Flashby JinxedChaptersAwakeningAcclimationAcceptanceAccessionAwakeningIt hadn't worked. The writing on the wall had said GRAB HER NOW, and even in a disorientated state I'd quickly followed the instruction, attempting to -while doing my best to remain calm- hold the rapidly constructing body in front of me, but when the new me had formed, she'd simply popped out of existence with a flash, and nothing had happened. I then found myself falling down as my wings refused to work, and rapidly having to come to terms with what I'd just witnessed as I glided out of the way of several jutting spears and fallen ponies. I had landed on a cold mesa of matted fur, mutilated flesh, and endless death. Built of myself. How long had it been since then? Two days? A minute back home turned into three here according to the journal, I had little way of knowing how long had passed beyond that, there was no indication to mark the passage of time here, no Sun, no Moon, no nothing. According to the pages the instruments were all destroyed, ones made before I'd arrived, by her. It had probably been a day before I found Twilight's journal, bloodstained and tattered as it was, penned in blood. I'd have found it sooner had I not suffered a bit of a dissociative episode, the void full of rotting bodies had been a lot to take in, the smell had been worse. When I snapped out of it and came to the surreal reality of the situation, little by little I soldiered on and started to explore. The book had been just under where I'd come down from, partially dug out from the masses in the mountain of flesh, a little cave of horrors where lifeless eyes had looked at me from all directions. The pages had mentioned Sparkle, a friend of Twilight, they'd gotten along quite well, but the fairly normal writing had abruptly ended at that point after Twilight had said Sparkle had been very hurt by an explosion, and Princess was to blame. I reasoned that was me, in a way. The hazardous potion I'd been working on, I remember teleporting it away from the lab. The past me had killed a lot more since then, a limbless gutted corpse not far from the bone spears was reportedly the remains of Princess. I knew because Twilight had been at pains to describe the things she had done to her victims after the incident following the simple bookkeeping. After Princess, there was just a short haphazard tally, and she'd ended it with ten written murders. I had a feeling this hadn't been all of her kills after Princess, but there had been no way of knowing. A blank page later, and the writing was slightly different, still written in blood to which despite the messiness of a shaky hoof, had been quite legible, certainly a different me. She's killed me. She was insane. She was me. I won't live very long, too many wounds, magic doesn't work, I can't regenerate. I killed her though, please understand, Sweet Celestia I didn't want to. It was self-defence. Please believe me, I never meant to hurt anypony. I'm so sorry. That was where I'd found the journal, its poorly skin-bound pages clutched in the hooves of who I think I could safely confirm was the freshest corpse in the dugout of bodies. She'd bled out from multiple stab wounds, and given that Twilight had 'helped' Sparkle to recover from her injuries after the explosion, the desiccated and charred half-corpse in there had quite likely been Sparkle. The journal hadn't mentioned Spike though, and I didn't want to think about the poor little dragon's impaled body that was resting there next to Sparkle with his innards barely kept from spilling out with cloth. It was all so harrowing. I'd cried at the sight, and thrown up a moment afterwards. I'd composed myself immediately, and gave them a sort of burial by collapsing the den of corpses. I wouldn't live there as they had done. That was yesterday. I hadn't eaten since then, my food was limited. I'd packed sandwiches in my saddlebags for myself and the girls as I'd been teleporting to a picnic... A picnic I would never make. I had to save what I had, as much as I could. I had a terrible feeling I wasn't going to see them for a while. Since then I've been busy working. I had to improve the situation somehow. I certainly wasn't going to kill the next me, as no doubt many of my predecessors had done, I couldn't imagine doing that. I knew I was going to teleport again at some point, it was too convenient not to. I hoped that the next me would get used to the putrid smell of the place just as much as I had so far. Surprisingly, it didn't take forever to acclimate. I still very much wanted a bath, but that wasn't feasible. The journal had a brief checklist and small inventory before it had descended into odd notes and insane rambling messages. I'd scoured it and the area for anything, there might be more I could use, and possibly rebuild what was lost. The other Twilight had given up, given into madness and chaos, but I wasn't going to surrender so easily. Then again, Twilight's journal was lengthy, it was likely she had lived for a very long time in the void, perhaps even the longest, and she'd grown tired of survival. But I was searching. There had to be more. There had to be a way out. My first priority was water. But I needed to create before I could produce it. Before, stills had been made of water bottles and sticks scavenged from previous saddlebags and bodies, but those had been lost in the explosion, and not Twilight, nor I at this point of my searches, had found anything reusable, which had likely contributed to her downward spiral into insanity in the end. Perhaps she had been confused and lost initially arriving here, but there were better ways to make a water purifier. Maybe she lacked the knowledge I had since gained, or maybe she'd been working on a less grisly mindset the second she'd accepted the gravity of her situation... But I didn't need any of the items she'd thought essential; I had flesh, blood, and bone, lots and lots of all of it. It was all a precious resource here. I need to capitalise on that. My magic didn't work here either, I'd discovered that the very moment I'd arrived and tried to teleport away. I'd thought of my bedchambers in the castle and expected to be gone, as quickly as I'd come. All that did was give me a severely heavy migraine and cause my eyes to bleed, which had likely contributed to my small detachment episode. Magic didn't work, so I had to use my hooves. It was horrendously messy work, there were tools to hoof already made of bone, made by Twilight, so I used those. It had taken a great deal of psyching myself up, but I managed to skin one of my many corpses legs, at least until I started dry heaving, I should have picked a fresher body. I paused while my stomach settled, and resumed not long after. It took a lot of time, I'd never hacked off a leg before. I slowly succeeded in separating the muscle, the fat and sinew, and now I had several new bones. I repeated the process on the other legs of the corpse, and then went to find a far less dessicated me so the detritus would be less offensive to the senses. My efforts led me to the top of the mountain, the me there having been impaled through the head on one of the bone spears. Her eye was missing, torn out, and when I had taken the body off the jutting spire of bone, I felt rather disgusted that her genitals had been partially eaten. It had been Twilight that had done it. Well, of course it had been, but, the journal's Twilight. The body's damage matched one of the descriptions of what she'd done to her prey here. Twilight of the Journal had become such a sadist in her final days. I looked at the body again with a great deal of sympathy, moving it down to a clearer area so I could work. She was less decomposed than most. I imagined femurs would be good for support, they were a long bone in other mammals, wing bones were extremely tough on Pegasi, quite the same for Alicorns, but for bowls I knew I would need the skull, probably quite a few. I quickly went back up the hill partway and retrieved an axe I'd found not a few hours earlier, and got to decapitating the body, as well as taking off the limbs too. The shiv I'd found earlier was put to use to remove the skin and muscle, a lot more precise than using the axe. I'd also made a point of gathering a number of bone knives scattered around, lying alone or stabbed into bodies, and keeping them on hoof in case this one should blunt or break. It hit me like a train as I finished removing the remaining eye, as I then looked into my own faceless skull, what I could manage to make myself do. I directed my dry heaving and spittle away from the work, painfully throwing up some bile as I hadn't eaten today. I took several ragged breaths, my throat burning, my eyes streaming, and my nose snotty as my heart thundered in my chest like an enraged Manticore. I wept for home and friends. I stopped myself before long, I needed not to cry. I needed to reserve fluids. A shock of sudden exhaustion overcame me and I collapsed there against a semi-clear space on the floor, and slept for what I felt like might be an hour. Awaking to my gruesome assignment had been depressing, but I knew I needed to push on. I tried my best to recover, and used the axe to carefully split the skull at eye level all the way around, giving as much space as could be allowed when turned upside down. The brain had been thankfully not too messy to deal with, I pulled that free and discarded it well away from my position. I had a bowl, made of my own skull. It was a distressing milestone in the path ahead. I was bloody, soaked all over in it, and Celestia knew what else with all the liquids that all these corpses could create. I wiped my hooves off on a fairly clean purple mound near to me, carefully tottering over to where I left my saddlebags and pulling out my wonderful sandwiches. They were starting to get stale, the hay and daisies in them were fine though, they should be for a few more days. I took my time eating one, making it last and savouring the texture. I allowed myself a second to settle the gnawing in my belly. I was going to put off resorting to what I knew would have to come eventually. Any food that still remained before I arrived was putrid and rotten, just like the possibly tens of thousands of corpses. With any luck, I would teleport some food. It was a small hope. I gathered myself and my thoughts, I had no time to waste, but then I stopped. The thought came that of course I should work smart, not hard, to save my strength as much as possible as without proper nutrition in the long run, what I had was limited. With the amount of bodies here, it was more than likely that some had rotted to the point they were just skeletons, or near enough to it. Would moving the masses of corpses in the mountain be more taxing than cutting one apart from near the top? It was hard to tell, I wasn't exactly the active type. It was certainly likely that there were nothing but skeletons at the very centre of it nearer the bottom. I had been teleporting for decades, and even without nature to break these corpses down, they still decayed with simple time. But as much as I wanted to make the work easier, the mound was far too large, it would take too long to go that far down, and I refused to dig long enough to find the pure skeletons anyway, as I knew I would find smaller ones. I'd teleported a lot as a foal, I didn't want to see those smaller bones. The Twilight of the Journal, as I had decided to call her, had made a noticeable pathway through the large sphere -which was one of many pages of information I committed to memory, along with the rough distance it covered- and from what I could see, had made a few smaller piles of bodies around the towering mound itself that were in varying states of decay, something which the journal had not mentioned. Like she'd been sorting inventory, or laundry. Perhaps an attempt to stave off boredom? Either way, as I made my way down to one of the piles, I could see it was now in such an advanced state of decomposition that coming near it threatened to make my stomach purge itself. I backed up a way, and quickly rushed at it, bucking the pile with my hindlegs like Applejack would have done to a tree in her orchards, and promptly stepped away. The pile had shifted, barely. I repeated the action until it spilled over completely. I felt myself take in deep breaths, far away from the fallen stack at least. Rather disgustingly, and yet also usefully, my back hooves had sloughed away flesh from the heavily rotting corpses, and the ones at the bottom of the stack were decayed enough that bone was already showing through their hides. The air was horrendous, but I took a deep breath in further from the pile, and then moved nearer. I managed to drag one of the corpses away from it, making a process of moving away to hold my breath, and coming back to work on it with a bone knife. I had to as my stomach was protesting when I didn't. I couldn't lose my food, I would dehydrate too quickly. That couldn't happen, I needed to survive. The flesh and muscle was so putrid that I was practically able to scrape all of it from the bones like it was snow being shovelled in winter, I found the comparison rather morbid if a little bemusing. Humour was good though, it helped my situation a little. A few more times of breathing elsewhere and returning, and I had some more bones. I had grabbed the axe and removed the head of the body too, there wasn't as much resistance from the muscles with all the rot. Unfortunately, after scraping away the everything from the skull, splitting it caused me to violently vomit, as I'd accidentally breathed in upon doing so, and the corpse was at such a level of putrefaction that the brain had essentially liquified into a horrifically putrid slushy soup, spilling out as I separated the bone. I took a few moments to recover, well back from it. It was disturbing to think that one area of corpses was a haven compared to another. I now had two bowls, and plenty of femurs, tibias, and metatarsals, which I had discovered were all roughly the same in length, the humeri, ulna, and radii were all slightly shorter and curved but still had good usage potential. Having them to hoof instead of seeing them in diagrams was certainly a learning experience, even if the circumstances were less than pleasant, it didn't change that pony anatomy was very interesting. Moving back with my skeletal collection to around the mountain, I found an area not far from it somewhat devoid of corpses, where the strange textureless surface of the sphere was overly present, and put everything down there. I was fairly certain anything I created would stand up if I made a good enough base, the sphere was large enough that the floor -if that was what it could be called- was seemingly flat. I spent a few minutes resettling all the things I'd gathered so far to this location. The next part was fire. A step closer in the hefty checklist to having water. Checklists were nice. Well, actually, the next step was making something that could use the fire. I needed to make a rack to dry things on, and to tie the bones together I needed lengths of string. For now I think I had to settle with stripping a corpse of its still wet intestines, so I used the same body I'd gotten the first bowl from. Fresher intestines would certainly be a great deal easier to work with and far less off-putting. Although I imagined a dessicated corpse would yield drier intestines, they would likely lose their tensity quicker and break apart due to rot. They needed to be suitably prepared. I used to axe to split the body from below the neck all the way down to the groin, stopping before the vagina just above the teats, she didn't need to be more defiled there than she already had been. Once I pulled the guts out I carefully cut them free and measured them out, pulling and twisting several lengths until they were fairly taut and in turn separating and tying those together, which wasn't easy to do with just my hooves. They would last for a fair while when they dried out, eventually I could replace them with hair rope that would essentially never decay. It was a tricky job next, everything so far had been, but even using my hooves I managed to tie together a roughly squarish base using what I had. I built upon it and eventually made a decent enough rack, made of bone and intestinal rope, to lay things on. It sagged to one side initially, so I added supports to keep it sturdier using the smaller bones. It was workable enough, if a bit wet. Now came the fire. Fire would make me warm, and I would sweat, I'd lose precious fluids I was still holding. But I also needed fire to dry out my rack and set the rope, and dry skin and gut to make filters, more rope, sewing strips... Fire would help me survive as much as water would. I'd found the flint-rocks already, Twilight of the Journal had used them to make fire, and so would I. She'd already perfected the way to do it, so I simply repeated her work. I started with scraped fur, sparked the rocks, blew on the fur until it smouldered, put it into a larger pile of fur that had some scraped fat in it, and put that on top of some manure. I placed my small rack over the beginnings of the fire as it grew, placing all the lengths of intestine I'd twisted taught across it. While that worked, I started on stripping down another couple of bodies and gathering the longest bones to build another bigger rack. It must have an hour or two to gather, and a further hour to make the new frame. I was making progress. It was slow going, but it was happening. The smell of burning manure, fur, and smoking flesh wasn't as off-putting as the raw smell of death from all the corpses was. If anything it was a great improvement. I had a brief concern flash in my mind of suffocation, but it was quickly dismissed as not only was the fire small and contained, I also reasoned that with the vast amounts of space in this spherical void it would take a lot of fire and a lot of burning before any smoke would fall low enough to asphyxiate me. Fire was going to be useful. I had no idea how long I would be here, and it was better to be pragmatic and assume that given all the bodies, rescue wasn't coming any time soon. Until I figured a way out, which no other me had done so far, I would certainly do quite well to make things liveable, and burning a number of these corpses once the bones were harvested would not only assist in freeing up space in the general vicinity and making a fairly decent living area, but would allay my mind in a more spiritual sense. I felt these bodies needed to be given some kind of rest. But that was for later. Right now, I felt I should sleep. AcclimationIt was unfortunate to wake up again hoping everything had been a fever-dream. I spent a while laying on the voids surface, the same as I had the previous day or two, trying to move past the heavy mental block in place. I still tried in vain to convince myself I would simply think of a way to escape in the blink of an eye, but no magic worked here and surely if teleporting had made me come here in the first place, I would simply just reappear back here again, and once I moved past that crushing despair and the disgust of my surroundings, it became a great deal simpler. I had to create, to survive. It set the precedent of my mornings -probably not an accurate term- quite well. Get up, go into a short state of shock, gather wits, move on, build, and live. As far as current plans went it was one of my simpler ones, but it worked well enough. I knew my brain was still processing the entirety of what was happening around me, but I also knew I'd eventually become desensitised to all of it and it would streamline my days that much more. I'd made a large rack yesterday -again, not accurate but it would do- and before falling into a poor state of sleep I'd stripped some flesh from the corpse I'd been using, that I had taken to calling Starburst, given my cutiemark. I figured as she was presently being turned into my survival equipment that I could give her a name at the very least. Her long strips of flesh were now mostly dried out, the small fire I'd set beneath the rack having burned out while I had slept. That was good, I didn't want them to be too dry or crisp. I'd already scraped the fur off the hide, so now I have several pieces of skin to work with. My next small task was simpler. At some point during one of past self's teleportations, they had been transporting rocks. At first I'd thought them to be more flint-rocks, but that was before my eyes had caught a small glint. They were quite small, but they still had a gem or two inside of them, likely they were being sent to Rarity. It was my luck at the moment though, because not only were they here, but these sapphires and rubies were already cracked. I speculated that she probably wanted them to break apart further to make small little gems for dresses, but now they would assist with my purifying methods. I gathered some spare bones -ribs from Starburst's body- and I gathered the gems once I'd dug them out of their rocks, then taking one of the flint-rocks that was larger and carefully began to break them down with some applied force. The bones were easier, the gems a little tougher, but it didn't take too long. Then I made another fire, but this time I used a small amount of the crushed bones with a pile of fur and fat, throwing the tuft of smouldering fur onto it and closing my hooves around it. There was no wind here, but bones didn't burn easily, keeping it contained turned the fire inward, and thankfully before long the crushed bones were aflame with help from the fat and some directed air keeping it burning long enough to take effect. I carefully kept it topped up with fur and more crushed bone as it grew, managing it as I worked. I alternated between that and harvesting more bones from other corpses as I needed as many as I could, but also more leg bones for the next piece in my growing collection of morbid creations. At that point I made a separate fire -not with the bones- far away from where I was working and began to throw all the muscle from the corpses I'd been using onto it. It was all rotted and of no use, and I wasn't so desperate at this point as to want to cook it for eating. Which then reminded me of my growling belly. My hooves were caked in dried blood -thankfully I'd avoided getting anything more obscene on them- and I hadn't added to that too much with anything fresh, as I noted rather grimly that I was getting far better at hacking limbs apart with greater finesse, only my lower body had received a new coat of blood. So at least when I pulled my sandwiches out of my saddlebags and ate two of them as slowly as possible, they weren't given any additional flavouring. On the negative side of things, I now only had four remaining sandwiches, and the daisies in them weren't mouldy yet, but they didn't smell too fresh. If I continued to have two sandwiches a day then that was two days of food left, I could stretch it to four days with one sandwich a day, but I'd have to work less to conserve energy, and it was likely the daisies would become inedible by then. It was becoming more apparent to me that I would eventually have to eat meat. Before that happened I needed to make water, Gryphons that had eaten meat had said that depending on the creature, meat could vary in its saltiness, and I wasn't sure where pony ranked on that list. If I ate meat I'd need water, or dehydrate faster than I already was. As it was, I was already feeling the occasional ache in my kidneys and a slight pulse behind my eyes, I really didn't want the symptoms to worsen. Princesses, please can I teleport some food, and a jug of water. I went back to my bone fire and added some more fur, crushed bones, and fat. That gave it a bit more life, and kept the mound of bone ignited. I broke up Starburst's spinal column and the rest of her skull, and soon added that to it too along with some of her fur, it was going well, but I'd nearly used all of what bones Starburst had to offer, only her pelvis and hooves remained. She still had plenty of intestine to give, turning that into more lengths twisted together as I draped them over the large rack. Hopefully the smoke would dry them out within a half hour, I'd be able to tell how long had passed by the drying of intestines if I counted it. Probably not the most efficient method of timekeeping though. With the bones burning and the intestines drying, I moved to my next small task. I took two of the strips of dried flesh and a bone knife, and began, very slowly and carefully, to cut them further into fine thin lengths. In the time it took I had taken the intestine rope from the rack and made the crushed bone fire a little bigger as it burned down, keeping it level and going, trying not to find a little amusement in Starburst's teeth heating to such high levels that they were popping. Teeth were a vessel where pressure grew from the small amount of water inside them that turned into vapour, too much and the reaction was the same as popcorn. I sighed, just a little more, I could make water soon. I used the axe to split a metatarsal, and split it again until I had four pieces, then taking one of my sharper knives and whittling each of them down. I barely noticed my hunger grow as the time flew, at this point the bone fire was certainly big enough, and when it finally burnt down to glowing bits of bone that refused to burn, and a veritable little hill of ash, I'd made several needles and used the knife to bore a hole in the ends to make an eye for them. Threading the thin strips of dried flesh though one of the needles eyes, I carefully tied a loose knot I could undo when finished, and I leant over and took the rest of the larger dried strips from where I'd left them, carefully rolling each of them into a cone and leaving a small gap at the bottom for water to drip through. I sewed them from top to bottom making sure there was plenty of spare length, pulled them fairly taught, and redid the knots to then cut off the excess. The short bits weren't much use, but I still kept them, they might still be used in something else I made. The thin lengths that remained were now for the final stretch of this build. Just a little more. Again bones were taken from the endless amounts of corpses, the fresher bodies given obvious preference so I could keep my food where it belonged, and I stripped them of their leg bones and skulls. I almost lost the little contents of my stomach again cracking the skulls, but I was prepared for the brain slush this time when it appeared. Every time that I split one I would move away as I brought the axe down and force the halves apart, letting the possible foul detritus leak out, and bringing the heads further from the work area I was settling into before doing it was also a good move. I didn't want putrid brain fluid where I was going to mainly sleep for the foreseeable future. With my quarry gathered I had several new bowls and more than enough long bones for the current build, possibly the next structure too. If I figured it correctly then I might have enough of the longer bones to make a tent, with enough space for another pony. I knew it would happen again, of course it was going to. Teleportation was convenient and I didn't know the horror of it unless I was dropped here, as the next one would, and like that copy, the Twilight that formed in front of her would move on to Equestria and be oblivious to the suffering she had caused until she then teleported and arrived here, for her copy to leave her behind. The cycle would continue ad nauseam. I would end it if I could. But I couldn't think about that right now. Water was the priority. Imminent survival comes now, space for the newcomer and breaking the cycle and the dread that arose from such an existential crisis due to whether surviving would amount to anything came later. The structure that would make my water purifiers was somewhat like making a rack, starting with a squarish base and building up with small supports added so it wouldn't just fold to one side, I deviated by making it go up further, without adding any too many bars across as with my previous racks and instead using bones spaced enough to hang my hide cones from, but close enough so I could fit more on the single structure. Once I took squares of cloth torn from the many saddlebags that many Twilight's had come here with, saving them just for these filters. I packed in two layers each into the cones, adding in another tightly wrapped and sewn piece of cloth that forced tightly into the cones small holes, filled with the still warm bone pieces, ashes, and a few slivers of gem. The rest of shards were sprinkled over the top of the small cloth pellets, sapphire and ruby alike, mixed into ashes that went with them, packing it in as best I could. It might have been that as no magic could be cast, that the magic of gems was also useless, but in case the slight cleansing properties of sapphire and ruby -the former gently cleaning to water and the latter more aggressive to foreign matter- didn't work, they would work just fine as the bone shards would along with the ash, and filter out impurities, it wasn't exactly charcoal, but it should do the trick. I figured one water filtering cone would get rid of most of the nastiness from urine, and a second would make it bearable to drink, so I hung two of them, one below the other, from a single bone at the top using a short piece of intestine, and placed a skull bowl below the filters. By the time I finished using up the space with the filters and bowls I had six columns hanging from the structure. I was actually quite impressed with myself that I still had three complete filters spare. I really hoped this would work, It looked like it might. Time to test it. I really did need to pee. I was thankful I was actually alone here for the brief few minutes it took to take down the topmost filters, relieve my pent up bladder into them until they were near-full, and quickly put them back up before the fluid could run through. I ended up filling four of them in the end, and I decided that I would spare the remaining filters to test how blood filtered. Blood was eighty percent water after all, so with any luck, that could be filtered until drinkable, but that might take more than two at one time. I was still feeling awake enough to do that, but first... I went elsewhere to relieve my bowels, as the saying went, don't shit where you eat. Or work. It was slightly bemusing that of everything, this was the least disgusting thing I had done so far. Not using a toilet and defecating in the open wasn't pleasant, but having to drink my own filtered -if it worked- urine and blood would be weirder. I was pretty hungry now after all the work to make everything, soon I'd be out of sandwiches. I had to wait, I knew from plenty of experience that even more tasking would distract me from the growling of my belly. For blood filtering to work efficiently, and neatly at the very least, I couldn't just scoop it up with my hooves, nor dunk the filters into the disgusting fetid pool of everything that pooled around one side of the corpse mountain. Why it all spread that way was likely that the sierra was slightly off-centre of this giant orb dimension and I was off to one side of that off-centre mass, thus it all pooled in the middle, and given how blood ran the same direction toward that rancid well, it added credence to the idea. I found that to be quite fortunate, otherwise I'd be constantly walking hoof deep in all sorts of disgusting fluids. What I needed was not the horrendous lake of goop. I just needed blood, and there was still a lot to take. When I worked on Starburst, going by the signs of slight discolouration through her hide from where I had shaved the fur from her coat, she was in a semi-state of livor mortis, the blood that flowed from her body had still been rather fluid, with only the barest amounts essentially turning into a thicker gelatin-like residue where gravity had made it pool. In modern morgues with preservation storage spells it took around four days for an average adult pony's body to complete livor mortis, and given that she was one of Twilight of the Journal's victims, and possibly died around the same time period as Princess, and certainly well before the last copy of me that I had discovered with the journal, it was safe to say she'd been dead for roughly over two to three weeks. Which by all logic and known science was innately wrong, by now she should have been in the middle stages of putrefaction. But here, things didn't work quite on the same time scale, so she was still only just starting to break down, the organs had still been intact, swelling hadn't yet occurred, and the skin wasn't blistered. Maybe it was simply due to the oddity of this place, the hollow void seemingly had its own rules on death and how it worked. I had a few theories, but not many that could be proven without any further ability to conduct controlled experiments from not having the essential equipment, and nothing I could act upon at the present moment in time as I had far more pressing issues. But it certainly warranted attention at some point. Those thoughts aside, it added up to the fact that there were still likely dozens of corpses with blood fresh enough that I could harvest a fair amount for drinking once filtered, if the filtering worked. The next two ideas then were to make something big enough to store liquids beyond skull bowls, and something strong enough to hold a corpse. After a short search I found a body rolled down from the mountain in rather the same condition that Starburst had been in when I had found her. She'd apparently died of a heavy stab wound below the sternum, and left to bleed out, the poor mare's face was a tired mask of utter confusion. As much as I wanted to say she might be another of Twilight of the Journal's victims, there were many corpses with a similar type of death. I wouldn't be able to get much blood from her, but like Starburst, I needed all of her body. Looking for a second corpse I found a fallen Twilight impaled on a bone spear through the throat that had fallen down to the very bottom on one side. I carefully removed it and wondered if she would have as much blood to use. Given my cutie mark again, I decided to call them Super and Nova. I took them back to my work area and got into the task. I needed two good sheets of skin, bigger than the strips I'd taken from Starburst for my filters, so I cut from below the middle of their shoulders all around to meet at the chests, and from the lower back down their flanks following the inner thighs to meet between below the barrel. I split a line down both of their middles, following the stab wound on Super, and carefully began to cut away. It only took a few moments to 'unwrap' the two sheets from one side to the other, and cut them off at the wings enough that the would-be holes could be twisted and tied off. Measuring out the various bones into a good-sized rectangular box that fit within my filtering rack, I used the now-dry intestinal lengths from Starburst to tie it all together. Once I was sure it was correct I made a second to go with it. One for blood, one for water. I started a small bone fire within the large rack and laid the skin sheets from Super and Nova across it after scraping them off so no fat or fur was left, half on one side, half on the other. Given how quickly the intestines had dried, I was hoping they would do so in the same amount of time while I worked on the corpse rack. The basis would be the same in concept as my other racks, a box that was big enough to fit a corpse on, but sloped upward and raised up enough that one of the storage boxes I was making would fit below, although it would essentially be a trough, so I figured that should be what to call them. I began to lay them out and lay myself down to see how much more I needed to add until they surrounded me. Putting it together, I then built it into a platform and had a slightly secure box with its basic supports. But I wasn't sure it would hold up with a body hanging on it once I kept building it up, so once I got the sloped basis tied together I added triangular supports to each corner facing outward, and added inner supporting sections anywhere it seemed needed. Doing so meant that it certainly did feel a lot more sturdy, and thankfully the curvature of the voids spherical surface wasn't steep enough that it could wobble. The top of it was important, I made it like my drying racks with barely any space between the bars the corpse would rest on, but instead leaving a small enough gap near the top that if I tried hard enough, I could push my hooves through. Hopefully it would be enough to hold a body. I didn't have many lengths of intestine left from Starburst, and with all I'd taken she was down to scraps. The few remaining lengths I had would probably go to finishing the corpse rack with additional supports. All that really remained of her now were parts of the coat I hadn't shaved and turned into strips, muscle and organs that I wasn't sure what to do with yet, and her hooves. I'd taken all of her other bones for my projects, and just used her pelvis for the fire to dry the sheets. It was a small part of my sentimentality that wanted to keep the hooves. She gave her body for my survival, it was the least I could do, to commemorate her. I'd been going for a while since hanging the filters, so I went over to check them. It was a little disappointing to see that barely anything had filtered through at all, but also partially uplifting that it seemed to be working. The water that had filtered into the bowls was still discoloured from the film that coated the inside of the skull tops, which was to be expected, but I had anticipated that. There was enough that I could take a scrap from one of the saddlebags I'd sliced up and scour it around the bowl. After a minute or two it was perfectly bone coloured, and I tipped the scummy water out elsewhere, placing the vessel back beneath the filters, and repeating the action with each skull top and a different piece of cloth scrap. I'd lost the small amounts of water that I'd successfully filtered from doing so, and after a quick check of one of the top filters, it seemed there wasn't much left to filter through, but it made sense, having to go through dry ashes that would absorb moisture, to also go through a small pellet of compressed ash, bone, and gem, it was going to need more. Overall, it was good, my filters were working. It was a success! Now, if I needed to pee more, I would be happier. I checked on the skin sheets and it seemed that being over a concentrated small fire that was left to burn down while the sheets kept the heat in, had done pretty well to dry them out to a usable degree. Dry enough that the moisture in them wasn't going to bother me all that much. I took one sheet off and trotted it over to where the beginnings of my troughs were, draping it over one and being rather pleased that it gave me plenty of room to push it down, almost until it touched the voids surface. If I tried to make a more boxy insert with the skin, I found there was a slight gap between the edges of the sheet and the bones I was trying to fit it into, so when I went and grabbed my needle and sewing strips from where I'd left them, I made sure it was as tightly adhered to the corners as possible without there being any gaps as I sewed the sheet to each corner in several places, and sewed the wingholes shut before tying them around too for good measure. The skin was smooth despite the slight folding in the corners, had no splits, and didn't look like it was going to tear any time soon. The tied knots of the strips that secured the sheet to the rack were doubled up, and tugging them didn't give any sign of snapping either. So now the corpse rack was secure, and I had a trough to go with it. Now, onto the final stretch, the checklist was almost complete. Despite my fatigue I went in search of another corpse, and it seemed as if it took forever until I came across a body that apparently hadn't died of being stabbed, and quite intact as well, her hide hadn't bloated or discoloured, and although she'd entered livor mortis she didn't seem to be any farther along than the other three bodies I'd been utilising. A quick check found she'd broken her neck, from falling or it having been inflicted I didn't know, but she'd be quite good for my purposes. I was getting pretty bored with cutie-mark names, I'd just call her Booksmarts. She, like many others, had rolled down the mountain, so I pulled her around to my working area with only a little effort. Lifting her up had been annoying, as I hadn't actually lifted the other bodies up, just dragged them around. I didn't want to say I was chubby, and I certainly exercised when I got the chance, but I was not easy to hoist around. Getting Booksmarts onto the corpse rack was a little worrying, doing it bit by bit until I got her rear legs and back end onto it with a precarious shudder from the structure, but the rack held. The support was doing its job. It held as I managed to pull her middle up onto it as well, and thankfully the body didn't slide much. It took a few moments of fussing and movement to lay her somewhat spread-eagle on her front, and it was pleasing to see that I could successfully force the rear hooves through the top gap and keep Booksmarts in place. As measured out, her head and neck dangled just over the edge near the bottom, with the trough below. I trotted over to my knives, grabbed one, and came back with a steady amount of apprehension. It was a bizarre feeling, that I'd already carved up a few of my own corpses like cadavers, and yet... slitting a throat was something that gave me pause, and I knew that the reason was because so far I'd seen bodies that had been heavily injured. If I squinted my eyes hard enough, it really did look as if Booksmarts was just sleeping. I think it was also because she had no marks beyond the bruising over her neck that I didn't want to damage her any more than she already had been, quite silly of me in a way. But I was also doing what Gryphons did to pigs, and that really hit home just what I was doing. I breathed in, and heavily dragged the bone knife across her throat. It didn't take a second before Booksmart's blood was flowing into the trough below, I found myself falling to my haunches and watching, transfixed by the sight of red liquid pouring forth from the wound I had inflicted. It was like wine with how it caught in the strange light of the endless void that surrounded me. Booksmart's face was so peaceful, she'd died with her eyes closed and her face blank, but I swore she was gently smiling. I couldn't help myself as I just... broke down, and bawled like a little filly. Crying for all the times I'd died here, I cried for Starburst, for Star, for Nova, cried for Twilight of the Journal and all of her victims, and Booksmarts that I'd slit the throat of. For little Spike. I'd crushed up bones, I'd sawed away muscle and sinew, gotten my hooves deep into guts and viscera, cracked skulls, made a mockery of life in the name of my own continued one, and shit in the open like a simple beast. All just trying to live, and to survive. I knew I needed to, but it was horrible, and I'd been pushing it all away, trying to focus on my tasks just like I had when I'd been a student under Celestia. My legs curled up and I laid foetal while I let myself sob. It wasn't right to be here, wasn't right that this should have happened. Nopony, no creature, deserved this fate. If not for the fact I'd found definitive proof that this was the consequence of teleportation I'd have believed this to be Tartarus itself. I wanted to go home, I wanted to be back in my bed with Spike to be annoying and wake me up early so I could get on with my duties, pout at him as he brought in a wonderful breakfast like the amazing number one assistant he was. I wanted to see my friends and hold them close. I know they'd help me weather this nightmare, but I was glad they weren't here. I wouldn't ever wish this place upon my worst enemy. Not even Sombra or Tirek deserved to be in this netherworld. It took me a good long while before my tears subsided, maybe I ran out of energy, it didn't matter. I laid there in the eerie quiet, my slow breathing and heartbeat the only sounds in this horrific dimension. I closed my eyes and breathed out in a shaky breath, willing myself under control. Slowly, slowly I got myself up until I was sitting again. I reasserted my mental barriers and fortified my defence. They were cracked and crumbling, but still held against the onslaught of horror that continuously slammed into them. They'd have to keep holding. Another deep breath in now. I had to get through this, or die in the attempt. I'd see my friends again, my home again, one day. If not, then I'd end my life with dignity and see them once more in the green pastures of Elysium. A glance at Booksmarts and she was still draining, gravity was my ally here, and the frame she rested on was holding, her hooves held tight. The trough was half full, and the blood flow was letting up, so at least it wouldn't spill everywhere. One last task for the day to go, then I could let myself rest properly. I moved over to the filtering rack, somewhat uplifted to see the skull bowls catching what currently just amounted to barely a mouthful of water in each of the used columns, I knew it would add up eventually. I grasped one and apprehensively lifted it to my snout, it didn't smell like urine, or the blood that had coated the skull. I gingerly took a small sip, and blissfully sighed in relief. I didn't realise just how parched I truly was until I drank the tiny amount down. Placing it back under the first filter column, I drank another and stopped, just in case. I knew that urine worked now, but it was still finite. I'd save it until I knew whether or not blood could filter. I carefully unhooked the last two filters at the tops of the spare columns and brought them over to my trough of blood, along with one of the spare bowls, and carefully scooped enough blood into the top of one of the filters to almost fill it completely, before hurriedly cantering over to put it back up before I lost a single drop, repeating the action with the other filter that remained. I sighed deeply and tiredly sat back as I simply watched Booksmart's throat ebb and falter to a drip, marvelling at what extremes a pony could push herself to, all just to live. I was spent, I ached in places I didn't usually ache, places I didn't know I had, with all the moving around and exercise I'd been doing. I never built things with my own hooves on this grand a scale. I thought about tomorrow, but I stopped before too long, I didn't have many sandwiches left, and soon I was going to starve. Even being an Alicorn I doubt I would last longer than the average pony, regeneration didn't work well if you didn't eat, it would consume the body to fuel the healing the same as a body used stored fat to burn for energy, and that magic was cancelled out anyway by being here. So before that I'd need to go to new extremes in order to stay alive. Don't think about it right now. It would take some time before everything was fully filtered through. I could certainly stand to rest for now. I should have made a tent, but I'd come this far, and I was almost dead on my hooves, so I think I deserved to lie down and get some sleep. It would be more of a nap anyway. Once I got back up, the next piece of work could begin, and then the next. I shambled over and settled down onto my designated sleeping space, closing my eyes, with nothing but the soundless vacuum around me and the faintly occasional pit pit of filtering blood and urine to accompany the heartbeat in my ears as I used another body as a pillow. Hopefully when I awoke, I would have more precious water to drink. AcceptanceIt had to happen, of course. I'd not long woken up, with a slight headache thanks to my partial dehydration, and drank down some of the filtered water from a bowl to allay it as best as I could. I was actually very pleased to see blood was filtering, even if not well enough. It was still a slightly cloudy pink where it had settled into the bowls, so it would need to go through more filters. I'd been thinking about making a shelter for today after that, but that was simply a creature comfort that didn't bank on my survival, and worked though my general fugue of being trapped in this evil place while preparing for my day. And then the strange flash of light had come as I'd been preparing to find another not-too-rotted corpse that I could drain for the blood, and later use the body for additional filters and structure building. While pondering the possible ways I might have to cook meat, and how best to pad it out with the idea of bonemeal as the recurring victor, an eerie sound came that accompanied the ominous flashing. It was like a low droning ethereal scream, clawing at the back of my mind from a long distance, the light itself curling around the corners of my vision and distorting everything, making me see disturbing apparitions that lurked and twisted in the shadows. I really hoped that was just simple bewilderment brought on from the bizarre phenomenon occurring just now; I didn't even remotely want to consider if malevolent daemons lurked in this reality with me. She'd appeared in a flickering aperture of broken reality, then hanging there utterly confused and disgusted as she watched on in horror while the new her formed from pure nothingness, growing bone, muscle, and organ in tandem. The second that the new Twilight's fur had spread over her finished body, she disappeared in another jarring blast of disorienting light, and the Twilight that had been left here quickly began to fall in a shocked scream, as she too found out her wings refused to lift her. Instinctively I'd tried to catch her, attempting to grab her within my telekinesis and immediately regretted it, berating myself when my head pounded as if Pinkie was playing an entire bandstand's complement of instruments inside my skull. I blinked away the tears of blood that ran from my eyes as I quickly scrambled up the mountain of emaciated corpses to get to her. When I managed to crawl over onto the semi-flat plateau she'd landed on, she was mostly still and non-responsive, just as I'd been when I first arrived. She'd seen the horror around her and it was too much, I understood completely. I very carefully put my hooves on her so I didn't shock her any more than she already was, finding her trembling, gently rolling her to one side and then the other to check her for injuries just in case she'd landed on something sharp jutting from the corpse mesa, as there were still plenty of sharpened bone spurs I'd not utilised in my works or cared to retrieve and remove from whatever bodies they were embedded in. Much to my relief she was unharmed and alright, alright being a relative term as no doubt the monumental reality-shattering impact of this forlorn netherworld was bearing down upon her mental health and the long-spanning psychological impact it was going to cause wasn't going to be pretty. Other than the current breakdown she was prostrated before within her own mind, she was a picture of health. I knew a little of wellness checking and medical know-how from preliminary studies after my coronation, additional training and knowledge gathering I'd set myself for the future in case I ever took to new fields of work beyond just wanting to learn magic, so I performed the basics that a nurse might do in a situation of severe shock. It was clear after a minute or so that she wasn't in any danger of a panic attack or seizure, and her semi-comatose state was actually beneficial to her mental well-being; she would recover faster if left to compartmentalise and sort through the utter chaos going on in her head right now. All I was going to do was keep her safe and warm, hold her close and give her creature comfort so she knew on a certain level that she wasn't alone. The first thought that came to mind after seeing her saddlebags, which made me feel rather guilty, was the question of food. I only had one sandwich left, and the second thought came quickly that I should keep it for myself and check her belongings. I was in a worse position, physically speaking, and what little nutritional value it still had was of utmost significance for me right now, while she would last longer than I would without it. I put all of that to one side for a moment, and carefully pulled her as gently as I could down the mountain of death. She was mumbling things to herself but I couldn't understand what was being said, just gibberish brought on by psychosis. Truly, I had no idea how I would help her through it beyond positive encouragement and talking. Any magic I knew to help alleviate stress on the mind wasn't usable, but even then those were basic spells to soothe headaches and the like. It took me some time, but I managed to take her to my camp area, pulling her around to where I had chosen to sleep. She was still very much unresponsive, and I couldn't exactly talk to her, so I gingerly removed her saddlebags to inspect them. I had to try very hard to stop myself from stealing her food, she had quite a lot! She must have visited Applejack at her farm or gone to town too because she had apples. There were a number of sandwiches; daisies, lettuce, and tomato, a good choice. Cheese and tomato, also very good. Oooh, banana sandwiches! Excellent! But they weren't mine, they were hers, I wasn't going to steal no matter how much I really wanted to. Beyond the food she had a general assortment that I usually tended to travel with, a few quills, a notebook, two pots of ink (of which would make excellent holders for something later), a single emerald (not as useful as sapphires or rubies but still good), and... My prayers had been answered. A flask. It wasn't just water, it was black tea. And it was still warm. I couldn't help myself, I unscrewed the flask and took a few precious sips, enjoying the feeling of a proper beverage and the taste of it. It was just the way me and the girls liked it between us, with milk and sugar in a fair amount that was agreeable to all of us. Even if Rarity took her tea without sugar most of the time, and Pinkie had several spoons in hers. The simple thought of our discussion once on the perfect ratio we could all be happy with amused me, the feeling utterly bittersweet in my heart. I screwed the cap back on and allowed myself a moment, before putting the flash back into its saddlebag and placing it next to the still-catatonic other Twilight. It may have just been a few sips, but the tea was doing wonders for my mental state. Realistically the amount of caffeine in the tea I'd drank wasn't going to have any marginal impact on my body, but the general knowledge of what it could do was enough by association to invigorate me into action. Morale was important in any terrible situation, and mine was slightly restored. Going over to the trough where I'd drained the blood, I took Booksmarts off from the rack and gathered a few spare bones from the other builds, putting them into a pile on one side while I went about removing a good sheet of skin from Booksmarts the same way I had with Super and Nova the previous day. A quick check revealed that the remaining sheet for the other trough was dry, and the fire had burned out, so once I was done taking the sheet from Booksmarts I began to carve her up for more bones, and did the same with Super and Nova with great efficiency. Harvesting all of the intestines, I covered a full rack and the half side of the other still spare that had the sheet draped across it once I'd started another small fire. I got it all done rather quickly. After a moment I decided that with my new guest I should probably make a start on a tent of some kind. I did have water now after all, and after I'd made a trough for the water to be stored beyond just using bowls, I'd really not have much else to do beyond general gathering for the future, and continuation of upgrading what I'd made so far. I could certainly begin the process of making hair rope, as while the intestinal ropes I'd made thus far were holding, it might not even be a week before they became taut and frail enough to break after rot finally set in. To that end I could always do to the intestines what I was going to do to the rawhide I currently had making up my troughs, which was to eventually make a solution mixed of fat , blood, and brain matter to create an oily substance that might help to cure and essentially tan the leather to make it truly waterproof, as rawhide would work for now but eventually rot from being wet. But to also do it to the intestines would mean taking away what I could use on the rawhide, and the hair rope would last possibly far longer than even cured intestines might, as it was more suited to instruments than rope. I don't believe I needed to rush though, not unless the blood trough started to seep or the water bowls became full, so I took my time as I decided on making the experimental substance for tanning. I couldn't really make a start on actual tanning racks or complete my water trough until the lengths of my gathered intestines were dry enough. I glanced over to the other Twilight, but she was still in a catatonic state. She'd been looking at me this entire time, her eyes open and staring. I wondered if what I was doing might perhaps be causing her to stay in her fugue but I couldn't just not work. Maybe I could cover her head with some spare cloth from the saddlebags I still had, but I also wondered if that might cause her to spasm due to sensory deprivation. Leaving her be for now I moved over to a disgusting pile of flesh and organs that I hadn't gotten around to burning yet, in my task to eventually clean up the void somewhat. Between the various rotting offal was the semi-fresh brain from Booksmarts, and Super and Nova too, so along with their brains I gathered some blood using a spare bowl -no need to take blood from the trough really- and used a cracked femur as a pestle to mash them into a paste. It wasn't even the most foul smelling or worst action I'd undertaken. I took my bowl of mashed mixture over to the other now-smouldering fire I'd made where I'd gathered both the fur and fat, taking some of the latter and slowly adding and mixing it in until the substance had an oily texture and feel to it, the blood having taken on a thicker consistency helping in making the mixture not too runny with the fluid of the brains factoring into it. On the whole I wasn't sure if the blood had been needed but at the very least it would make the leather a reddish-brown in colour. It hadn't taken more than a few minutes, but at least when I turned to check on the other Twilight again, she was moving a little more. I put the bowl down and went over to her. She wasn't quite there yet, still somewhat unresponsive when I waved a hoof in front of her face or tried to speak with her, but she did react to my being there, however little a reaction it was. There was a flicker of her eyes when I tried to meet her gaze. I was still a little messy and the gore I'd been recently covered in hadn't quite dried yet, but right now it seemed to me that she needed something. I carefully moved behind her and shifted my hooves underneath her barrel, being mindful of her wings as I settled into a gentle hug from behind. While I was hopeful it would assist in her recovery, it was also actually rather beneficial to me as well. Contact with another pony even after a less than a week of being here in this dark realm was a divine blessing, as much as it was a curse for them being condemned to be here. Her coat was comfortable and unblemished, and smelled faintly of pleasantly-scented shampoo, possibly lavender. How I wished for something to clean myself with, but she hadn't brought any- Wait, maybe somewhere in the endless mounds of corpses there might be a saddlebag with some soap or something, I know I'd made trips to the Ponyville Spa before for specialised shampoos, soaps, and conditioners before! Well, it could wait until later. She smelled nice in any case, her warmth was comforting. The mere presence of a living body in an enclosed void of death was as invaluable as water. She shivered beneath me, maybe from the middling temperature of the sphere, but I suspected it was more likely from her current disposition. I held her closer and relaxed, staying like that for what felt like a very short amount of time before I released her and got back up. I had to check the fires. The intestines were mostly dry enough to be used now, so that was something. With the sheet of rawhide that I still had spare, I worked on the trough for water. I hummed a tune under my breath and found myself smiling slightly, which I hadn't done since my arrival here, feeling a little odd about it as I continued. Another pony here was just uplifting, even if it was rather unfortunate in several ways. "Y-you..." My eyes widened in elation, physical contact had likely assisted! I turned as carefully as I could to not spook the other me and tried for a kind smile, although I hoped that covered in as much blood and viscera as I was it didn't come off as disturbing. "Hello." I spoke softly. "Are you feeling well?" She most certainly wasn't, but on a relative level she was hopefully doing better. The other me couldn't help but blanch in horror at everything around her, including eyeing me with a measure of fear when she finished up looking at her immediate surroundings to pay attention to my relaxed posture. I'd been here long enough to be able to relax, and maybe it was due to the sheer amount of absurdity that enveloped every sense with each passing second of being trapped here that allowed it, but it wasn't setting the other me at ease. I didn't speak for a few moments while she shuddered in disgust trying to breathe normally. I knew the feeling, she would adjust soon enough. "It's stuffy, I know." I offered, with a slight shrug. "You get used to it." "How can you be... be used to it?" She gasped incredulously. "How long have you been here?" "About a week, I think." I replied. "That's madness, you can't be used to this!" "Well, not all this, really." I gestured to all the corpses surrounding us. "That still disturbs me, especially when I have to use the bodies. It gets easier but it still doesn't sit well. I was talking more about the smell, that's what you get used to." "Oh." She uttered. "I-I see... sorry." "No need to be, it's a shock I know. I'm just glad you're properly awake." I smiled, shifting my shoulders to wind down a little. "It's... horrible, that you're here. Nopony should be here, but you are, and we need to make the best of that." She glanced around at my camp and I could see the cogs turning in her brain. She caught on pretty quickly as well, looking at me with a partly disturbed look after spending a few seconds examining my grisly buildings. "My wings didn't work, and that everything looks so ramshackle and made by hoof means magic likely doesn't work either, you have makeshift buckets for storage of... blood, so water is limited..." She stopped orating, then suddenly looked up in fear. "How have you been managing to eat?" "I had some sandwiches with me when I first came here." I explained. "Slowly been going through them, skipping eating for most of the time until it really hurts." "Oh, that's terrible! Please, help yourself to what's in my bags, I've got plenty." She quickly moved to the saddlebags beside her, but then caught herself. "Wait... no, of course we need to make it last." I nodded. "Yep, as long as we can." "You've already begun to work on methods of storage, you have what looks like a water-drip system over there as well... that seems like the most pressing issue and you're addressing it completely." She analysed, focusing on other racks. "I wonder if I would have thought to use bones and... what is that tying them together?" She looked like she knew the answer, but maybe she wanted confirmation. "Intestines." I told her straight. "I was afraid you'd say that." She almost mumbled. "I suppose, if you've got enough of something to use it..." "Exactly." I nodded, shuffling over and resting a blood-caked hoof on her shoulder, even if she seemed less than happy with the contact. "We need to use everything we can to survive and get out of here." She caught the heavy emphasis on my words and their full weight, nodding with exasperation at the predicament. "So we're trapped in a pocket dimension of corpses." "Well, corpses are a byproduct as apparently none of us have ever managed to sustain ourselves. But this realm, whatever it is, it's a massive sphere, featureless, hanging in its own void." I intoned, moving onto an important matter. "There's a journal written by one of us before I came here, I want you to read it." "Why?" She wondered with a raised eyebrow. "Clarity, and warning." I simply replied. She needed to see what would happen if we allowed ourselves to lose hope, and see what had been tried already. I would have little issue with explaining ideas to her, and given that she was me and on the same current level of knowledge I knew she would be capable of learning and adapting just as fast. I got to my hooves and went over just behind her to where I'd kept the journal, right next to Starburst's hooves I'd kept to commemorate her sacrifice, leaning over and pushing it across the void's surface to her. She balked at it being bound in skin, but picked it up regardless to begin reading. She stopped halfway through in thought. "Well, I was thinking about names but I guess you and I can't do that now." "Right?" I smiled, and we both shared a gentle giggle. "So... what do we call each other if not Twilight and Sparkle?" She asked, curious as she started to no doubt go through a list in her head. "I've given tribute to the bodies I've used almost completely for my structures and such else, I'd probably not want to use their names." I commented, starting to list them off. "Starburst, Super, Nova, and Booksmarts." "I'd been thinking of 'Star' by itself, actually." She smiled briefly. "How about... Twinkle and Shine?" I offered with a shrug. "That would work." She gave a nod. "Which would you be?" "You're the new mare, you can choose first." I grinned, although she chuckled nervously as I did it, so I could assume my appearance must have been dishevelled. "I'll be Shine then, you can be Twinkle." Shine accepted, glancing back at the equipment I'd made thus far and sighing. "I have to say, Twinkle; I'm impressed, if a great deal disturbed, by all of this you've made. The things this other Twilight-" "Twilight of the Journal." I proclaimed. "Her, yes. She never got this far beyond using what was at hoof, but you've gone even further, to greater ends purely because of necessity." Shine spoke, seeming more interested than upset. "The lengths a pony will go to in order to survive." I agreed. She sighed again, but far deeper. "Alright... alright." She closed her eyes for several seconds, opening them to sharply meet my own. "So, where do I start to help?" Author's Note I'd had a much longer chapter, but I wasn't happy with it at all. Hopefully this suffices for now. AccessionSomething has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.
AwakeningIt hadn't worked. The writing on the wall had said GRAB HER NOW, and even in a disorientated state I'd quickly followed the instruction, attempting to -while doing my best to remain calm- hold the rapidly constructing body in front of me, but when the new me had formed, she'd simply popped out of existence with a flash, and nothing had happened. I then found myself falling down as my wings refused to work, and rapidly having to come to terms with what I'd just witnessed as I glided out of the way of several jutting spears and fallen ponies. I had landed on a cold mesa of matted fur, mutilated flesh, and endless death. Built of myself. How long had it been since then? Two days? A minute back home turned into three here according to the journal, I had little way of knowing how long had passed beyond that, there was no indication to mark the passage of time here, no Sun, no Moon, no nothing. According to the pages the instruments were all destroyed, ones made before I'd arrived, by her. It had probably been a day before I found Twilight's journal, bloodstained and tattered as it was, penned in blood. I'd have found it sooner had I not suffered a bit of a dissociative episode, the void full of rotting bodies had been a lot to take in, the smell had been worse. When I snapped out of it and came to the surreal reality of the situation, little by little I soldiered on and started to explore. The book had been just under where I'd come down from, partially dug out from the masses in the mountain of flesh, a little cave of horrors where lifeless eyes had looked at me from all directions. The pages had mentioned Sparkle, a friend of Twilight, they'd gotten along quite well, but the fairly normal writing had abruptly ended at that point after Twilight had said Sparkle had been very hurt by an explosion, and Princess was to blame. I reasoned that was me, in a way. The hazardous potion I'd been working on, I remember teleporting it away from the lab. The past me had killed a lot more since then, a limbless gutted corpse not far from the bone spears was reportedly the remains of Princess. I knew because Twilight had been at pains to describe the things she had done to her victims after the incident following the simple bookkeeping. After Princess, there was just a short haphazard tally, and she'd ended it with ten written murders. I had a feeling this hadn't been all of her kills after Princess, but there had been no way of knowing. A blank page later, and the writing was slightly different, still written in blood to which despite the messiness of a shaky hoof, had been quite legible, certainly a different me. She's killed me. She was insane. She was me. I won't live very long, too many wounds, magic doesn't work, I can't regenerate. I killed her though, please understand, Sweet Celestia I didn't want to. It was self-defence. Please believe me, I never meant to hurt anypony. I'm so sorry. That was where I'd found the journal, its poorly skin-bound pages clutched in the hooves of who I think I could safely confirm was the freshest corpse in the dugout of bodies. She'd bled out from multiple stab wounds, and given that Twilight had 'helped' Sparkle to recover from her injuries after the explosion, the desiccated and charred half-corpse in there had quite likely been Sparkle. The journal hadn't mentioned Spike though, and I didn't want to think about the poor little dragon's impaled body that was resting there next to Sparkle with his innards barely kept from spilling out with cloth. It was all so harrowing. I'd cried at the sight, and thrown up a moment afterwards. I'd composed myself immediately, and gave them a sort of burial by collapsing the den of corpses. I wouldn't live there as they had done. That was yesterday. I hadn't eaten since then, my food was limited. I'd packed sandwiches in my saddlebags for myself and the girls as I'd been teleporting to a picnic... A picnic I would never make. I had to save what I had, as much as I could. I had a terrible feeling I wasn't going to see them for a while. Since then I've been busy working. I had to improve the situation somehow. I certainly wasn't going to kill the next me, as no doubt many of my predecessors had done, I couldn't imagine doing that. I knew I was going to teleport again at some point, it was too convenient not to. I hoped that the next me would get used to the putrid smell of the place just as much as I had so far. Surprisingly, it didn't take forever to acclimate. I still very much wanted a bath, but that wasn't feasible. The journal had a brief checklist and small inventory before it had descended into odd notes and insane rambling messages. I'd scoured it and the area for anything, there might be more I could use, and possibly rebuild what was lost. The other Twilight had given up, given into madness and chaos, but I wasn't going to surrender so easily. Then again, Twilight's journal was lengthy, it was likely she had lived for a very long time in the void, perhaps even the longest, and she'd grown tired of survival. But I was searching. There had to be more. There had to be a way out. My first priority was water. But I needed to create before I could produce it. Before, stills had been made of water bottles and sticks scavenged from previous saddlebags and bodies, but those had been lost in the explosion, and not Twilight, nor I at this point of my searches, had found anything reusable, which had likely contributed to her downward spiral into insanity in the end. Perhaps she had been confused and lost initially arriving here, but there were better ways to make a water purifier. Maybe she lacked the knowledge I had since gained, or maybe she'd been working on a less grisly mindset the second she'd accepted the gravity of her situation... But I didn't need any of the items she'd thought essential; I had flesh, blood, and bone, lots and lots of all of it. It was all a precious resource here. I need to capitalise on that. My magic didn't work here either, I'd discovered that the very moment I'd arrived and tried to teleport away. I'd thought of my bedchambers in the castle and expected to be gone, as quickly as I'd come. All that did was give me a severely heavy migraine and cause my eyes to bleed, which had likely contributed to my small detachment episode. Magic didn't work, so I had to use my hooves. It was horrendously messy work, there were tools to hoof already made of bone, made by Twilight, so I used those. It had taken a great deal of psyching myself up, but I managed to skin one of my many corpses legs, at least until I started dry heaving, I should have picked a fresher body. I paused while my stomach settled, and resumed not long after. It took a lot of time, I'd never hacked off a leg before. I slowly succeeded in separating the muscle, the fat and sinew, and now I had several new bones. I repeated the process on the other legs of the corpse, and then went to find a far less dessicated me so the detritus would be less offensive to the senses. My efforts led me to the top of the mountain, the me there having been impaled through the head on one of the bone spears. Her eye was missing, torn out, and when I had taken the body off the jutting spire of bone, I felt rather disgusted that her genitals had been partially eaten. It had been Twilight that had done it. Well, of course it had been, but, the journal's Twilight. The body's damage matched one of the descriptions of what she'd done to her prey here. Twilight of the Journal had become such a sadist in her final days. I looked at the body again with a great deal of sympathy, moving it down to a clearer area so I could work. She was less decomposed than most. I imagined femurs would be good for support, they were a long bone in other mammals, wing bones were extremely tough on Pegasi, quite the same for Alicorns, but for bowls I knew I would need the skull, probably quite a few. I quickly went back up the hill partway and retrieved an axe I'd found not a few hours earlier, and got to decapitating the body, as well as taking off the limbs too. The shiv I'd found earlier was put to use to remove the skin and muscle, a lot more precise than using the axe. I'd also made a point of gathering a number of bone knives scattered around, lying alone or stabbed into bodies, and keeping them on hoof in case this one should blunt or break. It hit me like a train as I finished removing the remaining eye, as I then looked into my own faceless skull, what I could manage to make myself do. I directed my dry heaving and spittle away from the work, painfully throwing up some bile as I hadn't eaten today. I took several ragged breaths, my throat burning, my eyes streaming, and my nose snotty as my heart thundered in my chest like an enraged Manticore. I wept for home and friends. I stopped myself before long, I needed not to cry. I needed to reserve fluids. A shock of sudden exhaustion overcame me and I collapsed there against a semi-clear space on the floor, and slept for what I felt like might be an hour. Awaking to my gruesome assignment had been depressing, but I knew I needed to push on. I tried my best to recover, and used the axe to carefully split the skull at eye level all the way around, giving as much space as could be allowed when turned upside down. The brain had been thankfully not too messy to deal with, I pulled that free and discarded it well away from my position. I had a bowl, made of my own skull. It was a distressing milestone in the path ahead. I was bloody, soaked all over in it, and Celestia knew what else with all the liquids that all these corpses could create. I wiped my hooves off on a fairly clean purple mound near to me, carefully tottering over to where I left my saddlebags and pulling out my wonderful sandwiches. They were starting to get stale, the hay and daisies in them were fine though, they should be for a few more days. I took my time eating one, making it last and savouring the texture. I allowed myself a second to settle the gnawing in my belly. I was going to put off resorting to what I knew would have to come eventually. Any food that still remained before I arrived was putrid and rotten, just like the possibly tens of thousands of corpses. With any luck, I would teleport some food. It was a small hope. I gathered myself and my thoughts, I had no time to waste, but then I stopped. The thought came that of course I should work smart, not hard, to save my strength as much as possible as without proper nutrition in the long run, what I had was limited. With the amount of bodies here, it was more than likely that some had rotted to the point they were just skeletons, or near enough to it. Would moving the masses of corpses in the mountain be more taxing than cutting one apart from near the top? It was hard to tell, I wasn't exactly the active type. It was certainly likely that there were nothing but skeletons at the very centre of it nearer the bottom. I had been teleporting for decades, and even without nature to break these corpses down, they still decayed with simple time. But as much as I wanted to make the work easier, the mound was far too large, it would take too long to go that far down, and I refused to dig long enough to find the pure skeletons anyway, as I knew I would find smaller ones. I'd teleported a lot as a foal, I didn't want to see those smaller bones. The Twilight of the Journal, as I had decided to call her, had made a noticeable pathway through the large sphere -which was one of many pages of information I committed to memory, along with the rough distance it covered- and from what I could see, had made a few smaller piles of bodies around the towering mound itself that were in varying states of decay, something which the journal had not mentioned. Like she'd been sorting inventory, or laundry. Perhaps an attempt to stave off boredom? Either way, as I made my way down to one of the piles, I could see it was now in such an advanced state of decomposition that coming near it threatened to make my stomach purge itself. I backed up a way, and quickly rushed at it, bucking the pile with my hindlegs like Applejack would have done to a tree in her orchards, and promptly stepped away. The pile had shifted, barely. I repeated the action until it spilled over completely. I felt myself take in deep breaths, far away from the fallen stack at least. Rather disgustingly, and yet also usefully, my back hooves had sloughed away flesh from the heavily rotting corpses, and the ones at the bottom of the stack were decayed enough that bone was already showing through their hides. The air was horrendous, but I took a deep breath in further from the pile, and then moved nearer. I managed to drag one of the corpses away from it, making a process of moving away to hold my breath, and coming back to work on it with a bone knife. I had to as my stomach was protesting when I didn't. I couldn't lose my food, I would dehydrate too quickly. That couldn't happen, I needed to survive. The flesh and muscle was so putrid that I was practically able to scrape all of it from the bones like it was snow being shovelled in winter, I found the comparison rather morbid if a little bemusing. Humour was good though, it helped my situation a little. A few more times of breathing elsewhere and returning, and I had some more bones. I had grabbed the axe and removed the head of the body too, there wasn't as much resistance from the muscles with all the rot. Unfortunately, after scraping away the everything from the skull, splitting it caused me to violently vomit, as I'd accidentally breathed in upon doing so, and the corpse was at such a level of putrefaction that the brain had essentially liquified into a horrifically putrid slushy soup, spilling out as I separated the bone. I took a few moments to recover, well back from it. It was disturbing to think that one area of corpses was a haven compared to another. I now had two bowls, and plenty of femurs, tibias, and metatarsals, which I had discovered were all roughly the same in length, the humeri, ulna, and radii were all slightly shorter and curved but still had good usage potential. Having them to hoof instead of seeing them in diagrams was certainly a learning experience, even if the circumstances were less than pleasant, it didn't change that pony anatomy was very interesting. Moving back with my skeletal collection to around the mountain, I found an area not far from it somewhat devoid of corpses, where the strange textureless surface of the sphere was overly present, and put everything down there. I was fairly certain anything I created would stand up if I made a good enough base, the sphere was large enough that the floor -if that was what it could be called- was seemingly flat. I spent a few minutes resettling all the things I'd gathered so far to this location. The next part was fire. A step closer in the hefty checklist to having water. Checklists were nice. Well, actually, the next step was making something that could use the fire. I needed to make a rack to dry things on, and to tie the bones together I needed lengths of string. For now I think I had to settle with stripping a corpse of its still wet intestines, so I used the same body I'd gotten the first bowl from. Fresher intestines would certainly be a great deal easier to work with and far less off-putting. Although I imagined a dessicated corpse would yield drier intestines, they would likely lose their tensity quicker and break apart due to rot. They needed to be suitably prepared. I used to axe to split the body from below the neck all the way down to the groin, stopping before the vagina just above the teats, she didn't need to be more defiled there than she already had been. Once I pulled the guts out I carefully cut them free and measured them out, pulling and twisting several lengths until they were fairly taut and in turn separating and tying those together, which wasn't easy to do with just my hooves. They would last for a fair while when they dried out, eventually I could replace them with hair rope that would essentially never decay. It was a tricky job next, everything so far had been, but even using my hooves I managed to tie together a roughly squarish base using what I had. I built upon it and eventually made a decent enough rack, made of bone and intestinal rope, to lay things on. It sagged to one side initially, so I added supports to keep it sturdier using the smaller bones. It was workable enough, if a bit wet. Now came the fire. Fire would make me warm, and I would sweat, I'd lose precious fluids I was still holding. But I also needed fire to dry out my rack and set the rope, and dry skin and gut to make filters, more rope, sewing strips... Fire would help me survive as much as water would. I'd found the flint-rocks already, Twilight of the Journal had used them to make fire, and so would I. She'd already perfected the way to do it, so I simply repeated her work. I started with scraped fur, sparked the rocks, blew on the fur until it smouldered, put it into a larger pile of fur that had some scraped fat in it, and put that on top of some manure. I placed my small rack over the beginnings of the fire as it grew, placing all the lengths of intestine I'd twisted taught across it. While that worked, I started on stripping down another couple of bodies and gathering the longest bones to build another bigger rack. It must have an hour or two to gather, and a further hour to make the new frame. I was making progress. It was slow going, but it was happening. The smell of burning manure, fur, and smoking flesh wasn't as off-putting as the raw smell of death from all the corpses was. If anything it was a great improvement. I had a brief concern flash in my mind of suffocation, but it was quickly dismissed as not only was the fire small and contained, I also reasoned that with the vast amounts of space in this spherical void it would take a lot of fire and a lot of burning before any smoke would fall low enough to asphyxiate me. Fire was going to be useful. I had no idea how long I would be here, and it was better to be pragmatic and assume that given all the bodies, rescue wasn't coming any time soon. Until I figured a way out, which no other me had done so far, I would certainly do quite well to make things liveable, and burning a number of these corpses once the bones were harvested would not only assist in freeing up space in the general vicinity and making a fairly decent living area, but would allay my mind in a more spiritual sense. I felt these bodies needed to be given some kind of rest. But that was for later. Right now, I felt I should sleep.
AcclimationIt was unfortunate to wake up again hoping everything had been a fever-dream. I spent a while laying on the voids surface, the same as I had the previous day or two, trying to move past the heavy mental block in place. I still tried in vain to convince myself I would simply think of a way to escape in the blink of an eye, but no magic worked here and surely if teleporting had made me come here in the first place, I would simply just reappear back here again, and once I moved past that crushing despair and the disgust of my surroundings, it became a great deal simpler. I had to create, to survive. It set the precedent of my mornings -probably not an accurate term- quite well. Get up, go into a short state of shock, gather wits, move on, build, and live. As far as current plans went it was one of my simpler ones, but it worked well enough. I knew my brain was still processing the entirety of what was happening around me, but I also knew I'd eventually become desensitised to all of it and it would streamline my days that much more. I'd made a large rack yesterday -again, not accurate but it would do- and before falling into a poor state of sleep I'd stripped some flesh from the corpse I'd been using, that I had taken to calling Starburst, given my cutiemark. I figured as she was presently being turned into my survival equipment that I could give her a name at the very least. Her long strips of flesh were now mostly dried out, the small fire I'd set beneath the rack having burned out while I had slept. That was good, I didn't want them to be too dry or crisp. I'd already scraped the fur off the hide, so now I have several pieces of skin to work with. My next small task was simpler. At some point during one of past self's teleportations, they had been transporting rocks. At first I'd thought them to be more flint-rocks, but that was before my eyes had caught a small glint. They were quite small, but they still had a gem or two inside of them, likely they were being sent to Rarity. It was my luck at the moment though, because not only were they here, but these sapphires and rubies were already cracked. I speculated that she probably wanted them to break apart further to make small little gems for dresses, but now they would assist with my purifying methods. I gathered some spare bones -ribs from Starburst's body- and I gathered the gems once I'd dug them out of their rocks, then taking one of the flint-rocks that was larger and carefully began to break them down with some applied force. The bones were easier, the gems a little tougher, but it didn't take too long. Then I made another fire, but this time I used a small amount of the crushed bones with a pile of fur and fat, throwing the tuft of smouldering fur onto it and closing my hooves around it. There was no wind here, but bones didn't burn easily, keeping it contained turned the fire inward, and thankfully before long the crushed bones were aflame with help from the fat and some directed air keeping it burning long enough to take effect. I carefully kept it topped up with fur and more crushed bone as it grew, managing it as I worked. I alternated between that and harvesting more bones from other corpses as I needed as many as I could, but also more leg bones for the next piece in my growing collection of morbid creations. At that point I made a separate fire -not with the bones- far away from where I was working and began to throw all the muscle from the corpses I'd been using onto it. It was all rotted and of no use, and I wasn't so desperate at this point as to want to cook it for eating. Which then reminded me of my growling belly. My hooves were caked in dried blood -thankfully I'd avoided getting anything more obscene on them- and I hadn't added to that too much with anything fresh, as I noted rather grimly that I was getting far better at hacking limbs apart with greater finesse, only my lower body had received a new coat of blood. So at least when I pulled my sandwiches out of my saddlebags and ate two of them as slowly as possible, they weren't given any additional flavouring. On the negative side of things, I now only had four remaining sandwiches, and the daisies in them weren't mouldy yet, but they didn't smell too fresh. If I continued to have two sandwiches a day then that was two days of food left, I could stretch it to four days with one sandwich a day, but I'd have to work less to conserve energy, and it was likely the daisies would become inedible by then. It was becoming more apparent to me that I would eventually have to eat meat. Before that happened I needed to make water, Gryphons that had eaten meat had said that depending on the creature, meat could vary in its saltiness, and I wasn't sure where pony ranked on that list. If I ate meat I'd need water, or dehydrate faster than I already was. As it was, I was already feeling the occasional ache in my kidneys and a slight pulse behind my eyes, I really didn't want the symptoms to worsen. Princesses, please can I teleport some food, and a jug of water. I went back to my bone fire and added some more fur, crushed bones, and fat. That gave it a bit more life, and kept the mound of bone ignited. I broke up Starburst's spinal column and the rest of her skull, and soon added that to it too along with some of her fur, it was going well, but I'd nearly used all of what bones Starburst had to offer, only her pelvis and hooves remained. She still had plenty of intestine to give, turning that into more lengths twisted together as I draped them over the large rack. Hopefully the smoke would dry them out within a half hour, I'd be able to tell how long had passed by the drying of intestines if I counted it. Probably not the most efficient method of timekeeping though. With the bones burning and the intestines drying, I moved to my next small task. I took two of the strips of dried flesh and a bone knife, and began, very slowly and carefully, to cut them further into fine thin lengths. In the time it took I had taken the intestine rope from the rack and made the crushed bone fire a little bigger as it burned down, keeping it level and going, trying not to find a little amusement in Starburst's teeth heating to such high levels that they were popping. Teeth were a vessel where pressure grew from the small amount of water inside them that turned into vapour, too much and the reaction was the same as popcorn. I sighed, just a little more, I could make water soon. I used the axe to split a metatarsal, and split it again until I had four pieces, then taking one of my sharper knives and whittling each of them down. I barely noticed my hunger grow as the time flew, at this point the bone fire was certainly big enough, and when it finally burnt down to glowing bits of bone that refused to burn, and a veritable little hill of ash, I'd made several needles and used the knife to bore a hole in the ends to make an eye for them. Threading the thin strips of dried flesh though one of the needles eyes, I carefully tied a loose knot I could undo when finished, and I leant over and took the rest of the larger dried strips from where I'd left them, carefully rolling each of them into a cone and leaving a small gap at the bottom for water to drip through. I sewed them from top to bottom making sure there was plenty of spare length, pulled them fairly taught, and redid the knots to then cut off the excess. The short bits weren't much use, but I still kept them, they might still be used in something else I made. The thin lengths that remained were now for the final stretch of this build. Just a little more. Again bones were taken from the endless amounts of corpses, the fresher bodies given obvious preference so I could keep my food where it belonged, and I stripped them of their leg bones and skulls. I almost lost the little contents of my stomach again cracking the skulls, but I was prepared for the brain slush this time when it appeared. Every time that I split one I would move away as I brought the axe down and force the halves apart, letting the possible foul detritus leak out, and bringing the heads further from the work area I was settling into before doing it was also a good move. I didn't want putrid brain fluid where I was going to mainly sleep for the foreseeable future. With my quarry gathered I had several new bowls and more than enough long bones for the current build, possibly the next structure too. If I figured it correctly then I might have enough of the longer bones to make a tent, with enough space for another pony. I knew it would happen again, of course it was going to. Teleportation was convenient and I didn't know the horror of it unless I was dropped here, as the next one would, and like that copy, the Twilight that formed in front of her would move on to Equestria and be oblivious to the suffering she had caused until she then teleported and arrived here, for her copy to leave her behind. The cycle would continue ad nauseam. I would end it if I could. But I couldn't think about that right now. Water was the priority. Imminent survival comes now, space for the newcomer and breaking the cycle and the dread that arose from such an existential crisis due to whether surviving would amount to anything came later. The structure that would make my water purifiers was somewhat like making a rack, starting with a squarish base and building up with small supports added so it wouldn't just fold to one side, I deviated by making it go up further, without adding any too many bars across as with my previous racks and instead using bones spaced enough to hang my hide cones from, but close enough so I could fit more on the single structure. Once I took squares of cloth torn from the many saddlebags that many Twilight's had come here with, saving them just for these filters. I packed in two layers each into the cones, adding in another tightly wrapped and sewn piece of cloth that forced tightly into the cones small holes, filled with the still warm bone pieces, ashes, and a few slivers of gem. The rest of shards were sprinkled over the top of the small cloth pellets, sapphire and ruby alike, mixed into ashes that went with them, packing it in as best I could. It might have been that as no magic could be cast, that the magic of gems was also useless, but in case the slight cleansing properties of sapphire and ruby -the former gently cleaning to water and the latter more aggressive to foreign matter- didn't work, they would work just fine as the bone shards would along with the ash, and filter out impurities, it wasn't exactly charcoal, but it should do the trick. I figured one water filtering cone would get rid of most of the nastiness from urine, and a second would make it bearable to drink, so I hung two of them, one below the other, from a single bone at the top using a short piece of intestine, and placed a skull bowl below the filters. By the time I finished using up the space with the filters and bowls I had six columns hanging from the structure. I was actually quite impressed with myself that I still had three complete filters spare. I really hoped this would work, It looked like it might. Time to test it. I really did need to pee. I was thankful I was actually alone here for the brief few minutes it took to take down the topmost filters, relieve my pent up bladder into them until they were near-full, and quickly put them back up before the fluid could run through. I ended up filling four of them in the end, and I decided that I would spare the remaining filters to test how blood filtered. Blood was eighty percent water after all, so with any luck, that could be filtered until drinkable, but that might take more than two at one time. I was still feeling awake enough to do that, but first... I went elsewhere to relieve my bowels, as the saying went, don't shit where you eat. Or work. It was slightly bemusing that of everything, this was the least disgusting thing I had done so far. Not using a toilet and defecating in the open wasn't pleasant, but having to drink my own filtered -if it worked- urine and blood would be weirder. I was pretty hungry now after all the work to make everything, soon I'd be out of sandwiches. I had to wait, I knew from plenty of experience that even more tasking would distract me from the growling of my belly. For blood filtering to work efficiently, and neatly at the very least, I couldn't just scoop it up with my hooves, nor dunk the filters into the disgusting fetid pool of everything that pooled around one side of the corpse mountain. Why it all spread that way was likely that the sierra was slightly off-centre of this giant orb dimension and I was off to one side of that off-centre mass, thus it all pooled in the middle, and given how blood ran the same direction toward that rancid well, it added credence to the idea. I found that to be quite fortunate, otherwise I'd be constantly walking hoof deep in all sorts of disgusting fluids. What I needed was not the horrendous lake of goop. I just needed blood, and there was still a lot to take. When I worked on Starburst, going by the signs of slight discolouration through her hide from where I had shaved the fur from her coat, she was in a semi-state of livor mortis, the blood that flowed from her body had still been rather fluid, with only the barest amounts essentially turning into a thicker gelatin-like residue where gravity had made it pool. In modern morgues with preservation storage spells it took around four days for an average adult pony's body to complete livor mortis, and given that she was one of Twilight of the Journal's victims, and possibly died around the same time period as Princess, and certainly well before the last copy of me that I had discovered with the journal, it was safe to say she'd been dead for roughly over two to three weeks. Which by all logic and known science was innately wrong, by now she should have been in the middle stages of putrefaction. But here, things didn't work quite on the same time scale, so she was still only just starting to break down, the organs had still been intact, swelling hadn't yet occurred, and the skin wasn't blistered. Maybe it was simply due to the oddity of this place, the hollow void seemingly had its own rules on death and how it worked. I had a few theories, but not many that could be proven without any further ability to conduct controlled experiments from not having the essential equipment, and nothing I could act upon at the present moment in time as I had far more pressing issues. But it certainly warranted attention at some point. Those thoughts aside, it added up to the fact that there were still likely dozens of corpses with blood fresh enough that I could harvest a fair amount for drinking once filtered, if the filtering worked. The next two ideas then were to make something big enough to store liquids beyond skull bowls, and something strong enough to hold a corpse. After a short search I found a body rolled down from the mountain in rather the same condition that Starburst had been in when I had found her. She'd apparently died of a heavy stab wound below the sternum, and left to bleed out, the poor mare's face was a tired mask of utter confusion. As much as I wanted to say she might be another of Twilight of the Journal's victims, there were many corpses with a similar type of death. I wouldn't be able to get much blood from her, but like Starburst, I needed all of her body. Looking for a second corpse I found a fallen Twilight impaled on a bone spear through the throat that had fallen down to the very bottom on one side. I carefully removed it and wondered if she would have as much blood to use. Given my cutie mark again, I decided to call them Super and Nova. I took them back to my work area and got into the task. I needed two good sheets of skin, bigger than the strips I'd taken from Starburst for my filters, so I cut from below the middle of their shoulders all around to meet at the chests, and from the lower back down their flanks following the inner thighs to meet between below the barrel. I split a line down both of their middles, following the stab wound on Super, and carefully began to cut away. It only took a few moments to 'unwrap' the two sheets from one side to the other, and cut them off at the wings enough that the would-be holes could be twisted and tied off. Measuring out the various bones into a good-sized rectangular box that fit within my filtering rack, I used the now-dry intestinal lengths from Starburst to tie it all together. Once I was sure it was correct I made a second to go with it. One for blood, one for water. I started a small bone fire within the large rack and laid the skin sheets from Super and Nova across it after scraping them off so no fat or fur was left, half on one side, half on the other. Given how quickly the intestines had dried, I was hoping they would do so in the same amount of time while I worked on the corpse rack. The basis would be the same in concept as my other racks, a box that was big enough to fit a corpse on, but sloped upward and raised up enough that one of the storage boxes I was making would fit below, although it would essentially be a trough, so I figured that should be what to call them. I began to lay them out and lay myself down to see how much more I needed to add until they surrounded me. Putting it together, I then built it into a platform and had a slightly secure box with its basic supports. But I wasn't sure it would hold up with a body hanging on it once I kept building it up, so once I got the sloped basis tied together I added triangular supports to each corner facing outward, and added inner supporting sections anywhere it seemed needed. Doing so meant that it certainly did feel a lot more sturdy, and thankfully the curvature of the voids spherical surface wasn't steep enough that it could wobble. The top of it was important, I made it like my drying racks with barely any space between the bars the corpse would rest on, but instead leaving a small enough gap near the top that if I tried hard enough, I could push my hooves through. Hopefully it would be enough to hold a body. I didn't have many lengths of intestine left from Starburst, and with all I'd taken she was down to scraps. The few remaining lengths I had would probably go to finishing the corpse rack with additional supports. All that really remained of her now were parts of the coat I hadn't shaved and turned into strips, muscle and organs that I wasn't sure what to do with yet, and her hooves. I'd taken all of her other bones for my projects, and just used her pelvis for the fire to dry the sheets. It was a small part of my sentimentality that wanted to keep the hooves. She gave her body for my survival, it was the least I could do, to commemorate her. I'd been going for a while since hanging the filters, so I went over to check them. It was a little disappointing to see that barely anything had filtered through at all, but also partially uplifting that it seemed to be working. The water that had filtered into the bowls was still discoloured from the film that coated the inside of the skull tops, which was to be expected, but I had anticipated that. There was enough that I could take a scrap from one of the saddlebags I'd sliced up and scour it around the bowl. After a minute or two it was perfectly bone coloured, and I tipped the scummy water out elsewhere, placing the vessel back beneath the filters, and repeating the action with each skull top and a different piece of cloth scrap. I'd lost the small amounts of water that I'd successfully filtered from doing so, and after a quick check of one of the top filters, it seemed there wasn't much left to filter through, but it made sense, having to go through dry ashes that would absorb moisture, to also go through a small pellet of compressed ash, bone, and gem, it was going to need more. Overall, it was good, my filters were working. It was a success! Now, if I needed to pee more, I would be happier. I checked on the skin sheets and it seemed that being over a concentrated small fire that was left to burn down while the sheets kept the heat in, had done pretty well to dry them out to a usable degree. Dry enough that the moisture in them wasn't going to bother me all that much. I took one sheet off and trotted it over to where the beginnings of my troughs were, draping it over one and being rather pleased that it gave me plenty of room to push it down, almost until it touched the voids surface. If I tried to make a more boxy insert with the skin, I found there was a slight gap between the edges of the sheet and the bones I was trying to fit it into, so when I went and grabbed my needle and sewing strips from where I'd left them, I made sure it was as tightly adhered to the corners as possible without there being any gaps as I sewed the sheet to each corner in several places, and sewed the wingholes shut before tying them around too for good measure. The skin was smooth despite the slight folding in the corners, had no splits, and didn't look like it was going to tear any time soon. The tied knots of the strips that secured the sheet to the rack were doubled up, and tugging them didn't give any sign of snapping either. So now the corpse rack was secure, and I had a trough to go with it. Now, onto the final stretch, the checklist was almost complete. Despite my fatigue I went in search of another corpse, and it seemed as if it took forever until I came across a body that apparently hadn't died of being stabbed, and quite intact as well, her hide hadn't bloated or discoloured, and although she'd entered livor mortis she didn't seem to be any farther along than the other three bodies I'd been utilising. A quick check found she'd broken her neck, from falling or it having been inflicted I didn't know, but she'd be quite good for my purposes. I was getting pretty bored with cutie-mark names, I'd just call her Booksmarts. She, like many others, had rolled down the mountain, so I pulled her around to my working area with only a little effort. Lifting her up had been annoying, as I hadn't actually lifted the other bodies up, just dragged them around. I didn't want to say I was chubby, and I certainly exercised when I got the chance, but I was not easy to hoist around. Getting Booksmarts onto the corpse rack was a little worrying, doing it bit by bit until I got her rear legs and back end onto it with a precarious shudder from the structure, but the rack held. The support was doing its job. It held as I managed to pull her middle up onto it as well, and thankfully the body didn't slide much. It took a few moments of fussing and movement to lay her somewhat spread-eagle on her front, and it was pleasing to see that I could successfully force the rear hooves through the top gap and keep Booksmarts in place. As measured out, her head and neck dangled just over the edge near the bottom, with the trough below. I trotted over to my knives, grabbed one, and came back with a steady amount of apprehension. It was a bizarre feeling, that I'd already carved up a few of my own corpses like cadavers, and yet... slitting a throat was something that gave me pause, and I knew that the reason was because so far I'd seen bodies that had been heavily injured. If I squinted my eyes hard enough, it really did look as if Booksmarts was just sleeping. I think it was also because she had no marks beyond the bruising over her neck that I didn't want to damage her any more than she already had been, quite silly of me in a way. But I was also doing what Gryphons did to pigs, and that really hit home just what I was doing. I breathed in, and heavily dragged the bone knife across her throat. It didn't take a second before Booksmart's blood was flowing into the trough below, I found myself falling to my haunches and watching, transfixed by the sight of red liquid pouring forth from the wound I had inflicted. It was like wine with how it caught in the strange light of the endless void that surrounded me. Booksmart's face was so peaceful, she'd died with her eyes closed and her face blank, but I swore she was gently smiling. I couldn't help myself as I just... broke down, and bawled like a little filly. Crying for all the times I'd died here, I cried for Starburst, for Star, for Nova, cried for Twilight of the Journal and all of her victims, and Booksmarts that I'd slit the throat of. For little Spike. I'd crushed up bones, I'd sawed away muscle and sinew, gotten my hooves deep into guts and viscera, cracked skulls, made a mockery of life in the name of my own continued one, and shit in the open like a simple beast. All just trying to live, and to survive. I knew I needed to, but it was horrible, and I'd been pushing it all away, trying to focus on my tasks just like I had when I'd been a student under Celestia. My legs curled up and I laid foetal while I let myself sob. It wasn't right to be here, wasn't right that this should have happened. Nopony, no creature, deserved this fate. If not for the fact I'd found definitive proof that this was the consequence of teleportation I'd have believed this to be Tartarus itself. I wanted to go home, I wanted to be back in my bed with Spike to be annoying and wake me up early so I could get on with my duties, pout at him as he brought in a wonderful breakfast like the amazing number one assistant he was. I wanted to see my friends and hold them close. I know they'd help me weather this nightmare, but I was glad they weren't here. I wouldn't ever wish this place upon my worst enemy. Not even Sombra or Tirek deserved to be in this netherworld. It took me a good long while before my tears subsided, maybe I ran out of energy, it didn't matter. I laid there in the eerie quiet, my slow breathing and heartbeat the only sounds in this horrific dimension. I closed my eyes and breathed out in a shaky breath, willing myself under control. Slowly, slowly I got myself up until I was sitting again. I reasserted my mental barriers and fortified my defence. They were cracked and crumbling, but still held against the onslaught of horror that continuously slammed into them. They'd have to keep holding. Another deep breath in now. I had to get through this, or die in the attempt. I'd see my friends again, my home again, one day. If not, then I'd end my life with dignity and see them once more in the green pastures of Elysium. A glance at Booksmarts and she was still draining, gravity was my ally here, and the frame she rested on was holding, her hooves held tight. The trough was half full, and the blood flow was letting up, so at least it wouldn't spill everywhere. One last task for the day to go, then I could let myself rest properly. I moved over to the filtering rack, somewhat uplifted to see the skull bowls catching what currently just amounted to barely a mouthful of water in each of the used columns, I knew it would add up eventually. I grasped one and apprehensively lifted it to my snout, it didn't smell like urine, or the blood that had coated the skull. I gingerly took a small sip, and blissfully sighed in relief. I didn't realise just how parched I truly was until I drank the tiny amount down. Placing it back under the first filter column, I drank another and stopped, just in case. I knew that urine worked now, but it was still finite. I'd save it until I knew whether or not blood could filter. I carefully unhooked the last two filters at the tops of the spare columns and brought them over to my trough of blood, along with one of the spare bowls, and carefully scooped enough blood into the top of one of the filters to almost fill it completely, before hurriedly cantering over to put it back up before I lost a single drop, repeating the action with the other filter that remained. I sighed deeply and tiredly sat back as I simply watched Booksmart's throat ebb and falter to a drip, marvelling at what extremes a pony could push herself to, all just to live. I was spent, I ached in places I didn't usually ache, places I didn't know I had, with all the moving around and exercise I'd been doing. I never built things with my own hooves on this grand a scale. I thought about tomorrow, but I stopped before too long, I didn't have many sandwiches left, and soon I was going to starve. Even being an Alicorn I doubt I would last longer than the average pony, regeneration didn't work well if you didn't eat, it would consume the body to fuel the healing the same as a body used stored fat to burn for energy, and that magic was cancelled out anyway by being here. So before that I'd need to go to new extremes in order to stay alive. Don't think about it right now. It would take some time before everything was fully filtered through. I could certainly stand to rest for now. I should have made a tent, but I'd come this far, and I was almost dead on my hooves, so I think I deserved to lie down and get some sleep. It would be more of a nap anyway. Once I got back up, the next piece of work could begin, and then the next. I shambled over and settled down onto my designated sleeping space, closing my eyes, with nothing but the soundless vacuum around me and the faintly occasional pit pit of filtering blood and urine to accompany the heartbeat in my ears as I used another body as a pillow. Hopefully when I awoke, I would have more precious water to drink.
AcceptanceIt had to happen, of course. I'd not long woken up, with a slight headache thanks to my partial dehydration, and drank down some of the filtered water from a bowl to allay it as best as I could. I was actually very pleased to see blood was filtering, even if not well enough. It was still a slightly cloudy pink where it had settled into the bowls, so it would need to go through more filters. I'd been thinking about making a shelter for today after that, but that was simply a creature comfort that didn't bank on my survival, and worked though my general fugue of being trapped in this evil place while preparing for my day. And then the strange flash of light had come as I'd been preparing to find another not-too-rotted corpse that I could drain for the blood, and later use the body for additional filters and structure building. While pondering the possible ways I might have to cook meat, and how best to pad it out with the idea of bonemeal as the recurring victor, an eerie sound came that accompanied the ominous flashing. It was like a low droning ethereal scream, clawing at the back of my mind from a long distance, the light itself curling around the corners of my vision and distorting everything, making me see disturbing apparitions that lurked and twisted in the shadows. I really hoped that was just simple bewilderment brought on from the bizarre phenomenon occurring just now; I didn't even remotely want to consider if malevolent daemons lurked in this reality with me. She'd appeared in a flickering aperture of broken reality, then hanging there utterly confused and disgusted as she watched on in horror while the new her formed from pure nothingness, growing bone, muscle, and organ in tandem. The second that the new Twilight's fur had spread over her finished body, she disappeared in another jarring blast of disorienting light, and the Twilight that had been left here quickly began to fall in a shocked scream, as she too found out her wings refused to lift her. Instinctively I'd tried to catch her, attempting to grab her within my telekinesis and immediately regretted it, berating myself when my head pounded as if Pinkie was playing an entire bandstand's complement of instruments inside my skull. I blinked away the tears of blood that ran from my eyes as I quickly scrambled up the mountain of emaciated corpses to get to her. When I managed to crawl over onto the semi-flat plateau she'd landed on, she was mostly still and non-responsive, just as I'd been when I first arrived. She'd seen the horror around her and it was too much, I understood completely. I very carefully put my hooves on her so I didn't shock her any more than she already was, finding her trembling, gently rolling her to one side and then the other to check her for injuries just in case she'd landed on something sharp jutting from the corpse mesa, as there were still plenty of sharpened bone spurs I'd not utilised in my works or cared to retrieve and remove from whatever bodies they were embedded in. Much to my relief she was unharmed and alright, alright being a relative term as no doubt the monumental reality-shattering impact of this forlorn netherworld was bearing down upon her mental health and the long-spanning psychological impact it was going to cause wasn't going to be pretty. Other than the current breakdown she was prostrated before within her own mind, she was a picture of health. I knew a little of wellness checking and medical know-how from preliminary studies after my coronation, additional training and knowledge gathering I'd set myself for the future in case I ever took to new fields of work beyond just wanting to learn magic, so I performed the basics that a nurse might do in a situation of severe shock. It was clear after a minute or so that she wasn't in any danger of a panic attack or seizure, and her semi-comatose state was actually beneficial to her mental well-being; she would recover faster if left to compartmentalise and sort through the utter chaos going on in her head right now. All I was going to do was keep her safe and warm, hold her close and give her creature comfort so she knew on a certain level that she wasn't alone. The first thought that came to mind after seeing her saddlebags, which made me feel rather guilty, was the question of food. I only had one sandwich left, and the second thought came quickly that I should keep it for myself and check her belongings. I was in a worse position, physically speaking, and what little nutritional value it still had was of utmost significance for me right now, while she would last longer than I would without it. I put all of that to one side for a moment, and carefully pulled her as gently as I could down the mountain of death. She was mumbling things to herself but I couldn't understand what was being said, just gibberish brought on by psychosis. Truly, I had no idea how I would help her through it beyond positive encouragement and talking. Any magic I knew to help alleviate stress on the mind wasn't usable, but even then those were basic spells to soothe headaches and the like. It took me some time, but I managed to take her to my camp area, pulling her around to where I had chosen to sleep. She was still very much unresponsive, and I couldn't exactly talk to her, so I gingerly removed her saddlebags to inspect them. I had to try very hard to stop myself from stealing her food, she had quite a lot! She must have visited Applejack at her farm or gone to town too because she had apples. There were a number of sandwiches; daisies, lettuce, and tomato, a good choice. Cheese and tomato, also very good. Oooh, banana sandwiches! Excellent! But they weren't mine, they were hers, I wasn't going to steal no matter how much I really wanted to. Beyond the food she had a general assortment that I usually tended to travel with, a few quills, a notebook, two pots of ink (of which would make excellent holders for something later), a single emerald (not as useful as sapphires or rubies but still good), and... My prayers had been answered. A flask. It wasn't just water, it was black tea. And it was still warm. I couldn't help myself, I unscrewed the flask and took a few precious sips, enjoying the feeling of a proper beverage and the taste of it. It was just the way me and the girls liked it between us, with milk and sugar in a fair amount that was agreeable to all of us. Even if Rarity took her tea without sugar most of the time, and Pinkie had several spoons in hers. The simple thought of our discussion once on the perfect ratio we could all be happy with amused me, the feeling utterly bittersweet in my heart. I screwed the cap back on and allowed myself a moment, before putting the flash back into its saddlebag and placing it next to the still-catatonic other Twilight. It may have just been a few sips, but the tea was doing wonders for my mental state. Realistically the amount of caffeine in the tea I'd drank wasn't going to have any marginal impact on my body, but the general knowledge of what it could do was enough by association to invigorate me into action. Morale was important in any terrible situation, and mine was slightly restored. Going over to the trough where I'd drained the blood, I took Booksmarts off from the rack and gathered a few spare bones from the other builds, putting them into a pile on one side while I went about removing a good sheet of skin from Booksmarts the same way I had with Super and Nova the previous day. A quick check revealed that the remaining sheet for the other trough was dry, and the fire had burned out, so once I was done taking the sheet from Booksmarts I began to carve her up for more bones, and did the same with Super and Nova with great efficiency. Harvesting all of the intestines, I covered a full rack and the half side of the other still spare that had the sheet draped across it once I'd started another small fire. I got it all done rather quickly. After a moment I decided that with my new guest I should probably make a start on a tent of some kind. I did have water now after all, and after I'd made a trough for the water to be stored beyond just using bowls, I'd really not have much else to do beyond general gathering for the future, and continuation of upgrading what I'd made so far. I could certainly begin the process of making hair rope, as while the intestinal ropes I'd made thus far were holding, it might not even be a week before they became taut and frail enough to break after rot finally set in. To that end I could always do to the intestines what I was going to do to the rawhide I currently had making up my troughs, which was to eventually make a solution mixed of fat , blood, and brain matter to create an oily substance that might help to cure and essentially tan the leather to make it truly waterproof, as rawhide would work for now but eventually rot from being wet. But to also do it to the intestines would mean taking away what I could use on the rawhide, and the hair rope would last possibly far longer than even cured intestines might, as it was more suited to instruments than rope. I don't believe I needed to rush though, not unless the blood trough started to seep or the water bowls became full, so I took my time as I decided on making the experimental substance for tanning. I couldn't really make a start on actual tanning racks or complete my water trough until the lengths of my gathered intestines were dry enough. I glanced over to the other Twilight, but she was still in a catatonic state. She'd been looking at me this entire time, her eyes open and staring. I wondered if what I was doing might perhaps be causing her to stay in her fugue but I couldn't just not work. Maybe I could cover her head with some spare cloth from the saddlebags I still had, but I also wondered if that might cause her to spasm due to sensory deprivation. Leaving her be for now I moved over to a disgusting pile of flesh and organs that I hadn't gotten around to burning yet, in my task to eventually clean up the void somewhat. Between the various rotting offal was the semi-fresh brain from Booksmarts, and Super and Nova too, so along with their brains I gathered some blood using a spare bowl -no need to take blood from the trough really- and used a cracked femur as a pestle to mash them into a paste. It wasn't even the most foul smelling or worst action I'd undertaken. I took my bowl of mashed mixture over to the other now-smouldering fire I'd made where I'd gathered both the fur and fat, taking some of the latter and slowly adding and mixing it in until the substance had an oily texture and feel to it, the blood having taken on a thicker consistency helping in making the mixture not too runny with the fluid of the brains factoring into it. On the whole I wasn't sure if the blood had been needed but at the very least it would make the leather a reddish-brown in colour. It hadn't taken more than a few minutes, but at least when I turned to check on the other Twilight again, she was moving a little more. I put the bowl down and went over to her. She wasn't quite there yet, still somewhat unresponsive when I waved a hoof in front of her face or tried to speak with her, but she did react to my being there, however little a reaction it was. There was a flicker of her eyes when I tried to meet her gaze. I was still a little messy and the gore I'd been recently covered in hadn't quite dried yet, but right now it seemed to me that she needed something. I carefully moved behind her and shifted my hooves underneath her barrel, being mindful of her wings as I settled into a gentle hug from behind. While I was hopeful it would assist in her recovery, it was also actually rather beneficial to me as well. Contact with another pony even after a less than a week of being here in this dark realm was a divine blessing, as much as it was a curse for them being condemned to be here. Her coat was comfortable and unblemished, and smelled faintly of pleasantly-scented shampoo, possibly lavender. How I wished for something to clean myself with, but she hadn't brought any- Wait, maybe somewhere in the endless mounds of corpses there might be a saddlebag with some soap or something, I know I'd made trips to the Ponyville Spa before for specialised shampoos, soaps, and conditioners before! Well, it could wait until later. She smelled nice in any case, her warmth was comforting. The mere presence of a living body in an enclosed void of death was as invaluable as water. She shivered beneath me, maybe from the middling temperature of the sphere, but I suspected it was more likely from her current disposition. I held her closer and relaxed, staying like that for what felt like a very short amount of time before I released her and got back up. I had to check the fires. The intestines were mostly dry enough to be used now, so that was something. With the sheet of rawhide that I still had spare, I worked on the trough for water. I hummed a tune under my breath and found myself smiling slightly, which I hadn't done since my arrival here, feeling a little odd about it as I continued. Another pony here was just uplifting, even if it was rather unfortunate in several ways. "Y-you..." My eyes widened in elation, physical contact had likely assisted! I turned as carefully as I could to not spook the other me and tried for a kind smile, although I hoped that covered in as much blood and viscera as I was it didn't come off as disturbing. "Hello." I spoke softly. "Are you feeling well?" She most certainly wasn't, but on a relative level she was hopefully doing better. The other me couldn't help but blanch in horror at everything around her, including eyeing me with a measure of fear when she finished up looking at her immediate surroundings to pay attention to my relaxed posture. I'd been here long enough to be able to relax, and maybe it was due to the sheer amount of absurdity that enveloped every sense with each passing second of being trapped here that allowed it, but it wasn't setting the other me at ease. I didn't speak for a few moments while she shuddered in disgust trying to breathe normally. I knew the feeling, she would adjust soon enough. "It's stuffy, I know." I offered, with a slight shrug. "You get used to it." "How can you be... be used to it?" She gasped incredulously. "How long have you been here?" "About a week, I think." I replied. "That's madness, you can't be used to this!" "Well, not all this, really." I gestured to all the corpses surrounding us. "That still disturbs me, especially when I have to use the bodies. It gets easier but it still doesn't sit well. I was talking more about the smell, that's what you get used to." "Oh." She uttered. "I-I see... sorry." "No need to be, it's a shock I know. I'm just glad you're properly awake." I smiled, shifting my shoulders to wind down a little. "It's... horrible, that you're here. Nopony should be here, but you are, and we need to make the best of that." She glanced around at my camp and I could see the cogs turning in her brain. She caught on pretty quickly as well, looking at me with a partly disturbed look after spending a few seconds examining my grisly buildings. "My wings didn't work, and that everything looks so ramshackle and made by hoof means magic likely doesn't work either, you have makeshift buckets for storage of... blood, so water is limited..." She stopped orating, then suddenly looked up in fear. "How have you been managing to eat?" "I had some sandwiches with me when I first came here." I explained. "Slowly been going through them, skipping eating for most of the time until it really hurts." "Oh, that's terrible! Please, help yourself to what's in my bags, I've got plenty." She quickly moved to the saddlebags beside her, but then caught herself. "Wait... no, of course we need to make it last." I nodded. "Yep, as long as we can." "You've already begun to work on methods of storage, you have what looks like a water-drip system over there as well... that seems like the most pressing issue and you're addressing it completely." She analysed, focusing on other racks. "I wonder if I would have thought to use bones and... what is that tying them together?" She looked like she knew the answer, but maybe she wanted confirmation. "Intestines." I told her straight. "I was afraid you'd say that." She almost mumbled. "I suppose, if you've got enough of something to use it..." "Exactly." I nodded, shuffling over and resting a blood-caked hoof on her shoulder, even if she seemed less than happy with the contact. "We need to use everything we can to survive and get out of here." She caught the heavy emphasis on my words and their full weight, nodding with exasperation at the predicament. "So we're trapped in a pocket dimension of corpses." "Well, corpses are a byproduct as apparently none of us have ever managed to sustain ourselves. But this realm, whatever it is, it's a massive sphere, featureless, hanging in its own void." I intoned, moving onto an important matter. "There's a journal written by one of us before I came here, I want you to read it." "Why?" She wondered with a raised eyebrow. "Clarity, and warning." I simply replied. She needed to see what would happen if we allowed ourselves to lose hope, and see what had been tried already. I would have little issue with explaining ideas to her, and given that she was me and on the same current level of knowledge I knew she would be capable of learning and adapting just as fast. I got to my hooves and went over just behind her to where I'd kept the journal, right next to Starburst's hooves I'd kept to commemorate her sacrifice, leaning over and pushing it across the void's surface to her. She balked at it being bound in skin, but picked it up regardless to begin reading. She stopped halfway through in thought. "Well, I was thinking about names but I guess you and I can't do that now." "Right?" I smiled, and we both shared a gentle giggle. "So... what do we call each other if not Twilight and Sparkle?" She asked, curious as she started to no doubt go through a list in her head. "I've given tribute to the bodies I've used almost completely for my structures and such else, I'd probably not want to use their names." I commented, starting to list them off. "Starburst, Super, Nova, and Booksmarts." "I'd been thinking of 'Star' by itself, actually." She smiled briefly. "How about... Twinkle and Shine?" I offered with a shrug. "That would work." She gave a nod. "Which would you be?" "You're the new mare, you can choose first." I grinned, although she chuckled nervously as I did it, so I could assume my appearance must have been dishevelled. "I'll be Shine then, you can be Twinkle." Shine accepted, glancing back at the equipment I'd made thus far and sighing. "I have to say, Twinkle; I'm impressed, if a great deal disturbed, by all of this you've made. The things this other Twilight-" "Twilight of the Journal." I proclaimed. "Her, yes. She never got this far beyond using what was at hoof, but you've gone even further, to greater ends purely because of necessity." Shine spoke, seeming more interested than upset. "The lengths a pony will go to in order to survive." I agreed. She sighed again, but far deeper. "Alright... alright." She closed her eyes for several seconds, opening them to sharply meet my own. "So, where do I start to help?" Author's Note I'd had a much longer chapter, but I wasn't happy with it at all. Hopefully this suffices for now.
