//-------------------------------------------------------// Insonnia -by Equimorto- //-------------------------------------------------------// //-------------------------------------------------------// Journey //-------------------------------------------------------// Journey Luna was flying. Over a sea of green hills she was gliding, and she could see rivers crossing them, blue as the cloudless sky above, from where the sun watched over the land, filling it with light. She felt the wind as it caressed her body as it did with the grass below her, moving it much like a stone thrown in a lake would move the water. While observing the wave-like movements of the blades and the way the water reflected the light she felt as if invisible, untangible string were pulling at her, and as the sun reached its peak in the sky onward she went, flying towards unknown places for untold reasons. She flew over a city, small but gracefull, with its many rooftops and chimneys, and narrow streets running between the geometrically arranged houses, and the main square with a tree shaped fountain from where the water flowed out in a small stream that rolled down the low hill the city was built on into the nearby river, over which an ancient stone bridge connected the two halves of a dirt road that led into the countryside. As the sun moved forward in its path across the sky, so did the princess. Evening found her soaring over a forest of young trees, and she heard the suonds of unseen animals returning to their nests to rest for the night, and that of as many others waking up from their slumber to once again take their role of hunter or prey in the endless game of life. All night she traveled over the woods, accompaigned by the nocturnal creatures' cries, and in the night she reached a mountain. She spent the next day flying over the mountain, and the one after, and all the ones that came, taller and colder the more she went on. From the sky she saw the dark greens and browns of the woods give place to the greys and blacks of the mounains' rocks, and then watched as these colors too left, and all became a thousand different shades of white as snow covered everything around. Soon a blizzard started, and in the endless swirling of countless snowflakes all lost its shape, and up was down and day was night, and there was no direction left but forward. Once the top of the last, tallest mountain was behind her, the alicorn found herself on a plateau, lifeless and covered in ice, with a frozen lake at its center, endlessly stormed by winds cold as the abysses of space. Through this place she flew, endlessly driven by an unknown desire, and in the far distance, when looking at a border of the plateau she was flying parallel to, she could see impossibly old mountains, blacker than the deepest parts of the sea, so incomprehensibly tall that there was no telling if the lights shining at their top were that of stars or came instead from the house of gods residing there. Past the plateau and descended the mountain chain on the other side was jungle, tall and lush and full of strange and unknown species, and in the jungle were ruins of an ancient civilisation, titanic and beautyful, a display of the power once held by something now too old to die, inhabited by beings too young to be called alive, where unseen, mysterious tunnels lead into caves of blue and green light above sealed off chambers as old as the earth around them. All of this Luna saw as she kept going in her journey, and looking forward she noticed that the trees there were burnt and dead, and the ground was covered in ash, as if a great fire had come to destroy all life. And past that was a desert, great and vast more than the eye could see. And the sun never left the desert, for as the princess crossed it never did the air grow less hot, but instead only became hotter, and hotter, and the sea of sand below her melted into a lake of glass, and the lake of glass broke into a sea of sand, and again and again for countless aeons, as the sun spun endless cicles in the sky, as if plummeting to the ground. Finally, the alicorn reached the end of the desert, and started to fly over an ocean. It was calm at first, with the greens and blues of the water and the wind and waves, and the whites of birds and fishes in the waves and the wind. But then was black, and in the black was red and purple and fire and thunder, and the storm raged on and on and all was water and light and then darkness, and Luna flying onward in the middle of all the chaos. And then she fell. In a blur of cold and black an water she fell, and deeper and deeper until light was only a distant memory, a dream, a lie, until the concept itself of light was no longer something that could exist, deeper into an abyss of ever blacker darkness, a cemetery of dead suns were rotting demons of forgotten gods lay waiting for the flames to fade, shapeless, nameless abominations. Luna landed on a shore of white sand, and upon looking at what was in front of her all she could see was an endless field of white, like a desert of salt with lakes of milk and a sky of bones. And then she knew. A shapeless, black, flat worm crawling on a surface of light, a toy in the hands of an half blind god, a spectacle for the enjoyment of things beyond, terrified she screamed and nothing was heard, for there was no sound, only the flickering of lightning in the minds of beings in dimensions above, and as the truth passed her mind and destroyed it she woke up to the blissful forgetfulness, again a puppet at the hands of another puppeteer.