It always starts the same way. You awake, trembling and alone, from a night of disquieting dreams, to find yourself transformed into a pastel* pony. You start and raise, unsteadily, to your hooves, stumbling as years of muscle memory struggles against a wildly divergent morphology.
"Bewailing my fate," you say to yourself, "is unlikely to change it." You huddle in on yourself against the chill in your flesh. The sun is low, the horizon is still tinged with dawn and the ground is cold. You see a road nearby, of packed earth. It might, you think, be the work of an intelligence that has assigned value to moving from one place to another with minimal difficulty. You follow it; perhaps you will find purpose at the far end. There none here.
You walk on. Eventually you see another pony, large and red and standing on a porch with a steaming mug.
"Good morning," you say. A conventional remark. You despise it.
"Eyup" he replies. He transfers the straw he is chewing on from one side of his mouth to the other. You attempt to divine meaning from the gesture but can not relate the symbol to the thing signified.
"Ah," you say. You walk on; you have long accepted that everything you say and do are unmeaning gestures made to an empty auditorium, but throwing senseless words into this other pony's bottomless calm exaggerates the effect and you cringe away from the sensation of pouring seconds. You have neither purpose nor meaning, just this brief flickering existence. There is no value in spending your short life in unoriginal monosyllabic exchange.
You walk on and meet a pale blue mare pulling a cart.
"Hello," you say. In response, she declaims her existence to the gently-rolling early-morning forest path in general. She speaks with the empty grandiloquence of one who is trying to convince themselves more than their apparent audience. You experience pity; however many she convinces of her greatness and power, she will never still the doubt in her own mind.
"I am Dorothy, the meek and small," you say. It is not true; you are not even a friend of hers. The path is not paved in yellow. "I do not believe that praising your greatness and power is the fulfilment of my life."
You walk on.
As you walk on you see bunnies on enormously long legs stilt-walking between the trees, grazing on rainbow-coloured apples. You see other ponies watching, faces stretched in comically exaggerated expressions of repugnance, but to you it is an unmeaning thing; a thing that happened, certainly. A thing that happened under the sun, reflecting its light so that it shone in your eyes, so that you perceived that it had happened, but not a thing more significant than any other of the things that happened that you did not see.
You walk up to the horrified-looking onlookers.
"Stilt-walking bunnies," you say. A fatuous remark. You are overcome with ennui.
"They were hungry you see, so I thought I would help them. Look how much they enjoy those apples, all crunchy and yummy in their little tummies." One of the onlookers is not like the others.
"Do you find fulfilment in these rabbits' well-being?" You are always hungry for tales of other sapients' discoveries of purpose, even though their purposes are often unoriginal and are always insipid.
"Well, I'm more in to the glorious chaos of it all. If I was being completely honest, I might even say that helping the bunnies was just an excuse."
You find this motivation risible.
"I can admire the technical mastery of rabbit leg length alteration," you say, "but I can't say that I see the point. Pre-change they would have grazed on grass and now they graze on apples. It's the same thing a little higher up, and it was the dull unmeaning routine of a creature mentally incapable of apprehending its place in a uncaring mechanistic universe to start with."
"What would you know about a good bit of chaos anyway? You're just an extradimensional visitor stuffed in a pony's body. I should turn you into something dreadful for insulting my chaos." You perceive a flicker of irony underlying his grandiose words.
"You could turn me into a thinking creature psychologically incapable of finding peace or meaning in a world devoid of underlying reason or purpose." You state the worst and only thing that you can imagine being in the only world that you can seriously contemplate the existence of; anything else is not you; any other world is not credible.
Without any apparent transition, you are home. You shiver in the draft from an open window. You are alone. You know that role identities and behaviours associated with those roles are important for people attempting to create the meaning in their own lives, so you sit down to write the lesson that you learned.
"Dear Princess Celstia," you write. "Today I learned that wherever you go and whoever you meet, whatever they have to offer, two things are unchanging. Yourself, and the endless fountain of unspeakable dread that we call the universe."
You stop and think for a moment. Outside, a bird sings. You perceive the notes as beautiful, clear and high. What they mean is this: IamhereIamhereIamhere. You identify with the urge to scream your existence to the uncaring sky even as you despise the practice. All your howls could achieve is to throw the cosmos's indifference to you into the forefront of your perception.
"No matter how far or how inexplicably you travel, you will always arrive shivering and alone, naked on the edge of the abyss."
*Translator's note: the German original word implies both small and pastel.
Author's Note
My first HiE. I think I really captured the confusion and wonder of waking up in a magical alien land.
The best thing would be to write down events from day to day.
Day 2
On a dull, grayish morning in Our Town, you trot down the street. The townsponies glance at you and then look away pretending not to have seen. You don't think that their denial will help them with anything, but you do not blame them; unflinching acceptance of and despair at literally everything is one aspect of your special talent, and you can't expect it of everyone. That is what "special" means.
When you get to the end of the street you knock on the door, and wait for Starlight to answer. She takes a few moments longer than you would expect. Maybe she is making you wait as a power play. It will not work; knowing that nothing can make life worse is part of your special talent.
"Morning Starlight," you say, "My cutie mark is back." You don't meet her eyes.
"Hi Sisihooves WAHT‽" She interrobangs.
So you turn to show your flank and then look back at it. You see your cutie mark: a pony rolling a boulder up a hill.
"Are you sure you removed it properly?"
Day 10
When you think about it, it is strange that none of the the other townsponies share your problem. The ponies of Our Town do not tell cutie mark stories, but literally every other pony you have ever met does, and one fact is clear: even foals can do it. It is not like you got generally less good at things as you grew up - why did they? why isn't anyone else in Our Town constantly manifesting marks?
Day 25
Starlight doesn't ask questions about the cutie marks she removes, and you don't offer the information but you know that a pony rolling a boulder up a hill means a lot of things. Physical labour, obviously. The inclined plane. The punishment of the old king who escaped Tartarus (he bound Death in is own chains, and fled). Finding meaning in the endless futile struggle that is called "living". The meaning you find in this ritual is this: the twitch over Starlight's left eye: you think it is some sort of code.
Day 47
You are the boulder. You feel the great wizard strain to push you to the markless hilltop. You roll down again. You are the boulder. You are dumb unyielding mass, seeking the place of minimum potential. Your mass calls to the mass of the earth and so you roll to the bottom. You are the boulder.
Day 135
The day dawns late and damp, and you trot across town to Starlight's house. The townsponies are used to this by now, and greet you in a friendly enough way, although the offer of muffins could be interpreted as a threat now that you know what they taste like.
Its return is not a surprise. It is, after all, a mark for endless labour. It would hardly be that which it is if it did not come back. When you get to the end of the street, you knock on the door, and wait for Starlight to answer. She always takes just a few moments longer than she should; enough to make it obvious that she is hiding something and has no talent for doing so.
"Morning Starlight," you say, "My cutie mark is back."
Day 365
You have done this every day for the last year, so you stop off on your way across town to buy some terrible baked goods and a substandard candle. You attach them to each other and set one of the them on fire before you knock at the door.
"Happy cutie mark removalversity, Starlight," you say, "It is a new celebration that I invented, for ponies that have spent a year removing cutie marks together."
You are not a great judge of expressions but you think that maybe she looks tired. You try to cheer her up.
"Isn't it wonderful how constantly removing ponys' cutie marks has brought us all together?"
You are explaining yourself badly; you always do, but there are somethings you don't even know how to think: I was lonely. I don't know how to be friends. I'm glad I have some reason, every day, to talk to someone. I wouldn't know what to do if this stopped.
Day 1235
You find that Starlight has been ran out of town. Now you'll never find out if her monomania is stronger than your commitment to the role.
CODA: Day 1537
It is a bright sunny day in Ponyville and you trot down the path to the Stronghold of Amicability and knock on the crystal door.
"Morning Starlight," you say, "My cutie mark is back."