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When the old research facility suddenly reappeared in our world it caused a fair amount of damage. Fortunately the damage was only done to buildings that had since been erected in the same location as it happened at night. I was sent to investigate. My name is Excavadora. What follows are the few excerpts I have been able to make out in the withered pages of a book found beside the unusually well preserved remains of one poor earth pony. He was found just inside the main entranceway. Due to the nature of what is contained I shall send copies of the pages to the director of archives in the hopes it can prevent such a tragedy from being repeated. It is doubtless he suffered greatly. Age and deterioration have made it impossible to recover every page, leaving only the following fragments.
Poor reader, why are you here? Do not read this here! Take these notes and run! Leave, gallop, fly! Quickly as you can, be anywhere but here in this ruined tormented place, go now! Now that you are hopefully elsewhere and safe from our misery we can get to it. Understand that as I wrote these notes it was always with a heavy heart, a heavy soul, a heavy burden. The burden of having survived, the burden of slowly outliving my friends and associates. I am finally the last. Not by choice but by mere happenstance, if these notes should ever be read though they likely will not be, know that I have suffered for them as well as myself. Here and there I have touched up or added to them where I may. Why? Well perhaps these notes will offer what little answer as can be given. I am dying, left alone to meet my end here in this place where all dreams ended most abruptly.
The farm was home, the farm was safety, comfort, familiarity, now the farm is all that there is. Why is the farm all there is? It befell us in the middle of a perfectly normal day, a beautiful day, one soon turned to horror. Immediately past the edges of its buildings, holdings, and fields there lies an impenetrable darkness. What happened, how did it come to be this way? Any that deem to wander in never return. What great confluence of fate and terror deemed to hurl this place into an eternal deadlock, the sheer contrast between day and night for all time outside its borders? Why do the sun and moon still shine though dimmed on this forgotten place, the rain still fall yet none seem able to escape its grasp? By hoof or wing, indeed by any other means there is simply no escape for us.
Once, long long ago, this great place stood as the central hub of a vast and grand grain empire, an empire of dirt and of soil. The veritable epitome of all that magic and science could ask of agriculture. The very central core of the entire scope that such technological control could possibly offer over food on every level. Why this place, surely it could not have been that important, enough to seclude from the entire sanction of reality? Those unfortunate enough to be here with us when the great schism between this place and the world erupted about them, remained. The very air itself seeming as if about to come alive and assault it's inheritors, how dare anything continue to live, here? This was once a research center dedicated to all the finer points of growing crops of every manner, what is it now? Merely a bare and bereft husk of what was, left to rust and decay. Not a place where life flourishes.
Yet we have indeed continued to live, but not have life. Only the depths of an endless dreary despair without hope, why feel hope here? For a short while at the beginning perhaps, but as hours turn to days, then weeks, then years, hope simmers away under the surface until none is left of coming help. Ah, glorious dreams of help, help from the sky! Help from under the ground! Help from the palace, help from..anywhere. We stopped dreaming. No help has ever come, the empty eternity of a decade cut off slowly piling upon us. Some finally give in, trot off into that interminable darkness to meet whatever fate awaits within, never to be seen again. Not even sound penetrates that wall, that sheet of black emptiness that laughs at us by letting us still vaguely see the sky but not the trees, the grass, anything beyond its horrid blinding veil. It does not even truly taunt us with glimpses of anything but the stunning swirling obsidian walls of pitch reaching into the sky.
These notes probably look scrawled more so than you might expect, that is because I write them with a pegasus quill strapped to a forehoof. The two remaining unicorns rigged it for me. There were plenty of them laying about after it happened. Cut off as we are from the world we have no smaller available and holding one in the mouth is near impossible. The tip is also far larger than the standard quills we would normally use giving a slightly smeared look to my writing and making me have to write far larger than I normally would to be legible. When we first became entombed in this nightmarish landscape we also had plenty of food or so we thought, it happened just after harvest time so the bins and silos were full. There were however nearly a hundred workers here at the time, 63 are left, mostly grounders like me naturally. First and foremost this was still a farm.
The vile walls that have surrounded this place seem insurmountable, impassable, like some great abyssal gates arisen from the depths to inflict themselves upon the unwary. I have taken to keeping this as journal of our discoveries or lack thereof, our efforts to redeem a semblance of life and order and truth. Justice fails us as we are thrust into this void of longing and despairing fruitlessness. Driven home ever deeper is just how black the deep truly is, to even look at the walls feels like seeking damnation incarnate. I grow ever more weary like all strength of any sort is siphoned away, shorn from me as easily as one might get a haircut. How long can we endure?
Miss Cornshuck was the first to go, she could not stand it anymore, for the first few days she did indeed hold onto hope. As the days drifted passed we all discussed what to do, how to do, some way to reach the outside of this seeming abyss in the world. Eventually we stopped trying, why did we stop trying? Why, Miss Cornshuck of course. You do not want to know what happened to her, not in truth, nor will I tell you in these likely pointless notes of mine. Why do I write these? So I do not bother to look out the window, it is best not to look whenever possible. There is plenty of paper and ink. Oh we do have to go out, to tend to what fields remain or we would have nothing to eat by now, perhaps we should just stop eating and give in, it might be preferable to this but it is harder to let go than you might think. I will come back to her later however. It was her idea you know..
Mister Arator, the owner of A.A.R. farms was of the old-school sort, work hard, live right, eat your oats. His presence was commanding and stern as well as kind and benevolent. He was the second to try just a little over a year later. He could not endure it either. He was one used to traveling all over the world, on business, on pleasure. I suppose losing that much freedom was just too much for the old fellow. We played cards quite a few times, he always won, somehow his bets never missed. Eventually I stopped betting against a sure thing, but that time, that time his bet missed. You do not want to know what happened to him either, it is best not to know. Maybe that is not true somewhere else, anywhere else that is not true, but here now, it is so. It was his idea too you know..
Missus Landbouer and her husband Agronómus. Fear is blinding and panic is not far behind but these two for the longest time showed none. I think they knew they were our best and only real chance to retrieve ourselves from the brink, this hole of calamitous misfortune. Such a terrible responsibility to suddenly be laden with, to save nearly a hundred ponies lives including their own. I pity them, two bright outstanding unicorns, both top of their respective fields. Suddenly as powerless as the rest of us, rendered helpless and alone. We earthers always look to unicorns for guidance on anything even remotely regarding external magic of course, for three years they tirelessly kept trying to find a way. We hoped the combined knowledge and understanding of those two in magitech would get us out of here. What happened to them, what happened to them is a matter most disconcerting. They did stay with us until near the end. As bad as it was for them, it got worse. It was their idea too you know..
Though I pity those poor poor unicorns so very much, truly the worst case was Missus Petani and her daughter Petal, those two dear sweet pegasi, they stood no chance here, not in this dark place. So sweet, so darling, so very naive. Looking up one can almost see the clear sky above and imagine flying out of this lunacy, this open wound inflicted upon the very fabric of reality itself. One day despair far too heavy in their hearts, they both flew up together, then they both fell together. Their cries as they fell locked in a final embrace was of souls extinguished, neither even attempted to stop before... that sound ever haunts my days. I was always the one left to clean up and place a marker for each of the departed, the rest could stand it even less than me but usually... usually there was little to clean up. They more than any others here had nothing to do with it..
So many others have walked, trotted, galloped to and from this place in the daily course of business, all manner and types of smart individuals or plain hard workers. The kind that know a good investment or job opportunity when they see one. What good is that knowledge now though? If I were a smarter pony would I have been able to help the unicorns get us out of this endless nightmare? It does not seem so. No amount of intelligence would appear to be enough to break through this enigma, this absolute travesty that afflicts the waking world around us. We all have bad dreams that are usually half-remembered or even completely forgotten because we must forget them, those that do not forget only suffer all the more. This is no dream, it is become our waking horror. A thing that has taken from us our freedom and our lives without pity or remorse. Why us?
When the obsidian walls rose all about us as if from some eternal pit of damnation many ran for it, for all I know some may even have made it out. The piercing echoing screams that scattered about us all tell me and the remainder otherwise before silence overtook this place. The awful awful silence of this dreadful oppressive atmosphere that now permeates the very air we breathe, perhaps it poisons us with some shared delusion or is a byproduct of whatever dark force walls us in. Whatever the case I would think help would have come by now based solely on the merit of our disappearance from the world, so many of us gone missing must have attracted attention at the very least. Yes they must know we are gone and where we were when it happened, why does no help come? Maybe they are as locked out of here as we are locked inside it.
After the sheer cacophony subsided we took stock of who was left, what was left. We asked each other if anypony knew what had happened, none seemed to, not even the head researchers. Yes they were indeed involved in an experiment but it was as usual just seeking ways to improve crop yields and the like, nothing to indicate the slightest hint of the impending doom about to come crashing down upon us. The immensity of scale boggles the mind, it must take such power to sustain something like those sparking gleaming towers of ill omen that imprison us. This place we realized later, is still whole, not a single building missing or so it seemed. When the walls went up they formed a nearly perfect square keeping the entirety of it within save for a field or two. We found no trace at all of those who ran.
What did not remain within was a single outbuilding of no particular import, more of a large shed really. Used to keep whatever various bric-à-brac might have happened to have been of interest that day or another but no longer. I said nearly a perfect square.. where that building was is the slightest difference in all the limits of what is now effectively our prison. As this place is fairly large we at first did not quite notice it but there is an indent in the..field there, the unicorns determined it to be where the very leading edge of the shed would have been. We have done our absolute best to think of some detail, some long forgot minutiae about what was stored there that day or any other but it all seems so very normal. Nothing we can recall being placed in there seems to matter at all, much like anything else in this place now.
I think..I will find my final resting place here amongst this hollow emptiness, alone and forgotten by all but the few whose hoof-falls still echo all the more loudly throughout these worn halls by the day. If we can call it day, sun and moonlight still filter into this place, I suppose if it did not we would all have been gone even longer ago. We can still grow food, water became a problem for a while but there was so much left in the way of materials the unicorns designed a very ingenious water catching system for when it rained. Most efficient, most practical, you would think that might mean something. Here it only means our bleak lives drag on yet longer. After all, why bother? Forlorn and apart from all the world and the love found within it we slowly falter and fall, each of us to depths that heretofore none of us could even imagine existed. Somehow in this evil place gutted of all reason time still passes.
I myself do not keep track of the days, another did. Sometimes I wander through the ever emptier buildings, as much as I hate going outside to reach them there is nowhere else to roam. Somepony kept a makeshift calendar meticulously up to date until his last breath, why did he do that? I never knew his name before, fairly early on we learned it best not to know the others too well..it hurts too much. Half a year after Arator made his great gamble, I found this one unmoving, staring at his calendar, eyes unblinking. He had made an addition to it, a ridiculously scrawled picture of the sun with a smiley face underneath which he had hastily wrote 'my name is Emmer'. Had this lost soul amongst a raft of them somehow forgotten his own name?.. I could have imagined him still lively as ever hanging as he was over a railing, his face forever in a fixed smile gazing at his calendar. The poor fellow was quite dead, the unicorns tell me his heart simply stopped for one of the myriad reasons hearts cease to give life. Myself I think it just broke. Who could blame him?
Perhaps his spirit is free from this place, one wonders. Surely that at least is allowed to leave this gray dull eternity of suffering seemingly thrown upon us at the whim of fate? I more and more suspect I will find out one day. He had only one possession here, an engraved locket containing what I assume to be a picture of his mother. Both it and she were strikingly beautiful. 'All my love dear child' had been carefully engraved on the back. It did not have a name. All my love, can a simple locket truly contain something of that magnitude? Maybe he thought so for it seemed he had it on him the entire time. I learned he was just another worker here, passing through on a rotating shift most likely until going on to the next place. Simple, normal, mundane, safe. That which is rote and routine keeps us all going, it is familiar and understood, something we can keep pace with. What we do when something unfamiliar approaches us as unwelcome as it is may show us something about who we are, something we like or something we come to loathe very much.
I do not know which category he fell into, I merely passed him by a hundred times over in my haste to get to whatever job needed doing at the time and in so doing never came to know him. Who he was, what he hoped and dreamed for or of I never knew. Why do we never ask these things? It simply did not seem important enough at the time but at his passing it dawns on me I have never truly known anyone. I never asked. Perhaps he wanted a family, maybe he was destined to have his own business one day or to become a famous musician, a clockmaker or any of the infinite variety of other things he now cannot be. His hopes whatever they may have been died with him and maybe none ever knew what he truly wanted. Destiny seems as irrelevant here as anything else. I learned only one other thing of him from some records I found later, he had them send nearly every bit he made home to mom. Oddly the transactions actually listed her only as 'mom', her name shall forever remain a mystery to me. The only thing I know of her son now is that his mother loved him very much and if she yet lives somewhere out there her heart is surely broken at his long and now permanent absence.
Why am I still writing these notes? It has now been let me see, four years I think though it feels like an entire millennium has since passed us by, of the hundred or so that were here when this abysmal twist of the knife in the world swallowed us whole, about thirty remain. Many have given up entirely to await their end, after all what point is there in remaining sane here? Some think it a punishment given from on high, but a punishment for whom and for what reason? Surely, not all of us. To learn from a punishment there must be understanding why it is meted out, what purpose is there in this? Even the unicorns broke just near the end of last year, when those two gleaming beacons of hope and chance said they could do no more it was almost like those eerie towering walls could be heard laughing at us. I am sure that is being overly dramatic, they remained as they have always remained. Dark, menacing, foreboding, as silent as death itself, between us and..life.
Are these notes of mine of any value? Why write them at all? They will never be seen, or perhaps they will one day and serve as a grim reminder and warning of the toll sometimes taken against even the innocent. The minutes pass us by here as if in slow motion, each second blending into the next dragging out a single hour until it feels like its own eternity and so I write. Not only to pass the time but in some way it helps to imagine the outside world is alright as it ever was, grand and glorious and full of wonder as all who live in it flit and flitter from one moment to the next each seeking their own meaning from life. I found mine long ago or so I thought, quite young indeed. A simple meaning, a simple life was all I truly wanted or needed. What brought us all together in this sweeping madness? This maelstrom of malevolence? Surely not my choices, I am too small compared to the world for that.
When we were torn apart from the rest of the world did it happen to everything else as well? I shudder to think of every pony and creature everywhere down to the very insects each trapped in their own little slice of torment cut off from all aid, is this now normal everywhere? We had a farm and a means to continue living but what of someone trapped in their home? They could not have lasted long. What constitutes normal anyway? Why consider something to be normal? Is it because it has always been? Surely what is normal changes from time to time, if it did not the world would become a stagnant unmoving and uncaring place full of suffering. How we suffer within these terror filled years cannot be normal certainly. Yet these walls feel as if they have been here forever, maybe in some way they suffer as well? How silly of me to imagine that dark haze has feelings. I as all others caught in this mad place am surely going mad as well. In this place I have watched the shining light of each ones eyes slowly fade away until only utter despair is left.
Where is the good? The promise each life held? Why was it all taken from us? The dim corridors of this once great place grow ever more dreary and dulled, the gleaming hallways neglected as the ever slower minutes go ticking by in the endless well of suffering from which we now drink. What is it that causes these minutes to fall dead?, to slip into an ever longer and deeper eternity? I nearly feel each second as it slips as if a physical thing I might reach my hoof out and touch, am I simply slipping into complete madness? Why care of course? We are all going to die here alone or hurl ourselves into whatever sits there in the dark. That monolithic emptiness that cascades back upon itself forever surrounding us in our painful solitude. Does any creature anywhere yet live? Do they also live as we do, divorced as we are from the connections to the world we all considered our right? Why have we been condemned to this awful pitiful caricature of existence?
So long have I written this over-sized journal I begin to feel as though this is all there ever was, that and wandering this blasted farm that is surely soon to be little more than a gigantic mausoleum, an unmarked and unreachable grave to us all. Does anypony even remember us anymore? There are fewer and fewer of us, as little companionship as we may offer one another I fear each and every departure with a somehow still growing dread. We are all the lonelier as each decides that they too have had all they can stand and head towards the blankness. I dared stare at those walls of pain and sadness that have held us prisoner for so long when one of us ran into it, the walls rippled like an ocean of crazed glee where he hit it only to disappear. My apprehension grows by the day, it has now been seven years I believe since this insanity enfolded us into this envelope of sheer loss. As there is little else to think about that image sears itself into my brain. Did it hurt? Did he make it? Or did he simply evaporate into some pile of component molecules on the other side? I may never know.
What happened to each pony as they stepped inside the seemingly infinite gap, that ever overseeing medley of grief that bars our way? Did it hurt? Did it set off some new endless agony? I hope I do not come to know. Fear itself seems present in those walls of seething broiling pointlessness. Are they solid? Are they smooth to the touch? I should not think such things. Thinking about the walls only makes it hurt all the more vividly. We are its captives until we all are driven to the brink or wither away to nothing here encapsulated in doubt and inability. He as the others chose to go into it headlong and quickly, if painful one hopes it was as brief as a jolt of lightning. Fast and instant, nearly without pain, if by choice is that not the way one would choose to go and no longer linger in this fortress of maleficence? To have endured so long in this hellish landscape forever bidden to remain in the dim shadows of twilight must be some kind of tremendous accomplishment, but who cares? In all likelihood no other living thing will ever know our ultimate fate.
Perhaps he is now trapped in some new form of oblivion? For his sake I hope he either got back to the world or at least met a quick end. Why are we sentenced to find our final moments hapless and seemingly abandoned? Each day has blurred into the next until most of us are gone, there is only me and six others now, nigh upon ten years have passed us by. Our everlasting ceaseless torment closing in all about us, even the two unicorns are gone, the both of them finally utterly caved in as was likely inevitable and told us they would save us now or die trying. More hopeless sounding words I have never heard. We few remaining all knew it was bound to be for naught. Nothing living or otherwise has escaped this abyss, this eternal morass of oblivion. They had us all meet outside close to where the shed had been, why they chose here I do not know. Much too close to the darkness for our comfort. They told us if they were successful to run. No need to tell us that, I imagine if we were freed our legs would carry us at speeds unheard of. Here we go.
The noise, the shattering noise! It felt as though my very bones wanted to unwind themselves at the onslaught of it! The unicorns combined their magics, those arcane mysterious things they can do that I could never hope to understand as they sought to drill a hole through the darkness for us.. a corridor of hope and light, heavenly in its promise of open skies with all it brings, soft fluffy clouds and daylight, lazy fun-filled summer days or the soft hues of winter snow reflecting the glittering grandiose sun. It HURT, in all my days I have never felt such pain! It hurt so much we all fell into a befuddled mess, we could do nothing but watch as our final hopes were extinguished. Maybe it was working, maybe it wasn't. All I know is the horrible thing my eyes beheld as those two mighty graceful unicorns struggled under the weight and impossibility of their task, what really happened to them, who knows? It seemed to me as though their own magic turned on them like a living thing of its own accord. Was it just too much for them to handle? I know nothing of magic, why would I? Maybe nothing that had not happened a hundred times over before now did.
They are gone, do our final hours now approach us as softly as a final drop of rain after the storm? There is nothing left to hope for as our hearts collapse under the strain. If I had hoped for anything it was the simplest of things, to truly see the great landscapes and vistas spread out before me in all their beauty. Ever more alone we grow as these days pass in emptiness, there is nothing left to fill the void any longer and so we wait. Just wait, there is not one thing to be done now and as ever the walls remain, standing silent vigil to each soul departed this mortal coil. What redress could there possibly be for this? The last of us say our final sorrowful goodbyes to one another and go our separate ways knowing full well this will be the last time we meet. Always do we take the smallest things for granted until they are long past and only then realize how much more meaning they held. If any should ever chance upon this journal by some miracle these are my last thoughts.
I am here alone in the middle of this fallen empire, one that once stretched forth to affect the lives of a great many. I have lived a decade straight of pain and sorrow. Now I lay here dying as I feel my heart slow. At least that freedom is finally granted me. The sole purpose of this place was to enrich the lives of those it touched, so far it had fallen. To have gone from that to this mire of doom and despair is something I once could not even have imagined. As I lay here scrawling my final words I am happy to know my end has come at last. Finally the pain is over, I watched as each one fell or went, it was all I could do. After all I have ever been the silent watcher from afar, never getting involved in others lives but for each that had to find their final moments here I have wept at least a tear on every lingering day. Did any of us deserve this? I do not know. I can but ask of you that has somehow come across this journal, lay high praise upon every single one that stood in this now utterly empty place. Surely they deserve to be remembered fondly.
Before I meet my end there is one more thing to tell you, in the very back of this journal placed between a hidden page is the reason for our exile. I found it in my wanderings only a few days after the unicorns had failed, hidden in a long forgotten office drawer whilst on one of my endless meanderings amidst this, our tomb. Our departure from normalcy was instigated by none other than Miss Cornshuck, it was a simple thing as most things are though the unicorns are at fault for allowing themselves to be fooled. An experiment had been running that black day, one that masked another. She used it as cover to go down a dark and forbidden path. No wonder she was the first to go, surely we would have directed our ire towards her had we found out sooner. Her departure garnered pity instead of the scorn and anger she surely escaped in doing so. I did not tell the few others left, not in what would surely be our final days, to inflict more pain on them I simply could not do. As much as she may have deserved our hatred, she suffered for her actions. If only she had suffered alone.
If any should ever read this, take this journal to those that know about such things. Perhaps it will save others such a horrific fate as ours, I could not understand the experiment outlined in that note or how to escape from the results nor even the intent. If only I or another had known of this when the unicorns were still with us, maybe they could have understood what had actually been done disguised under the test they had been performing that day. She fooled them all into it. My eyes dim and perhaps trick me as I glance out the window for the last time to see an odd flicker in the walls, mayhaps just the failings of a dying mind. Time to finish up. May all the worlds small blessings be ample in your time, enjoy them for all the worth they bring. I shall lay aside my quill for the final time now and dream of unmuted sunshine. Goodbye.
