Wretched Hive 3: The Gray Pony

The changeling opened his eyes to find himself in his bed again, but not in the hive. Looking around, Kernel found himself in a gray library. Lining the walls were all gray bookshelves holding the same, monochromatic books. In the distance, he could hear their paper spines hit the floor one after the other. A strange reflex had the changeling look up, but his blue eyes found the ceiling of this library. He turned back toward the sound and began to trot toward it.

It was a trail of destruction. Books were flung off the shelves with no concern for their conditions and onto the floor like common garbage. The strange part was that there were no claw marks, ashes, or any major damage to any of the books. Almost stranger was the fact that the books bore no titles on their covers or words in their pages. The changeling looked over the wasted paper until the sound of more spines hitting the floor grabbed his attention. He galloped this time.

Kernel rushed through the library, tracing the line of books to the source of the ruckus. A shadowy figure reached a long and gangly, dragon-like arm up to the top of the shelf and pulled several books down with one motion. The changeling could hear the figure flipping through all the pages before the long arm tossed the empty books aside like the rest.

“Hey!” Kernel shouted at the figure.

What turned toward him was something he didn’t recognize. Four green, changeling-like eyes looked at him from a rounded snout sporting two sets of fangs. The upper set was normal; the lower set was more like two mandibles, twitching as the four eyes made contact with Kernel’s two. Below the mouth, eight thin legs supported the monsters weight. Each seemed to end with a pair of claws. Covering the creature was a black cloak that seemed to end in dark smoke, keeping its hind obscured from his sight.

The creature crooked its head slightly as its mandibles twitched. Its four eyes blinked. Then it fled, its eight legs a blur within the smoke. Kernel chased after it, only to find the smoky trail leading up the side of the bookshelf.

“Wait!” he cried out to the thing.

But it was gone.

Kernel trotted around the library, unsure of where his old bed had gone to in his chase. He could feel the gaze of the monster crawling down the back of his spine, but when he turned there was nothing. He trotted faster. The feeling persisted. Kernel galloped toward a reading table and ducked underneath it. This started to seem familiar.

As if on cue, eight long legs thumped lightly onto the floor a foot away from Kernel’s cowardly snout. They scuttled toward him. He could hear papers rustling and felt the sounds of four claws thumping down onto the table above him. Kernel watched the sounds scratch their way down the length of the wood until they were directly above his neck. Looking back toward the legs, his gaze was met with the four eyes staring back. Though it had no lips, Kernel could tell it was smiling. The cloak had been caught on the table and a changeling horn stuck out from the monster’s forehead.

“What do you want from me?!” the startled changeling screamed at the beast.

The mandibles stilled themselves before pulling away from the maw. “To explain,” Foresight’s voice echoed out. “I need you to explain this...”

One of the extra limbs grabbed Kernel by the throat and dragged him out from under the table. He shook out of the creep’s grip, only to find a strange collage of pictures sitting on the table. Each picture was a different drawing of part of a monster. When combined, it looked like Bubbles.

“What is that?” Foresight’s voice echoed from beneath the cloak.

“What does it matter?” Kernel asked it, glaring back at the eight-legged thing.

“It’s foreign,” it whispered. “You didn’t think of these images yourself.”

“Oh please,” he scoffed. He gestured toward the table. “It was here the last time I had nightmares! This library had that monster and a dragon with some kind of tentacle.” He shook his head. “There’s nothing foreign about it! It’s just as foreign as you... Whatever you are.”

The four eyes blinked asynchronously. Two of the limbs gestured toward a couple busts to the left. “And them?”

Kernel looked over the sculptures. Both were of ponies. The second one was missing its jaw. They seemed familiar. Then it clicked.

“That’s my innocence,” he explained. “And that’s my conscience.” He smiled. “Even less foreign than everything else here!”

The four eyes smiled back at him. “That’s funny.” The limbs seemed to be shuffling around under the sheet. Two of them reappeared with a book held between them. “Because I just happened to find a transcript of your mind.” Its mandibles shifted slightly, grinning more widely as he held the gray book out to Kernel.

The changeling grabbed it from the monster’s claws and started flipping through it. It was just like any other book in the library.

“All the pages are blank!” Foresight’s voice cackled. “You don’t have the foundation for any form of dream, let alone a nightmare of that caliber!”

“Then how do I remember those nightmares so well!” Kernel insisted.

The cloaked figure shook its head. “You just don’t get it do you?”

The smoke flared up as the library began to melt.

“You can’t reference materials that don’t exist!”

The darkness clouded the monster enough that only Foresight’s voice could be heard.

“Which means if someone tells you...”

The voice faded into blackness.

Kernel could feel that his eyes were closed.