Fanfic / Herald

"My handsome little cherub, close your eyes.
Mommy's going to give you clear blue skies.
So you’ll laugh and dance and play in the air.
And sing the song of angels everywhere."

Herald is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic Dark Fic written by shortskirtsandexplosions.

Mrs. Cake had just tucked in her children and gone to sleep. She was woken up by a loud crashing noise, finding the house empty, with its doors and windows boarded.

Something is causing the pegasi to grab other ponies, lift them high above the clouds, and drop them to their death.

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This fanfic provides examples of:

• Anyone Can Die: Cheerilee, Mr. Cake, Granny Smith, Big Mac, Twilight, and Spike. Derby, Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy all have fatal injuries, but keep moving due to the Crystal's effects. It's implied essentially every other named character dies alongside everyone else, but it's not shown on-screen.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: "Miss Sparkle, what if... what if the pony responsible is in here?"
• Foreshadowing: When Mrs. Cake expresses worry about finding her children, Cheerilee is confused. Because Mrs. Cake is talking about both her kids...
• Idiosyncratic Episode Naming: Each chapter title is a line of the poem above.
• Implacable Man: The pegasi. Even death is not enough to stop them.
• Lighter and Softer: If this story is too dark for you, you can instead read a lighter story inspired by it, Huggled.
• Our Zombies Are Different: They're technically brainwashed ponies. Then they keep moving around when they're dead, so the become regular zombies, too.
• The Killer in Me: Mrs. Cake, of the Amnesiac Killer variant.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: To Mrs. Cake's confusion, Cheerilee and Twilight both spontaneously kill themselves in front of her...
• Unreliable Narrator: The story is narrated in third-person limited, following Mrs. Cake's point of view. Since she's one-quarter pegasus, she's also been affected by the crystal.
• Wham Line:
  • "Mrs. Cake, Pound Cake died a year and a half ago..."
  • In the final chapter, Twilight asks a question that turns the entire story in its head:
    Twilight: Didn't Mr. Cake once tell me that you were one-quarter pegasus on your mother's side-?

• Zombie Fic: Herald is a fanfic where something is causing the pegasi to grab other ponies, lift them high above the clouds, drop them (to their death) when they get tired, and look for another alive pony to grab. This continues even after the Pegasus is dead.