Reforming Spell

Obviously, my first reaction was to thrash about wildly, trying to figure out which way was up, and ruining any chance of feeling it out by spinning in place and waving my limbs around until I was dizzy. Eventually, I noticed that I hadn’t drowned. I also noticed that I was still a bat pony, since two of the limbs I was flailing around were bat wings.

So I chirped. The high-pitched sound echoed through the water, reflecting off a large flat surface beneath me at an angle. In every other direction, there was no return – the water went on forever. Or else whatever the chirp hit was acoustically dead. Echolocation isn’t perfect.

So I swam down towards the flat surface, and discovered that it was glowing, slightly. Or rather, that it was the surface of the water, and that I had been completely wrong about which way was up. Something was glowing beyond it, but the water I was in was nearly opaque, so the light didn’t travel far. I tried to break through the smooth, mirror-like surface of the water, but found it a barrier that I couldn’t penetrate. So I pressed myself up against it, instead, to get a better look at whatever was beyond.

It was a cave, with glowing mushrooms. To one side, I thought I saw a staircase.

I kicked my bat pony form’s cloven hooves against the surface, but they just stopped when they reached it, without even the courtesy of the sort of jarring pain you’re supposed to get when you kick something with all your strength and it doesn’t break.

I tried to swim for the edge of the pool, but no matter how far I thought I moved I never got more than halfway towards the edge.

I decided that panicking was called for, so I did that for a while.

Eventually I got sick of it, so I curled up and cried.

When I’d cried myself out, I tried to sleep, but I couldn’t stop being conscious, and lying there not doing anything was not only boring, but threatened to push me back into panic mode. So I ‘woke up’ and tried to think rationally about the situation, and I realized that there were only a few things I hadn’t tried. One of them was to swim deeper into the pool, and see if I could find another exit that was actually an exit and not just a vision of an outside world put there to taunt me.

The other was to start composing depressing music about my plight, and keep sane by singing to myself. It occurred to me that I could pretend that I could craft a spell-song to dispel the barrier, which would let me feel like I was being productive while putting off exploring or doing anything else useful indefinitely, since composing music wasn’t exactly a fast process.

So, that decided that. I based the song on one of the counter-songs that Twilight had taught me, and tried to adapt it to my current problem.

I’ve spent my life pursuing infamy and fame,
But I don’t need the ponies calling out my name.
The one and only thing
That makes my spirit sing
Is music. It’s the music. It’s the music in my heart.
So I’ll break out, and set myself free!
Gonna go home, and brew me some tea…
And I can’t think of good words
This is getting quite absurd
But I’m sure that it’ll make me, um, free as a bird?

And that wasn’t even my first attempt. Needless to say, the magical barrier failed to fall before my musical prowess.

“Gah! This isn’t working!” I slammed my head against the barrier, or at least I think I did? My eyes were closed, so I might have missed. There was still no sensation of hitting anything.

“Do you need some help?” asked the creepiest chorus of slightly-out-of-sync voices in dozens of different pitches that I’ve ever heard, and I’m including the giant spider demon.

My eyes shot open, and I froze in terror, like an ice cube bobbing in a punchbowl. I felt cold, slimy tentacles slipping around me, curling around my limbs and torso, but I was too scared to look.

Also, suddenly aroused. Go figure. The tentacles seemed to notice, because one of them inched towards my crotch, while the creepiest voice ever asked, “Will this help you relax?”

“Probably,” I managed, squeezing my hind legs together and curling the pathetic stump of a bat-pony tail. “That doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea. I’m not sure relaxing is really appropriate, since I don’t know how much danger I’m in. Are you a friendly tentacle demon, or just the sort of monster that plays with its food? Is this world even real?

“To us, it’s more real than the world outside the mirror,” the voice replied. “The creatures from beyond the mirror tend to disagree, of course.”

“What would happen if I died here?” I asked, as a tentacle slithered around my neck, not squeezing uncomfortably tight, but instead caressing and tickling, like a fairly skilled lover who happened to have tentacles.

“We are unsure… death has no place here. If you were torn to pieces, the pieces would survive, and we would absorb them, and add them to our collective.”

“Right,” I said. “And, hypothetically speaking, is this something that you usually do to the ponies you catch in your tentacles, after you have your way with them?”

The voice laughed. “Most ponies choose to join us without being torn apart.” The tentacle squirmed its way between my legs, wiggling between my thighs as it headed for my slit. “But you are already different, staying by the gate for so long. You should relax, and join us, and together we will sing your song, and perhaps we will escape this world as our true selves, at last.”

“That seems like an incredibly bad idea,” I replied, relaxing a little despite myself. It’s hard to hold on to a state of utter terror when somepony is willing to talk to you in a reasonable tone of voice. I bet most of the smarter predators know that trick, but even knowing that it was probably a trick, I couldn’t help but relax. “As in, I find it impossible to believe that anypony would actually agree to it.”

The tentacle reached my crotch, and slowly licked its way up the length of my slit, like it was a tongue, and even though I was soaking wet due to being underwater, the cold slick chill of whatever it was that the tentacle was made out of felt wetter than wet.

“There is much we can offer, and nothing for you to gain by remaining apart,” the voice replied. “This gate will not let you leave as yourself. Even we are constrained by its enchantment, the fragments of us that are drawn out bound to the whims of the ponies that invoke it.”

“I have friends, and they’ll find a way to get me out of here,” I said, as the tentacle pressed its way just inside me and started to explore. “I was sent here by mistake, and if Twilight doesn’t realize that right away, she’s sure to check on me in the morning. I just have to hold out until then… it can’t be long now. I’ve already been here for hours.”

“Time has little meaning here,” the voice said, the cold slimy tentacle on my neck slithering its way down the length of my chin, then up the side of my face. I really should have been able to see it, but there was nothing. “Especially here, near the gate. What feels like hours may be days, or seconds.”

“Oh,” I said, poking at the invisible tentacle with my tongue, and finding nothing to lick at. “Fuck.”

Then my limbs jerked against the restraining tentacles as a bolt of slick ice shot into me, penetrating me and filling me with a bitter chill, spreading from my belly.

The voice laughed, as it began to thrust. “We thought you’d never ask.”