How You Live and Die in Equestria

“Hmm, a twist here, a toss there, and away the world flies,” says a voice from all around you, echoing off the walls. As it does, you can actually seem to feel it in your chest, the reverberations of it making you feel like you’re shaking apart, only for the walls to do just that, dissolving before your eyes into...not darkness, but more like an absence of anything, including color. You floated in that void, with nothing in it save yourself for what felt like an eternity, only for the world to come back onto you with a bang, your ears popping painfully, and then you dropped.

Luckily, the fall was short, the ground close to your body, and allowing you to hit it with a bounce rather than a splat. Better, the stuff beneath you gave, rather than staying firm, meaning you weren’t even significantly harmed by the fall, allowing you to just sit there, breathing hard, wondering just what in the world happened. When you had pinched yourself, to find you were not dreaming, you slowly rose up, first onto your hands, then onto your feet, and took a look around you.

About you was a world unlike any you’d seen before. It was white, white as snow that had fallen fresh upon the morning light, with an almost sparkle to it that made it seem as if it were fashioned of crystal. Worse, it seemed like, instead of reflecting light, it was made of the stuff, with the white nearly blinding you for several moments as you blunk through tears that kept threatening to well up, only to finally bring everything into sharp focus, and causing your breath to catch in your throat.

The white stretched away into infinity, fading as it got to the very edge of what you could see, many miles in the distance. You could make out vague shapes though, things beyond your vision that felt huge, like moons or stars in the sky, but moving at a speed that would have been frightening. Beneath your feet, the ground was soft, but warm, with a feeling of comfort to it you were incapable of explaining, while somewhere beneath it you could feel something moving, rapidly and heavily, like a great river flowing through a tunnel.

And then there were the towers. They were spires of a size that was incomprehensible, towering over the landscape. A single one was as tall as every building you’d ever seen in your life all stacked on top of one another, and then multiplied by another three orders of magnitude, if not more. Their base could have held a state inside their girth, and yet, this was not a single monolithic structure, but a whole group of them, all spaced with plains of white between them, so many that even if you had tried, you couldn’t have counted them all.

Still trying to process the sight, you heard something, a voice you thought, but so loud and booming that it was impossible to say. The words, and you were sure after a moment of listening that they were words, were lost to your ears. Still, hearing a voice was comforting, especially after the dismissive tone of the previous, and you shouted out, trying to call out to the speaker. Your own voice was lost amid the plains though, so small that it didn’t even echo, as if the towers themselves absorbed every syllable, and left you mute.

So you stood there, staring off into the distance, before finally starting off. You would get no help here, and you knew you needed it badly, so you walked. The sound of the voice would return sometimes, and after a few repetitions of it, you finally figured out the direction it was coming from, and started towards that, and towards the tower closest on your way there. You don’t know what you were expecting, maybe to die walking, but somehow, despite the hundreds of miles it must have been, you arrived at the base of one of the spires an hour or so later, and stared at it up close.

What you had taken for smooth structure was proven to be something much different, with a ridged and folded exterior, and seemingly no way inside. It was warm as the ground too, but seemed to be made of a different material, with the ground feeling soft, while this felt hard. Still, the ridges in the side were useful at least, as you placed one hand on one, and then a foot on another, and began to climb the thing, barely feeling your own weight as you lifted yourself up, hoping to find some landmark beyond the spires, or at least to see farther.

You were barely up from the ground though, only a few dozen miles above it, when everything shifted. Suddenly, instead of being drawn down, the world turned, and what had been left became down. A bit of warning, and you might have been able to do something about that, grab a handhold, or otherwise save yourself, but it was so abrupt, that all you could do was try to scream as your fell to the side, tumbling end over end towards some unknown draw on your back.

The fall took several minutes, and after the wind had been ripped from your lungs a dozen times by weird winds, you had stopped screaming, numb to all around you. Then something appeared, a sparkle at first, more distinct than the ground had been before, then a ripple, and finally, a small wave. You knew then that you were falling towards some weird looking ocean, with a pink sea bordered abruptly by a white ocean on one side, and a black abyss on the other, with you coming to a splash into the white one.

At once, you were drowning, the stuff around you closing up like gel rather than water, holding you firmly, rather than allowing you to swim freely. Then darkness fell, all at once, and you thought for a moment you were dying, and your eyesight had gone, but then the light returned, and you found the hard gel was loosened, warm wetness mixing with it to allow you to swim upwards, falling breaching the surface of the stuff with a gasp for air to fill your burning lungs, even as you tried to blink away the stuff that had gotten into your eyes.

When at last you were recovered, you tried to look around again, but your vision was instantly taken by something moving towards you. It was a set of spires at first, dwarfing even the ones you had seen before, and black in color, drifting over the dark abyss and pink sea, coming towards the white where you were. Despite their size, they moved quickly, and you could soon see that the spire were connected to a base, a wall of some sort, sweeping over the ocean, and coming straight for you.

You couldn’t do anything, of course, nothing in your life was as large as that wall, and so as it came on, you just resigned yourself to whatever happened. When it hit, you didn’t even close your eyes, and so got to watch as the wall, pushing a wave of liquid over the sea, picked you up, nearly slamming you as it went into a wall beneath it, only to pull back over the sea again a moment later, allowing you to see the world as it was for the first time since you’d gotten here, and letting the sight of it just stun you.

Your world, the white world and its spires, was only a world to you. To everyone else around you, it was a woman, a woman of equine features, with a long muzzle, a powerful build, and a beautiful dress. Her body was reflected in a mirror she was looking in, as about her, a dozen smaller anthropomorphic equines moved, tossing bolts of cloth against her, and otherwise using her as a dress up doll. Only the crown on her brow told you see was he one in charge, as she smiled warmly at her reflection, as if smiling right at you.

Then she blunk again, the eyelid you were stuck to, sweeping down, and then time, as it moved, you were folded under it, being driven down into her eye, rather than being carried. When it moved back, like could be seen again, a distorted image of the pony woman, a vision of loveliness on par with the sun, standing there. She was allowing them to make her a dress, something regal, and as you stared, her head turned to find three others, similarly crowned, going through much the same process, dresses slowly forming on all of them as their servants worked.

Then your felt it, the burning need for air, the eye gel around you hardened to the point where you couldn’t move. A few burbles came from your lips as you tried to call out, and yet, to who you didn’t know. After all, the woman you were on was so large, you were literally drowning in her eye. No one could have found you here, and as your vision faded, you looked up to see here reflected again, the last thing you see being her smile, while the last thing you hear being that voice that had brought you here, laughing at something.