Cosmic Breed

There in the shade of the nearest 'graveyard', he knelt in the undulating energies of the decomposed and their echoed voices. He could feel them tickling at the membrane over his neck and the gushing sanguine beneath his eye wraps. A stir of unintelligible mutterings and jabbering presences ate away at his senses. So he grit his teeth and covered his ears, drowning them out and focusing on the gravestones.

As petrichor drowned the place in downtrodden drummings and little fairie fractures, he felt at peace when the air constricted and chilled his red button nose.

"You feel them too, don't you. You hear them... just like me." Someone hushed, her voice, a million tones and frequencies in harmony, a sweet symphony of something hard to swallow.

He turned back to see her, astonished and quite pleasantly, by the ever present glow of her visage. It felt, for some reason, comforting in the closest way possible to natural kinship. And more so as she hovered about the loosened mud and crumbling dirt, did he seem so entranced by her familiar ways.

Her hair was lilac purple when dense with rain, and half of that curly, lovely mess was a faded white. The unfettered purity of her coat reminded him of an old martian winter. The mare's eyes, of an old martian princess surrounded by a cascade of praetorians with silver and MK III bronze gattling arms. So naturally, he stayed his tongue and glanced elsewhere, nodding faintly in odd intervals.

"You don't have to hold your thoughts, breeder. We know of your kind. You mean no harm. You never did."

Before he could object, he found her presence cooling the very core of his intellectual being. In liberty, he recognized her invisible connection and cherished it. He let his thoughts hatch and he kept his eyes on her, the only one to ever hear him. To know him as he knew her.

[you are not... like them.

you are free; never to rot.

whence do you know me

whence do you know us

tis been two centuries now...

your curse is welcome

legion; thrall of hate

where did you learn to accept

where the others couldnt...?]

Sweetie Belle, or what was left of her amalgamate core of indecipherable persons, cracked a smile and closed her eyes.

"Doesn't the rain feel so forgiving... Don't the clouds seem just as distressed as we are. They huddle together to run from the cold. And they cry because they too were born in this nightmare. You remind me of her. A stranger in a stranger land. And a single person to come and change us as we are; flesh and blood. Flaws and all."

When the clouds began to roar, he glanced just right of her. Her majestic glow and her unspoken secrets. Were they really fated to meet, as his knotted gut had urged him to hear. Before, he hadn't the slightest idea of why his invisible intuition told him to visit that graveyard. Or why it felt so naggingly imperative to endure the harsh storm of unrealized noises. But he did. And he embraced her by acknowledging her.

[so the nightmare stays...

the curse has never lifted.

i would weep for them.

i would weep for Our Mother

but she is buried somewhere

beneath this new land.

the promise has stayed

even if they would not hear

i am here to try.]

She snickered and let loose a low, fading stream of bitter laughter. It struck her throat in raspy bursts and jumped her diaphragm every which second she spent kneeling over that tombstone. That particular grave piece had a cane sword lodged in it's soil. And there halfway up the trick blade, a waving coat made from silk and fine linen, it's hue: black; it's ragged holes and bloodstained cloth: a reminder of the trials that it fought to earn it's peace.

"Try... and hold onto that promise. We've all been bad; us ponies. Those of us that saw you; we were weak. We didn't do what we needed and we all suffered. It is our penance to suffer for the arrogance we spew as a species that is crass enough to think it is above it's own neighbors."

He wanted to tell her everything was alright. That the dark in mare's hearts was only a child crying out for an answer to the pain it knew. But he didn't, because he knew she'd already heard it before and the deep melancholy weighing her down wouldn't listen. Because that was how they all were. They were all children in the eyes of the void.

"If we could turn back time... and do it all over, you know we'd do it in a heartbeat. Nay, sooner, as a virus such as us breeds in the dark. We would have broken the curse if we understood how wrong we were." She murmured, her eyes fixated on the last words of somepony she hated.

On crumbling and vine-ridden stone, she recalled those bittersweet half-truths etched in months ago.

'In loving memory of Lilith Hargrove Li:

You wouldn't be happy without me.

Tomorrow never sang for us.

So you slept away from the world, until I thawed

and took away all that I loved.

At least before, we were alone together.

But now I'll always be cold.

Forever and always.

- your angel of lies.'