Fanfic / Nine Days Down

Nine Days Down is My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction by JoeShogun. The story was originally written over 2015 and 2016. It was later taken down when the author deleted their account, but was reuploaded in May 2023 when JoeShogun rejoined the site. The reuploaded story can be read here, on Fimfiction.net.

The story begins as a lot of episodes end, with Twilight and her friends rallying the power of friendship to defeat a villain and save the day. However, just on the cusp of their victory, the villain uses a last spiteful attack to banish Celestia to Tartarus.

This proves to be a serious problem, because Equestria, see, wasn't always the Sugar Bowl that it is now. Once upon a time, it was a much dangerous and terrible place, haunted by horrors beyond counting, and it took a great deal of work by the Princesses and their allies to defeat them and make the land safe. Most of those horrors are still around, however, having been banished to Tartarus over the long eons. As a result, as Equestria grew safer, the pit grew worse and worse, becoming a hive of danger of evil.

For Celestia, winding up there wouldn't be a serious problem. A mortal pony would be in very serious danger, especially given that modern Equestrians have no preparation for the sheer awfulness of Tartarus, but Celestia is more than capable of handling herself as she heads for the exit...

... except that, just as she was banished, the ever-faithful Twilight tried to save her and was drawn right in there with her.

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This work contains examples of:

• Alien Sky: The sky in Tartarus is a black and empty, holding only a single perfect circle of flame surrounding a deeper black void.
  The sky was black as the darkest night. More so, for there were no stars. Dead center in that sable sky was a ring of slowly flickering red fire. The inside was empty, an impossible pit of deeper darkness in a sky that held nothing else.
• Anatomy of the Soul: Deities have multiple souls and bodies to contain these, which are in concert and communication with one another but maintain distinct personalities and senses of self. Luna and Celestia both have their physical self on earth, their celestial body (Celestia in particular notes that the Sun is male, despite the rest of her being female), and a sapient soul-weapon. Partway through the story, Twilight manifests her first additional soul when she forms her sword, Insight. The author's commentary at the end of the story notes that this concept was derived from the Primordials in Exalted and their multiple souls and souls' souls.
• Beast of the Apocalypse: Typhon is a monstrous, monstrously huge and monstrously powerful being who slumbers beneath Mount Etna in Tartarus; should he awake, he will embark on a wild rampage and try to destroy everything in his path. He was originally meant to be a protector for the world, but his traumatic birth and the total rejection his family gave him left him filled with nothing but madness, rage and grief; his only goal now is to utterly unmake the world and himself with it.
• Beneath the Earth: There is an extensive network of caverns and tunnels beneath the surface of Tartarus, crossed by underground rivers and home to monsters such as predatory shrimp, clans of wights, and unique and dangerous entities sealed in isolated caverns. When he first comes to the surface, Bait the wight is profoundly unnerved by the experience of being in a seemingly endless open space without any walls or ceiling.
• Capital Letters Are Magic: Tartarus' pronouns are always capitalized, even where other divine beings' are not, to emphasize Its transcendent, unfathomable nature.
• Chest Burster: A species of crab-like animals in Tartarus reproduce by implanting eggs in other creatures through their claws, which, if they take, quickly mature into larvae that burst from their host. Adult crabs remain attached to their hosts' bodies, which dangle as withered husks from their bellies.
• Classical Cyclops: Cyclopes, appearing as huge, one-eyed humanoids, are among the inmates of Tartarus. The characters specifically encounter Polyphemus, who stands guard over the road to Mount Etna where Typhon slumbers and who was blinded long ago in an encounter with Luna. Twilight had always assumed that they resembled equines, and is somewhat at a loss for describing a humanoid being.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Briareos the hekatonkheire is horrifying, even by the standards of the things that live in Tartarus. He physically resembles nothing so much as a living lake of gel, bearing fifty bleached skulls as his heads, each at the end of a long pseudopod and belonging to a different animal species, and with a hundred tentacle-like arms that he can extend and retract at will. He speaks in a chorus of voices, is bizarre and off-putting when he speaks, and even when trying to be pleasant he always has a few heads that glare angrily or sulk or bear no readable expression. He is also one of the few truly kind beings in Tartarus, and when Twilight stumbles across his home he tries to be a courteous host and simply wishes to break up the monotony of his isolated life for a bit.
• Death Seeker: Gorehounds desire nothing more in life than to die fighting a powerful foe. As a result, they have little desire to escape Tartarus due to it being filled with mighty horrors to die against, and the ones that attack Celestia all but throw themselves to their deaths in fighting her.
• Death World: In Tartarus, almost every intelligent being is either actively evil or a ruthless opportunist, every animal is a monster, and many plants are dangerous. Food is scarce, shelter scarcer, and the geography has a tendency to shift when you're not looking. Topping it all off, the dimension itself is aware, in full control of its shape and contents, and enjoys nothing more than trapping creatures and making them fear and despair forever. Ancient Equestria used to be something similar, although less extreme, as it teemed with predators, monsters, hostile races and powerful evil beings; Celestia, Luna, and their ancient companions were responsible for driving most of the nastiness into Tartarus, turning Equestria into the Sugar Bowl of the modern day.
• Demonic Possession: Tartarus can send its will into any of the creatures living in It, completely taking over their bodies and burying their minds until It chooses to leave. It hates doing this, however, as It loathes being bound to a single, fleshy body and the limited perspective of its senses, and as such only does this when It absolutely needs to.
• Elemental Embodiment: When the characters prepare to flee from Tartarus, Terra sends an elemental to aid Twilight in escaping. The creature can freely change its shape at need; when bearing Twilight it resembles a flat stony platform capable of moving over the earth at high speeds and can project crystals and rocky spikes from itself as weapons and defense, and later it takes the form of a huge apelike beast.
• Exact Words: While trying to find Twilight in Tartarus, Celestia makes a deal with her sister Terra where, if Terra finds Twilight for her, Celestia will owe Terra a favor to be redeemed at a place and time of Terra's choosing. Terra does so, fairly easily, but the deal was only that she find her, not that she actually relay this information afterwards.
• Eye-Dentity Giveaway: Twilight realizes that Cretes has been possessed by Tartarus when the bull turns to look at her and she sees that his eyes have become pure black except for a thin ring of flame — exactly like the not-Sun that hangs in Tartarus' black sky.
• The Fair Folk: The Fey, capricious and dangerous beings who range from bestial hunters such as bewilderbeasts and changelings to intelligent and deeply malicious beings like Nuckelavee. A few remain free in the upper world, but the worst of them were all banished to Tartarus long ago.
  The monster strutted before a veritable horde of creatures like him, inasmuch as anything was like him. The Fey. Chittering, cackling, impossible things, no two of them alike. One was like a huge dog, wrapped in chains and flexing claws of corroded bronze. Another bled from every orifice, giggling endlessly. One wore a coat made entirely of faces. And there were so many more.
• Genius Loci: Tartarus. It's not alive, not exactly, but It has an awareness of Its own and can exercise a great deal of control over Its physical environment.
• Genre Savvy: Discussed. After becoming isolated, Twilight reflects on Celestia's comment that Tartarus enjoys playing out horror stories with Its captives by trying to think in terms of how horror narratives work. She runs into a few problems, such as the difficulty in working out whether someone is a protagonist or supporting character, and ultimately concludes that the problem with trying to be genre savvy is that it is impossible for a character to outsmart the story, since they aren't in control — only the author is.
• Glowing Flora: After becoming lost in a cave in Tartarus, Twilight finds her way lit by patches of luminescent moss and fungi growing on its walls.
• Headless Horseman: Dullahan, the Headless Horse, is an alicorn who keeps his severed head attached to a hook on his saddle and with mist endlessly pouring from his neck stump. He leads a procession of spirits through and between the worlds, and offers those that he meets the chance to join him and leave behind life and its sorrows forever.
• Healing Potion: Panacea is a miracle healing salve that soothes pain, disinfects, seals wounds, boosts healing, and regrows hair. It is extremely potent but also extremely expensive to make, and as such is reserved for critical cases.
• Hope Spot: Fairly early in the story, Twilight, Bait and Ben emerge from the cave system in the Fields of Asphodel, the closest part of Tartarus to the exit, and come across Cretes the bull, who offers to guide them to the way out in exchange for his herd being allowed to leave as well. Just as it seems like the characters have a clear shot at escape, however, Tartarus extends its will and possesses Cretes, refusing to let its new toys get away.
• Lamprey Mouth: While crossing the Fields of Asphodel, Twilight and Bait are attacked by a pack of creatures resembling raptors with eyeless, circular rings of razor teeth for heads.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: While Equestrian chimeras are fairly coherent mixes of a limited number of animals, their cousins in Tartarus are random, discordant, many-headed mishmashes of dozens of different species, often with odd numbers of limbs and entirely unrecognizable components.
• Multiple Head Case: While Briareos the hekatonkheire speaks in a single chorus of voices, his fifty heads all technically have their own thought processes and must come to agreement over how to act. He reflects this by using "I" when his minds are all in concert and "we" when there is debate and only a majority supports what he is currently saying or doing. Additionally, while his heads usually display a single common mood at a time, there are always at least a few that show distinct emotions from the rest.
• Named Weapons: The weapons of deities are additional souls made manifest in the physical world, with their own personality and sense of self, and as such all bear their own distinct names. Celestia's sword is named Hyperia, Luna's set of floating blades is Thousand Glittering Shards in the Darkest of Nights, and Twilight's sword is Insight.
• Nothing Is Scarier: In "Wandering", while trying to find her way out of a cave, Twilight is hit by the third variant — believing yourself to be alone until you realize that not only is there something in there with you, but it's been there all along — when she hers growling from the darkness and realizing that something has been following her.
• Nuckelavee: Nuckelavee is one of the monsters imprisoned in Tartarus, and resides in the Fields of Asphodel. He has the usual horrifying appearance, with no features on its humanoid head save a single nostril and a too-wide mouth full of needle teeth; Twilight, who has never seen anything humanoid before, can only describe his second body as a strange apelike thing. He has a particular hatred for ponies and other equines for reasons lost to history, and delights in spreading plague among them using the toxic vapors that he exhales.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Typhon seeks to destroy the whole universe and everything in it.
• Our Centaurs Are Different: Twilight encounters a centaur living alongside the wight clan. As Twilight has never seen anything humanoid before, she has trouble describing its upper body outside of thinking of it as a sort of strange ape with weird, shortened jaws.
• Our Sphinxes Are Different: Phix the sphinx, one of the inmates of Tartarus, has a lion-like body and a human face and breasts, with long ears and blue-and-white hair. Sphinxes enjoy goading other beings into riddling contests, and, if their partner fails to answer correctly, they can force them to obey a single request. Usually, that request is "sit still while I eat you".
• Our Trolls Are Different: Swamps trolls are huge, lumbering creatures covered in carpets of moss, bark, and mushrooms, and surrounded by clouds of toxic spores that pose a deadly threat to anything near the beast. The condition is curable, but the trolls themselves refused this treatment and were banished to Tartarus as a result.
• Our Wights Are Different: Wights are pony-like creatures, but not ponies themselves. They have no hair besides a thin white mane, and gray leathery skin. They have a pair of bony, clawed arms mounted like a pegasus' wings, and another set of fingers and a thumb where the front a pony's hoof would be. They live in the caverns of Tartarus, and are predators who will gladly eat other sapients.
• Patchwork Map: Tartarus is a living dimension that can rearrange its interior at will and operates through magic and story logic rather than mundane climate and natural systems. As such, its landscape is a patchwork maze of forest, prairie, tundra, rivers and wastelands, often bordering each other with extremely sharp and regular borders.
• Public Domain Character: The population of Tartarus includes a number of beings from classical mythology, such as the Cretan Bull, Polyphemus, the hekatonkheire brothers Briareos, Gyges and Cottos, and Typhon under Mount Etna.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Tartarus serves as a prison and sealing place for ancient villains, demons, and entire species of monsters. While dangerous creatures remain around in Equestria, these are for the most part simply wild animals, more moderate bandits, or willing to leave alone if let alone. Everything else — the horrors and predators that delighted in preying on people and sowing destruction, that would not cooperate with civilization, leave others alone or change their ways — were eventually banished or forced to retreat into Tartarus, with only one another for company and kept under watch by the living consciousness of Tatarus itself, which delights in playing out endless horror stories and gloats over its prisoners like a dragon on its hoard.
• Shout-Out: Several, most of which are identified in the story's last-chapter summation.
  • The concept of deities having multiple souls and distinct bodies, which exist in concert but have distinct senses of self and personalities, is derived from Exalted.
  • Yothga, a magic-eating plant found in Tartarus and which holds a powerful being imprisoned in its vines, is from the Conan the Barbarian story "The Scarlet Citadel".
• Stout Strength: When she and Celestia encounter Polyphemus, Twilight notes that he has the kind of heavy, rounded muscle that visually resembles fat, but which is much stronger than the sculpted physique of bodybuilders.
• Sugar Bowl: Modern-day Equestria is an incredibly safe and welcoming place, where those threats that do occur can mostly be solved through diplomacy and understanding and without anybody truly getting permanently hurt. As a result, modern ponies have only a limited and theoretical understanding of what a war entails and no concept of rape, and Twilight does not even recognize swear words when she hears them. In the ancient past, it was instead a Death World, where small bands of ponies were tyrannized and preyed on by endless monsters and villains. The reason this is no longer the case is because Celestia, Luna and their followers worked very, very hard to make it so. A lot of the story's drama comes from Twilight, who has spent all her life in the Sugar Bowl of the upper world, becoming trapped in Tartarus, where all the old monsters were banished to and which very much remains a death world.
• Spooky Animal Sounds: While crossing a dark forest in Tartarus, Twilight and her group are accompanied by the noises of unseen creatures, ranging from rustlings in the bushes to a distant echoing howl, although the makers of these sounds are never seen.
• Super-Powered Shrimp: The monsters of Tartarus include a species of shrimp that live in bodies of water underground and feed on creatures that come to drink. They have four claws, both capable of being launched forward with immense force; two end in serrated blades, capable of punching through anything short of steel, and two end in blunt clubs capable of shattering stone. They live in swarms and are nearly fearless, and the other natives of Tartarus fear the greatly.
• Super Spit: The lamprey-mouthed raptor-like animals that attack Twilight and Bait in Asphodel spit globs of corrosive goop that can eat holes in materials up to and including shields of magic force.
• Weird Weather: Weather in Tartarus occurs less so as a natural phenomenon than as a direct action by the living consciousness of the dimension Itself based on what It happens to think is funny or dramatically appropriate. As a result, besides regular rain, Tartarean weather can include things like showers of blood or mercury, freezing fog, and tornadoes of biting beetles, all of which can occur underground just as easily as on the surface.
• Who Wants to Live Forever?: Discussed and subverted. There is in-universe fiction that depicts immortality as a terribly tragic thing, which burdens its bearers with endless ennui and grief over lost loved ones and denies immortals the peace and release of death. When asked about it, Luna comments that she finds it all to be ridiculous to the point of hilarity; yes, immortals have regrets, as does everyone else, but on the whole she immensely enjoys her everlasting life and the novelties it brings.
  Luna laughed, her voice ringing pleasantly through the woods. "Been reading the novels about us, have you? Oh! The ennui of eternity!" She raised one hoof to her head, faux-swooning with great drama. "If only I were mortal and could have died before I lost my one true love! If only I could feel real feelings again!" She laughed further, falling behind as she shook with it. "That was an actual line in one! What nonsense! No, We do not get bored."
• The Wild Hunt: The Hunt is a gathering of fey and nightmares, who come together from the dark corners of the world to run rampant and hunt whatever they come across. It appears towards the end, led by Nuckelavee, to try to stop the heroes as they attempt to flee Tartarus.
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: Will-o-Wisps are fey creatures resembling floating lights, and take malicious joy in leading other beings into danger. Twilight and her group see them while crossing a dark forest in Tartarus, but Twilight knows enough to give them a wide berth.
• Words of Power: Word magic is a form of spellcasting that creates effects by saying specific syllables in the right order. Gyges the hekatonkheire can do an especially powerful version of this, as each of his fifty heads can intone a different chant at once. Instead of recognizable words, Gyges' spellcasting consists of a cacophony of ear-grating sounds with no particularly obvious meaning.
  She'd heard of this. Word magic. Spells that were cast by saying the right syllables in the right ways. But she'd never guessed it could be so terrible. The whole tree-thing swayed with that maddening spell-speech, and Twilight wished more than anything that it would just stop.
• Wreathed in Flames: Cretes can cover himself in fire when fighting, which shapes itself into a pair of flaming wings.

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