Why is the world all black?
Grunting a bit, the pony moaned a bit as she sat up, trying to right herself with the world. She felt so… dizzy, like she had been spinning for about an hour. The sickness inside of her stomach was held back as she tried to reorient herself with the world, but she eventually failed and gave into a series of upchuckings, letting loose a small pool of her last lunch on the floor.
The mare squeezed her eyes as she kept them closed, trying to calm the raging storm that was swirling about in her mind. Then, the pain. It nailed her like a freight train had run over her head on the railroad track. Each wheel created a huge, pounding pressure and pain upon her mind, making the mare scream out in agony. Falling backwards, thankfully not in her puke, she rolled upon the ground as if in a fit of a bawling child, and bawl she did for quite some time.
Ugh… what… where...? She absently thought as she was finally getting back to a bit of normalcy to her mind. The mare sniffed a bit and shook all over her body, her wings finally coming to be registered. Crying deeply again, she nuzzled them against her face as the only form of comfort she could muster, and stayed there, weeping into them for a few minutes until the pain subsided. Finally, with some effort and avoidance of the biohazard now in front of her, she dared to stand up, wobbling on shaky legs at her surroundings.
Simply put, there was nothing. Nothing, just simply the color black. It coated the world before her with its eternal abysmal color. The void of emptiness gaped throughout her vision, penetrating both her sight and her own mind, making her wince a bit as if she was blinded by a fierce light.
Blinking her eyes a bit to focus them, the mare thought that her vision had went initially, but soon found it untrue. She could still see her hooves in front of her and the trim body attached to them. Looking around again, she didn’t know what to think of this place… it seemed so odd yet at the same time… familiar…
“Hello…?” She called out hoarsely, hearing the echoes of her voice travel endlessly into the pitch black land. What… what in the world? Her thoughts felt incredibly loud inside of her head, making her wince as a spike of pain went throughout her skull. Eventually the echo died down and she was left in that pressurized silence, as if the void around her was a physical weight upon her body.
The mare immediately hated this place.
“Hey! Is there anypony out there?!” She called out, louder, hoping to get some kind of different result. Instead, all she got was an echo of her own voice which stretched out into the infinite distance around her. Now, she was fearful.
“Hey! Somepony, anypony!”
“Hey, somepony, anypony… hey somepony anypony… hey… somepony… anypony…” Was her only response.
The mare looked around frantically, as if denying everything that she saw. She couldn’t be alone here… she couldn’t! She had to fly up and see if-
Fly. The pony looked down at her feet, noticing that she truly didn’t know where the ground was before her. If she flew up would she… would she ever be able to get down to earth again? Being a pegasus, she was naturally inclined to fly, but something in her gut prevented her. Flying through the air is great and all, but never returning to the ground? That seemed like a terrible fate, even for her love of aviation.
There wasn’t anything to do here though, she concluded, besides just sitting around. I might as well try to see if I can go somewhere, right? Maybe I could find an exit? Although her usual attitude and spunk had been diminished by this monotone landscape, she was still able to spur her body to begin moving forward.
The hooves beneath the mare clopped noisily as she walked forward, step by step, into the darkness and away from the rank pile of throw up behind her. She wasn’t used to such conditions, being such a free pony back home. But this place… it was incredibly open, that she knew. “So why does it feel like I’m imprisoned?” she murmured, instantly regretting it as the whispers traveled throughout the darkness. She sighed and kept going, hoof by hoof.
Her body gave a slight twitch as she shivered, a sudden chill coursing over her body like a silent wave. Why… why am I getting so cold? This is so… so scary… She hated to admit the words to herself, but she felt incredibly helpless in a place like this. The chilling temperatures just made everything worse, her breath becoming a visible fog in front of her now.
She was incredibly tempted to fly up and speed forward, away from the cold, away from the black. She didn’t dare however. She didn’t even want to spread her wings, lest she get tempted to spring up from the ground. The mare couldn’t risk that and it frustrated her that she couldn’t do anything. She hated being so, so…
I feel so weak…
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It had been days now. Or at least from what she could tell. She couldn’t keep track of her time spent in this damnable place since there wasn’t any sun around. She could only guess, and she knew it was bound to be quite off. She sighed, focusing back on her forward pace, the repetitive and monotonous feeling her muscles and bones constantly grinded with.
In all honesty, she was thoroughly surprised that she hadn’t been driven insane by now by walking so much, but for once in her life, she thought. She thought about this place, the cold, her waking up here, and the fact she never felt tired or needed food or the bathroom. It was all just so… odd. Creepy even.
Even so, she continued on her endless journey.
A forced exhalation came from her lungs as she felt the icy air grip her lungs. They felt like physical hands, clenching at her chest, but she could not shake them off no matter what she did. This cold… It permeated through her coat and sunk into her skin, an everlasting itch that wouldn’t go away.
The mare could feel her wings stiffen, ever so slowly, day by day, along with the rest of her body. For some reason though, she was compelled to keep moving forward, never taking a rest to try and warm herself up. She had an unnatural feeling that if she did, it would be disastrous. The pony couldn’t understand why, but she knew that she had to keep moving now, no matter what.
“Heh… to keep moving…” she smiled slightly as the ghosts of her words rebounded into the distance. Stubbornness was something she was good at, just like one of her close friends and rivals. Even the cold seeping into the mare at that very moment would do little to prevent her friend from trying to outperform the mare. A soft chuckle escaped lips quivering cold. “Yeah, she was something, that… that…”
The mare shook her head a bit, trying to remember the other pony’s name. All she got was another round of dizziness and a bit of a headache. She sighed and put her focus back on the invisible road in front of her. “Eh, it’ll come back to me… I’m not that forgetful…”
Her words were as hollow as the land she was traversing.
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The mare had been alone for so long now. It’s been… how long? About a year now… maybe… It certainly seemed like it for the pony, whose only enjoyment and entertainment was making echoing sounds with her hooves. It wasn’t much, but it passed the time away quickly for the mare.
The mare amusedly belted out a piece of music, sweet and melodic with the added effects of the echoes around her. She smiled as she kept up the beat going for a few minutes, ending with a fierce finale and a cascade of stamping hooves. It was along the lines of a rock solo, but she had everything planned out for the song in her head. Everything.
She knew the beat, the rhythm, and the score. How high some notes would be and how low others would be. All the instruments that she wanted to be in the song. Who would be the best people to play those instruments. What the instruments would play, note by note. The lyrics she revised at least 50 times in her head, editing, re-editing and occasionally scraping the whole idea. She knew where she wanted to play it, how she wanted to play it, and the steps it would take to get there. There would be about 100 people in her first performance which would basically be about all of Ponyville, and she knew which ponies would show and which wouldn’t. She even knew the reasons why. She estimated the amount of money it would cost, approximately 3,492 bits, give or take five, to supply the band with each instrument, the venue where they would be, matching outfits, amps, electronics, and necessities.
The mare had thought about it… A lot.
She had been walking and braving the cold for so long, she didn’t know what else to do… besides to create and to remember. The mare cringed, wincing as thoughts about her past resurfaced inside of her like a calm pool rippled by a faint wind. She couldn’t stop them however. The ripples and the wind became larger and stronger. They were part of her after all and they would always be around to taunt her in this void. Slowly but surely, she let them resurface in her mind once more.
The most common thing she remembered was her friends, which happened to be the most painful of her memories. The group of them had been through so much throughout the years… She had relished every time she was with them, even if she didn’t make it out to be that way. Her only regret was not being able to spend more time with them before winding up here… wherever it was.
The pony wondered what they were doing right now… Maybe they are looking for me? No, I know they are looking for me! They wouldn’t just give up on their old buddy like that!
The mare smiled broadly and chuckled as a memory surfaced in her head. “Yeah, she would always be needing my help! That poor mare… I wonder how… how... ‘that pony’ is doing. Yeah, I know they are coming for me… they need me!”
Denial had become a common occurrence in her voice lately.
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The pony was cold. Oh so cold. What used to be chills throughout her body became parts of her body. As a constant now, she could hear the repetitive breaking and creaking of ice on ice from her back haunches. It sounded like smoothed glass pieces gliding across each other, but the bitterness and iciness around them was nothing in comparison. Every step hurt. Every movement hurt. Everything muscle in her body groaned in protest, telling her to stop and just break it off from the rest of her.
But no, the mare kept moving on, despite her back legs nearly frozen over now.
It had started happening a long time ago, the ice forming on her body. But for some reason, she never cared much about it. Her only intentions in mind were to keep going forward on the one track way she was going. She had lost any intention to try and figure out this place however… she just wanted a way back home. Back towards the light. Back to the warmth.
She hadn’t felt this tired or cold since her first moments in the landscape she called ‘The Black Expanse’. It suited the place, being just a vastness of black, although after awhile, she thought of it more than just that. It was symbolic. It was the one place that would be the entire opposite of herself, the one place where even she would never want to go to.
Monotonous and mocking, it offered endless room for her but suffocated and strangled the life out of every fiber of her being. The mare didn’t dare spread her wings for fear of being swallowed up by the darkness surrounding her. And the cold. She hated the cold… It was so cold in there… All she wanted to do was lay down and let the frost take over her so she wouldn’t have to deal with the frigidness any longer.
“I can’t see the light…” It was an odd sound, escaping her lips, but a welcome one nonetheless. It hadn’t been heard in so long, she forgot that it had once existed; laughing, singing, shouting, cheering… Her own voice felt like its own presence, detached from the endlessly walking body of her now routinely dull life. Nothing had changed that flow for a very very long time.
She was, through and through, a stubborn pony. She would keep going and moving on, still being spurred forward by memories of her past life, even though she never saw a light at the end of the tunnel. She needed to keep moving. Her friends were looking for her and she needed to find them. That was what she was all about anyways… She needed to be with her friends, to feel that warmth, to be in the light once again.
Even after the 40 years she had estimated her being here, she would not give up.
She couldn’t. In her mind, she knew she mustn’t. The Black Expanse may have surrounded her body, but it could never extinguish her flickering determination.
After awhile of being there, her repetitive walking had became a competition for her, to see how long she could last before the cold got to her completely. 'A race against the end' she had announced in her head a few years ago. Although already covering a good portion of her body, she knew it would still be quite awhile until the icy prison entirely encompassed her. This is no ordinary challenge, she mused to herself often. This is one I HAVE to win. This was one I am GOING to win.
If it meant being with her friends, she was that determined, even to a bitter ending.
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60 years. The mare had estimated that it had been about that long now, not that she even tried to remember it now.
This was the first time that she had truly thought in a long while. Her steps, like her mind, had become slower and more sluggish with every passing moment, until now they were both simply at a crawl. An agonizingly slow crawl that moved at a suffocating steady pace, making it all the more torturous for the mare as she kept going on... Clop. Clop. Clop. Clop.
Ice was now a part of her. Her tail had completely frozen over, hanging droopily with a clear thin sheet of ice around it. Her hind legs had now become slow moving popsicles, still able to let her move, but formed, melted, and reformed at a constant rate as she walked. Her forelegs had a similar effect physically, but since she saw them all the time, her mind barely could hold the information intact. They simply slipped to and from her mind like they did through the black below her. She wanted to look away from it, to stop being reminded of her slow decline into oblivion, but fate had her neck frozen too, nearly immovable where it was.
She didn’t have the determination to break it either. She simply let it be; nothing more, nothing less. The cold, she knew, had won the battle a long time ago. Determination, she had learned, was not as strong as she thought it was.
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The mare didn’t care for years anymore. She didn’t care for anything at all. All she cared about was how much longer it was going to take to reach the end of this grisly place. If there even was an end that is.
Clop… clop… clop… clop…
Her hoofsteps, like her mind, had gotten increasingly slow and hollow. Nothing was felt in them anymore like once proud peacocks losing every bit of their brilliant feathers. Her head was downcast, looking at the ground in front of her as she walked, step by slow step.
The crystalline ice had formed a shell around the pony, hugging her tightly with its cold grip. Her body felt numb, weak, and exhausted where the ice touched her coat. It was as if an amoebic parasite had attached itself on her and was slowly eating away at her, day by day, week by week, year by year.
She had forgotten almost everything by now, her memories only frail remnants of what they had used to be.
They were to her, the only things left that comprehensible in her head. Glimpses of bright colors and other faces, faces she once called friends. She remembered how they made her laugh, made her angry, made her cry, just made her feel. They enveloped her with love and friendship like nopony else had ever done.
They were the only light that her mind allowed to hold in this desolated land.
She missed them. She finally concluded that she missed them, sorely and desperately missed them.
It was as if her insides had been ripped away from her, leaving only her heart to remember them by. Everything had been pulled out of her, year after year, leaving nothing but the cold hollow shell she had let herself become. The ice was no longer the coldest thing she could think of; the coldest thing ever to touch her was the emptiness that now seeped throughout her body.
She couldn’t move on anymore. There was no end in sight, none whatsoever. She had known it was futile all this time but now… Now she accepted that it was. Finally, willingly, she stopped dead in her tracks, one last echoing clop echoing in the Expanse.
She fell to the floor.
The ice around her broke immediately, spiraling all over the blackness in cool, crystalline pieces. The mare didn’t care though. She was done. Over with. It had won, and she had accepted it. She simply wanted to lie down and sleep. The pegasus hadn’t slept in years. She needed the sleep, as it was inviting her in her brain to simply give into it.
The pieces of ice however, had a different idea. They slowly crept along the black non-existent floor, skittering and colliding with each other. The mare, fascinated by the phenomena, watched as the pieces, one by one, began to connect themselves together. Slowly and meticulously, they pieced each other, piece by piece, until a shape began to form.
“That’s… me…” The mare croaked, her throat hoarse and dry.
The crystalline pegasus was a perfect replica of the mare and it stood before her, its head looming down on the mare as if looking at her. The sheer elegance, beauty, and preciseness of the ice-pony amazed the mare, but a certain aspect of the pony made the mare tremble in fear.
The face of the ice-pony was non-existent, its hollow opening pointing directly down at the pegasus menacingly, its purpose exact and clear. The mare shuddered as it looked down on her, and she would have screamed next if her voice hadn’t cracked at the very beginning of her shrill terror.
It moved.
The golem of a pony moved, slowly lifting its hooves up and down, letting it get steadily closer and closer to the unmoving mare. The sounds its body made were soft tinkling notes, playing melodically throughout the blackness around them. They were bell-like, like a wind chime playing softly in a gently breeze.
The mare had never heard such a horrendous sound in her life.
So… this is the end… She thought in the cavity her head held, which she thought only mimicked her surroundings. This… thing is going to take the rest of my body for ice… She watched as it was closer now, only about a foot away from her.
Goodbye everypony…
Eight inches.
Goodbye life…
Four inches.
Goodbye, my friends…
One inch.
A single teardrop slid out of her eyelid.
One inch.
A certain spark had alighted within her, something she hadn’t in years upon years. It had started from the single droplet of water on her face, steadily winding its way through her entire body.
Warmth.
For the first time after decades of walking, of thinking, of mind numbing reptititious noise and thoughts, she had stopped. She looked into the ice ponies open face, into the icy blackness within it. All at once, a torrential flood of memories filled her mind, bringing forth more and more warmth.
The heat, the desire, the passion, the drive, the anger, the frustrations, the laughter, the confusion, the intensity, the thrills, the happiness, the sadness, the frustration, the heartbreak, the disappointment, the love… she remembered it all now. She could feel it pulsate within her, a steady beat in a rhythmic tune… Bump-bump, bump-bump…
“Is that… my heart?” She wondered out loud, her voice coarse and distant, as if on another plane of reality all together. She looked down at her chest and could feel it pump the blood through her body once more. But she realized, it wasn’t just pumping blood, it was pumping something more, some substantial, something beautiful.
Life. It was spreading now.
The pegasus could barely hold her joy as she felt the cold leave her body, slowly at first, but steadily making its way through her veins and organs. She shook herself a bit, an action long since forgotten, and put a hoof on the ground, followed by another and another and one last one. She was standing, once again, and she faced the ice golem of herself, which was looking back at her plaintively.
It was there, just merely there now. It couldn’t do anything. It wouldn’t do anything. The mare would make sure of that.
Suddenly, she smiled and did something she had wanted to do, something she had always meant to do, but feared to do initially. Now, it was all that she could think about. Slowly, she extended her wings, stretching them out to their full length.
Freedom. It felt so wonderful…
With a small trot forward, she flapped her wings, her body speeding off into the endless sky of The Black Expanse, leaving the ice being to its lonesome self. She could feel her heart race, her heart beat, move, and pump. She felt her wings flap into the air, a steady beat that moved in sync with her heart. They were one, sharing the warmth with the mare, letting her be free after so many years of being imprisoned by the cold.
That’s when she saw it. When she finally saw it. At first, she didn’t believe it to be true, that it was simply a ruse that the land around her was sickeningly playing with her. But she dared to try and go towards it. She had wanted it so badly for so long now… no, she needed it. The mare knew that that was where she needed to go now.
She needed to head towards the light.
Finally, she could hear voices. Other ponies voice, ones so familiar, so natural to her, she almost cried in midflight. But she knew she needed to focus on flying faster, further, and deeper towards the light.
The mare knew that she was going to be home very soon.
The light got bigger. It got wider. The voices became clearer, louder, and more welcoming to her. Doubling her efforts, the pegasus sped on, climbing the heights to reach this light, to reach this warmth.
Suddenly, she remembered something, something she never had thought of remembering in this morbid landscape. Thinking about it right now, she chuckled, thinking it so ridiculous that she could forget something so important. “Oh yeah, that’s right! I nearly forgot my name! My name is… is…”
“Rainbow Dash!”
Warmth. It felt so pleasant…
A/N:
So, this is a semi-one shot story i wanted to try~ I had a plan to expand it but that is a maybe in all honesty so we may see future chapters~ :)
Either way, hoped you enjoyed it~ :)
