A journal lies open on the table. It’s bound in leather, and looks well-loved. You open to the middle, and it’s a mess of calculations and diagrams one might barely realise are notes. Flipping to the first page, there is the following written:

You can take this as some sort of omniscient flashback. A written mix of what I know now and didn’t know then, somewhat coherently combined into what I hope is not a boring read. I’d like to hope it’s just me reading this, a collection of my thoughts and experiences arranged not-so-neatly for my own benefit- but I know how tempting it is to see someone’s diary and wonder what exactly goes through their mind. If it is not me reading this, I ask that you at the very least keep what you find within to yourself, as some of it is very personal to me.

Now, where were we?

My story starts at the end of another, and one that should be far more familiar to you. The element bearers stand before discord, and, through their harmony and friendship, at last unite and summon the power to return him to stone.

“Noooo!” he cries out, attempting to shield himself from the blast of raw, unfiltered magic. It’s in vain, as you know, but he attempts one last act of escape, tries to flee to another dimension.

Of course, he’s not successful. This story would not have come to pass if that were the case. Or maybe it still would have, in its own way, at another time, but that’s somewhat besides the point.

Discord’s attempt to escape failed, but he did still open a crack into another dimension, for the smallest of instants. The tiniest of cracks, leaking the tiniest amount of the wild magic of equestria into my home dimension of earth. Earth is a low-magical dimension, and if you were a unicorn scholar, you might know that creatures in such places have adapted as such. All life does exist with a certain amount of magic inside of it, and it requires a proportional amount to survive. The dominant race there, for example, are almost entirely magically inert; they’re nearly 100% magic-proof. The only exception is the tiniest amount of magic they soak up from the world to sustain themselves. And I’m sure you can guess what happens next.

By pure dumb luck, or perhaps the opposite, I was close enough to the crack when it opened for my body to have absorbed that tiny mote of foreign magic. It would have dispersed into the earth if I’d not been there to catch it, maybe making some odd amalgam, like a platypus or an otter or something along those lines. But the fact remains that I was there when that crack opened, and took the magic into myself. The thing I’d soon come to learn about equestrian magic is that it is powerful.

Imagine that your body is a drinking glass, and that the magic running through you is like the water inside it. If you left it outside, it would fill up with the rain, and it would start to evaporate in the sun, but always would contain water. Understanding how catastrophically damaging foreign magic can be to you comes next: imagine that you put a single droplet of the blackest of black inks into that glass. Ink clouds in the water, and stains the vessel. The sun evaporates the water, but the pigment in the ink will remain. Probably. Try it, if you’re curious! The metaphor kinda stops working from here, I’m not exactly a genius, but this does give the general idea. We’ll come back to this at some point, but keep it in mind.

So, my body is dyed with equestrian magic. Now, equestrian magic tends towards states of increased harmony. Nasty concept, harmony, if you consider the implications. Apparently, ‘harmony’ means ‘the quality of forming a pleasing and consistent whole’. Hah! It’s not an incorrect description. Something so powerful, in a body that seemed almost magic-starved to it? It did the thing it always does. It fixed things, to create harmony.

It started off well enough, it just left me feeling so alive! Walking through the forests nearby my apartment was surreal, it was as if I could feel some pulse, some through-line of nature that I had somehow missed before. I was in-tune with the world, and loving every second of it. Next, better still, I found my focus improving greatly, and my body and mind felt stronger and faster than they’d ever been. Naturally I wasted that on video games and little else, but all the same it was, again, amazing.

Though, after the first few months, the nightmares started. They started off infrequently, just once every week or two, but they were unpleasant enough for me to remember them vividly even to this day. They were always the same: there was on a boat of some sort in the middle of an ocean in a raging storm, and as odd as it sounds, I was the ocean. But I was also the storm, angrily tearing at the waves, pulling and striking the surface of the water. The battle between the storm’s pull and the oceans sheer brain-melting scale and size raged on for a long time, until eventually, the storm would grow frantic, and attempt to swallow the ocean whole. I’d wake up, then, in a cold sweat usually, near-delirious from the stress and the strain on my body.

After that, it was all downhill. I’d start to get fevers and migraines in the day, something I had been prone to, but weren’t common, and in the nights I’d have the nightmare again. The physical strength I’d found myself with was stripped away and I found myself weaker than I’d ever been.

Eventually I’d come to call these effects “Reality Sickness”, something that I doubt any potential reader of this knows about. We’re getting there, but for now I ask you to be patient.

Turns out there’s a lot more of my story than I can be bothered writing down in one go, so any curious other will have to read another day for that.

The rest of the journal is filled with various scribbles and writings, but flipping through it reveals no other entry that seems to directly continue this story.

Author's Note

Well, here goes nothing! I was a little anxious about writing a blatant self-insert HiE story, but what the heck. Any feedback would be appreciated, and I hope that it was enjoyable so far!