'GRAB HER NOW' I write on the smooth wall, using blood for ink. Not my blood, well sort of my blood. It's complicated. The important thing is for the next one to read it soon enough.
Teleportation is just a flash, I once thought. Pop-poof and you're there. I should be able to forgive myself for thinking that, but I can't. I can't forgive any of my selves for being so fundamentally wrong.
It feels like three days ago, though there are no 'days' in this empty place.
I simply teleported, as unthinkingly as ever. It was stupid. I just wanted to get to Pinkie's place faster – I'd spent too long picking out my dress. How could it be any more trivial? If only I'd known the suffering it would bring.
Teleportation is a complicated spell, few master it. I wish fewer did. I wish it was never developed. Despite the spell's complexity, I was accustomed to it. I used it flippantly.
The familiar magical light flashed, and instantly I came to this place, this magical nowhere, an enormous empty sphere. Well, not entirely empty. I wish it was empty.
I hovered, motionless in the center, amazed as the teleportation spell did something I thought it had never done before. A copy of myself formed, taking bare seconds to build itself out of nothing. She was alike in every detail, but instead of watching in rapt attention, she floated limp, eyes closed.
Poof, she was gone; I fell.
I fell onto a gruesome heap. My eyes took it in, my hooves felt the cold flesh underneath, but it took ages for my mind to accept it: an enormous pile of dead ponies. Dead purple ponies, unicorns and alicorns. A pile of my own rotting corpses.
My legs went weak at the sight, the smell of it. I couldn't stand to touch them, those horrific bodies.
Before I recovered, I found one of them wasn't dead. “Murderer!” the other me shouted. “I'll kill you!”
She was thin, gaunt, and she stumbled as she climbed the hill of decaying bodies. What hair she had left was frayed, sickly... I saw dark stains around her mouth and madness in her eyes.
I'll spare the gory details, the grim duel, the weapons she'd fashioned from old bones. All that matters is that when silence fell again, another body lay on the heap, another testament to the ugly suffering I'd forced on myself.
I gasped for breath, my legs trembling atop the rank flesh, momentarily heedless of what I stood upon.
Slowly I understood what happened, what had happened over and over. Teleportation isn't a way to send myself somewhere. It's a way to send a copy, perfectly complete in every detail, even the memories I held before I cast the spell. The original? She's unnecessary. Refuse, garbage, the detritus of a spell that should have been forbidden, not taught to promising young unicorns.
Yes, when I looked, I found them. Dozens of little horned skeletons near the heap's bottom, and there must be hundreds more underneath. As a filly, I'd loved practicing teleportations. The thought of my youthful enthusiasm sank like a ball of ice in my gut. Which one was first? What a lonely death...
But not all in the pile were copies of myself. That was the worst part. The first one I'd noticed was a green spot in the pile of purple and black-brown rot. Spike, the little dragon I'd hatched from an egg, the one I'd teleported so many times. After a cursory search around, I noticed several more that didn't match – all of my friends ... how many copies, I hadn't had the stomach to count. Why count them?
Every corpse was emaciated, bones outlined through the skin ... starved and dehydrated. Worse, some had dark stains on their muzzles, others had parts missing, bites taken out.
Will I stoop to that? Will I do it this time? It's unthinkable, horrific. And yet, so many of my past selves resorted to eating ... that in their desperation, in their primal need to survive for just a little longer. I shudder. Already my stomach gnaws at me from the inside, my head hammers from the lack of fluids, and that pile waits, stinking and mocking me with wasted water and nutrients my body could almost digest.
Instead, I focus on what I'm doing. I've moved countless bodies. I could barely bring myself to touch them at first, having to move them by hoof because my magic doesn't seem to work here, but I'm inured to it now. Maybe that's the first step toward madness, but I want to think – need to think – that it's merely doing what's needed.
My new pile of bodies gives me access to the wall of the sphere, the one I faced when I first appeared here, I think. And on that wall, in the still-wet blood of the copy I'd killed, I've written my simple message: 'GRAB HER NOW'.
I hope the next time one of me will read that, somehow lurch forward and grab onto the fresh copy before it flashes away. If that's enough to get her out, she'll know this place, be able to cooperate with the new copy.
Maybe they can even find a way to rescue me from this hell. But who knows how long it will be. I'd gone months without teleporting last time, long enough for the previous copy to nearly starve despite her cannibalism.
The chance of rescue is a desperate delusion, I know that. But I have another hope: Maybe this message will lead to an end. If it's enough to prevent the other me from ever teleporting again, that will be victory. That hope might be enough to forestall the madness that took my predecessor, enough to repel the sneaking thought of how those corpses taste...
Please, I plead to my other self, please just never teleport again.
Author's Note
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