The sound of a clock was keeping John awake.
He lay on his back listening to the metronomic clicking, the covers abandoned somewhere near his feet. Unfocused blue eyes stared up at nothing as he reflexively twitched his arm with each mechanical heartbeat, counting them off in his head.
The clock wasn't the only thing between him and sleep. Little aches and pains were making their contribution, along with the sounds that only came out when everyone else had gone to bed: the house shifting and groaning as the walls contracted after the late summer heat, the distant wash of the waves on the sand streets away. The clock was just the closest and the most obvious source of discomfort.
The most obvious source that he could deal with, anyway.
John rolled over to stare at it. A cheap analogue model with a double-A in it, sitting alone on his bedside table showing a time he didn't want to think about right now. He listened. The click came. Then, fainter, there was a second click, like an echo. The sound of two clocks just short of running in tandem.
John's clock didn't have a twin.
It did, however, have an off switch.
He wouldn't be late for anything in the morning. His new lifestyle, if you could call it that, would grant him that one grace. John reached out a hand through the tired fog, towards the vague shape on his night stand, but froze when his hoof hit something hard in the air just in front of the clock face. The mental dissonance hit, and his eyes slid sharply into focus on the end of his limb.
A blocky flesh tone tumour hung just over the table. His fingers were visible protruding from the sides of the block, pushing up mounds of flesh as they twitched like the a captured insect while the faint tan shape over them waved sluggishly. The second click was now almost as loud as the original, becoming a more nuanced mechanical sound. The numbers on the clock were no longer visible, hidden behind a brown haze like transparent varnished wood hanging in the air. Seized by adrenaline, John pushed with all his weight through the midair surface.
The hoof disappeared, and John heard a hollow wooden thud followed by a phantom sensation of being forced against the mattress. The clock clattered off the table and bounced across the carpet towards the wall. John fell onto his back, panting from the sudden rush.
The second clock had gone. Lying uncomfortably awake, John listened to the muffled single click from across the room until he was satisfied that there was no echo. Eventually, he let his body drop numbly onto the bed, and tried very hard to ignore the tiny glitter of a naked battery in the corner of his eye.
Ten minutes later, he was dressed in dirty clothes under an old jacket, pacing in the living room. He'd never seen the point in staying in bed when he couldn't sleep. He had thought, briefly, of lying down and trying again, but that had only made him more determined to leave the room. John didn't think like that. Clear Skies thought like that.
He stood on the rug, five and a half feet of tired confusion. John had covered over the mirror, so he had no idea what he looked like in his ancient coat and boots, but he could hazard a guess: hangdog eyes under a greasy mat of hair, cocooned in a dirty, stained work shirt and badly fitting jacket. A scruffy beard, the product of a neglected razor, poking out from under twitching lips. A wave of nausea washed over him. John sat down, groaning. The nausea attacks were becoming more frequent.
He didn't really want to know what that was a sign of.
He doubled over with another wave. When it faded, a sudden bolt of panic shot through him at the unfamiliar shadows and alien devices lining the walls, and a sudden feeling of restriction as he fought to escape from his deformed and unfitting skin. A ghostly black and orange shape slithered across the walls towards him from the left, but he couldn't find the strength or the muscles to pull himself off the ground. It leapt from the shadows, John bolted unsteadily to his feet, and the lights swept over him and away as the car passed the window.
That had been happening a lot, too. Sometimes, he'd come back around with deep scratches on his arms, bite marks on the flesh of his hands, and he'd remember the terror of these bizarre claws, the primal desperation to just get them off by any means to reveal the hooves underneath. The disgust at the cloying taste of meat in his mouth, and the white hot pain and fear at it being his own flesh.
He remembered the shrieking whirlwind that he'd fallen into, with concerned stranger's voices and overly vibrant colours, asking for "Clear Skies" as they shoved glasses onto his face, and how the Technicolor smears had momentarily resolved into inhuman forms and features as he clawed his way back to reality.
John was in no state to go out. Neither was the sleeping, terrified mind that even now was palpably bleeding into his own. Faced with the alternative of staying inside, alone with his nightmares, John staggered out of his door into the night.
The seafront had been popular once.
Piers jutted out into the water, hulking black monoliths that threw borders around five hundred metres of once-sanitized beach, which now served the function of a giant ashtray. They stood out against the dull orange of the nighttime clouds as burnt out garish monuments to the old days, which found a mirror image in the dilapidated buildings of the waterfront.
John's aimless wandering had led him to the guard rail overlooking the sand. The clouds briefly broke over the water as he absently ran his hand along it, and for a second he stopped to look at the moon reflected on the waves. The gap quickly closed as he watched, the wind catching in his unwashed hair.
John took another look at his hands. He'd heard once that they were one of the most sensitive parts of the human body. That was certainly believable. The bite marks were healing now, but it didn't take a genius to work out that he was operating on borrowed time. Nothing he'd tried had been able to stop the damage wreaked on his body when Clear Skies lurched into control, and John took a measure of private, sick satisfaction that the same appeared to be true on the other end of the link.
"Hello? Can you hear me?"
John turned sharply. There was nobody behind him.
"Relax, Mr. Walker. I have no physical presence where you are. I am talking through the connection you have with my world. Audio only, as it were."
John found his voice, hoarse from days of inaction. "You're a ghost from another world, talking to me through the unstoppable gaping holes in my brain. The thought isn't terribly relaxing."
"My apologies, Mr. Walker, but it will have to do." The voice was female, with an odd cross of an American accent and recieved pronunciation, and clear to the point of sounding unnatural. The sound lacked the tiny reverb and reflections added by distance between people, but also lacked the half-theoretical properties of an imagined voice, leaving an unpleasant feeling of the speaker talking directly into his mind without any intermediate processing.
"What do you want?" he asked, rubbing his face with a sweaty palm. The speaker coughed, a bizarre dissonance over the direct mental link.
"A conversation. A little walk along the beach should give us sufficient time."
John paused. "Why do you want me to go for a walk?"
"Solitude, mostly. The sight of a... man going for a midnight stroll is, I expect, much less likely to arouse suspicion than a man standing alone talking to invisible beings."
"And why, exactly, should I trust you?" asked John, although his legs were already in motion. There was a sigh from the other end as he lowered himself off the gritty concrete steps onto the sand, and tiny pits started to form as the rainclouds reached the shore.
"Because time is running short."
"You know, with all the panic attacks and nausea and hallucinations, I kind of gathered that things weren't going well." John kicked irritably at a crest in the sand, firing a miniature dust storm across the ground. "So what are you going to do other than tell me things I already know?"
There was a sudden pause on the other end, heavy with the silent noise of thought as the speaker considered her next sentence. Eventually, she reached a conclusion.
"Mr. Walker, please understand that while I do not wish to harm you in any way and will do all that I am able to assist you, the wellbeing of my subjects overrides my personal concerns. I am not threatening you, but it is imperative that you understand that my responsibility to Mr. Skies overrides my responsibility to you."
John half turned before he remembered that he was alone. "What the hell sort of message is that?" he snarled. "Who the hell are you to break into my mind and start ordering me around?"
The female voice cleared its throat.
"It is the truth, Mr. Walker. I'm sorry, but what I'm about to tell you will happen regardless of whether or not you consent, unless you give me a very good alternative. While I will do all I can to make the operation safe for us all, the longer we wait the more dangerous this will be, and if the situation deteriorates too far it is my duty to ensure that the majority of the damage is on your end." The voice softened. "I really am sorry, but there's nothing else that I can do."
There was a terrible certainty to her tone. John knew he'd lost. The connection had always been stronger coming the other way, the attacks longer and the resulting injuries more severe. Four weeks of hell had convinced him that the connection was genuine, despite his early skepticism. Anything powerful enough to break into that connection was something that, ideally, John wanted nothing to do with, but failing that he certainly didn't want to anger her. Still, he wasn't just going to lie down and take it. He stopped walking, and stared into the empty space in front of him.
"You said you weren't threatening me, and if I'm right we both know I can't put a scratch on you. At least let me see your face. I want to know what I'm talking to."
There was a pause, as if she was waiting for more, then another as she contemplated his request. Finally, the female speaker responded.
"This is an acceptable concession, provided you listen to me with minimal interruptions afterwards. As I said, time is growing shorter by the minute."
"Deal." said John tiredly. The inner fire was dying rapidly, replaced by familiar crushing weariness.
A shadowy body appeared on the sand a few metres away, quickly fading into existence as if a slide projector had been positioned behind John's eyes. The form was close to the ones he'd seen on his brief hallucinogenic trips to the other side of the link, with oversized eyes and colours that didn't mesh with his understanding of light. She was taller, with wings and a horn, but her general appearance was of an advanced version of the ponies he'd seen through Clear Skies' glasses and in the mirror.
He instinctively knew that she was a Princess, a ruler of another land, from the low level scraps of information that constantly drifted across the gap, but he felt no need to denigrate himself to her. For her part, she just nodded curtly to him, and started walking towards the sea. John followed, pulling his hood up against the strengthening downpour.
"You are not surprised by my appearance?" she asked, without looking at him, in the detached tone of a doctor asking where it hurt. He nodded.
"Information crosses the gap sometimes, and I see ponies in the mirror and in the visions."
"They are not visions." John turned to look at her, but she kept her eyes resolutely facing forwards. "When there is an especially large break in the borders between your mind and Mr. Skies, there is not enough time for the usual barriers to construct themselves before a large portion 'slips through'. They eventually reassert themselves, but, to use a visual analogy, they are 'losing ground'."
"You mean that we're sort of slipping further into each other?" John stared straight at the (alicorn, that was the word)'s unblinking eye, but it looked around him towards the stormy horizon: the princess was deliberately avoiding eye contact.
"In a manner of speaking."
"And you can fix it?"
A light, a navigation buoy, blinked on the other side of the bay, just for a second over her star encrusted mane. John's eyes were drawn to the momentary light, and lingered on the top of her head. She blinked and swallowed, minor panic flitting across her face, but John didn't notice.
"In a manner of speaking."
Her ears were wrong. They were half hidden in the clouds of stars frozen on her head, the tips poking out in the night air, and throughout the conversation they hadn't moved once. Everything above the eyes acted as if there was a slip joint between her face and the top of her head hidden under her mane. John looked back at her eyes, noticing how controlled each blink was, and the visible, tiny jumps of emotion just as the eyelid closed.
"What do you mean, "in a manner of speaking?""
She stopped walking, and there was another split second burst of emotion as surprise, laced with guilt, burned through her dour mask, the features jumping suddenly between one state and the next. Caught off guard, she sputtered: "You cannot keep interrupting like this, time is-"
"Short, yeah?" The burning rage was back, fueled and sustained by the sudden deceit John saw in her neutral expression. She blinked, and he saw surprise again as she closed her eyes. "What, exactly, are you going to do to me?"
She thought he was an idiot. That was the only explanation behind this paper thin disguise, breaking up as he watched into snapshots of surprise, guilt and what looked like desperate anger. "You couldn't possibly understand the complexities! Every moment I spend explaining is focus taken away from the necessary spells!"
She'd told him that she'd go ahead as planned regardless of his input, but John still felt betrayed. He used the feeling as fuel for his own anger, chasing after the fleeing confusion he'd seen on the Princess' face. She'd stopped even trying to hide her emotions, but was still avoiding his gaze, visibly grasping for something to placate him.
In her haste, she failed to compensate for the transfer of information over the mental link. John suddenly felt her wracking his memories for possible analogies, comparing them against her own and throwing out inapprorpriate matches. She worked fast. Not fast enough to come to a conclusion before, ahead of his rising disgust at the violation, the phrase "Gordian knot" bled into John's brain.
He put two and two together.
"How much damage have you done?" he said, quietly. Dangerously.
The Princess knew what he meant. She'd felt the bleed too. He'd felt her confusion, and the rising panic at a simple, difficult job gone irretrievably wrong. Her mind had rejected him before he found anything more, but her inappropriately simple disguise, made to fool a much simpler mind, lay in tatters on the ground. Her face fractured like a broken render as the various mental routines crafted to handle the puppet soldiered on over her growing lack of control.
"How dare you-" she started, before he exploded over the end of the sentence.
"How dare you break into my mind, lie to my face and rape my memories?" John hadn't noticed before, but his frantic attempts at recalling his home and the trip to the beach turned up blanks, with ragged trailing edges where the memories unravelled around the widening holes.
"This was to be a simple operation! I had no idea of the complexity of your mind, I expected a mere cover of a personality!" The princess, the nameless mind breaking abomination had taken to the air, hovering above the sand. She was terrified, like a child that had gone too far, tears of remorse and fear beading at the corners of her eyes, covered by the shell of a still-placid eyelid. "I'm sorry! It had to be done, I had no way of knowing!"
"You didn't bother to check!" shouted the man on the beach. His head ached, then burned, ancient memories coming to light as they were pulled apart by the caustic, unstoppable magic, held at bay on one side by an invisible barrier. His job, the name of the company, the name of the town fracturing apart as he dropped to his knees in the rising tide, howling and clutching his blazing skull.
The magic surged as the princess shouted something in a language he no longer understood, and then it knew nothing.
Several weeks later, the bloated corpse of a half naked man was found by a schoolboy lodged on a crag on the headland. Based on the tattered remains of the clothes, the newspapers suspected it to be the body of the missing John Walker, aged 25, but due to the state of the body it was impossible to tell.
An immeasurable distance away, a midnight blue alicorn screamed in her sleep. One hundred and thirty seven kilometres away from her, as bat winged attendants rushed across polished floors and a white alicorn curiously raised her head from her newspaper, a pegasus rolled over in his bed.
As his gathered family and friends watched, he smiled for the first time in four weeks.
Author's Note
Well, if you're still here, thank you for reading this... thing.
Yeah, I wrote this over the course of several nights, as you can probably see. I pushed it out before the endless revisionism ate it, as you can also probably see. As a side note, writing on a Kindle is the devil.
Like it? Want to see me crucified for making this? Vent your spleen in the comments, it's the only way I'll learn. Again, thank you for reading this far, and, um... have a nice diurnal cycle?