Untitled Pastejam


                                            This was the first time I’ve written something that wasn’t meant for an assignment or job, and I really enjoyed doing it. I will fully admit that this one got away from me, and I had to scrap a whole bunch of probably necessary context to get this across the finish line in time, but I do think I’ll try writing again in the future.


                                            >She set it ablaze, and the cavern around, her, now faintly illuminated by the wan vermillion glow of her likewise-coloured candle, flickered into a scintillating sea of reds. Above her, inset into a vast firmament of mahogany earth, an ocean of crystalline crimson stars glimmered faintly, dancing in a silent rhythm beat by the wavering of the candle’s oxygen-starved flame.

                                            >Between these earthen stars erupted vast, salmon-pink stalactites, their ponderous bulk disappearing into the shrouded gloom of the ceiling above. Across each of these immense protuberances flowed a trickling flow of a ruddy maroon liquid: water, deeply polluted during its journey from some unknown underground wellspring through the ceiling of the cavern. This red-tinted water ended its journey from and though the unknown ravines and tunnels of the earth in a series of age-carved pools that patterned the rough stone floor.

                                            >Just before her, erupting from the rough tone floor of the cave, lay the carmine brick road. The road was a slender thing – spanning just wide enough to accommodate a single large pony – and could have been dismissed as the unremarkable craft of some lost race of subterranean crafters, save for the utter, alien perfection of the thing. From where it started before her, and spanning to where it departed the anemic glow emitted by the weakly-burning candle, leaving only inchoate suggestions of trails in the dark of the cavern, the carmine brick road lay totally and completely unblemished; not a mote of earth, nor stray drop of water, nor even the beginnings of a fissure or fracture marred the surface of the road.


                                            >The mare stood at the start of the road, fidgeting, twitching, and ripping shallow, panicked breaths from the stagnant air of the cave into heaving lungs. She knew, intellectually, that she couldn’t afford to feel fear now – the timer had been started, and the rope supporting the hungry guillotine-blade she had strapped herself below was quickly burning through; her fear, apathetic to her remonstrations against it, still sat heavy in her, and she continued to fidget and twitch, desperately trying to recompose herself.

                                            >In the mare’s silent shaking, she glanced down at the candle before her, catching her own distorted reflection in the burnished bronze of the candleholder which she gripped in the effulgent madder-red of her magic: she took in her amber eyes, pupils dilated both from fear and the long journey here through unlit tunnels; her eggshell-white coat, marred now with a plethora of angry scrapes from that same journey; and the unruly shock of sweat-soaked auburn mane perched atop her head.

                                            >Seeing her mane -- one of the two birthrights shared by every Red that had ever been, or that ever would be -- Ruby Red remembered her brother.

                                            >She remembered his great, gentle bulk, so uncommon among her kind; his ever-kind eyes and easy smile; his eternal, unshakable confidence in her. >Then, involuntarily, she remembered receiving the letter from an estranged friend, having travelled its long way across the jagged mounts of the Eastern Border Range, calling her back to Shelter Glen on urgent business.

                                            >She remembered her journey across that same range, paying her passage with a convoy of merchants making the journey.

                                            >She remembered the rough mountain roads, the cold and the wind, and the scenery of the Glen that she thought she’d consigned to the realm of memories and dreaming.

                                            >She remembered her ancestral home -- left empty and cold, but still so full of her brother.

                                            >She remembered desperate searches alone through the boreal woods that surrounded the town, what few search parties the Glen could muster having long since exhausted their hope before her arrival.

                                            >She remembered finding pieces of him nestled in the hollow crook of a great oak tree, the putrid stench of decomposing meat alerting her to his presence.

                                            >She remembered her sobbing rage, unable to do her brother even the final kindness of giving him a complete burial, sending him half-complete into the sepulchral depths of the family mausoleum.


                                            >Ruby remembered the grim determination that had filled her then; her steadfast resolve to avenge her brother, retrieve his remains, and take up the ancient, venerable post, reserved only for the scions of the Reds, that she had fled from, dooming her brother.

                                            >She had mixed her noxious, iron-reeking candle and wormed her way through hidden channels and ancient paths to where she stood now. Was she so pathetic that she would give up now, goal in sight, at the first real trial?

                                            ‘Yes’, she thought to herself, ‘of course you should give up now. It’s what you’ve always done, pathetic coward that you are. You ran from your home, neglecting your responsibilities as firstborn and dooming your ill-equipped and overkind brother. It’s a shocking mercy – one that you don’t deserve -- that the mark adorning you is a lamp and book, not some more appropriate brand suiting your fecklessness, fear, and the base self-preservation that rules you. You have, without exception, fled every trial presented to you. Why should this be any different? Give up now. Let the candle flicker away. Spend your last living moments in trembling, mewling terror. It’s far from the punishment you deserve, but it will have to suffice’.

                                            >In the choking, swirling fog of the inward-facing rage filling Ruby, she remembered her brother again. Remembered finding his journal, still ensconced in the same nook he always thought it was hidden away in. Remembered the countless passages where he equivocated to himself on trying to call her back. Remembered how outmatched and overwhelmed he had felt. Remembered his unwavering confidence in her.

                                            >Her thoughts moved, then, back to herself. She thought of giving up. She thought of disappointing, yet again, one of the few true friends she had ever had, and the only family she had ever known. In the depths of the earth, a slowly diminishing candle her only lifeline, Ruby awakened to a sudden clarity.

                                            >‘I am’, she realized, ‘ruled by fear and selfish desire – of course I am. There is no shame in admitting truth’. Ruby started into haltering movement then, beginning a slow, faltering walk, the attention given each to each unsteady hoof placement obvious. ‘My one true talent is self-preservation’, she thought. ‘This one time, though, I won’t give up. I can’t. I want to be an admirable older sister just one last time’.

                                            >With that, Ruby propelled herself into a hurried trot, the staccato clip-clop of her polished hooves impacting the unnaturally smooth brick filling the stillness of the cavern with an echoing din.

                                            >In her trot, Ruby stared with unfaltering, unblinking focus at the earth slightly ahead of her feet, her full attention directed solely on ensuring that each hoofstep impacted only the red brick of the path -- that not a fraction fell on the hungry earth which surrounded it. Time passed, and Ruby, lost in the haze of her single-minded focus, was only dimly aware that she had been moving for an impossibly long time.

                                            >She only halted when she was thrown from the trance of focused movement which had consumed her by the feeling of a sudden immersion into a heady swamp of potently thick ambient magic.

                                            >She looked around, baffled,  taking in the great walls of an enormous hallway that now surrounded her.

                                            >The hallway was hewn from a stone so purely, abyssally, black that it stood highlighted vibrant against the incomplete darkness of her barely lit surroundings.

                                            >Shaken, Ruby glanced below her; her gaze was met by the familiar carmine brick road, cutting an implacable channel through the midnight stone of the hall. Ruby began to inspect her surroundings, looking for some source that could explain this sudden and intense ambient magic, and her transition from the cave to this new location. Her gaze flickered across carven murals and figures, each as elaborate as they were inscrutable, before focusing again on her candleholder; the vermillion candle burned easily now, the once-starved flame now glutted by the rich, lightly floral-scented air which surrounded it, but the once-pristine cupped bowl of the candleholder now held a heavy load of reeking sanguine wax.

                                            >This stark reminder of the ever-decreasing clock compelled Ruby back into action. Gone now was the focused, careful trot; Ruby now cantered through the twisting halls, mind still focused on the road before her – yet unlike before, where the road and the placement of her hooves occupied the fullness of her mind, she was unable to banish the candle from her mind, the melting wax overflowing the candleholder and decorating the ebony floor behind her with vermillion spots feeling like lifeblood leaving her arteries.

                                            >Ruby almost left the path when it turned a sharp, 90 degree angle towards a smaller corridor, and almost left it again when it wound its way through a gallery of obsidian statues decorating plinths of similar shades. Before, the fear from coming so close to leaving the road would have paralyzed her --compelled her into stunned, silent panic. Now though, with the candle looming so large in her thoughts, her canter barely slowed as she pressed onwards through the halls, filling her lungs with the rich dry air of the halls.

                                            >Ruby paused mid-step – moments ago, she knew, she had been racing through the halls, finding her way through the black maze by candlelight alone. Now, she noted, the world around her was violet with the coming of evening, and an ocean wind tousled her sweat soaked mane and cooled her exercise-heated flesh. She took a deep breath, filling her lungs with the moist, brine-scented air of the ocean. Her ears, filled for hours with nothing but the drumbeat of hooves impacting brick, now caught the ceaseless, splashing roar of distant waves breaking across stone.

                                            >Before her, jutting forth from the wind-blasted heath where she now stood, was a lighthouse of tremendous scale, a massive obelisk standing tall against the twilight sky. A great octagonal base of polished blue-grey stone supported a sloping cylinder of a similar shade; this spire was crowned by a delicate array of paned windows, shining mauve with the deepening twilight in exquisitely wrought metal frames. Topping the lighthouse’s clustered windows, shielding them from the rain that often beats in these coastal places, rested a tarnished copper dome.

                                            >Ruby was broken from her reverie by the memory of the candle, her foremost concern over these last few hours, and the cause of her escalating hurry. She glanced at her candle, shocked to find it burnt three-quarters through, trembling and guttering pathetically in the wet, windy air that scoured the heath where she stood. Fear again rendered her motionless, stunning her briefly with gawping idiot panic, before she regained enough of herself to compel her magic into action, forming a partial shield to windbreak for the candle.

                                            >Glancing again at the candle, seeing how perilously low it had burned, Ruby threw herself into a sprinting gallop, racing across the path which charted a mercifully straight course to the lighthouse ahead. Reaching the base of the lighthouse, Ruby continued her desperate run up a long flight of straight stairs, reaching an oaken door with no handles, standing tall in a frame of the lighthouse’s blue-grey stone.

                                            >As she seized the door in her magic and desperately, futilely attempted to wrench it open, she thought again to the lighthouse she was striving to enter -- although dusk was already upon it, no ray of golden daylight had scythed forth from the lighthouse to pattern the surrounding seas. Ruby dismissed this thought from her mind, redoubling her hopeless efforts to somehow prise the door open. When the door slammed open before her, moving independent from her efforts, and she saw for scant moments the blinding luminescence that erupted from the now-open portal, Ruby knew that her questions about where the lighthouse’s beam had been directed had been answered. She felt bile erupt from her throat, and she departed from herself.


                                            >A great ape, shaven and clothed, sat at an enormous, yet barren, banquet table; across from him, engaged with the ape in incomprehensible conversation, sat a pegasus stallion, every inch of his robust form laced with weeping scars.

                                            >The ape was soaked through with a thick layer of gore, and a growing pool of blood that devoured ever more of the checkerboard floor beneath him spurted forth in an endless flow from his upper limbs, which had been crudely severed close to its torso.

                                            >Despite the extent of the hideous injuries that plagued both participants in the conversation, the tone of the discussion remained decidedly staid and unharried.


                                            >Her departed brother, rendered now as he was in life, with the exception of his once-kind eyes – eyes which now burned with a cruel fire – ran at the head of a great herd of the dead, chasing unknown prey through the eastern forests of the Glen.

                                            >Behind the dead, the places where they stepped shone black with accelerated decay; healthy brush and vegetation rendered into moldering black heaps in moments. Her brother laughed, and she heard the hysterical scream of a pony.


                                            >A great wind blew forth from an enormous ziggurat in the unexplored depths of the sun-blasted western deserts, and brought with it a great hunger; blighted crops patterned the fields of Shelter Glen, previously full streams ran at a trickling crawls through dried creek beds, and the desert greedily advanced towards the town, sucking endless earth into its cavernous maw.


                                            > Ruby came back to herself, and felt her senses immediately overwhelmed: thrumming waves of magic washed over and subsumed her, and it took all the desperate focus she could muster just to keep the candle pressed in her weakening, shielded grasp; the light, purer and more terrible than she could fathom, pressed itself beneath her closed lids. Mewling in terror and pain, Ruby laid down, feeling the press of cold brick beneath her, as she covered her eyes with her trembling hooves in a vain attempt to block the blinding white.

                                            “Shield not your eyes, Ruby Red”, commanded a thundering, reverberating basso, “Behold me in fullness, and in knowing me, know the gift I have bestowed you”.

                                            >Compelled by the instruction, Ruby numbly removed her hooves from her eyes, and opened her lids.

                                            >A throbbing pain in Ruby’s skull jolted her from her trance, and she was greeted by the sight of a dim grey mineshaft, the faint light of day flickering through from some nearby-but-obscured entry exit to the surface.  She felt an unfamiliar, vitreous weight at the back of her skull, and her head pounded in metronome-beat with pulsating waves of misery and pain.

                                            >An unfamiliar weight now burdened her, and she inspected herself to find herself adorned with an unfamiliar saddlebag. An involuntary shudder racked her when she realized the make – an unfamiliar leather, embellished throughout with bizarre and incomprehensible symbols.

                                            >Glancing down, she spied her constant companion, the carmine brick road, which had reached its terminus in the earthen floor of the mineshaft. With trembling hooves, she took a delicate, uncertain step off the road, placing a hoof on the stone before her. The hoof landed firm, the motion displacing a cloud of dust from the thick patina that surrounded the rough, grey earth where her hoof hand landed.

                                            >Emboldened by the reassuring banality of the interaction, ruby inched her way onto the rough, slate-grey floor of the abandoned mineshaft; exhaling in relief, she floated the faintly guttering waxen remnants of her candle from beside her to rest on the ground before her, briefly and dispassionately observing the wax spilling from the tilted bronze bowl. Then, inhaling deeply, she blew out the candle.