Flash

It 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.