Those Who Watch

by Zorotokon

Rating: teen
Tags: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Original Character, Human
Length: 4272

When one sees beyond the stars, it is never what they wished to find.

There are no humans in Equestria. In fact, most ponies haven't ever even heard of a human.

A lone clocksmith is taunted by sleep. Eventually the pony reaches out to a doctor who suggests keeping a dream journal.

Perhaps the nightmares can be explained through good old fashioned psychoanalysis.

Perhaps there is a very good reason you do not remember your dreams.

Published 2012-05-30 10:14:01 UTC
Last updated 2012-05-30 10:14:01 UTC

If Found, Please Return...

October the 8th, 1000.

What a year it has been. With the return of Nightmare Moon, the Discord incident, even the attack on Canterlot during the royal wedding! I'm glad that we have the elements of Harmony ever vigilant to protect our fair lands. None the less, even with that comfort known to me, I feel something amiss.

Not in my mind or life as such. The gears spin on, the clocks tick, and the metronomes count back and forth into infinity as they always have and always will. My doctor wants me to record a dream journal, that's where the problem is, you see. My dreams are, not what they used to be. Ever since Discord... Discorded me? I suppose that he is a verb now. Anyway, since I was discorded my dreams have been unsettling and I am subject to nightly terrors.

Many ponies were fortunate enough to not remember that time, their recollections being purged with the chaos that propagated their actions. I was not so lucky. My doings during that time were deplorable for a clocksmith such as myself. So many broken springs and dials. And the time was all wrong.

AND THE TICKING THAT INFERNAL ETERNAL TICKING

It haunts me. In a manner. The doctor said that it was because of the Discord incident that I can no longer sleep. I do not agree entirely. There is ticking in the background of my dreams, but it isn't what keeps me from rest. The ticking I hear is not the stuff of nightmares, it is simply my faithful clocks making their ways into my slumbering mind.

No, what prevents my somnolence is the feeling of eyes and faces. There is something, perhaps someone watching me. Or at least, that is what I feel.

If I dream of it again I will record it. If I do not, then I am cured and free.

November the 1st, 1000.

Nightmare Night. Usually one of my favorite nights. After a particularly hard evening of partying, I took an early night cap to clear my head. For the first time since I cracked the spine on this tome I now record my thoughts in, I dreamed of eyes.

I dreamed of three thousand faces watching me. I do not know how I knew they were faces, or how I knew the number. They belonged to creatures unknown to me, or any other pony I have spoken of them to. They were flat, grey colorless things. Their eyes small and inset, almost hidden beneath broad brows and dark visages.

If they expressed emotion I did not know of it. There was no sense of dread or anger among them, or even fear for my part. Simply that they were watching. Eternally gazing in all directions. Only a tiny hooffull were turned towards me. I could not say where they were focused, but their eyes roamed and roved, perhaps their targets were beyond my vision. Their progress marked by tiny contracted pupils lost in the vast sea of the iris.

I feel oddly content now that I have seen them. It is certainly just a flight of the imagination. Such creatures cannot exist.

Strange. I felt a presence just now. Not as if somepony was sharing the room, but as if my name had been whispered just beyond my cusp of hearing. My eyes wander in time to my clocks, all perfect time, and all perfect sync. I find myself even now gazing upwards. I do not know why.

I have remembered something else, the faces I saw were floating amongst the stars. Perhaps they are of them, and I am simply dreaming of the cosmos. What a silly notion, a simple pony gazing at the stars, expecting to see a great eye meet their gaze. What a foal I am at points. I return to bed, having only been awoken by the close of the eyes to write this.

November 6th, 1000.

I dreamt of faces and eyes again. Less faces this time. Nearly enough to count, but still too many to understand. I'm not sure if that last sentence made sense. Logic is hardly applicable when my mind has cast itself to frolic among the heavens so recently.

Instead of a mere watcher this time I had grown great unseen wings and was allowed the privilege to soar around them on hidden currents and nonexistent updrafts. I was able to observe the faces, now fully formed heads, from all angles. They lacked any form of hair, and all of them looked the same to me. Though I doubt that they looked the same to each other.

This was made especially clear when in front of me two of the heads collided in their achingly slow dance. The two turned towards each other.

I woke up. I do not remember what happened. Well, I tell myself I do not remember what happened. I closed my eyes for but a moment when writing this, my mouth formed a strange scrawl in the margins, which I will not reproduce here.

It is a grotesque thing. It depicts the two faces I saw, they have collided, and one is eating the other. Great bites have already been removed from the victim and the mouth.

Oh Celestia help me, it was by mine own quill that such horrors have been wrought onto parchment. The mouth is an infinite pit, lined with dark jagged outcroppings of some black metal. I can only assume they are teeth. I can only hope they are teeth.

I pray to the Princess of the Night that I will never have to revisit that place.

December 12, 1000.

THE EYES

What dark and malevolent creature has cursed me so?! I howl at the heavens in challenge, please strike me now, let me not learn anymore, let me not know anymore!

I have dreamt of them again. But this time, they were waiting for me. Or, one was. I have begun to grow accustomed to them, I suppose. Accustomed is not the right word but I can hardly be as erudite as I wish to be when I have been woken from my sleep as soon as my head touches pillow.

The worst of it all, is when I did sleep. It was there. I recognize it now. It was the one, the devourer from before. A destroyer. I recognized it because of the eyes. Now I can see them clearly, where I once thought was white there are colors. Strange colors not known by me or by nature. This one, the one that was waiting for me, had eyes that could almost be called green.

I say almost because I could only stare at it for a second before being awoken, my head and mouth screaming with knowledge unbidden. It has cursed me to know such things. I must write them down, I must purge them from my mind somehow.

It taught me of its past. It called itself "Human" I only know the spelling because it told me. It told me everything. What manner of creatures are these? They are truly dark gods in their sense and sensibilities.

Never before have I known of such a species that is so... Barbaric. Not even dragons are comparable.

They kill their own kind. Their own kin. Even themselves.

Death is no stranger to Equestria, but to even be able to contemplate the murder of another pony... No I can't even form the thought. These are not creatures, they are monsters. No, even monsters have some presence of mind and self preservation.

These Humans are avatars of destruction. The One showed me their ways. Showed me their history. Showed me what they did, willingly, and on purpose. But then he showed me something else.

I do not claim to understand how these creatures work, I do not think that any pony could truly understand them. The face that taught me of the human's lust for death, also taught me of their triumphs. To me, some of them were indistinguishable.

Long ago, they ruled all the universe. All that was known was controlled by them. An uncountable number of species lived in peace under their rule. They created entirely new universes to accommodate more life. Prosperity and happiness had been found by all creatures. The humans weaved the stars and galaxies themselves into great tapestries, enormous sculptures, grand, imposing impossible to understand paintings and metaphors.

They told stories with live characters, they have imagined and created such works of art and architecture that my mind reels back at the scope of even the simplest of their works. But my mind refuses to work for other reasons as well.

When I gazed upon the stars they had formed into an illustrious web, I was filled with... Anger. Not my own, but of the human who's eyes I was sharing. It was not perfect. And only perfection could be allowed to exist in my world.

So I tore it apart, down to the smallest unit of matter, to make it again. I, it, they, in that moment destroyed so many stars, and the planets suffered the same fate. There were creatures on those planets, sentient beings with lives and families.

They didn't care one bit.

I watched this play out again and again and again. Sometimes the creations were deemed worthy of survival. I now wonder if they even realized the existence of life there. Or if they fully grasped what they were doing.

I must put quill down now. I have seen too much already. The hair on the back of my neck has stood straight up since I awoke. I am sure I can feel their gaze on me even now.

January the 14th, 1001.

I was wrong. I have never been more wrong in my life. I once called these faces and eyes nothing more than figments of my imagination. Tonight the One with greenish eyes visited me again. This time, it spoke.

Its mouth did not move and its tongue made no sounds, but still even over my own screams I could hear the thing's voice as a booming cacophony over all other noises. It spoke in a grotesque and unfamiliar tongue, yet I understood as it told me just how wrong I was.

Humans are very, very real. Others know of them, but I am the first pony it has spoken to. The first creature any human has made contact with for as long as any of them can remember. I am now fully aware of them. Their movements as they traverse the sky, their encounters, their eyes.

Never do you find them in groups, they strike out against each other, devouring, destroying, never creating, never collaborating. I have named the greenish eyed one Gil'gan, I do not know why.

It told me how to count them, and so I did. Five hundred and twenty eight eyes. Two hundred and sixty four faces. That is all that is left of the thousand thousands I once dreamed. They have devoured one another. Or killed. Or made to not exist.

I no longer know. I wish I had never known.

I wish I was never given this knowledge of these infernal and blasphemous creatures! Earlier I struck my own head with a large iron I used for bending metal to try and remove the thoughts. It hurt unimaginably, and only succeeded in knocking me unconscious for an hour or two. Even during that time I was visited by the eyes. I saw them watching in all directions, but there were seventeen pairs watching us. And one watching me.

January the 15th, 1001

I...

I do not know how to continue.

Or even if I am able to pen these words in a suitable manner to convey my experience. I can feel them now. Fully. Even while awake.

They exist in a plane far apart from ours, but they move back and forth through what we consider reality so easily and so often. They simply slip through the cracks and come and go as they please. Gil'gan, he, and I am very sure it is a he now, is different.

The others, they watch and manipulate, tugging on the strings of fate here, unraveling a timeline there, but never directly. They do not reach out and speak as I have been spoken to. Gil'gan. I do not know what he seeks. But he seeks something. He has been snuffing out his brothers and sisters.

JUST NOW

Yes.

I am sure of it now.

That same sensation of a hundred pins all being pressed to the skin at once and driven in by as many hammers. It means that a human has died. Or, ceased to exist. Can they die? Do they live? I do not know. I do not think these questions even can be answered by answers at all. Ponies were never meant to know of these things and their lives.

Two hundred straight. That is how many still live. After that one just before. While I was writing. Two hundred. I can feel their gazes turning as they rake all of the universes for entertainment, or inspiration. I am unsure of which.

Gil'gan and his 17 brethren are now clustered around my small spit of existence we call a planet. This gathering of individuals is unprecedented. Something about the pony form or life captivates them. Perhaps it is because we are so unlike them. The humans are creatures of vast destruction, and sudden, violent, fiery creations. They are children of the stars.

We are children of the earth, the sky, and of magic itself. They watch us even now. I can pinpoint to the meter where each gaze falls. One over Canterlot, two in Trottingham, one in the middle of nowhere, circling the same spot of desert, over and over. Gil'gan's gaze is fixed upon me.

As it has been for quite a long time.

January 29

It is nearly the end of the month. Each of my waking moments is spent tracking the wandering gazes of the humans. None of them have reached out and touched our world, but still they watch.

I strive to find patterns in my maps but I find nothing! There must be a pattern! There must be some explanation! These creatures are not without logic! They are human! They have pride, they have art, they used to love, they still live! Why does nothing they do make any sense?!

Gil'gan has started his move. For the first time in many a day his visage is pointed away from me. Instead he silently stalks his partner viewers. Four have already succumbed to this hunt. More will follow. All will follow. The others do not seem to notice or care when one of their own is destroyed. They do not even fight back when they themselves come under his assault.

Gil'gan luash kurumeh. Gil'gan luash kurumeh. Gil'gan luash kurumeh.

I do not know what the above lines mean. I was compelled to write them by my own slipping sanity.

I have stopped my clocks. There are no more ticks or chimes in this house. I turn away customers, friends. All. No pony should be allowed to see these writings. Or me for that matter. I have shattered my mirrors. I have eaten most of my food. I have no idea what I look like. Perhaps I have already died and this is some cursed purgatory.

Perhaps this is hell.

Then I feel Gil'gan move again and know that this is real, and that there is now one less human.

February 14

It is my birthday today.

I think it is my birthday today. I am now 34. I think.

I have tried to keep track of the time on a calendar. But it was not for the new year. It is the turn of the century! Year 1000 and all that. Big year! Full of importance!

I fear I may have lost count of the days at some point. I have nearly run out of parchment. I have gotten quite good at copying maps out in short time however, I have nearly reached the point of perfection. My renditions of Equestria would make even a master mapsmith jealous. Is that what they are called? Mapsmiths?

I am a clocksmith. I make clocks. Therefore a mapsmith makes maps. Yes. There is logic in these words.

My hair pricks. I mark another face off.

I just realized.

I have run out of faces.

First there was seventeen.

Then sixteen.

Thirteen. Twelve, nine, four, three, one. That was the last one. Gil'gan has completed his dominance of our world. There are no longer any forces of his caliber to oppose him. His gaze turns towards me. I can feel him now.

his eyes boring into the back of my mind like twin augurs crushing destroy cutcutCUT

I have awoken. I have been there.

Oh Celestia help me. I HAVE BEEN THERE.

The land where humans reside, he took me!

A land of infinite grey, and HE WAS THERE

Somepony help me, he was there.

In his, no, its true form. I screwed my eyes shut and clamped my hooves down over my ears, but still he called out and still I saw.

I cannot put down in drawings what I endured, so I shall try with words.

Limbs, so many limbs, jointed at an uncountable number of places wrapped themselves everywhere, most had no start and no end, some simply came into being from the grey aether around and disappeared as such into that same background. Others still undulated, or terminated in great grasping claws that tore apart one another, causing torrents of think red blood to fall from the beast, down, down, forever down the bottomless well that marked Gil'gan's domain.

What was not grey in the far distances was composed of great fleshy mouths filled with those same black crags that filled the first human form I saw. They rippled and undulated across the landscape. The entire realm was Gil'gan, not just this creature that floated before me.

And the eye. There was only one great eye centered in the folds of the thrashing and twisting limbs. It was the same color as what I remembered, but now I could see in full glory that the eye was green. All aspects of green. It was trees, and plants, and toxins and danger, and slime, and strange things that I cannot understand and dare not commit to text. It was green, pure and plain. All of other existence simply borrowed from that eye.

It spoke to me again, but this time not in words.

It screeched and howled and made such noises that flooded my brain with such ideas that I was afraid that I would die right then and there. Why do I still grasp my life so close to my chest? I have tried to end it before. Cutting myself with the broken glass. Falls from the stairs. I always seem to recover.

Perhaps the humans were not as hands off as I thought. That is another thing. I can no longer think of my hands as hooves. The word seems wrong to me. I still have hooves, but the point remains. I am thinking of myself as a human even now. Writing with the quill clenched in my fingers, as a human would. I am unsure of how this actually works, but it does. I do not dare question it for fear of it either suddenly making sense, or not working at all.

It feels more natural.

I digress.

It shouted at me for as long as I can possibly imagine. Then it was gone.

I was slumped over my writing desk, covered in sweat and shivering. I could no longer feel them. I could no longer sense the humans. I wiped my brow and knew I was feverish. I shall head for the hospital. I shall make up a story about some sort of illness that has kept me bedridden for the past month.

Blessed silence. I do not know where he goes.

October 8th, 1003.

It has been three years since I first wrote in this volume. Over two since the last time I brought pen to paper. I still write with the quill clutched in my hoof, although the process by which I do so has confounded and befuddled both me and my attendees. I found this relic of past insanities while cleaning up the shop earlier today. After reading the earlier entries I am sure that I was afflicted with a severe brain infection, there is no other explanation.

I can hardly remember even penning some of these outrageous passages.

Giant heads floating in space? Pah, what a ridiculous concept.

I have come back from the door. I could have sworn that I heard somepony outside, but no one was there. But back to the matter at hand, hoof. Hoof. I haven't made that mistake in quite some time. I must simply be flustered. I'm moving. Getting out of here, too many strange happenings in Ponyville for my taste. I'm moving someplace normal, someplace safe, someplace quite.

I have put the kettle on. I set out two cups with preparations, my guest requested extra sugar. It will be good to have company, I am expecting their arrival post haste.

No, no I am not expecting anyone. I told my friends that I was packing today, they all had previous appointments. Am I really become that scatterbrained?

Oh listen to that. One of the clocks has gone off.

There that is fixed. Oh, now another.

I have given up. It has been ten minutes of fixing and readjusting, as soon as I get one correct another decides to rebel and stop telling time correctly. Even the metronomes are fighting against me. I will vent my frustrations in paper.

I just spoke out loud. "Sit anywhere you like." I am alone. What is going on?

I have reviewed the previous entries in this log. Was I really insane? Did I really write this? Did I really see these humans? The more I read them, the more I recognize turns of phrases of my own. Here and there a correction to a misspelling scratched out in pen. I always remember my misspellings. And I remember these.

The hairs on the back of my neck are rising. I feel like I am being watched. I dare not turn around now.

There is most definitely some sort of creature behind me. It is in the room with me. I must calm down I must calm down I must calm down i must calm down i must calm down

I know who it is

He's back.

I recognize the eyes. The way they burn into the back of my mind. The way they slink about like snakes and grass combined. They are greener than all the world's pastures, they are more striking than all the vivid hues in this life.

He does not make a sound when he approaches, but I know that he does so. He is now directly behind me. If I was to turn even a centimeter in any direction I could see him. I could see my tormentor come back after all these years.

It is reaching out to me IT IS REACHING FOR ME

HELP CELESTIA CELESTIA HELP CELS

Final Entry.

I have entitled this entry much differently from the rest because I know that it will be so. He is gone now.

But I am fine, and right here.

For some reason I have begun to write things my idle mind considers important. I have had a look around the house. Everything appears to be in order. The clocks have returned to time keeping, and the metronomes have returned to rhythm.

I like it here, after all.

I don't think I'll be moving out. It was just a silly feeling really. I wish that I could claim the same for my encounter with Gil'gan. I have looked in the mirror.

And don't I look good.

My eyes, normally a deep hazel, have clouded over. I can still see perfectly fine, but the pupil, the iris, the white bit around the edges, even the blood vessels have all been covered by a slowly roiling grey. I have a fog bank in each eye, it's very striking, but I have seen ponies with stranger eyes.

The mark, musn't forget the mark.

And yes, my cutie mark has been changed as well. It was originally a clock in pieces, everything laid out, ready for assembly. Now it is a blackened semicircle with lines coming out at odd intervals.

It is mine.

But it is mine, and there is nothing wrong with it.

I am fooling myself, of course. It is the mark of Gil'gan. I know that. Why he has chosen me I do not know. He has left this world, but he has not left me. My eyes and my mark are proof enough of that.

Herald, prophet, seer.

I do not know what he has in store for me I just wish that I would have been able to understand his actions just once.

But I'm right here. And I am fine. I like it here, I like this body. It is mine.

And don't worry your little head, pony-thing. You were right on some things. For instance, I am a he. However, my name is not Gil'gan.

My name is-