered over her back, where they stuck and burned. It flipped her over and smashed her back down onto the log before readjusting its grip to her hindlegs, pulling them apart so hard she felt they might tear off. Free of the obstruction, she tried vainly to evacuate the contents of her intestines, but just as before, not even a drop of the otherworldly seed flowed from her gaping hole.
She felt the tip of the Wendigo’s dick press between the folds of her marehood, and she closed her eyes and cried.
Be it by exhaustion, or shock, or a loss of a will to live, Scootaloo said nothing, did nothing. She laid back still as the veiny blue member shoved into her pussy, her mind drifting entirely away from the moonlit campsite.
Her brain brought forth a memory, some avenue of escape from the situation, and she fled to it, finding herself in the body of a filly, exploring old dusty books in a warm attic. She had just finished reading the story of the Wendigo when her mother had found her, and at the time, confused about being berated for taking an interest in their work, had ignored what she had been told.
“These aren’t playthings, Scootaloo. I’d love to tell you all about my job, but do not read these books. They’re dangerous, especially for a little girl like you.”
“But it's just a made up story! There aren’t any things called Wendigos. It’s just somepony confused about what a Windigo is,” Scootaloo had pouted in response.
“All stories have their roots in reality, Scootaloo,” Mane Allgood had said, pulling the book away from her. “Some moreso than others. Look at me, Scootaloo. Look! Do not ever tell any pony what you read in that book, ever, especially not in the Everfree. Do you understand me?”
“Whatever, mom,” Scootaloo said, already disinterested with books that were clearly more trouble than reading them was worth.
The Wendigo roared yet again, and the gushing rush of leaves brought Scootaloo’s mind back to the forest floor. She could hardly see through the tears that had been pouring from her eyes, but the monster was still right above her, relentlessly smashing her cunt with its cock, the knot pounding against her sex like a blacksmith at an anvil.
She found herself thinking, almost absentmindedly, that she didn’t feel right. Her right legs had both started tingling, and her left legs radiated a deep, arthritic complaint. She shifted feebly, noting that the limbs appeared to be bending far away from where she remembered the joints being. Even her ravaged insides had stopped complaining, the signals cut off as each organ shifted slowly like meat in a stew.
The Wendigo pulled down hard on her legs with enough force to rip them from their joints, but they held true regardless and instead Scootaloo felt—distantly, as if it weren’t even her body anymore—her taint tear like a ruined seam as the knot forced its way into her tunnels. Again the disturbingly loud gurgles of cum bloated her, her vag pumped full far beyond its capacity could ever be. She laid still and took it, letting the heat of the seed emanate through her ruined body, no longer caring what happened to herself. She had begged for death and, having been denied its comforting grip, had given up entirely.
With a soundless grunt the Wendigo ripped her off its now finally softening member, inspecting the dangling mare with unblinking eyes before tossing her against a tree, where she rolled down and collapsed, breathing shallowly.
Her unfocused eyes watched as the shaggy, monstrous form blended back into the shadows of the Everfree, her divine punishment having apparently been served, the creature leaving with no more a noise than what it had arrived with.
She blinked sluggishly, her mind blank save for a single thought.
She turned her head slowly, her body somehow ridded of all its pain when the dump of spectral spunk had swollen her womb, and her eyes settled on a white and brown lump of pony across the campsite, where Featherweight’s lifeless body lay.
A hoof that was not a hoof reached out towards it, the growing claws of her left foreleg latching into the ground and dragging Scootaloo an inch towards the body.
A leg that was not a leg pushed against the tree she had been thrown against, sliding her closer to Featherweight’s body.
She didn’t blink as she maneuvered what was left of her body towards her friend, her eyelids gone. It didn’t bother her. Nothing seemed to bother her any more. Nothing, except for the single thought engraved in her brain. The immediate memory of her despoilment was already fading away, pouring out of her head as it shifted and reformed. Her name, her friends, her past, she could feel all of these things slipping away as she herself started to turn ever-so-slightly transparent. She couldn’t remember or think of anything except for that one, solitary thought.
Scootaloo reached Featherweight and sobbed a sigh of relief as her claws curled slowly into the flesh, the thought echoing loudly, over and over, roaring louder than a waterfall, crashing into her over and over and over.
She was just so very, very hungry.
Author's Note
"In spite of its function as a reservoir for human darkness—or perhaps because of this—the shadow is the seat of creativity." — Carolyn Kaufman
