The Doom That Came For Cloudsdale
Lately I have suffered a most peculiar and disturbing series of dreams, no doubt brought about by some mixture of the painkillers and alcohol. My job is demanding and I have never second guessed the necessity of what I do for the good of the flock. Some part of me, deep down, must feel different and my attempts to drown it out thus far have failed. It taunts me at night as if it had been there alongside me as I killed her, as if I had the power to go back and change it.
The nightmare is nearly identical each time that my fitful slumber permits me these visions. Once again I stand above the Pegasus Device at the edge of the metal scaffolding, the chains dangling in the background. My footing is firm, wings ready for fight or flight, yet I am trapped in the diminutive stature of a filly. Towering above me is a mare with blood lust in her eyes, her purple mane stained a sickly crimson with blood. She screams at me, telling me I have failed the flock, as her spittle rains on my face.
Behind her a faint but hideous pair of eyes watches as blasphemous whispers fill the darkness. They promise me any and all of my darkest desires if I surrender my pain to them. They remind me how I killed Scootaloo without remorse, like the hundred score before her, and the countless thousands that will follow. They promise me the strength to continue my work, even as the orange pegasus shoves me off the scaffolding.
The metal teeth whir to life and bite into my flesh, pulling me into the device. I cling to the chains as my body is distorted and broken, bit by bit. The darkness is lit by a rainbow of color as my insides turn to pulp. The watcher in the dark laughs.
I awoke in a tangle of sheets soaked through with my sweat, a faint headache growing, and my throat parched. It took a minute to free myself from the linens and find my way into the bathroom for a cold shower. Before straightening out my mane and tail, I took a few more pills with a glass of water. My fur was matted to my skin by the sweat and the ice cold water was a welcome relief.
Each night seemed more vivid than the last, and the madness more and more understandable. This nameless voice said it could take away my pain, or perhaps it just revelled in forcing me to relive it each night. It had not affected my work at the Rainbow Factory yet, nor would I allow it to. I was the only pegasus fully devoted to the cause, the one called in to make the hard decisions and stain their hooves so others could keep them clean.
The alarm clock in my room sounded and I turned the shower off to dry myself and get ready for work. My coffee machine had broken last week so there would be no caffeine to aid me in preparing to face the day. I headed off to work with dark blue bags under my eyes, luckily a brisk flight above Cloudsdale did much to improve my alertness.
As I neared the factory I felt a surging pride in the work I did, as countless pipes and decorative rivers carried the life-sustaining rainbows out into Cloudsdale. Every weather system, every crop grown, every pony nourished lived only because the flock provided for them. The lesser races, unicorn and Earth pony, came from far and wide to marvel at the Winsome Falls beneath Cloudsdale. Even the run off of the factory provided for a spectacle of liquid rainbow waterfalls over a hundred feet high.
Swift Thunder, a stallion who had worked at the factory for thirty years, was on guard duty outside the massive wrought iron gate that separated the inner and the outer factory. He greeted me as Director Dash, letting me in without needing to see my identification. A pony of my station within the flock could go anywhere and do anything as reward for their service, a service not even the Princesses knew we provided to keep the gears of Equestria’s industry turning.
It was unfortunate it was Monday, because it meant the board would be meeting so the bureaucracy could run their mouths about the productivity of the factory. Dr. Atmosphere was better than the other directors, having played a crucial role in the process of turning ponies into spectra to fuel the factory. He may not have been as hoofs-on as I liked, but he would have gladly thrown his own parents into the device if it meant keeping the factory running, which was why I liked him.
They bade me to sit as I entered while a fat pegasus displayed a chart of the factory output from the last three quarters. It had been declining, due in part to several foolish initiatives by the Mayor that had reduced the number of fillies failing the final flight tests. Despite making the test harder and even bribing the judges, we were still down in production. At ten percent loss a quarter, we were down thirty percent and the directors agreed drastic measures were necessary to ensure the reserves of spectra did not run out by the end of the year.
“Dash, I’m going to need you to lay off thirty percent of the workforce at the end of today’s shift. We’ll keep the gate barred from the outside an hour before the shift ends. I trust you know what to do?” the fat pegasus asked.
“Of course, but at least give me a chance to find another solution? These are some of our most loyal workers, most have served for decades to be promoted into the inner factory.”
“If you can raise the reserve tanks by forty percent then perhaps we won’t need more spectra, but if you can’t then I expect you to handle the liquidation.”
After the meeting I headed through the main theater to a nearby control room to begin assessing solutions to the problem. We had handed out pink slips before, sometimes by lottery, others by seniority, and each time it led to messy riots and decreased worker morale. The extra spectra produced would make the numbers look good for the upper management, but the decreased productivity would rob back those gains inside a month.
If it came to it I would have to feed each of them into the device myself, and I would do it, but surely there must be a better way to supplement the reserves. It was then that I remembered the Winsome Falls and the diverted rainbow trails that were allowed to cascade down the mountain. They fed into an underground aquifer, the entire tourist trap did little but allow us to flaunt our superiority to the lesser races.
After many calculations I figured that shutting off the flow to the riverfalls could shore up our reserves by thirty percent over a month. If I also placed some bribes at a few flight schools to push up flight tests, I might be able to increase the incoming sacrifices too. It would be a hard sell, convincing management, but I had ten hours left on my twelve hour shift to put a plan into motion.
One by one I located and closed each of the shutoff valves around the industrial complex. The pipes groaned in protest as the runoff was redirected from the Winsome Falls to the reserve tanks, but the factory held together as it always had. I headed outside, instructing Swift Thunder to dispatch for a dozen off-duty guards to reinforce the gates for a round of layoffs. Of course, to Swift, layoffs meant losing a job and not being fed into a machine of countless metal teeth.
I arrived at the Winsome Falls to a peculiar sight, as the river beds had all dried out once the rainbow flow had been cut off. The soil looked parched with small crevices filled with bright magentas, yellows, and blue. Deep underground there might be some salvageable runoff so I flew down to take a look around, but before I could land a great quake shook the landscape.
There was a rippling all along the scorched dirt, knocking over several trees and sending many animals fleeing. Large rolling waves moved out from the ground, and a great grinding like a landslide filled the air with a horrific noise. I flew up higher to get a better look around and noticed a large sinkhole had formed, the entire mountain seemed to be slowly lowering into the expanding dust cloud.
Between the cracks in the soil, a thick viscous black ooze began to bubble and squeeze itself out, covering the terrain. Countless other pegasi had taken to the sky to watch along with me, and down below I spotted a family of Earth ponies trying to leap across a crevice and flee. The stallion landed in the ooze and screamed, as his hooves appeared stuck. There was a sizzling sound even at this distance as he fell into the ooze. His limbs spread as he melted into a puddle of syrupy orange spectra, which was then absorbed into the foaming sludge.
As the cracks widened further, there was a thunderous crash as the sinkhole fell into an unfathomably black darkness. A creature the likes of which I had never seen reached one hand out of the gaping hole, each finger the size of a modest mansion. It dug into the dirt as something began to pull itself up out of the emptiness.
It was a most indescribable sight, and if I were to tell you that the being looking back at me mixed the features of a dragon, an ape, and an octopus, I would not be far off from the truth. It was truly loathsome and coated in the fetid ooze. Those eldritch eyes seemed almost to show a spark of recognition as its gaze fell upon me, and I could hear the whispering again as if I were in a waking nightmare. It uttered but a single drawn out syllable.
“Dash.”
I do not recall how long I hovered there watching the amorphous being pull itself free of the dirt, trying to find some comprehension of what in Tartarus I had just unleashed. It was not until the creature leaned back and yawned that I truly took in the sheer size of the being. With only its head, arms, and upper torso pulled free of the ground so far, it towered far enough above me for its head to be level with Cloudsdale. Within its expanding mouth, ringed by tentacles, were concentric rings of teeth clacking. The clashing bones formed a gibbering speech all their own as they sharpened themselves against one another.
Then I saw what the beast was doing as it inhaled deeply, a gale force wind like a hurricane pulling dozens of cloud houses and startled pegasi down into its maw. The rows of grinding teeth silenced the shouts and screams of panic, replacing them with a deep crackling noise of wood furniture and foundations being consumed alongside their owners.
Whatever hunger it had was not nearly sated, not even as it turned its attention to the pride and joy of Cloudsdale: The Rainbow Factory. It fit the factory into the palm of its hand as the fingers curled around it like countless steel tendrils. Pipes burst and metal screamed as pressurized spectra and rainbow shot out into the air, the byproduct of a thousand lives dripping toward the ground. The accursed being reared back its head again as it drank from the factory, teeth rending the metalwork apart. In a single bite he did what countless fools over a millenia had attempted and failed to do.
He had destroyed the Rainbow Factory.
I am ashamed to admit how long I stared in shock at the great demonic fiend before feeling spurred to action. As I examined it searching for a weakness I found only clouds of fungus-like growth and countless spores in the air that stung my sides and burned my lungs when I got too close. Large patches of skin sloughed off like a reptile trying to shed in a few seconds what should have taken a few days. Underneath was a repulsive layer of scales, mottled like lichen on a rock and overlapping without the tiniest of gaps.
Dozens of pegasi struck at the armored hide, probing for weakness. No weapon nor blade seemed to make any progress, and several pegasi found themselves falling from the sky with half their flesh and bone dissolved by the acidic ooze. Others spat blood as their insides liquified from breathing too many of the fungal spores.
Yet I seemed spared the worst of these horrors, as if it had chosen me to bear witness. Perhaps some perverse loneliness or unfathomable desire to increase my suffering led it to ignore me as it tore Cloudsdale apart one cloud at a time.
In the end, only a few scattered clouds remained in the air. The few metal pipes on the crater’s edge were the only sign left of the factory. Scattered sofas, beds, and kitchen appliances were the only sign that a city, population once numbering in the tens of thousands, had ever existed.
How many had fled in time I do not know, but it had pulled itself loose from the earth and had set its sights on Canterlot mountain. It lumbered forward, slobbering a trail of noxious ooze, leaving me behind as the whispers mocked my inaction. With each footfall, the ground formed great canyons, and with each breath, gusts of wind threatened to knock down trees. As it walked along at its full height I could see only up to its waist, where a pair of stygian wings draped loosely over its back like a cape. The rest was, perhaps mercifully, above the cloudline where ponies could not witness the doom bearing down upon them.
I knew then that if the flock was to survive, I had to get word to somepony I could trust to warn them. There were other pegasi cities that could be saved, even after Celestia and Canterlot fell. Were Nightmare Moon herself to reappear in all her fury to defend the city, the sisters would still be lambs waiting to be slaughtered. And so I found myself breaking the sound barrier as I shot towards Ponyville.
It was not a long flight, and I landed at the home of the last pony I had ever wanted to see. I had made sure every pegasus that moved to Ponyville knew that Fluttershy was a failure, an outcast, and yet here I was now to beg her aid.
I found the home empty, and decided to leave her a written account of what had happened. The voice was louder in my mind now, the unutterable syllables of the ancient language were giving me a migraine. Madness crawled along my sanity like a swarm of starving ants, leaving me little time to act.
I worked quickly to explain to Fluttershy my plan, pitiful as it was. She would have to rebuild the Rainbow Factory, and sacrifice the Earth ponies and unicorns to buy time. There were other pegasi cities, they could harness the Pegasus Device to create spectra. Perhaps the beast would satiate its hunger and rest before continuing its conquest. If the flock was quick, perhaps they could start feeding it spectra again. They could keep it asleep for another thousand years, and ensure the flock survived.
By the time my account was done, I noticed several of the clumps of abnormal fungus had attached to my flanks. They oozed a sickly green and sent rootlike tendrils of black beneath my fur. Touching one with my hoof sent a jolt of pain up my spine, and the whispers in my head got louder. I realized it was too late for me and went to the kitchen to grab a knife.
I flew out into the Everfree and found a nice looking rock to lean against. I could hear the voice clearly now and it shook me to my core as comprehension of a being named Cthulhu came to me. My pupils narrowed in fear, and I felt my body go rigid.
I ran the knife directly into my heart and felt an ice cold sensation as I gasped for air. My heartbeat quickened. Crimson blood ran down my fur and mixed into my rainbow tail. I began convulsing, capturing short frantic breaths only a second long. I struggled to speak as Cthulhu’s voice shouted at me in outrage.
With my last breath I spat out blood and spoke one last time.
“For the flock.”
