The Hollow Kingdom of Big Macintosh

Exhibit L

"You seem stiffer than usual." The time for exactly one day to have passed is almost now. "Also, there are bags under your eyes? Did you sleep well, darling?"

"... I didn't sleep at all." Last night was far more harrowing than usual.

"Why, that's absolutely terrible!" Rarity starts removing her work from Big Macintosh, and she insists he take the day off before he can protest. "You're a grown stallion and you just can't function without sleep."

"Sorry about this, Miss Rarity," he says, but not without a yawn. "I'll just head on back then."

"Not in your condition, you won't." Rarity stops him before he can exit, which confuses him. He can't very well sleep at Carousel Boutique. If he sleeps on the catwalk, that would be uncomfortable. If he sleeps on her couch, her customers would give him odd looks for snoring so loud. If he sleeps in Rarity's bed, that would be risque. "You can lay down on the couch in the drawing room."

"Oh." He had not considered that, but then again he wasn't terribly familiar with the concept of having a drawing room. Although they are not traditionally used for drawing, he was right in assuming Rarity used it for that purpose.

"And just call me 'Rarity', alright?"

Rarity takes him into the back room, which would probably be more aptly named a study rather than a drawing room. Things are not often studied in this room, but the pony who came up with the names for rooms didn't know a damn thing, probably. As promised, there is a couch big enough for him to recline on. He needed no prompting to sprawl himself out on the velvet cushions, which were an incredible contrast from his wool blankets back home. He wants to say they feel nostalgic, but he knows that isn't the right word.

"Do you mind if I ask what kept you up?"

"I had a crazy nightmare and couldn't get back to sleep after that," he tells her.

"About what?"

He tells her.

He tells her how something had made a noise outside his window. It was not an impressive noise or even a peculiar one, but he awoke and then he heard it immediately afterwards. That was unsettling enough.

His brain quickly remembered that the sound was just a cartwheel squeaking down the road in front of his house. He was compelled to go out and see it for himself, this cart he had heard. He went outside and saw it, a pony in a black hood hauling an empty cart behind himself. Big Macintosh followed this pony. He tailgated the pony. He walked right beside him.

"Are you lost?" he asked.

"I could ask that of you," the hooded pony said in a raspy voice, not turning to acknowledge the pony beside him. He kept his head forward, and his face under a cowl. The fringes of his clothes looked like moths or rats had been eating away at it, while the train of his robe was riddled with holes and caked with mud. His cart, empty as it was. struggled to turn its wheels through the accumulated rust.

"So you're not lost?"

"No, I know exactly where I'm going." The hooded pony marched on. His steps were light, silent even. He was like a heavy smoke rolling over the ground, without a fire to light it. "You're the one who is lost."

"I'm not lost," Big Macintosh told the pony, even though he feels uncertain about his answer. He could not pinpoint where his uncertainty is coming from. A thundercloud rumbled overhead, heavy with rain and crying out for relief. It's only answer was the breeze, calling the dying clouds together into their final fold. "Anyway, what're you doing all the way out here in the middle of the night?"

"Just doing my job," the pony said. Big Macintosh didn't know of any job that would require somepony to drag around an empty cart in the middle of the night, so he asked what the pony does for a living. "I take them."

"You take them?" There was another rumble of thunder.

"I take away the pillars of sanity," he said. The breeze tugged at the cloak. "First pillar is reality, obviously. It wears out without much effort, so easily in fact that most sane ponies don't have it anyway. A lack of a firm grasp on reality isn't harmful, just annoying to those around you. You can't see what's really up.

"The second is empathy. Sometimes ponies just disassociate themselves with the rest of the world, refuse to get invested; that's when this pillar crumbles. Ponies with empathy can't bring themselves to do anything terrible, and they seek empathy in return. Helps folks get along, but when it's gone... I think you can imagine what might happen.

"The third pillar is guilt. Sure, if you have no empathy you might do something bad, but you may still fear consequence. Consequence is so frightening that it sometimes restores the second pillar, believe me. It scares the hooves right out of their shoes. A pony without a guilty conscious becomes like a hunger that knows no fill.

"The last pillar is faith. It sounds odd, but just hear me out. When I say faith, I mean putting your trust in a power that far exceeds you. That's faith, and it's the one crazy thing sane ponies do. We don't place the fate of the world on our backs and pull, we trust that the science and magic keeping the world up will remain. We don't scrambled to raise the sun or moon, or make the tide draw in and out, or force the hands of time. It sounds crazy, but it works. That's just something we do to function. We trust, in the big things and the little things.

"And your faith save you if you ever meet an entirely faithless pony. There is no place for trust inside them; they often do not trust themselves. If they have no sense of reality, no empathy, and no guilt, they're insane. They never say what they mean, but they are in the business of meaning what they say. If you run, they chase. If you hide, they wait. If you fight, they fight. They have nothing but their own inconsequential, biological existence and it doesn't mean anything to them. Yours means just as little.

"Now I don't make ponies crazy, no sir. I just clean up what they've done themselves. I load the debris into my cart and add it to the growing mountain of sin and ignorance in Tartarus. In fact, I was just on my way there now." The wind was blowing from behind the pair, egging them on while another thunderhead growled.

"You're heading towards Tartarus?" Big Macintosh asked. His eyes darted to the empty cart rumbling along the path. There wasn't another soul around in the moonless, darkening street. "But, your cart is empty."

"You're right," the hooded pony said. "I came to claim the fallen pillars, but I found them so broken they were nothing but dust. I can't put dust on the mountain."

"But you're going back anyway?" Big Macintosh asks. A bolt of lighting touches down somewhere, shaking the air with its lingering touch. The hooded pony starts laughing an empty, wheezing laugh. He comes to a halt, causing Big Macintosh to stop right next to him.

"No, I just thought I'd bring you to where you belong."

Big Macintosh turns to the road ahead of him.

Ponyville General Hospital

The hooded pony vanished into the rain, but his laughter roared with the wind. Big Macintosh froze in front of the sign, illuminated by the occasional crack of lighting. His hooves scrambled across the damp path as he tried to put the building behind him. No matter how fast he ran, the wind tried to pull him back, the rain tried to push him back, and that laughter taunted his attempt to escape. The harder he ran, the more he felt himself sucked in. The more he fought it, the truer it became.

"That sounds horrid," Rarity says. "I doubt I'd be able to sleep after a nightmare like that."

Big Macintosh stares at her and blinks, for a second.

"... Right... a nightmare..."