Mitternacht

Twilight regained consciousness. She felt sand under her and heard the sound of ocean waves nearby. The pain in her body had gone away, but she didn't want to get up. What she had seen had been a dream after all, but still it hurt her. She thought of the words that had been told her before, about how whomever was responsible for her situation would try to stop her. She had made it through this, but she feared for even worse things to come. Still, she was fully intentioned to discover the truth. She felt water reaching her body as the tide rose and she finally got up, once again ready to face the unknown.

She found herself on a beach of white sand. She looked behind her and saw an ocean devoid of any island stretching as far as she could see. In front of her was what looked like the edge of a forest, trees and leaves growing too thick for her to see through them. She decided to walk alongside the shore.

As she moved along in the never changing landscape, every step she took identical to the ones before, she started to wonder what she should have been searching in this dream. So far the passage from one dream to another had always just come to her, without the need to search for it, but it had always happened in a rather violent manner, usually from a great shock, which, she thought, made perfect sense, since they were dreams. She contemplated the idea of trying to drown herself to get out of this particular one, but quickly set aside the thuoght. She had no interest in finding out what it felt like to drown, assuming she would have even been to do so. And besides, she was curious to see what this dream had to show her, as she wondered if the ones she was going through had some sort of meaning or if they were simply meant to keep her prisoner.

After quite some time had passed and scenery around her still looked exactly the same as it had since she started walking, enough so that she started to wonder if she hadn't already circled the entirety of the island she might have been on, she decided to head towards the forest, and since it looked too hard to just walk through it, she chose instead to fly above it to look for a clearing inside inside it in which to land.

She took off and headed towards the forest, but once she was high enough to see above the treetops she realized the whole space behind them looked exactly the same. She tried flying higher to have a better view, but no matter how high she was she couldn't see any sign of a clearing or of something reaching above the trees, just an endless sea of green. She turned to the ocean and saw nothing but water in that direction. The beach she had been walking on, seen from up there, looked like a white line separating two differently coloured halves of an endless plane, one green and one blue, stretching endlessly into the horizon. Discouraged, she floated back down.

She laid her body on the sand and started to think about what to do next. Trying to drown was still an option, and in case it didn't work she could always just try falling from a high enough place, but she didn't want to have to resort to these means to move on. It would have felt like admitting defeat to herself if the best thing she could come up with to wake up was 'let's just try to kill myself'. Still, she had no other ideas. She tried concentrating herself on waking up, but it didn't work. She tried to use her magic to open herself a pathway through the forest, but the trees seemed unaffected by her powers. She tried to use it on the water, but the waves remained unchanged in their monotonous repetition no matter how hard she concentrated. She started to teleport herself further and further along the beach, but wherever she arrived it always looked just like the place she had come from. Frustrated, she stopped midway while casting yet one another teletransportation and instead discharged the magical energy as a blast towards the ground.

The spell blew a small crater in front of her. It wasn't anything more than a little hole, and soon the wind and the waves filled it back with sand, but for as long as it remained that part of the shore had been different than the rest. Twilight watched as it disappeared, then pointed her horn to the ground and started to use her magic to dig. She kept digging deeper and deeper, and when the hole had already become various times her size she felt something other than sand. She carefully used her telekinesis to estract it and then brought it closer to her to inspect it.

It was a slab of what looked like glass, with a series of words inscribed on it.
'It's over. I've walked on this shore for far too long, and I can't go on any more. I wish I hadn't ended up here, but really, what could I have done? Nothing. Soon the waves and the wind will erase every trace of my presence here, like they did with all the ones before me. I should have never left the wreck of my ship to look for help, when I tried to come back it was already gone. Everything looks the same here, the same trees, the same ocean, only the marks of my steps in the sand show me I'm still moving forward, but they never last for long. I think I'm losing my mind. If only magic worked on something other than the sand. But why am I even writing this. To be remembered? And by who? I was running away when I arrived here, and yet now I wish I had stayed. I would have rather died there than here. But it's late now. I'm tired, hungry, thirsty, and using my magic on this has taken away what little energy I had left. Soon I'll be erased too, and nothing but white will be left. I see it. Or is it the world around me that's being erased? I must be losing my mind.'

Twilight finished reading it, and then she put it back under the sand. She didn't know why, but she felt like she knew what to do now. She filled back the hole, and then she waited. She heard the sound of the waves, she felt the wind through her mane, and she looked at the white sand below her. And the more she looked, the more it looked like it wasn't sand, but only a color, and it filled her visionmore and more. And the wind and the waves grew distant, and then they stopped. And the world faded around her, and there was nothing but white.