Flash

It 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.