To Know Hell

I awoke in darkness, my surroundings a still, quiet void of black nothingness. Was I dead? Was I dreaming? It was hard to tell, given the surreal experience that had sent my sanity reeling and left me unconscious in the first place. All I knew was that it was blacker than the devil's asshole and that I was back in my original body instead of that strange quadruped I had woken up as on the moon. My mind shuddered at the memory, the darkness around me quivering in tandem as I hugged myself tightly. Then something moved at the edge of my vision, my head turning to see what it was, only for it to turn out to be nothing. Someone laughed, a woman from the sound of it, and I spun around, searching for the source. All I could see was the same, inky blackness.

How curious.

I froze, the strangely sensual voice seeming to come from everywhere at once, my eyes casting about as fear gripped my heart. What was going on? Who was that?

You do not belong here.

I gave a startled little scream as a pair of large eyes, the irises the blue of a robin's egg with slit, serpent-like pupils, opened in the darkness before me. I felt small as they glared at me, sizing me up as if trying to decide if I was something good to eat. I couldn't move, couldn't breathe as an equally large mouth was revealed, full of sharp, predatory fangs as the...thing grinned at me.

Good, you should be afraid of me, little ape. You are nothing before me but prey to be devoured.

I screamed again, louder now, as the mouth opened and those teeth descended on me before the darkness took me for a second time.

0o0o0o0o0o0

I woke still screaming, limbs flailing as I instinctively tried to flee, only to stumble and fall as the fact I wasn't used to walking on four legs, combined with the lack of familiarity I possessed with this new body in general, caught up with me. Still I scrambled in the off white dust, head jerking about as my wide eyes darted left and right, heart racing and breath coming in short, ragged gasps. I was back on the moon, though it was darker now, the Earth(?) shrouded in the embrace of night. What was happening to me? Had that blow to my head caused some kind of coma induced hallucination? But I could feel the ground beneath me and the pain still faintly ringing in my skull felt all too real for me to dismiss it out of hand. Perhaps a test was in order? Couldn't possibly make the situation any worse, or so I reasoned. So I rolled over onto my belly and tried to butt my head against the ground, only to grunt and go cross-eyed as something stopped my progress and sent a fresh jolt of agony ripping through my head.

"Fuck!" I cursed loudly, trying to see what exactly had stopped my head from hitting the lunar surface. Whatever it was I couldn't see it but maybe I'd be able to feel it? It was worth a shot anyway. I looked down at my metal encased forelegs(?) and tapped them against the ground, able to distantly feel it as if I was wearing boots. Maybe I could take them off? I sat up, shaking first one leg, then the other, grunting as they refused to shake loose. Well, if it was armor I supposed that made sense. I turned and twisted my head, my neck longer than what I was used to, allowing me to see latches holding them shut. Okay, that answered that question but brought another to mind: how in the hell was I supposed to undo them? This, among other things that were painfully obvious, confused me greatly.

What even was I? I turned my head, craning my neck to look back at my body, not exactly all that surprised to see it was that of your typical quadrupedal animal, though two things stuck out as fairly abnormal. Item one: there were a pair of ebony feathered wings folded against my sides. Item two: something was sticking out just above where I assumed my, ahem, butt would be, floating and twisting in the air as if in a gentle, nonexistent breeze. It was nebulous and blue, with sparkling lights shifting within the semi-transparent mass, like the stars I could see in the black void of space. I focused on it, the...tail swishing a bit as muscles I'd never had before contracted in my hindquarters. Okay, it was definitely a tail then. Did the wings work? Using unfamiliar muscle groups was a bit of a pain, as all I managed was to get them to shuffle and twitch, but yes, they seemed to be functional, not that it mattered under the circumstances.

"How is any of this possible?" I asked no one in particular, having always had a penchant for thinking aloud whenever I was by myself. "I'm on the moon, somehow, and I'm some kind of black colored animal with butt marks...wait, butt marks?" Yep, I had butt marks, one on each side of my hindquarters. The fur there was purple and a crescent moon stood out against the blotches of color. "Great, I'm in the body of an edgy, winged creature with something sticking out of its forehead and a tail that looks like it's made out of sparkly gas." Definitely the most insane coma dream in existence. "On top of that I'm somehow breathing and talking on the moon instead of, I don't know, suffering from explosive decompression!"

My vision blurred as my mind tried to deny the insanity, but I growled and shook my head, unwilling to fall back into whatever black hell that I'd gone to the first time it happened. "S-stop freaking out, David, it's not helping!" But I was starting to hyperventilate anyway, my instinctual response to this impossible scenario being to panic. "I don't want this! God, please, what is happening?!" I tried to stand, stumbling and shaking, but I somehow managed to get all four legs under me this time. What I was planning to do or where I was going to go, however, even I didn't know. "I can't...I don't..." I trailed off, staggering forward, my movements jerky and fumbling in my inexperience and hysteria. "Get me out of here!" I tried to jump, but the gravity wasn't like what it was supposed to be and I only managed to end up painfully sprawled out on the ground once more.

I'm not ashamed to admit that I started to cry, babbling nonsense as I curled up in the dust as best I could. How long I stayed that way was anyone's guess, but something eventually happened to snap me out of it. A voice rose from the ether, warm, kind and sorrowful, stilling the chaos of my mind and drawing my attention to the world below me as the moon became bathed in a golden glow of light that sent tingles through my whole body. I listened to it, enraptured, a myriad array of emotions forcing their way into my brain. Regret, pain, love, rage, hate, guilt, a sickening inferno of unwanted feelings that weren't mine, both making me want to start crying again and start spitting furious curses at the voice at the same time.

How dare she sing to me, as if I were some helpless filly that needed her pity!

I don't deserve it anyway. I've hurt her too much to be forgiven.

No, those weren't my thoughts! What's happening to me?!?

"Make it stop!" I shouted, clutching at my head as the song continued, images flashing through my mind, of chasing another winged quadruped through the air, of laughter and pain. "Stop it! STOP IT NOW!" Yet it continued and I wept, trying to shut out the voice and the thoughts, shuddering helplessly as I felt the moon shift beneath me, the glow that enveloped it growing brighter as the singing began to wind down, the strangely familiar voice bringing the lullaby to an end. All I could do was lay there with the hate, love and guilt warring inside me, but I remained unable to understand any of it. Alone and afraid, I just closed my eyes and covered my ears, praying to whoever was listening that this really was just a coma dream and that I would wake up in a hospital soon. A childish, naive hope, but it was all I could do.

0o0o0o0o0o0

I'm still not sure how long I senselessly lay there, my tortured psyche having been battered from all sides. It's hard to describe what it's like to have your sanity assaulted, to have the sheer wrongness of a situation make your whole being just scream: NOPE. The singing, sorrowful voice had triggered some sort of reaction from deep within my subconscious, turning what sounded like a comforting, heartfelt message of apology and remorse into shards of jagged glass stabbing me in the brain. Even with the song having ended, the turmoil in my soul wouldn't relent. Something was twisting within me, like an oily tendril of hate wrapping itself around my guts. At the same time, however, there was something else beneath that mass of rage; a sliver of guilt that made me want to either weep or throw up.

Maybe both, it was hard to tell given the circumstances. Eventually, however, these alien feelings would grow quiet and I was left to recover from mental and emotional overload. First I'm assaulted in the parking lot after being drugged, then I'm turned into some kind of talking, winged, possibly horned, animal that hears voices in its head and can somehow hear someone singing through the vacuum of space. Let's not forget the icing on this shit cake my life had turned into: for some reason I couldn't even begin to fathom, I was now trapped on the lunar surface. Clearly God hates me, but back to the fact I'm recovering from my latest round of mental and emotional trauma.

I was dazed, confused, nauseous and once again nursing one hell of a migraine. I managed to stumble to my...hooves? I could only assume my legs ended in hooves considering I didn't have the sense of toes inside the odd boots I was currently wearing. So I had become some kind of quadruped with hooves but I wasn't any sort of animal I'd ever heard of. Wings, hooves...was I some kind of pegasus? What about the thing poking out of my skull? I reached up to touch it, having surprising dexterity for something on four legs, able to feel that it was conical in shape, like you'd see on modern depictions of unicorns. Wings, horn...what did those make me? A pegacorn? A unisus? You might be wondering why I was trying to figure this out.

Frankly, when faced with a situation that challenged everything I had thought I knew about how reality works as a whole and what in God's name I was inhabiting the body of, I'd rather focus on the problem that was more readily solved. At least I was still male, or so I assumed. I sounded male, though my voice was now that of a baritone rather than my original deeper bass. A quick duck of my head confirmed this, the sight of a sheath and scrotum oddly comforting. Could you imagine how messed up I'd have been if I'd been a girl? I like being male, so my gender identity being utterly destroyed would have added a huge, tumorous cherry on top of the already rancid sundae my life had inexplicably become. With that out of the way, and with my migraine starting to finally calm down a bit, I decided to survey my surroundings, choosing to take things one step at a time rather than focus on the mind shattering whole of it all.

As you can imagine, there really wasn't much of anything to see. The moon's surface is just as barren a place as you'd expect given the footage from the Apollo 11 mission and what could be seen through modern telescopes: a blasted, dusty landscape riddled with the evidence of millions of years of impacts from meteorites of various sizes. I could barely see the sun around the shape of the earth, squinting against the glare and somehow not going blind considering there was no atmosphere to filter out the more harmful aspects of the light it cast. How long had I been here? Time was hard to keep track of beyond the position of the sun, but I had passed out multiple times already and had remained unconscious during these instances for what could have been minutes, hours or even days. As I went back to stumbling my way along, however, something began to feel off. More so than everything else going on, I mean.

I couldn't shake this feeling that there was something out amidst the crags and craters, watching my every move. Were there other pegacorn things on the moon with me or was I just succumbing to a sudden onset of paranoia due to an extreme reduction in SAN? I couldn't see anything out there, so maybe I really was just crazy. Wouldn't be surprising, given my situation, so I decided to ignore the feeling and just...wander some more. What? I'd like to see any of you come up with something to do while stuck on a barren planetoid with no clear means of escape. So I walked, slowly becoming accustomed to the gait required to keep myself from toppling over and planting my face in the lunar dust, though that did happen multiple times. I walked and walked, the trip only solidifying in my mind the bleakness of my situation, the thought of dying of thirst on a lifeless ball of rock sending chills up my spine.

"Couldn't even kill myself if I wanted to," I grumbled, petulantly scuffing at the ground with one metal shod hoof. Though I suppose if I was feeling masochistic enough I could have maybe flown into Earth's atmosphere and burned myself to death. No, dehydration seemed a much gentler way to go, if not a more expedient one. I couldn't just give up, though, right? I got to the moon somehow, so there had to be a way to get off. Hope. Faint and flickering, like a candle in the night, but it was all I had. I would eventually come to the border where the light from the sun didn't reach, staring into the inky darkness beyond.

As I peered into that abyss where the light did not shine, I felt my sense of unease return, like something was telling me not to venture within. Not that I would have regardless, given I wouldn't have been able to see, but still the feeling persisted even as I turned back. My thoughts turned back to survival, wondering how long I could survive without water. A human being could only last a mere handful of days, but what about an oddly proportioned unisus thing? I knew that some animals could survive a bit longer than that, others for weeks, like camels, but given I still wasn't sure what I'd become, I couldn't even begin to fathom my physical limitations.

"Who cares about water when I can't even understand how I got here in the first place!" I shouted at space, feeling my focus, my one way to stay calm, fading fast. I couldn't ignore the bizarre nature of it all, the blaring incongruity of being alive on the moon as a winged, horned horse thing enough to drive anyone to distraction, if not outright madness. I wanted out, to go home to my shitty apartment and my mind numbing, piss poor excuse of a job! "Fuck this noise!" I started running, nearly falling as I raced across the rough terrain, heart pounding as the desire to escape drove me onward. The next thing I knew I was stepping into air, a startled cry escaping me as I fell over the edge of a crag that I hadn't seen in my rush to get away from everything. So much for not being able to off myself, right?

As I tumbled through the air, however, I felt the muscles in my back contract and, with a jolt, my wings unfolded. While I was upside down. My screams were legendary as I spun through the air, wings flailing as I tried to right myself. You can imagine that this did not work out well for me at all. At the end of my imitation of a flying brick, I crashed to the ground below, craving a small trench in the rock and getting covered in off-white dust. It hurt, certainly, yet somehow I hadn't broken a single bone or even gotten a bruise from the experience. Just how tough was I now? Dizzily rising to my hooves, I groaned and glared up at the cliff I had just fallen from before turning my eyes to my wings, which I experimentally tried to flap. They sort of twitched a bit but remained pretty useless. Shaking myself off, and sneezing at the cloud of dust this act generated, I shambled along, the urge to just mindlessly run having been thoroughly knocked out of me by my sudden encounter with the ground.

Now I was tired, hungry and ached all over from my fall. What poor decision would I end up making next? Panicking was not going to help me figure things out, yet what exactly was I supposed to do about it? The only thing that sprang to mind was trying to fly back to the Earth, but how would that even work? Not only had I just demonstrated that I didn't know the first thing about using my new wings, I also had no way to tell if I could survive reentry. Still, I had taken that fall pretty well. Who was to say I wasn't somehow also fireproof? But that was ridiculous, right? Like being a pegacorn, unisus, whatever I had become wasn't just as out there, if not more so. I could probably learn how to fly eventually, but could I do it before I died of thirst? I was already feeling parched, though that could have been attributed to the amount of dust I had inhaled moments before.

I coughed and tried clearing my throat, yet it only made things worse. I wished I was back in the parking lot being mugged. I wished I was sleeping in my lumpy old bed. I wished I was sitting on my couch, eating a shitty microwave dinner. I wished to be anywhere but here, but my wishes went unheard. I coughed a few more times, hacking and spitting in an effort to clear my mouth and throat. One thing I noticed in my misery was that my aches were gradually disappearing, my muzzle turning down into a frown as my eyes narrowed. I've watched and read plenty of fiction over the years and, given my clearly impressive durability, as that trench in solid rock would attest, my conclusion was that my body was somehow repairing itself beyond anything a human being was capable of. Had I taken that fall back in my real body, I'd have been severely crippled, if not killed outright.

"Oddly proportioned and capable of surviving what would kill anyone back home," I muttered to myself, part of me glad to have something other than my looming death to focus on for the time being. "Wings, horn, butt marks...what sort of creature am I?" I was going in circles, but what else was there for me to do? I spent a long time thinking, looking myself over, testing my limits a bit as well. I learned that I could jump quite high, though my landing was...spectacularly bad, to be honest. Still, my insane durability let me walk it off and, with a bit more caution, I figured out how fast I could run before my inexperience with four legs had me tripping over my own hooves. I'll spare you further details, but suffice it to say my new body was capable of more than I would have ever expected. If not for the fact I wasn't going to be around long, I might have enjoyed the prospect of being so physically adept, but as it stood I wasn't all that thrilled to say the very least.

The whys and hows of my situation still nagged at me, as did the source of that mysterious voice and the feelings hearing it had brought up inside of me. There was also that persistent feeling of eyes on my back, despite how there shouldn't have been anyone or thing to watch me. Of course there shouldn't have even been a me in the first place, so something else being out there wasn't completely out of the question. As much as I wanted to just curl up in a ball and shut out the world around me, I'd always been too curious for my own good. Besides, if I could figure things out, there was a chance I could escape, or so I reasoned. A goal and deadline, something I was all too familiar with having to deal with, though this time I was playing for keeps rather than for my next paycheck. "No pressure."

0o0o0o0o0o0

"Gah, what was I thinking?" I groaned, having just walked from one end of the light zone to the other, not having found anything beyond rocks, dust and more rocks. I don't know what I had expected to find, exactly, but I'd ended up with having done nothing but waste my time. Time I didn't have. Now I was even more tired than before with nothing to show for it. "Damn it." No clues, no sign of whatever was causing me to feel like someone was constantly watching my every move, just a whole bunch of nothing. I paced a circle in the dust, finally giving in to the urge to rest and laying down, legs folded beneath me as a sigh escaped my lips. Then my skin began to tingle, my head, which had started to lower, shooting up as a golden glow swept across the lunar surface. "The fuck?!" It took me a moment, but I remembered this happening before when I heard that voice.

"No more singing, Christ, I can't take more voices in my head!" I scrambled to my hooves, tense, yet there was no voice, at least not one I could hear, but a sensation of movement, like when you ride an elevator, was felt in the pit of my stomach. "The hell is going on?" The Earth was moving, or rather the moon was. "What...WHAT?!?" I stared at the passing view of the Earth, left eyelid twitching as my brain was again assaulted by reality shattering information. This wasn't right at all. The moon doesn't spontaneously begin to glow and move more swiftly along its orbital path! My whole body was tingling, like a million ants were scurrying over my skin, my wings flaring as my fight or flight instincts kicked in.

"Not right," I murmured, the movement of the moon slowing until it seemed to stop, though instinctively I knew it would still be in motion, the light fading gradually until it was gone entirely. "It's just not right." My flanks hit the ground and I stared blankly at the view of the Earth, or what I had thought was the Earth. But I was starting to realize the truth of my situation. "We're not in Kansas anymore Toto." My sanity cracked, a twisted grin splitting my muzzle as I started to giggle, then chuckle, until I gave in to maddened laughter as the reality of my situation became all too clear. That wasn't the Earth and I wasn't on its moon. "Not only am I a deformed horse thing, I'm an alien deformed horse thing!" I continued to laugh, vision blurring as moisture built in my eyes, then spilled down my cheeks as the sound of my crazed release of tension and burgeoning madness rang loud in my ears. This was my reality now, inescapable and undeniable, but I had no idea what in God's name I was supposed to do about any of it.