Chapter 7: Trail of the Wolf


Luna's entire body aches as the swirling maelstrom of unlight winks in strobing flashes before her unwaking eyes. It wasn't the slight tugging of teleportation, but something more akin to being sucked through a straw and stretched like dough. The Princess of the Night's discomfort blends with a familiar garbled sound; as a peel of thunder shivers through the storm, so bleats a muffled babble through the void.

"-Consuetudine constet. Centurionis proferre hasta-"

The voice rasps the unknown phrase with an utter absence of life. Tiny clicks and static pops impinge on its edges, and Luna recognizes it for what it was. It was a recording. Whatever else had been stored for her quickly fizzles away.

Even that stony realization can't help numb the nauseating pull which draws her through the vacuous expanse. Her body throbs with muscle cramps inflicted in rhythmic spasms, as if triggered by a beating drum. Its rough tattoo feels staccato and unpracticed, like a fumbling foal's first attempt. Her senses grow dark and the painful pulse lessens as it slows. The dual-beat fades like the rhythm of a pony's heart.

'like a heart.'

Realization fuels a surge of her own muscle which strains against a stricture in her chest.

'Alpharius?'

This wasn't the shared dream. But the thought is torn away as something lightly brushes past her battered form. A thin withered limb claws desperately at her hind hooves. Luna's own breathing comes in ragged spurts as instinctive chills tremble across her spine. She wanted to raise her hind leg and buck at the offending claw, but halts herself at the last moment.

There was nothing there. Even as the whirlpool churns faster into a roiling mass of gaudy rainbow hued colours, a tortured breath escapes her lips unbidden. It's not her own, but she feels the sensation as keenly as if it were. It's dry, hot, and shaky.

It's a death rattle.

There was one unspoken duty that the princess had overseen in her night-time vigils, something that her sister could never truly feel: Luna had acted as a mortal gatekeeper. The ghastly and thoroughly loathed shiver of the last mortal quiver fades away, and for a moment, the princess of the night senses that last desperate gasp. It pulls itself with laboured effort from a young, abused body, broken and racked with effort.

The princess's eyes open as recognition dawns. A wasted waif of a creature hovers in a watery reflection just behind the thin skin of the riotous maelstrom. Her pale ashen face is marred by streaks of grime and flecks of blood, pink foam gathering at the corners of her lips. But she stares at the Alicorn for the first time on her own.

"Sabinus?"

The youth's eyes sparkle in shared recognition, and that frightful dull pain slowly ebbs. She was there when ponies slipped away in the night and she felt the tug on their mortal bonds as they broke from the world and passed beyond. Humans, apparently, were no different.

And as much by reflex as intention, the Princess stretches her foreleg out for the girl. Her limb parts the stream, pushing through the torrent that thrashes and roils around her. It turns violent, frothing and bubbling as if to lash back at her for daring to touch the youth. Even as the pale Sabinus reaches back, some otherworldly weight tugs her away from Luna's proffered hoof. The human girl shoots a hand out, desperately stretching her fingers as she's pulled into the imperceptible darkness beyond the maelstrom.

Luna takes a sharp breath and lets her horn gather energy. She feels the strength of her magic, but the build up sloshes electric sparks through her conscious mind. The heady strength and confidence imparted bolsters her just as another wary part of her whispers that she could just cut the connection and awaken. This single creature wasn't her responsibility.

'Right? But, isn't it my fault? So that makes her my responsibility.'

That same disparaging whisper echoes again through the Alicorn's mind.

'Everything that you do and are, are anathema to this creature. To her reality. Don't interfere. There's no need. Just go home.'

But that whisper had been lingering just beyond some cognizant part of her mind. It wasn't a thought, it was a thistle that scratched and pricked but was never enough to hurt. It was a distraction.

'You knew this was a danger, and if you didn't, then you weren't paying attention. Luna, you knew this was taxing for it. You knew from the start that this was a drain, and you let it prattle off and waste itself when you had no intention of helping. You're to blame, you did this. Don't make it harder. Go home.'

Words come unbidden in a relentless condescending tide.

'Go home!'

As luna focuses her attention on Sabinus's quickly disappearing form, the Alicorn spots her lips move. There was no way to tell what was said, but from the fearful tears, she didn't need to see it to know the desperate plea.

'Help. Please.'

With a flash of anger, Luna's horn glows as a torrential beam of magic careens into the paper-thin skin of swirling colour.

The moment the magical blast strikes the maelstrom, the whirlpool flares to life in a searing flash. A barrage of formless voices babble a dozen different conversations as they invade her mind in a wave of white noise. But among the static screams and low chanting, a fleeting series of wet crackles slowly replaces the auditory miasma with a single feminine voice. It's serpentine and utterly devoid of empathy.

"We must be swift."

Another voice, this one masculine but no less unhallowed, breaks the maelstrom along with the the sharp sour scent of a ginkgo tree.

"Why must we hurry, Akshub?"

The ginko's pungent smell melds into the putrid stink of rotten meat.

"There is another presence near, a one-eyed ghost who walks between worlds and seeks to return..."

The female's voice slows, and Luna's body flares in agony as if being pulled and stretched to turn her inside out. The flick of a knife and errant bite of metal rasps against her back, like a grater run across a freshly shaven pelt.

"Magnus, you old snake."

Luna yowls and hisses her discomfort, realizing it was the flaying gaze of something just out of reach. She bites her tongue far too late to stop the ephemeral call.

"No, now there's two!"

"What?! For your sake-"

"Be silent!" the female hisses, "The veil, quickly, quickly!"

The Alicorn reflexively lashes back at the voice. It had no direction, no up, nor down, but she reaches out in the way only a purveyor of her realm knew. She found the voice, and with a monumental shove of energy, it turns from a seething hiss into a needling screech of pain as the swirling vortex vomited her out.

The princess of the night is suddenly and uncomfortably expelled into the world where she flopped on cracked and broken hardpan in an inelegant bundle of flailing limbs. With a groan, Luna rolls onto her belly and blinks away the cloying haze clouding her vision. She grumbles, feeling a tremor that shook through the landscape.

Even before she can rise, the cracked and shattered ground beneath her hooves trembles before churning and folding over itself in a wave. Grungy rust-red hardpan gives way to a transmuting ripple of earthy loam and twisting roots.

"It's a dream."

She'd passed from the brittle crystalline form of memory into the verdant pool of the dreamscape once again. Luna pulls herself up, and takes in her surroundings. Evidently, she had been spat into a forest. But it looked painted, artificial in its construction, and almost hollow with a distinct lack of life. From her perspective she saw patches as if passed over by the painter, empty expanses of white or blotches of simple colours much the same as the set of a particularly cheap playhouse.

It was rickety but among the shade of the trees and rustle of leaves, it was soothing. The scene had been made like this. It felt directed
but nopony was meant to see it from this angle. It had taken too much effort with too little time to prepare.

Trekking up the tangles of roots was somewhat difficult, but a few errant wingflaps brought her up to a wooded hillock overlooking a grassy valley. She spots packs of plains creatures gazing on the rolling steppes, unattended and unhunted as they sedately meander in the distance.

The glint of late afternoon sunlight flickers over a lone waterfall, emptying out into a life giving stream that calmly traced its sapphire finger into a high pterra basin. Soft pink and orange clouds reflected off the diminutive lake's mirror-like surface, painting the heavens above. But the underlying scent of cut grasses and rural charm still held an antiseptic churl and potent sting of some unwelcome aromatic. No flower held such a woody scent, and no loam diffused its spice; it was the cloying pong of incense wafting in the breeze.

Now, more wary, the princess let her mind wander in the dreamscape. Intuiting the direction of the dreamers wasn't difficult, but other presences seemed to clutter the edges as if not allowed to trespass upon the painter's domain.

In that arrogance, there was direction. And Luna even allowed herself a joyless smirk as her head instinctively pans towards the base of the woods. She could see nothing, but she knew that the architect was near. It was devoting its effort to something, angling its attention to present its painted frescoes to another. Luna gathers herself up, taking a few steps forward and stretching out her wings.

All of a sudden, the breeze stops. It's less than subtle, like a shiver. With a few running hop steps, the Alicorn takes to wing and soars through the leafy canopy with practiced skill.

The sudden erupting gale buffets her into a tree trunk as the winds scythe sideways through the line of trees. Luna gasps, and with a flick of concentration, the upper half of the tree becomes insubstantial. As she breaks through the cover of the forest canopy, she sees a glittering red star winking on the horizon, and catches sight of two figures at the base of the forest.

Two tiny figures, clad in white, hurry off at a lope as an ethereal wolf howl echos faintly in the distance. She couldn't chance a shortcut by teleporting when the dream was actively being manipulated. Something here was trying to throw up barriers, to block her out, and the suddenly shuddering and growing trees were evidence of that, as was the rattle and crack of rocky outcroppings thrusting up like spear tips from the ground.

She felt one of the pair's gaze on her, even from a league away. Even feeling it set eyes on her made her feel like she'd been licked by a diseased serpent. Its attention lingers on her for a few seconds before so crudely blotting out the dreamscape, leaving just a tiny black cube containing the two figures in an endless white field.

They fled... they fled from her.

She charged her horn just as the world unfolds into another prefabricated dreamscape.


Another world begins to writhe and form in corners of the endless white void. This one didn't hold the spicy scent of wet loam, but the dry gust of furnace bellows. It heralds a blaze as the white fields burst into flames. They scorch away like tissue paper, revealing a massive cityscape shrouded in the cloak of night and lit by endless strings of artificial flames.

Luna knew they were cities by the sudden tides of creatures. They pour into the enormous soot stained avenues and gather in pulsating knots illuminated by massive banks of lights that vaguely resembling rounded Manehatten streetlamps, though inflated like a fattened tick. From there, the similarities to cities like Canterlot, or even the metropolis of Manehatten, ends.

Choked by cloying grey banks of incense, the doleful peel of bells rings off the ribbed and skull adorned walls of towers. The grey basalt edifices aren't new, but pitted with age beyond reckoning. They soar thousands of paces over the arterial streets and bridges which criss-cross the enormous expanses.

Luna finds herself atop a brazen casing, her hooves and frogs cold and sopping wet. But as she looks at the vein-like latticeworks of lights and converging multitudes of creatures, she only dimly became aware of the immensity of this dreamscape.

"Where..." she glances around, her eyes unable to pick out two figures in the throngs from any distance in the gathering dark. It was too much, too great to take in.

"This is impossible." she mutters with a stamp, "Stars damned impossible."

A partial memory, yes, but in a dream it was limited by the dreamer.

'They aren't a pony,'

While others would stop there, she recognized the significance at a glance.

'It's still limited by the mind to fathom and understand.'

Either this was a fathomless intellect and will, or there was more at work here.

As a flash of sheet lightning bleached her perch to stark monochrome, she caught the glint of metal. Craning her head back, she found herself staring into dead eyes and eeped in fright. She stood on the bridge of a beast's nose right between its bulbous crystalline eyes

As her thundering heart slowed back to normal, Luna took a breath of air and ruffled her feathers before giving the massive statuary a glower and a dismissive flick of her tail. The sudden shock of a dozen wing-length eyeball staring at her was, perhaps worryingly, not an unknown feeling to the Princess of the Night. That didn't mean she was comfortable standing on the enormous head of a brass gargoyle jutting from a mountain-sized building.

It she didn't know better, she would have sworn she was in the dreams of a giant. But her memorization fades swiftly, retaking control in her natural domain. Something was wrong. A flash of lightning heralds an otherworldly hiss. The eyes of the enormous avian blaze once in virulent streaks of indigo, red, and purple flame.

"You should not be here." The formless warning rasps a wet gurgle. "Do not interfere with your betters, xeno. Go home."

The Alicorn slowly turns to confront the blazing eye again. That last little acidic phrase echoes in her mind.

'Ah, thaaat's whose voice it was. There you are, creature. '

Luna smirks to herself. "Your opinions are noted. But I don't take orders from anypony." With a tiny leap, the Alicorn hurls herself from the perch and into the void.

She feels the ripple flow through the realm, a shiver trailing from tail to forehooves. Wings folded, there was a certain exhilaration to be had slicing through the air as fast as lightning, beyond what was physically possible.

Luna hurtles past the first airborne bridge stretching between two monstrous structures. She catches a glimpse of the blob-like figures, approximations of these creatures at a glance but evidently just that, glimpses from a distance.

'Not so powerful after all,' she grins.

A raucous cry from the statue echoes into the void with a shrill serpentine hiss.

Focusing her perception as droplets of incense and condensate form on her slicked back wings, the Alicorn wills them away, brushing them off with a ruffle of her feathers that turns them into a puff of white vapour.

Luna plummets from immeasurable heights as swiftly as a comet, the scream and snap of displaced air feeling remarkably close to Loyalty's exploits done to a practiced perfection in the dreamscape. Part of her realized she'd have to thank Rainbow Dash for this, another just found herself reveling in the sensation.

So caught up in the sensation of weaving through the enormous city, Luna barely notices the bubbling shadows. It was just a faint twitch in her peripheral vision, but the movement was enough to catch Luna's momentary attention. Dark winged shadows detach themselves from under the bridge and descend like wraiths behind her.

"You defy us?! You are a maggot, an intestinal worm, a parasite feeding on something you cannot comprehend. Leave. Now!" they shriek as one voice from a dozen lipless maws.
The keening scream grows louder as the Alicorn blazes through a league of space in moments, and still finds herself with at least as much distance to the ground.

Flattening out her trajectory some, the world contorts, having waited for some unseen event. The tolling bell coincides with a bridge sprouting in a sloppy oozing mass from the shadow of another building's immense baluster.

Horn charged, Luna focused her efforts in a single thought. Eyes hooded, she looses a single lancing ray of eldretch blue flame from her horn. Magical energy crackles in a roiling torrent, arcing from her as the creatures pacing her screech in surprise. The beam strikes the still bubbling and blistering stonework, obliterating it in an unearthly puff of blistering black smoke and crackling silver embers.

The Alicorn plunges through the opening as the winged beasts fall behind near the now collapsing bridgework.

Luna's small grin disappears swiftly; a trick might work once against the uninitiated but this was a dreamscape of some other entities design. It was hard to say if it would work once again.

Her flight flattens out, and she stretches her wings to catch the thin cloying air: it was unnecessary but habitual. She caught an updraft and banked hard as she flew parallel to the lofty footpaths to flit around the side of the massive stone building. She emerges into the light only to confront something else.

Before her was some sort of tributary square, halfway between a market and one of her sister's gardens. A plaza lies in the midst of the cluster of skyscrapers, completely dominated by a half score of statues laid out in a wide semi-circle. Each of the gold and silver idols were of such enormous size that they themselves were as tall as a Canterlotian building, towering on massive foundation plinths far above the insect-sized masses who throng their bases.

The largest of the idols shines in perpetual lights cast by bulbous lumin orbs. But firelight braziers the size of Yakyakistani funeral pyres send cascading orange shadows licking up the idol's bases. In a sense, it was so morbidly misshapen that even compared to the bewildering creatures she'd seen, it was both heroic and completely alien. The vast figure of towering metal poses with one hand outstretched, an ungainly claw of some enormous creature upturned melodramatically like a fillies grade school play. The other hand hefts a massively oversized blade that looked like it was supposed to look like it was on fire. Around its sharp and avian face was a crown of thorns.

The idol's sharp features glitter in the stark lights cast by some monolithic airship, bloated and vast with training scrolls of parchment more ludicrous than Princess Twilight's worst proclivities. They hung from banners uncomfortably close to slowly spinning propeller blades lining its corpulent frame. Luna spots even more flocks of strange birds spiraling around it like brass winged gulls, and heard the droning chant and bleating cries of prayers in foreign tongues. Tongues not meant to be heard by her or meant to be understood by the dreamer.

"You aren't supposed to be here, Xeno!" The shrill rasping voice cries again.

Luna chances a look at the footpaths and balconies lining the corner of the square. Thousands of mouths speak at once, as the flocks of birds wheel and sweep towards her. Babbling groups of hovering creatures swoop forward, their frame diminutive and fat in some dwarfish imitation of the humans she'd seen. They giggle and twist, cavorting in midair before alighting on the edges of the arching balustrades.

The Alicorn scans the puppets. They were doll like, stitched maws and black orbs for eyes, inhuman and exuding unguarded malevolence as their false bodies strain at the seems. Thousands of them look up and down at her, and for once Luna halts her flight and hovers in the little circular space between two intersecting bridges and the open balconies of a massive spire. Flapping in midair, she concentrates, and amid the sea of faces she spots something unique.

The simian face stares at her; short pug nose and hairy springs of fur sprout like the Stormking's apish features, though this one had a twitching mirthless grin plastered across its face. Unlike its puppets, it wears the loose fitting robes of some barabaric clergy. From the bedazzled hoshen housing four skulls with bejeweled eyes, to its golden eagle tipped staff and gilded mitre hat, it all stood in stark contrast to the pocked and unshaven visage jutting its chin at her. It stretches out the staff and the thousands of flesh puppets lining the gantries point at her.

"You are unwelcome here. Leave, go home. You will invite your doom if you anger the Powers further! Your parasitic presence pollutes the sanctity of the Delphos, you trample a sacred observance-"

The more it spoke, the more it became clear that the massive airship was altering its course to shroud what transpired. It hoves near like a whale, and already Luna could tell the architect of the dream was elsewhere beyond that vessel.

"-aking obesense to the Powers that embody the world! If you were to bow to acknowledge the primacy of the Primeval Architects-"

'Sacred Stars, it's still talking?'

"-possibility that perhaps you too shall yet live! Cease your fruitless endeavors."

Luna balks with a harsh laugh, "I'm fairly certain you're the parasite here. By right I should just toss you from your perch, ape. So save your breath and just point me to your masters. Better yet, just point me to Horus Lupercal."

With a screech, the creature shakes its staff like a totemic shaman. The puppets' mouths unstitch, hissing and sprouting tangled fangs as the swirling flock molt in midair. Their ivory pinions melt into black bat wings tipped in bone shards, bodies swelling beyond the limits of their frames as skin bursts open in tattered rings and falls in fluttering scraps.

Swallowing back the tide of revulsion was difficult, but this was just one dream-shaper. No doubt about it. There were more, there had to be. It was some sort of cult, or cabal.
That made sense. She'd stumbled upon something set up well in advance and crafted for some creature like a museum exhibit.

The shrieking creature stabs its staff towards her as the dolls from the balconies crowd the edge, and they too suddenly burst from the seems. Masses of tentacles and claws split from fingertips and feet in a single writhing multitude.

"Enough!"

Luna's horn sparks with power, sweeping a beam of pure blue across the gantries like a spotlight. Wherever the light touches, corrupted skin sizzles and withers with a sickening wheeze. For a moment she was taken aback as limbs flop from the gantries where the creatures had been obliterated.

The marionettes throng in even greater numbers as whatever force animating them surges from another direction, a sensation felt in the interconnecting weave of the dreamscape rather than seen. They surge forward from the balconies dozens of meters away, the swarming hordes spawned from the caverns of shadow wreathed hallways. They spill from the byways and clamber over one another in a seething tide of ragged clothes and alien limbs. With growing horror, Luna sees them linking their writhing tendrils and claws to form a sickly sprouting bridge of mangled limbs that hangs over the edge in ivy-like sheets.

With a wheeze, Luna twists and throws another burst of magic. The ribbon rakes the balcony, tearing through the seething mass of bodies and shearing through them in a slopping gush of black ichor. It sliced through the base holding the creatures up, pitching the interwoven mass over the edge and into empty space. Hundreds of bodies plummet towards the ground, still intertwined and writhing.

Even from this height, it was impossible to miss the bone crunching slap as they crash to the pavement at the edge of the idol square.

The hallowed chants from the airship mingle with the squealing shriek of the airborne beings, swimming up from the deeps as they try to duck below the suspended walkways.

But the fur prickled on her neck, and Luna let herself drop down as a bolt of sickly glowing green vomits from the shaman's staff. The energy bolt hisses and bubbles past her, a few gobbets of the caustic slop coating her secondary feathers and a spot on her withers. And despite herself, Luna heard the hiss of fur and feathers just before she felt the acidic bite.

That shouldn't happen, it couldn't happen.

In a moment of rage, she twists onto her back and aligns her horn with the simian figure leaning over the edge of the bridge's balcony. She directs a wrathful beam of smoldering blue energy at her target while a seething tide of puppet beasts fling themselves into midair towards her.

But her magic aimed true, and even as the creature tried to duck away, the ray swept across its chest and it stumbles backwards with a wail. The once eagle-embossed staff falls from numbed hands, though the moment it left the ape's hands it contorted into a fetid totem of shriveled flesh, rattling bones, gaudy feathers, and shiny stones. Even from a distance, she could smell the stink of putrescence in her nostrils.

But the swarm of bat-creatures had caught up. Luna takes a breath and throws a barrier of force around her body as the first dark figure impacts upon the telekinetic shield an instant later. A bone talon from a grotesquely swollen beast slams into the arcane barrier, sending spidering cracks across the hazy blue mass.

She turns her head and flares her wings, batting the creature aside. The grotesque creature once resembled a pegasi melded with a human, now it was a blistered bot fly the size of a cow, its suckling proboscis oozes slime as scythe-like limbs flail into her barrier.

"Ceifador!"

The mystic halberd sweeps upwards in a killing blow even as it materializes. The blade carves through slick black chitin in showers of silver sparks, disintegrating whatever it touches. But it's merely one of many grotesqueries clambering to swallow her. Horned faces and beaks snap and peck at her while lashing limbs and raking claws carve juddering furrows into the barrier, pushing more strain on her body and taxing her ability.

A swipe of her halberd, a twist of her barrel into a corkscrew dive, and she pushes under the morass of beasts as the deluge of bodies plunge past her. Several reach out to brush against her shield, and she can see the formless waxy faces streak by with gnashing needle teeth. But she shoves her way through towards the idolatrous ring of statues as the mass of bodies rains past.

She shakes the nightmarish flock of creatures, but the dream never dies. The shaman and his marionettes were gone, replaced by a more 'normal' crowd. But th perfectly normal looking humans still felt 'off' as they set about in what appeared to be a common routine of fascinatingly macabre chores.

Some men scourge their backs bloody with rush tailed whips, others hold up scraps of parchments and affix scalding wax seals to the flesh of kneeling cenobites. Others preach from skittering daises mounted on sextets of spider limbs while masses crowd around them. A shambling cluster shuffles past, clad in dirty burlap robes and ringing bells stitched to the stumps of forelimbs like some deluded school choir.

Luna sweeps over them, well out of reach, but seemingly unseen to them as she passes into the shadow of the macabre airship. The entities haven't given chase, rather, they seem to have melted into the bleak background of this world.

And so she licks her lips and finds her voice, "Horus! Horus Lupercal!"

A single shiver runs through the world around her, as motion completely stops. From around the statues golden frame, she sees a blot of pure white light torn into the world. It was another room, another place prepared for the dreamer.

She seethes, plunging in headlong knowing full well, the architect was near. Still, as she slipped into the closing rift, she noticed the broken form of another simian priest nearby. It looked exactly the same as the creature that confronted her.

'Peculiar.'