Dear Child of Cacoethes

Light flecks formed intricate designs on the frigid water, and the crystalline reflection seared into the unicorn's retinas. The scorching distress was as frigid as the the polar regions, permeating with debris from the day prior. The air split like satin torn by invisible puppet strings, revealing time as a cascade of moments that balanced on top of each other, stifling in their weightlessness.

Starlight floated and collapsed, weighted by ribbons of light, each as sharp as a razor but soft as down. She felt sparks dance across her body. Like noxious whispers, lullabies repeated through shattered teeth. Colours bled in tandem, not in harmony, but like a loud and irate argument on a canvas. Reds tasted of iron and ash; blues hummed with the cool bitterness of forgotten words, and yellows—it was always yellow—burned at the margins, the brilliance scorching the corners of her vision until she couldn't see without the heat blistering her state of being.

Her thoughts flowed like oil on water, slipping away as soon as they arose. Nothing remained quiet long enough to make sense, but rationality had no place here, not in the earth's pulse, which throbbed beneath her hooves like an out of sync heartbeat. She was attached to it by light threads, yet the knots were loose, unravelling even as they tightened.

In this paradox, time responded as a cruel joke, stretching and folding in on itself like paper burning from the edges. She sought for a memory—no, it reached for her, clawing at her consciousness with a grasp made of smoke and glass. It shattered the instant she touched it, leaving shards that cut, but there was no blood, just the weight of things unsaid running down her back like cold, burning perspiration.

The wind sang in languages she didn't recognize, yet the melody was familiar, like the murmur of a faraway storm. It carried the scents of places she had never been—lavender fields bathed in gasoline, sugar dissolving in alumina, rain falling upwards into the sky. She inhaled it, tasting static, the gap between seconds, and the silence of stars too distant to hear.

The universe disintegrated around her, parts slipping away like sand through clenched grips, yet it was the hold that was incorrect, too tight, too loose, everything slipping and breaking in the gaps between the tufts of her coat. Her hooves dug into the dirt—not earth, glass—with each step, splitting the surface in delicate, spiderweb patterns that gleamed in the dark. The sharpest, softest glass she had ever felt.

And the darkness? It wasn't dark. It was velvet wrapped in steel, a black hole that consumed light and spewed it out in fragments, leaving only echoes murmuring against her face. It was a shadow, a highlighted silhouette of something she should have known but didn't, and it stared at her with eyes that were never there.

She was caught up in the rhythm of it all, each pulse a collision of fire and ice, each breath a symphony and a mute cacophony. The sky above her was not a sky at all, but rather an open and infinite mouth that swallowed stars and spat forth nothing. And she stood there still, as the universe curled itself inside out around her.

The magic curled from her horn like tendrils of smoke, winding through the air in leisurely spirals before wrapping around the quill. It did not lift; rather, it hovered weightlessly in the gap between her and the earth, as if it had always belonged there. The radiance of her power spilled over the feather, stroking it as if it were a secret.

As it rose, the quill pulsed in the grip of her spell, vibrating like a heartbeat in the palm of the sky. Her magic felt electric, but soft—like trying to hold a flame without being burned. The quill responded, trembling in the air as if it could feel her intentions, as if it knew her thoughts before she did. Each pulse of magic through her horn was a song that only the quill could hear, and it swayed, a puppet on light strings. It wasn’t a tool; it was a creature, fragile yet lethal, its feather-light weight pressing like a violently passive storm.

The feather itself shivered in the aura, each strand alive, bruising against the currents of magic with the sensitivity of a thousand nerves. Holding it with her magic was like trying to cradle a dream—intangible, yet real enough to cut, real enough to sting with its presence.

The tip gleamed sharper now, glowing under the spell’s hold, an extension of her will. It was alive with power, a living thread of her magic woven into its spine. She felt it in her teeth, the way it hummed in the air, vibrating with the potential to tear words from her mind and bleed them onto the page:

Can't keep this mask on.

Can't fail you.

Twilight.

Twilight.

Please tell me I'm good enough for you.

Head pounding, whirling, searching—wavelengths distant from the sounds of colours and as tangible as numbers with olfactory epithelium. The high of bewilderment and the weightlessness of a loss of consciousness.

Twilight.

Images of the alicorn flickered before her. Silently auctioning herself towards the hardest soft surface below her like the brightest pile of fluffy needles amidst shadows.

I want to love you without destroying you.

I want to love you without destroying myself.

With the opening of a door, the unicorn was disturbed from her torturous slumber.

"Starlight, are you alright?"