Lavender huffed. She'd been looking for a job for months. Every time she found one she would get fired two weeks later. It's not like she was doing a poor job...apart from that one time she worked as a waitress and slammed her food tray so hard on the head of a rude customer that it became their new collar.
Her small home sat between two trees magically entwined together on the side of the road leading to the nearby town of Feldlock. She lay on her soft bed covered in a white comforter, deforming what was once a smooth and very clean surface. The shelves carved into the tree trunks held a few books, but most were disheveled and dirty. There was sparse decoration, limited to a short metal table, a few large pillows on the floor, and whatever was in the kitchen in the next room. The lumpy walls weren't conducive to hanging anything on them.
The light from the window directly above it illuminated the whole, tiny cabin, helping the mare focus on the job ads she held in her hooves. In the worst-case scenario, she would have to leave her home and live somewhere else. Staar felt a weight tug at her core at the thought. This was the best comfort she had felt in such a long time and it would be a shame to leave. The mare flipped through another page and her eyes widened almost instantly.
'Cleaning staff required at Canterlot Castle. Candidates will be selected personally by Princess Celestia herself'
It was for today, even! Those idiots at the offices again! They always did this! Furious, the mare grabbed all the necessities from her home, throwing boxes and folders left and right in her search for them. Even a job like that would at least help her pay for most of her necessities. For the rest, well...she would reach that road when she reached it. Lavender stopped at the door and checked everything she needed. She had her old, ragged, brown saddlebags from school, her documents, and a book to read while she waited in the waiting room for her turn... A shock coursed through Staar's brain. She looked to her flanks and readjusted the gray-blue, full-body suit to better cover her mark. With a sigh of relief, Staar left her home and went to the raggedy train station just on the outskirts of her town.
Every second on the train was stressful for the mare. Would she arrive on time or would she be late? Every bounce on the minor defects of the rails made her stomach bounce and apply more painful, stressful pressure to her insides. Should she have not answered the ad? The others probably had weeks to prepare.
"Now arriving at Canterlot Station! Next stop, Hardy Grove!" the conductor announced through the speakers.
The second the doors opened, Lavender bolted out onto the streets, knocking a few ponies aside by accident and throwing one on their rear, causing the boxes they were transporting to tumble off their carrier. Staar looked behind her and grimaced. She wanted to apologize, but she didn't have time.
Fast, fast, through the streets of Canterlot Staar galloped. The castle was getting closer and closer, but the mare wasn't sure she would get there in time. Was she late or early? She didn't have time to think about it too hard, she...thought? Around ten minutes later and the mare was struggling to the castle gates where a unicorn royal guard awaited her, gasping for air that her screaming muscles demanded.
"Who goes there?!" the guard called out. "The castle is closed to visitors."
Lavender dug into her saddlebags and pulled out the hiring ad between her teeth. The guard took it in his magic and eyed both it and her skeptically several times before handing it back.
"Here for the job, hm?" the guard asked with a raised brow. He leaned against his spear. "Just go through the main doors then turn right. First door. You'll see the others there waiting." Staar nodded and walked past the guard. "Don't talk much, hmm?" he asked. The mare froze in place. His voice seemed to scrape at his own throat, and Lavender could see something in the corner of her eyes, but looking at him revealed nothing extraordinary. "What?" he asked.
Staar ignored him and continued through the garden, noticing a strange, dry crunch with each step through the dirt road leading to the castle entrance. The bricks had been removed, and the new ones, still white in color, were being looked over by the road builders to the right of the path. There was nothing in way but mud, so what was the crunching noise?
Most of the foliage the castle garden was known for had either wilted or was being trimmed, and whatever caused said wilting left behind strange etches in the ground and the air around them. Black gashes that waved about like they were enveloped by a heat haze that no pony reacted to. Patches of the grass seemed to overlap patches in the same spot, like two realities had meshed together, and others had taken on a blueish-gray color. The cloudy, darkened sky above didn't help with the strange atmosphere coating Canterlot Castle, something a few unicorns wearing white shirts seemed to be commenting on.
The entrance of the castle was immense. Tiled floors with tiny black specks of imperfection in the stones gave it some personality, but the bare material froze the air, causing Lavender to shiver from the sudden temperature difference. Had she fleshy feet, they would have turned to ice by mere contact with the stones. Only a few small plants lining the walls decorated the area, and Lavender could see that a lot of ponies were too busy cleaning the naked entrance to pay attention to her. It did explain the emptiness, though. The mare looked around and scrunched the corner of her mouth. Didn't Canterlot Castle have stairs in the entryway? They probably redecorated. It was an old building, after all.
Regardless, Staar took the first door and ended up in a much smaller room with a brown carpet floor, a few wooden seats, and a single tinted window that let in just the barest of light through its yellowish glass. A single pony was sitting impatiently on one of them. She was nibbling at her wing tips, making the lighter brown feathers fall and vanish into the floor. The pegasus shot a nervous look at the newcomer and cleared her throat.
"Oh, uh, you're here for the job, too?" she asked. Her olive green eyes were trembling with fear and stress. "I really want this job, and apparently Celestia might hire most, if not all of us if we qualify." She gave Staar a nervous smile and brushed her unkempt, tan mane out of her eyes. "I'll have to redo my mane..." She groaned with worry. "D-do you think they'll dock points for that? Maybe Celestia will understand it's because I'm nervous, o-or not? My cousin told me they pay attention to that and if you're easily stressed! M-maybe--"
Staar stared at the mare, dumbfounded. She just kept talking and talking and getting distracted by her own story. She trailed off probably twenty times before catching herself and clearing her throat.
"I'm Chocolate Swirls. What's your name?"
Just as Lavender opened her mouth to answer, a door directly opposite Chocolate opened up, revealing itself hidden behind the corner of a short wall.
"Are you here for the job interview?" a voice asked.
"Yes!" Chocolate proclaimed.
Staar saw the guard's head lean past the door. He opened his mouth then paused and looked at her without turning his head. His eye widened in shock.
"Four?" he said with a poorly hidden tone of shock. He looked down and around, frustrated and pensive. "Fine. You may come as well. Time is short."
The mare looked at the guard skeptically and followed silently after Chocolate Swirls. He closed the door after them and hurried forward. The unicorn seemed taller and lankier than most ponies Staar had ever seen. She would have to explore Canterlot and see what other body types existed. She suddenly realized that seeing the same shapes at her home was tiresome. Staar bit her lip. Maybe she stayed at home too long.
"Hey," Chocolate whispered to her. "Doesn't he seem really tall and skinny? I didn't know ponies could get like that."
Discretion at its finest, Staar thought to herself. The hallway they were walking through seemed to repeat itself ad nauseum. The top of the right wall was occupied by windows that let in very little light whilst the bottom of said wall was decorated with only a ministool or a potted plant, if lucky. The floor was partially covered in a red carpet with golden tassels that absorbed the sound of every step the group took, but it seemed to stretch forever in this unending hallway.
The pegasus snorted several times and snirfed. Staar stuck out her tongue in disgust at the slimy noise the pony was making.
Chocolate noticed and chuckled nervously. "Sorry. There's just this strange, super intense, sweet stench in the air. Like sugar being burned with a rose, I guess." She cleared her throat. "Not really good with identifying things."
Lavender noticed that the mare's fetlocks were pulled back, revealing much lighter brown hooves. Chocolate's cutie mark was also exposed: A chocolate bar floating over a sea of melted fudge. Lavender was getting hungry for chocolate now and was almost consumed in daydreaming about chocolate ice cream drenched in chocolate syrup when the guard opened a door to the left and entered it without inviting his two guests.
"H-hey, wait!" Chocolate called out. Staar followed, but when Chocolate opened the door, it ended up being another hallway with no guard in sight. "Wha..." The two turned around to see that there was a white brick wall in place of the hallway they had just come from. "Wh-what's going on?!" the pegasus squeaked.
Staar pulled her away from the door and closed it. When the two looked away and then back, it was gone. In its place was even more hallway. Chocolate started galloping in place, but whatever sounds she would have made were being eaten by the carpet beneath them. The lighting had dimmed from noon-ish bright to pale moonlight doing its best to illuminate their path.
"I'm scared," Chocolate squeaked. "Why does the castle look so sinister now?!" She looked around statically, too scared for smooth movements. "G-guard? Princess Celestiaaaaa?" she cried out. Staar walked forward, her expression more tired than anything. "W-wait for me!"
The two moved slowly and silently until the corridor shifted into an arc. This section was much larger than what the two had gone through. Five doors made themselves available to the two ponies. At least seven ponies could stand side-by-side here. Much like the entrance, there wasn't much decoration save a few potted plants of an unknown, purple-leafed species that Chocolate looked at with intrigue. The second door from the right creaked open slowly within the weighty darkness and silence, breaking the quiet and pushing the ponies into a more defensive posture. It was eventually forced against the wall with a sudden and violent movement.
Chocolate screamed at the top of her lungs, making Staar flinch and glare at her angrily. "Heh heh...sorry."
"There you are, my little ponies," a familiar voice rang out.
"Princess Celestia!" the pegasus cried out in relief.
A very bright light in the sea of black offered itself to the two, but while Chocolate was excited an hurried inside, Staar was more skeptical. Celestia was drinking tea and sitting on a rather large, faded-pink couch with a white trimmed cloth covering it. An immense doily. In fact, most things had the same doily. The short wooden table placed between the couch and two chairs, the floor beneath them. Even the two cupboards filled with all sorts of decorative glasses and plates had them atop their frames...and on the interior decorations. Staar looked up and averted her eyes from the overwhelmingly bright chandelier flooding the room in white light. It too was covered in a massive doily. Lavender was going to bring it up, but Celestia spoke first.
"You're here for the interview?" the alicorn asked.
"Y-yes!" Chocolate said as soon as she landed on the red chair's cushions. "A guard was escorting us, but then he vanished, and the place we were in was gone, too!"
Celestia coughed into her teacup, splattering some brownish liquid everywhere. "Excuse me. Right. I thought I had sent out the message to prevent anypony from coming in, but you two still reached us." She cleared her throat and used the doily on the table to clean her mouth. "There was a magical incident, so now the castle grounds are all turned over. Random events happening." She chuckled. "I'm afraid that even Discord won't be able to help much until the magic calms down." She floated two more white cups from the cupboards and poured tea into them. "Tea?" she proposed. Lavender looked around, a fierce scowl furrowing her brow, suspicious of their surroundings. She floated a steaming cup of tea towards the nervous pony standing next to the second chair. "Come now," Celestia said with a warm smile. "Have some tea and relax. We can wait out this unfortunate circumstance."
Staar sat down in front of the table, ignoring the chair, and took the cup in her hooves. She stared at the steaming liquid, analyzing its every minute detail rather than drinking it. It seemed innocuous enough to the pegasus who enjoyed the warmth it brought to her body with every sip, and the heady aroma cleared her sinuses. The three ponies sat in an awkward quiet broken at short intervals by Chocolate Swirl and Celestia sipping from their tea cups. The tea kettle, which was also covered in a white doily, hissed steam from its beak sporting a loop in its shape.
Chocolate looked at the Lavender from the corner of her eyes and took another sip of tea. Celestia leaned in ever-so-discreetly, eagerly awaiting Staar's reaction. The earth pony displayed audible disgust and posed the cup onto the table, causing the alicorn's face to crease up like it was being pulled taut against a solid surface.
"You can't do that!" the pegasus berated Lavender. "It's a gift from the princess!" she stated through clenched teeth.
"She's right, you know," Celestia added. "It's quite rude to refuse a gift from another, especially as a guest."
"Princess, I want to apo-oooowwwhat?" Chocolate's breath was taken away when she looked at Celestia's strange appearance. "What's happening to your face?"
"What do you mean?" Celestia asked. Her mouth formed an 'O' shape. "Oh, is the tea not to your liking?"
"N...ha..."
The tea that Chocolate had been drinking turned into a goopy, reddish-brown color, and teeth appeared along the surface.
"I thought of trying a new recipe since I know many ponies seem to adore tea-based delicacies. Something called 'infusion', I think?" The pegasus threw the cup away, shattering it against the wall. She gradually took on a greenish tint and puked all over the chair and floor, much to Celestia's displeasure. "How rude! A treat I made just for my little ponies!" She gasped. "Is it that... Am I not the princess you all love?" she wondered. She moved the table aside with a foreleg and leaned forward. Her eyes were hidden behind the taut skin. "Am I not adored by ponykind?" Chocolate tried to shrink away, but the chair's back held her in place. "I need to remedy this misunderstanding. Come. Give us a hug!"
A wide smile formed on Celestia's face as her neck started to bulge and pulsate, like something was hidden within and trying to break free. The long, slender neck many mares envied burst like it was made of papier mâché, and two, long, bony arms ending with three fingers stretched out towards the pegasus who screamed at the top of her lungs and fell off the chair in her bid to escape.
"Such rudeness!" Celestia chastized. She stood up, frowning. Staar watched silently as the skin around her jaw started tearing. "I admit that I am still rusty at this 'public affection', but that is no reason to react like that, young filly." She sighed and shook her head, and as she did this, her neck elongated and caused it to wobble left and right more and more. "Let us try this again. I simply want a hug."
"N-no! No!" Swirl protested. Something clawed at her insides. At first she thought it fear, then noticed her wings starting to lose feathers and bulge, like the arms from Celestia's neck. "Aaah! Get it off! Get them off! Stop!" Chocolate's eyes swelled with tears, and she was too paralyzed with fear to try and wipe them clear.
The alicorn pulled back, despondent. "That's not a way to react. You'll need to be taught some manners, young pony," Celestia stated firmly.
She spoke like a mother chastizing a misbehaved foal and even wagged the finger of one of the hands jutting from her neck. The alicorn turned towards Staar, a wide smile on her face. So taut was her skin now that her jaw and teeth poked through. Chocolate reached out to the earth pony, hoping to cry out for help, but her own-former wings wrapped themselves around her head like tentacles, muting her.
"I'll start interviewing you right now, young mare," 'Celestia' told Lavender.
The world seemed to cave in on itself, with Staar as its center of convergence. Staar fell quietly into a seemingly endless, cylindrical abyss and looked at the walls around her for details. She noticed a hand or two, like the ones Celestia had, through the black miasma. The silent falling was broken by a blinding light striking the earth pony directly in the eyes. She grunted and looked down to see a giant Celestia face looking at her with skin pulled tightly across her skull and an open, empty mouth. It appeared to just be the skin and nothing more.
Staar stared at it sternly as she approached it. She would never know what would have happened had she reached the face, as a black, amorphous mass struck it from its left side and began devouring it. A strange, muffled scream reverberated off the walls while the light flickered in intensity the more the face was overtaken. A violent tug ripped the mare from the tunnel and into a ruined Canterlot, causing the building she burst from to collapse. Rubbing the back of her head to try and alleviate the pain, the pony realized that the brief glimpse she caught was not a Canterlot in ruins. Rather, it was an agglomeration of buildings growing out of an extended hallway like tumors swelling the flesh red and causing pain. The ruined architecture wrapped with the misshapen hallway made it seem like giants were hunched over to stare at what was walking between them.
Bright lights came from their interiors, illuminating the otherwise dark stones, but only barely. The ceiling was still impossible to see well.
"Hello?" a voice halfway to crying called out. "A-anypony there?"
Chocolate Swirl found herself running away from the fake Celestia. The first door she took led to another hallway, and every door reopened to the alicorn coming in for a warm embrace. Again and again and again. The mare cried silently to herself. The horrors she was succumbing to didn't matter as much as the primal need to get away. Her desperation was increasing by the second while she tried to find a real door, knowing that 'Celestia' was approaching her every second she wasted here.
She had begun to give in to her fate until a door finally opened to something else. Something unseeable that pulled her into its gaping maw and threw her elsewhere in the castle. She landed with a splash into a river of tea being mixed by dozens, hundreds, if not thousands of the three-digit hands growing from the brick walls.
The current became stronger and stronger until the pony could no longer resist it and was pulled like a paper boat. The arms kept her screams muffled and prevented her from wiping the tears from her eyes. All she wanted was a job at the prestigious castle of the alicorn sister. What was happening to her and why?! Was she going to die? She wished she had stayed in bed.
She was pulled out of her thoughts by the arms growing in number and snapping at her in a bid to catch a great prize. They grew in number and density until several dozen emerged from the river bottom and grabbed onto her.
"Mmmf!" she cried.
She struggled to get out of their revolting grasp and only had enough space to crane her neck slightly to the side and bear witness to a bright light coming from behind her.
"All we request of you is a hug!" the twisted and warm voice of Celestia called out. "What are you afraid of? You will feel much better afterward!"
The mare started struggling even more violently as the thought of that false Celestia embracing her was slowly turning into a reality. In a fit of anger, the mare twisted her foreleg around one of the arms and tore it in half, giving her enough momentum to free herself and get pulled further down the current.
The arms continued to snap more and more aggressively at the pony until they chose a new plan: Interlock into a wall, taking up the whole hallway. They caught Chocolate in their trap, and with the current of tea pulling at her so roughly, she couldn't get away. The light at the end of the flooded hallway reared its ugly head again and caused the mare to panic once more.
She needed to call for help, but the arms were in the way. She pulled at what were once her wings, but they squeezed her tighter and tighter until they started to cut off circulation. The pegasus looked through tears at the increasingly blurring light. No solution came to mind, but the wall shifted regardless. Chocolate turned and yiped in terror. A shifting cloud of black smoke from which only the vaguest sense of a body could be perceived overlapped her perception of the arms and any space around it. Its proximity hurt the mare's head. The net of arms started to dissolve as the cloud 'focused' into view, aggressively taking over the space it chose to occupy. Swirl felt herself relaxing for just the smallest of moments. Unfortunately for her, loud splashes started to reach her ears. They were getting louder faster and faster as Celestia rushed towards her.
Splash
Splash
Where were the third and fourth splashes?
Splash
Splash
Celestia was getting closer. Now her body was breaking through the darkness and the pegasus' eyes shrank. The arms coming from the alicorn's neck had grown in length and size, and her body bobbed up and down like she was standing on her hind legs.
"A hug isn't all that demanding," she stated softly.
'Celestia's' face was torn. The skin of her lower jaw dangled loosely like ill-fitting clothing, giving her a permanent, false grin. Her eyes had become empty holes from which a light emerged, rotating through both sockets like the warning signal of a lighthouse. Chocolate didn't have time to see the rest of her features when the wall snapped and she was pulled down a teafall. The ensuing crash knocked the air out of her lungs, and without her mouth free to breathe, she slowly began to lose consciousness. Whether it was part of the game or just to keep her alive, the arms loosened enough that Chocolate's mouth was now free. She climbed onto the riverbank, sputtering more of the disgusting liquid. The mare would have vomited once more had her stomach not already been freed of its contents.
Several doors offered themselves to her in this sewer-like version of the castle hallways. It stank of rotten, heated tea, and orange mold grew along the humid walls, making any purchase precarious at best. The pegasus took a moment to rest from the ordeal, listening to the loud teafall and staring at it as long as possible for any signs of light. A piece of wood floated up from the depths of the sea, giving the tired mind of Swirl an idea. She quickly leapt at it and stuck it between her former wings which tightened almost instantly, but they could not go far. Not anymore. To her horror, a black mass emerged from the tea, staring at the terrified pony. It was an eye stalk with a long arm. It instantly locked onto the pony and started pulling itself towards her, but the slimy surface made its task unnecessarily difficult.
In a panic, Chocolate went to the doors. Most of the massive, metal objects on the riverbank were rusted shut, but one let itself be pushed open with tremendous force. It screeched so loudly that it acted like an alarm to the princess, and the light she created appeared from atop the teafall almost instantly.
Chocolate hurried inside what appeared to be a storage room. The stink was even thicker here, but she didn't want to cover her mouth. Not again. Rusty metal shelves held wooden mulch and former tools as well as small barrels. Larger ones, bigger than a pony, were placed about the room. Swirl looked around in a panic, hoping to find a hiding spot, and there was one right in the corner of the room to the right of the entrance. She leapt behind it and stayed there as Celestia's hooves became louder and louder. Was the stalk meant to garner her attention? Chocolate mentally facehoofed. Well, she did a good enough job of that herself.
It was only a matter of time before she was caught, but, a miracle: A vent big enough for her to squeeze into was hidden behind the barrels, and the grate had rusted into dust. Only its acrid-smelling screws remained.
Happy, the mare moved to get through, but try as she might, she couldn't fit. A million reasons crossed her mind, then she noticed the arms.
They were pushing her back.
"No no no!" Chocolate Swirl whispered to herself. "T-this curse can be broken! Let me through! I want to change you back!" But the arms would not listen. They pushed harder and harder against their host's efforts, and as they did so, they caused the wood to gradually fail and splinter.
"Are you in here?" Celestia called out. "All this for a hug." She huffed, annoyed. "How immature."
More tears welled up within Chocolate's eyes when she realized the only solution to free herself. The pegasus pushed the wooden plank with her hooves to have a better grasping point. She inhaled and exhaled several times in rapid succession before chomping onto the left arm.
Crunch
Every instinct in her body told her not to do it. To not harm herself. Her brain even fought against her, but Chocolate pressed on and began to pull.
A tiny head peered out of one of the bent doorways of the misshapen buildings to look at the mare. He created a dark contrast to the bright backdrop and gestured Staar to follow him inside.
She acquiesced and entered into the misshapen mess of a grocery store. Cans and bags all with twisting, winding forms or bloated and sharp bodies were either placed on shelves in perfect lines or messily on the ground. The floors were a mostly clean and immaculate gray surface accompanying white walls, but what struck Staar was the building's height. She leaned back and tried to see past the blinding light, but it was far too painful to look at. The best she could see were black outlines of piles and piles of food reaching ever higher, far higher than made sense.
The unicorn stallion that had invited her in was a gibbering mess. He sat on the floor, his head hung low, and his eyes darting left and right rapidly. His red body was emaciated, displaying the bones beneath. Two screen crescent shapes decorated his left torso from his spine to his belly, or what was left of it. His mane had mostly fallen out, leaving behind streaks too thin to determine the color, and a naked tail. His cutie mark was hard to make out, but the mare could make out three carrots planted in a field. It was an odd sight to Staar to see such an emaciated form, but worse to her was all the food available that he wouldn't touch. She extended a hoof to one of the misshapen bags of bread when the stallion leaped on her foreleg and looked the mare directly in the eyes. He pulled his lips back and shook his head.
He spoke in a hushed and tired tone. "Don't eat the food," he pleaded. "It's evil." Staar furrowed her brows and moved her leg away just as the stallion did as well. "I...I came for a job. I've been stuck here...days? Weeks? I can't remember anymore!" He buried his head into his legs. "I'm starving, but that food..." He shivered. "Need to leave. Need to get out, but where?" The stallion wheezed. "Stay in the light. She comes in the dark. Stay in the light. She comes in the dark." The unicorn realized something important was missing and smiled sheepishly at his guest. "S-sorry. My name is Carrot Shake. What's yours?"
Staar rolled her eyes and grabbed hold of the pony to pull him out of the false store instead of answering him. He pulled at her to escape, but his state made him about as strong as a cough. He stopped fighting once he was out and looked around in a panic. Surprised, the unicorn stood on his own and looked around nervously. Much to the mare's annoyance, he stood uncomfortably close to her, but there was nothing she could do.
Once more, they would have to walk down the corridors, passing more and more hunched-over buildings that became increasingly stretched across every surface like gum forgotten on clothing. Carrot squeaked and leapt back in terror.
"Th-there!" he pointed.
Lavender raised a brow and followed his foreleg. Bathing in the light of one building was a plate with a flower sandwich resting on it.
"Don't go near it or eat it!"
The mare looked at Carrot, implying 'Are you serious?' by it. Staar approached and looked at the tiny plate sitting at her hooves then casually pushed it over with a hoof, spilling the contents on the floor.
"Oh."
Lavender shook her head and gestured the stallion to follow her, something he was more than eager to do. He felt a sense of relief staying at the side of another pony who turned out not to be some kind of monstrosity.
"Worming around. Coming out of everything," he muttered to himself as they walked. "All red and swollen. Everything getting pushed out. Then they ask for more. They don't even notice," he squeaked.
He kept repeating these lines to himself, droning on and on and getting on Staar's nerves. After what felt like an hour of walking, a voice chimed from the walls.
"There you are!" a mare's voice proclaimed joyfully. "I really wanted you to taste these pastries." The voice's owner seemed hurt. "They're filled with all manner of tasty deliciousness. I even made some spicy!"
"No! No!" the stallion screamed at the top of his lungs.
He ran away as fast as he could, leaving Lavender behind. She tried to reach out, but he was too far and couldn't hear her. A sudden bright light blinded her to what was coming, but as soon as she felt comfortable enough to look past her foreleg, she found herself in a miserable little simulacrum of the Canterlot Public Library. The hoof-carved granite had broken apart to ruin, the many massive windows adorning the face had fallen to pieces, and the stairs were caved in and lopsided. A giant statue probably stood guard in front of the entrance, but the bronze was little more than a smoldering heap of slag. Grass grew through the cracks of the stone comprising the front of the area, and the benches had been gnawed away by time and the weather. Only vague marks on the ground were proof of their existence.
Every building around was in a similar state of disrepair, but sported no windows or doors on the first floor and acted like a wall around the false library.
Splitch
Staar flinched when something splattered on her shoulder. It took a moment for her to realize that it was paint. Paint that came from above. She was still in the castle, and the strange, purplish sunset that hung above her had been painted on the walls and ceilings. Grunting in frustration, the mare walked nonchalantly up the broken stone steps and opened what was left of the wooden entry doors.
Carrot galloped as fast as his exhausted legs could get him and dove into one of the buildings. It was filled with frozen produce and chilled him to the bone. Plastic bags carrying an unknown item littered the floor randomly and leaked a revolting brown liquid that smelled sour and burned the nose hairs. Carrot hid behind hanging, red bags and covered his mouth with his forelegs while he rocked back and forth.
"In the light, I'm safe. In the light, I'm safe," he repeated incessantly to himself.
"In here?" Celestia called out.
In a fit of panic, the stallion barged through the frozen walls somehow and galloped out of the empty building next to the frozen one.
"Come back!" Celestia cried out.
His left shoulder hurt so much, but Carrot Shake couldn't focus on it. He had to flee. To escape. The stallion tripped and skid along the floor. The culprit was a group of bowls filled with soup. Carrot's stomach growled furiously, and his hunger pangs struck at him more powerfully than before. He clenched his teeth and closed his eyes when he felt his brain erupting in his skull.
Struggling to open an eye, he bore witness to a solid black pony with no features holding seven bowls on one foreleg at once somehow. It let two bowls slip through it and shatter on the ground. Unlike the five others it threw away, those two had been empty. Grunting in pain, Carrot watched as the figure slowly stretched out like goop, leaving solid pieces of it behind.
The stallion opened his mouth to make a sound, but nothing came out, so he continued to flee as fast as he could despite a growing limp. Carrot's attempts to enter a building with doors were destroyed when shapes pushed through them and started to move toward the stallion. Stiff, amorphous shapes with flesh sloughing off of the bones. One jumped out at the pony, intercepting him. He couldn't make out the body and could only perceive the smell of freshly cut grass. It pried his mouth open with multiple, oddly shaped limbs and attempted to force itself inside. A brief flash of light showed a single, blood-shot eye and an upside-down beak on the right side of one of the limbs.
Carrot jerked his head left and right, breaking free of its grasp and kicking it away. He managed to make it a few feet before finding himself stuck in place and gradually sinking into the ground. It had turned into some kind of brown mulch that smelled like freshly baked bread mixed with melted chocolate. As he sank further in, his face became gradually engulfed by the material, but he kept his mouth above it.
"There you are! All that exercise must have made you famished!" Celestia proclaimed. She clapped her hooves together. "I can't wait for you to try this. A pool of chocolate bread! I'm sure it'll taste delicious if you give it a chance!"
He couldn't see her legs or face, but Carrot Shake could see her torso...standing upright now. She looked like a thin rubber layer had been stretched too far across too much. He could see pieces of it flaking off, revealing the bones beneath and a white, mulchy substance held in the thoracic cage. There were no organs to speak of, and her movement and demeanor didn't fit a body in such a state. Carrot sank further and further and fought as best as he could. When he thought he could escape, the same pressure from just before he fell into this trap assaulted his brain again and felt something pulling him down.
"No! Not again! Not again and again!" he cried in his mind.
The mulch forced itself down the stallion's gullet, and a smile he did not reciprocate curled at the corners of his mouth as his eyes began to bulge out and his ears twitched open.
If this was a library it had definitely seen better days. Even with all the destruction it suffered, the shelves were splattered across the floors and the books were ripped to pieces. An occasional gust of wind blew around the free pages from the dirty floor, only to let them land back down into the hoarding pile. Staar jumped back in fear when one of the chandeliers above finally let go and crashed into the ground, pulling rotted wood and dust down with it. It kicked up the moldy, ashy miasma that rested quietly below, stinging the mare's nostrils with the acrid stench. Every intake of the odor made the mare sick to her stomach.
Lavender almost yelled at the top of her lungs when one of the piles erupted upwards, revealing a blue stallion unicorn wearing broken glasses. He sported a look of disbelief and patted himself all over before relief took over and his body failed on him.
"F-finally! Free again." He looked up at the mare and smiled weakly. "Ah. Finally. I'm out of the castle..." Staar frowned and shook her head, making the stallion well with despair again. "N-no! I was free!" He slammed his hooves onto the piles. "I was free! I was going to go home!"
"We were free!" he spurted to himself.
"No! We were home!" he said with a lighter voice.
The pony clenched his head. "Stop it!" he yelled to himself. "I'm not supposed to have other voices in my head!"
Lavender noticed a glint of black in the corner of her eyes and snorted. She slapped the stallion, forced him onto his hooves, and shoved him forward. This wasn't the time for him to fall apart. He was going to look around when she locked his head forward towards a set of wooden stairs leading to a second floor.
This unicorn was the kind of pony that kept themselves 'prime and proper', but they didn't look too well right now. Their mane and tail were a lighter sky-blue shade compared to their deeper egyptian blue coat. While they were just as rough to look at as the other two ponies Staar had encountered, she could see the dregs of a hairdresser's work. The mane had been cut short and the tail had some contours to it that gave it a vaguely cylindrical shape. His mane sported white polka dots ruined by its state, so Staar could only really see white streaks over the rare dot. As for the cutie mark, it was a jewelry loupe and easier to make out than Carrot's. There were dregs of what was probably a fancy outfit around his ankles and dangling in threads off his left hind leg which matched his sorry state and the broken glasses he still wore for some odd reason.
"Glint Flower..." he squeaked nervously. The stallion wouldn't look directly at Staar and shied away. "That's my name...What's yours?" he asked softly.
"No one cares!" he yelled at himself aggressively. "We're stuck in the books! We need out!"
"N-no no! We're already out!" Glint said with a third voice. "I am out!" He sat on his haunches and clamped his head between his forelegs. "I'm out but pieces of me are broken. This is horrible!"
Concerned, the mare moved forward and placed a hoof on the stallion's back. His skin retracted at her touch but broke him out of his stupor. He nodded and stood up, clearing his throat.
"I'm not sure how you got here, but I think I've been stuck here for years," he said. Staar nodded pensively. "I...I thought...the books..." he grunted and put a hoof to his head.
"Too much to read! Don't touch me!" Glint snapped. Staar moved her leg away, shocked and angry. "Gotta read more books to get out of here."
"They brought us here in the first place!"
The earth pony shook her head and went for the stairs. Glint was quick to slap himself again and followed closely. He stopped Staar with a leg when they reached the top. It was a platform leading to stairs on either side and back to the other half of the first floor. His eyes locked onto something dangling from the ceiling.
"Prey on my love of books, will you?" he growled quietly.
Staar pushed Glint's leg down and took a few steps forward. Dangling from one of the holes in the ceiling were two, very long white legs ending in black...approximations of hooves. The limbs swayed back and forth, making them look like long ropes hanging from a crane, and the...'hooves' acted like the hooks at the end. Leaning closer, Staar realized that they looked vaguely like the fleshy eponychium that covered a foal's hooves when they are born. The earth pony flinched back in disgust when she noticed the flesh tendrils normally comprising said 'meat boot' were moving about like toes.
"She's upstairs," Glint growled.
"I just said that!"
"No you didn't."
The mare followed Glint Flower up the fractured steps and did her best to not be stabbed by splinters sticking out every which way like pikes. However, every step she took saw her getting further and further from the unicorn. She did her best to try and catch up to him, but she found the world around her being engulfed in blackness. Staar skid to a halt after finding herself back in the darkness of the hallways.
"Carefully and quietly," Glint warned himself.
The stallion punched his head several times and ripped out a large splinter from the stairs with his magic.
"Shut up! You're not real!"
Bookshelves and bookcases either rested at steep angles on the ground or floated in the air. Their contents wouldn't fall or shift regardless, even if the wind picked up powerfully and caused a small tornado of dust and pages to briefly form. The stallion's body clenched when it dissolved. Her back was facing him. Her disgusting 'wings' were in full view, looking like wax hands that melted in the sun. They twisted about, grasping at books on the floor or any of the bookcases that floated around. Celestia's skin was coalescing into a pinched line of flesh along her spinal area, making the stallion gag.
He snuck about the floor, being careful to not make any sounds as he got closer to the princess. All this time, tortured by this...place would be alleviated if he could just. Kill. Her!
The splinter whistled through the air, ripping pages from their places on the floor into the air.
"There you are!" Celestia said cheerfully. One of her wings grabbed the splinter and threw it away.
Glint Flower cursed loudly and scampered away into the other room, disappearing within the maze of bookshelves. Their confines bent and folded and stretched out, preventing their occupant from knowing what direction was what. There was no logic that brought Glint here in a place he might be lost for all eternity. He passed his head past a shelf and saw his own body above him.
"Aren't books marvelous?" a feminine voice asked with glee.
"Why is she still here?!" Glint growled loudly. "We're not reading the books again!"
He galloped through the maze until he reached a point where he began to float in midair. Before he had a chance to parse the new information, he fell to the left and landed on the ground. He looked up and only saw more bookshelves rather than a path.
"But...but we just fell from th-"
"Shut up!" Glint yelled at himself.
"Books transport you to worlds unknown and open your eyes to so many different characters and thoughts!" Celestia continued.
A light flashed from three different directions, stressing out Glint. A book fell in front of him, pages first. He would have walked over it, but the unicorn's eyes wouldn't move, and he felt something scraping at his brain, filling him with an emotion he didn't recognize. A completely foreign sensation that made his body malfunction, for lack of a better term. He started to pant like he just ran a marathon and was filled with gallons of water. Flower kicked over the book to discover it wasn't a book at all. A blackened shape was resting on the pages, eating the book. It shifted and screeched loudly, hurting the stallion's ears. He turned tail and ran, but several more of the books fell from their holds and fell screaming. Several coalesced into a strange, broken amalgamation of torn book spines and paper and chased clumsily after the pony. Tripods. Quinqapods. Two legs with one longer than the other. Several reached out with long, spindly hands to grasp the stallion, and all the while the effect on his mind only became more intense.
Glint stopped running and grasped at his throat. Air wouldn't come in. He fell towards the upper-right of the maze and crashed through the bookshelves, tumbling through wood and cloth while his brain felt like it was being cut apart by scissors. The moment he hit something, the stallion felt relief, but his head felt like it was bleeding. A sharp, hot pain. He took several short breaths and kept his eyes closed, taking the moment to recover, but it was for naught.
"Oh no, you're exhausted."
Glint Flower's eyes shot open. She was looking at him with her ripped face. Was she smiling or not? Was it just the exposed teeth or the dangling skin making that shape?!
"Well, a good bedtime story should help you." Celestia ignored Glint struggling to escape her long foreleg crushing him against her bony chest. "Ah, here we are," the alicorn said. The stallion desperately beat at her foreleg and even started to bite into it, but she didn't react, and it hurt the stallion's teeth.
"No! I escape your living book slime! I won't get back into this!"
Celestia paused a moment, confused, but shrugged the stallion's claims. "Here you go, my sweet little pony. This is one of my favorites." Glint pulled himself away as best he could as Celestia's wings opened the contents, unveiling a bright light. "I find the characters to be very immersive."
"No!"
"No!"
"Please, stop-!"
Glint Flower felt his soul being sucked into the book and splitting into dozens of pieces. Again.
Staar grunted and wiped the debris off of her coat. This had become annoying and frustrating all at the same time a long time ago. Now she was stuck in the hallway again. Ugh.
Something flickered in the corner of her vision and the wall opened up, letting spill tea and a familiar, brown pegasus. She sputtered out gallons of tea and grabbed her head as soon as Staar helped her up. The earth pony furrowed her brows. Chocolate's head had been filled with tea. She could see the liquid roiling in her eyes and leaking from her ears and nostrils. Lavender felt great pity when she noticed the red stumps in place of what were once her wings. Had she done that to herself...?
"What happened? Did I escape?" she asked. Every word came with a gush of fluid that splattered at Staar's hooves. "I thought I got away. The black eye thing...did it do anything, or did I just make its job easier?" Staar's apathetic expression returned at the mention of a 'black eye'. "Oh, it's you. I never did get your name. Thank you for helping me up. Everything just seems...blurry for some reason."
They weren't going to be able to find an exit with the pegasus in this state, and what about the others? The ground beneath the two's hooves bubbled then split apart, taking on the appearance of processed animal food. Carrot Shake erupted from it like a zombie bursting out its grave.
"Help me! Get it away from me!" he begged.
The stallion puked out the 'mud' and threw his forelegs forward for the two ponies to grab and pull free. He rolled onto his back, gasping for air. He convulsed briefly and sighed in relief.
"No...things coming out anymore. Good. Good," he sighed. Staar didn't have the heart to tell him that his flesh still bulged actively in several places like a giant parasite was burrowing out of him. "Another?" he wheezed when he saw Chocolate. "Wait no. You were there before me."
"Y-yes," the pegasus stuttered. "I thought we were let out another way."
Carrot grunted. "I did too. It made sense. Room was too small."
Glint Flower fell from the ceiling and was narrowly caught by Chocolate mid-seizure. She placed him on the ground and held his hindlegs down, looking to Staar and Carrot in a panic. The earth pony jumped forwarsd and held the stallion's forelegs down as well.
"Don't do anything," Carrot wheezed. "So hungry..." He gulped and raised his head. "You need to wait it out. Nothing else that you can do but hold him in place. Learned that...at school."
Staar looked at the seizing stallion in shock. Multiple faces emerged from his own, each sporting different expressions. She let go of Glint's legs and held his head in her hooves then pressed inwards.
"What are you doing?!" Chocolate panicked.
Lavender ignored her and continued to push in. Slowly but surely, the faces started to recede, until Glint Flower was fully conscious of looking at Staar with wide eyes.
"Thank you," he said. He broke down in tears and grabbed onto her. "Thank you!"
Staar patted him apprehensively and looked to the side to see the bizarre aberration that took on Celestia's shape was standing in front of the four with her hooves on her hips.
"Ah ha! I knew there was something odd," Celestia stated. She leaned forward and shook her hoof accusingly at Staar. "You weren't supposed to be here."
She frowned and looked at the other three. "It was supposed to be just for you three." She crossed her forelegs. "Who shared?"
The three terrified ponies shook their heads. Their expressions of terror turned to confusion when they noticed Staar wasn't really paying much attention to the thing before her.
"No pony? Then how did you even find the invitations?" the alicorn shook her head. "I am something of a god to these ponies," she stated. "That means I have a lot of responsibilities to them. They love me, so I should reciprocate that love, but you're not allowed to intrude when you aren't invited. I'm afraid I will have to give you a light spanking."
"W-watch out!" Chocolate spurted. "It'll send those eye things after you!"
Celestia's head tilted. "Eye things?"
"She'll try and trip you with some weird thing that eats cans..." Carrot wheezed.
"Or books that..." Glint grunted in pain. "Books that tear at your mind and turned into weird monsters."
Staar didn't take her eyes off the bipedal Celestia and smiled when she noticed the confusion painted on what was left of its face.
Celestia raised a hoof to her mouth in shock."That sounds terrible!" she exclaimed. "I would never do something so horrific to my poor little ponies. I'm just trying to let you enjoy the lighter things in life." She tensed the muscles in her foreleg. "That doesn't mean I forgot about your impoliteness, young filly."
With lightning-fast speed, the alicorn's hoof split apart and branched out into black, fleshy branches that interwove into a net, and smacked Lavender's left flank, sending her flying.
"I'm quite sorry, but that was necessary." Her form started to twitch when Staar stopped moving and came to. "Wh-what is-is that?!"
Perplexed, the three ponies followed Celestia's gaze to Staar and screamed in agony when they saw her flank. The mare scampered to recover it as best she could with a hoof, freeing the ponies and the alicorn from her mark's influence. It didn't stop a sentence from repeating in the afflicted's minds, however. A message from their own instincts.
You shouldn't have done that
A noise like a tea kettle whistling and being strangled at the same time filled the ears of everypony there. They turned to see a strange, black mass stretched out from the wall. Though it had no features, everypony felt like it was staring at them. Staar was the only one who did not respond and preferred to sit up and rub her sore hindleg.
"What is this?" Celestia stammered. The light in her head started to rotate faster and faster as she tried to grasp what was in front of her. "I can't...I can't perceive it!"
The three ponies watched silently, too exhausted to react any further. Staar realized they were at their limit and limped toward them.
"Get away from us! We don't want you here!" the alicorn spat.
The walls shifted, letting sections extend and twist into cones that rapidly jabbed at the mass. Unfortunately, they didn't cause any damage, and the black smog remained in place. Worse still for 'Celestia': Her walls were warping on contact with it, turning into shapes that hurt the tormented ponies' eyes and heads when they looked at them, but only served to terrorize the false Celestia even further.
"No!" she bellowed. "Keep away from me!"
She dissolved into a ball of light and fled down the hallway at great speed, disappearing into the blackness in seconds. Unfortunately, much like her victims, she returned to the same spot. Over and over she did this until she reformed, much larger and with features even more exaggerated. Elongated teeth, empty eye sockets, exposed ribs and bones filled with a whitish mulch, and hand wings that had grown as long as the multitude of arms that grew out of every surface of the hallway.
The princess tried to rip apart the entity, and the three tormented felt their bodies start to change against their will again, but it was quick to stop. They looked on in shock as the false Celestia's form wildly shifted in size and shape while the black smog overtook her. Within it the ponies saw a shifting amalgamation of forces flashing in and out of perception with every pass of the light within Celestia's head. Bipedal. Tripedal. Quadrupedal. Horse. Minotaur. Avian. Insectoid. Unknown agglomeration of shapes. Every pass was something new, and every pass saw the hallways trembling and destabilizing. IT shook more and more, and pieces of it began to collapse in on themselves.
The sound of metal being scraped in an echoing chamber from far away started to play as the fake Celestia was gradually overcome by the black mass. The ponies looked away when a giant face that filled the hallway looked at them. Several hands emerged from its hollow mouth, reaching for the three, its 'eyes' wracked with fear and sorrow.
"Please, help me, my little ponies! Please!" it pleaded. As the black mass slowly consumed her, Celestia's words soon became quieter and the screeching louder. "I was just being a good pony..." she lamented before the light in her was devoured.
There was a brief moment of respite before the mass turned to the four and pounced on them, making the three tormented scream once again.
Several unicorns had come from a bureau of magic investigation to try and determine that oddities happening at the castle. They had already uncovered traces of a guard, but both it and the stuff infecting the grounds remained an utter mystery. The magic, if it could even be called that, was unrecognizable and reacted to no forms of magic language any of them knew. It was by sheer luck, it seemed, that the oddity started to dissipate.
"Hey, the weird magic stuff is stopping," one of the unicorns proclaimed.
The others hurried over. A patch of static, gray grass gradually started to recover its normal state once again.
"That's not right. Would it randomly--"
Their thoughts were interrupted by an immense explosion ripping apart the whole left side of the castle and casting rubble everywhere. Four ponies came flying out and landed on grass that was somehow free of any debris. Staar quickly scampered to her hooves to check on the state of the ponies. Chocolate Swirl was no longer filled with tea, but her wings were still... Lavender clenched her teeth. Carrot Shake was still emaciated, but he no longer looked like a skeleton, and there didn't seem to be any bulges left pushing at his skin. As for Glint Flower...well, only time would tell with that kind of mental damage.
"What...what happened..." Carrot wondered. "I...what in the world was that black thing?!"
"It...was it like Celestia?!" Chocolate wondered.
"Well," Staar began. "It said it was a god, no?"
The three nodded.
"What about it?" Glint asked.
Staar scratched the side of her neck and shrugged. "You ever think about what comes after gods?"
The three paused to think about it and collectively stood in shock at such a realization. Their eyes, bulged in shock and fatigue, slowly turned to face the mare.
"You mean that--" Chocolate started.
"Now what comes after that?" Staar asked.
"What is going on here?!" Celestia declared furiously from the sky. She landed in front of a group of guards and unicorns arriving to see whatever had happened to the castle. "I'm trying to find a solution to this calamity, and now my castle explodes and four ponies come popping out of it?!" She stomped forward. "What did you four do?!"
It took them about a minute to register, but when the three realized Celestia was standing before them, they started screaming hysterically. Because they were too tired to gallop away, the three frantically clambered over each other in a bid to escape their trauma. Staar's nose scrunched when she realized one, if not all of them, potentially 'voided' themselves in their terror, much to Celestia's horror. The three were bawling their eyes out and doing their best to get away from the white alicorn.
Celestia was taken aback. She didn't know how to react. "Wh-wha--"
The three were hiding, face-first in a pile of rubble like ostriches whose bodies shook violently. The guards intervened almost immediately and pushed Celestia away, much to her continued horror.
Staar, meanwhile, huffed internally. She would have to find a job again and grunted in realization. That was how it had received the job announcement at the last minute. She couldn't begin to comprehend the incomprehensible, but what was done was done. Lavender lamented her cutie mark at times and grabbed some ruined cloth from whatever ruined sheet it came from and wrapped it around her body as her own words repeated in her head.
"And what comes after that?"
Author's Note
Any constructive criticism would be appreciated since I'm not very good with horror. I'm fairly certain a lot of this might seem corny and probably funny to you readers. Unless that's just me since I don't get nightmares anymore. Only fuel for the pyre of creation.
