Around me, I stand on the shore
The waters are black and swirling
I hold a black mirror in my hooves
The swastik winds sweep around me
Their arms the nightbreath sleepwalking
The sighing of imminence and ending
All there the waves curl under and over
Around me, I see things coming to a close
The door is nearly shut
As we stare at it the tinylight squeaks out
Slower and slower
I see things coming to a close
The folding cerecloth shrugs down over the windows
The lights burn still but invisible to us now
I see things coming to a close

The purple sleeping form stirred, sluggish and cold and gravity weighed down heavy with meaning upon the foetus form. Pow! Pow! her eyes fluttered open, her lids grudging to part open as the light which pierced the closed kept darkness was blinding, painful of a white which stretched endlessly in all directions, she winced and raised a hoof quickly to shield and tremble with a bore. Her head throbbed in an ache in the skull, a low pulse which hit her which mocked at her attempt to think clearly at a rude awakening.

In breath came her in uneven strokes, shallow gasps which rattled in her chest which sounded hollow of working parts, the air was thin but clean, so clean it stung with the smell, joints aching as she sat up, sluggish, every muscle was resisting her as if she had been cocooned and awakening from a deep slumber, too long to the point the body and mind had forgotten their purpose, a distant echo of something passed far away from her self.

She was lying on a stone path, its edges raw and jagged at points, precariously hanging from angles at the cliff face, surface uneven and scarred with cracks and fissures. Stones beneath cold and damp to the touch, though it seemed birthed of an invisible undefined moisture unexisted. And above her the cliff ascended endlessly into the white void, disappearing into the blinding mist far of in the void.

The void.

It was everywhere she looked and the white pressed in, with an absence with no weight, like a mist not a fog or cloud, just simply the devoured distance the consumed depth which left an illusion of space. Which swallowed the bottom of the cliff far below her, a gulf that stretched downward forever like a chasm disappearing into pale nothingness in a perpetual disappearance. Chorazaim.

Blinking hard to attempt to block the light which clawed at her eyes like spiders, making them water of a silence which pressed thick into a maddening unnatural unwrongness, so pure and so absolute, strained far from sound yet her ears strained for sound for the faintest echo or the softest wind. But there was nothing, nothing but the slow labored breath and thump of the heartbeat.

And this cliff was familiar, she knew it or known it but did not know why, the contours of the rock, the jagged breaking off, the faint shimmer of the past golden-brown surface coated by the waves of a memory stirred hovering just out of reach. This is Calvary.

A metaphorical hoof reached for her thoughts, and searched for the mind that felt hollowed and excavated, scoured clean of flashes or fragments or any threads that could pull, a voice inside her, a mirror of the surrounded surrounding.

Her hooves trembled as she pressed them against the stone, pushing and holding herself up to a sitting position, her body felt fragile aching in ways which seeped beyond the flesh coat of fur, through the bone and deeper into the unspeakable, shuddering at the unfamiliarity of her touch to the faint rhythm of her own heart.

She eyed the stone path extending outward beyond and narrowing into a ledge that curved downward and upward from the ways one looked, disappearing into the white below. Her hooves quaked as she forced herself up fully, and her steps unsteady, silence swarmed her at every stampede, filled her heard and amplified the paranoia which crept up into her spine, creeping, she gazed upward where the cliffs summit would be but it was vanished into the white void.

Above and below, there was only the stoney adjusted land and the nothingness which swallowed everything else.

She grazed the rough wall of the cliff with her hoof to find balance, her hoof scraped against the rock with a dull pain, she kept her thoughts in a rotorvator which clawed at the emptiness of mind, grasping for anything and any memory or any fragment of what had been before here.

But there was nothing.

And it yawned wider the void.

Stepping forward away the precipice finding upon the uneven solid cold unyielding surface of mixture, a step with sent the faint aches through her every time she stood and stepped and she continued to press on, driven to venture into an instinct buried deep in the hollow chest cavity. Onkalo.

The white stretched on, infinite, unchanging, a canvas of nothingness.

Canvas of unchanging nothing in this depthless silence, a whisper in a sensation not of sound which represented a faint tug at edges of the being demanding her presence.

A pause and a catching of the breath, looking down at her hooves, at the pale trembling hoof in different movement, a smudge appeared and she her head, the motion slow and disoriented as though painful to move, a smudge in the form of a name she was certain a name had echoed faintly, in the head mirroring, a grasp in the churning sea of confusion.

A taking glance over the shoulder, her back towards the edge of the path where she had woken, the nothings stretched out there too, indifferent.

Forward again where the path curved down, end hidden from the sight of fog, there was no choice she had but to follow downward. Looming, waiting, pulsing in white.

Standing for a second an hour wrapped in a second, time collapsing, folding in on itself, irrelevant. Her eyes now open wide to the oppressive endless whiteness that no longer hurt or burned at the retinas, but its absence was like a trick and a lie in the tightened chest, how long had she stared down, don't lose yourself here. Where?

Stones darker then before, adjusted to the brightness, hesitating now against the hollow sound.

A negotiation with the ground in this descent, in the air growing colder and sharper in the teeth which scared skin at her exposed hoof where the fur could not protect her, a thought of snow or the smallest flecks of white against the blackened stone, tricks of the light, absence of light. What?

Gaze fell again, grey rocks of dull grey river stones of aching and the grey, the grey of a winter sky moments before the storm comes and rains down, the grey of the reflection of the water which she couldn't drink, bitter with salt. She pressed a hoof to the surface, too rough surely, texture sent the shivers deeply encased in the rheumatic upward groove of the rock which swirled in patterns, ouroboros. Half formed and half erased, pulled back quickly a scrap with a bloodless backward pulling.

A noise. A memory.

A shell of syllables as the heart raced to a turn so quickly in the empty vast unknowable mockingness.

Stumbling into the pebble as she catches it on the small and hard piece of white porcelain rock, curved and it wobbled on the edge as it fell and tumbled into the mist blow, a buzzing faintly heard in the silence, a hum just below the level of sound.

A harsh twice in the hoof, cold which bit down like a bat and creeping into her joints, bones of snow which gathered at the edges of the path, in thin patches and scattered remnants.

Celestia.

The name, appeared so golden and stuck like a stone to her chest, she gasped, the noise escaping her lips. Celestia. The shape so familiar, warm and painful, buckled, against the cliff wall.

Celestia against the whiteness.

The surface of the rocks so grey and rippling and then shifting and then blinking and then still, Uneven bursts of breath, she pressed her hoof to her chest, heart raced so frantic and uneven and out of time with itself. Runic wreaths on the ground-wall.

Downward in steps each slower than the last and the cold biting down harder every time as sharp as knives, eyes then drifted across the path and to the snow and to the cracks which moved when not looking, changing shifting in excellent teleportation. She didn't dare and then it fractured. .

Thoughts which came and went as half formed and splintered thoughts of the name now spiraled and echoed and folded over, who, a name a face a warmth she couldn't face, void pressed and grasped and the silence was now whispering back again.

Scraped and clipped of ichor, pain that wasn't there, growing louder the white in presence and the weight not weight wrapping and it burrowed like a spider into the nest where the path then narrowed and the rocks darkened into pitch dark.

Shivered so violent and numb and further into the grooves shifting and forming, pulsing of a light, time of hollow and the path blurred without the need of vision and she buckled and fell to the ground, right down against the freezing rock.

The whiteness cold unbearable and somewhere the stirring backwards, weightless she lay and gravity abandoned, stone below which dissolved into a sensation less void of blackness that broke the white above and now lost its barely functioning coherence, and all the world seemed to be in darkness, and all the world seemed to be in brightness. Everything even the body drifted in and out of themselves, echoes receding into a canyon which stretched more and more to not let those wretched echoes reach the bottom and back again under a menstrual night and moon.

Head turned like a Maltese cross, the stubble field, a willed to the vast unbroken and featureless. Hebron's vale, now the body of Twilight just a thine in the featureless lively oppression, eyelids heavy and leaden the strain of keeping it open was now unbearable and felt like a fall through molasses so thick and suffocating of the body which sunk so much deeper then into itself.

And all dimmed now tunneling and succumbed to the exhaustion of the clawing of bones through this haze of dark which overtook in the barely discernible against this sea of white of a vast and angular rising of something large and far of a structure an object in the overwhelming presence of looming of a shadow visible in the nothingnesss, edges sharp and the surfaces shifting in twisting of the reconcile to refuse the mind.

Memories snuffed out, flickered through brief and faint, a thread and then the eyelids dropped and so the white was snuffed out, the faintest traces of the structure lingered in geometry that etched into the back, blurry blurriness of the bending of lines and stretching and never arriving through the unlit.

Everything alive swelled and the sensation fell deepened into an intoxicated haze of unpleasant pleasantry of soft and muted which slip beneath warm water where the current took where it willed the body in the foreground and miasma penetrates. A hum to a vibration and a quiet slow haglaz resolve.

And then she slept.

"Sometimes I feel like a swallow. A swallow which by some mistake. Has gotten into an attic. And knocks its head against the walls in terror."

I dreamt
I cannot see
I cannot see
I can no longer see
And nor would I want to
Anymore
Clearblindlayeredlightcolourblindeathcomecomecomecome
Goaway
At the edge of the Rock face
By the pebbles and by the dream
By the post and by the bell
By the dawn and by the form
Formless She Lay and Dreamt
And formless we lay and shall dream
And then the rain

Author's Note