Though I walk through valley after valley after valley
And find only shadows
Though I walk and find only shadow
Yew
The shadows then lengthen and there again the long shadows fall

The after mirage of a dream, unbearable thoughts circled in her mind, brittle and faint and then gone. The last echo of a sound never fully heard, it all felt like a dream still, or the body hadn't had time to wake, her mind dragging itself forward through the viscous, sticky fog which coated her fur and tainted spots white. Perception distorted. Disjointed. Everything slightly wrong, angles which didn’t meet in mathematical ways, edges that bled into one another. Her motor skills still sluggish but less overpowering, limbs heavy but were willing to obey her for a push and a rush.

All alone
In her concrete cell
All alone
Terrified

All alone
In her nirvana
All alone
In her nirvana
All alone
In her nirvana
All alone
In her nirvana

She pushed herself up, swaying, the ground beneath her unsteady with perception and uneasy grey black and uneven, dirt and rock that compressed into shapes unnatural, indents in the nonexistent existence, patterns left untraced and unchecked, comprehensive tiredness. The aching of the fourteen bones, a rub to the temple of thought and actions.

Her breath was shallow as she took the first step, then another. And she was at the bottom of the path, but she hadn't made the descent, the remembrance lost on her, something else had taken her, haply. She turned, her vision blurring like the white void around her pulled at her eyes, pulling and forcing them wide to beg to view but refusing to let them focus on the canvas.

And before her a threshold stood, an opening in the cliff. It jutted outward in a shortened small extent, natural in the snow which fell soft and constant inward the hole, small flakes drifting down like ash and freshly crushed flies, They melted before they could touch the ground and ceased.

Twilight stepped closer, her hooves unsure on the uneven terrain of the earthen steps to the entrance. The opening which expanded into a basin, wide and empty, stretching far out into the endless white void.

A subtle movement just at the edges of her vision, sight manipulated, the pulse on the screen of a half alive world which breathed rapidly to consume itself in the fog of its own creation. Weightless snow emerging from the fog in a cascade of crystalline fragments to not remain, surface destined to remain barren, black and grey and dry as it never should.

She shivered not of the cold but a discrepancy in the white, a movement at the viewable end of the basin, mind foggy, no movement, the space stretched and shifted, folding in on itself in a way which the senses of the body could not track properly. Her head throbbed. Her chest tightened and caved in. Staring into the basin void, grains of sand slipping. Faaip de Oiad.

There but for the grace of God goes God. She rubbed her eyes, a hoof pressing against the sockets with the kind of force meant to awaken, to bring clarity without fatigue, but it did nothing except double the shapes and fracture the light into ghostly trails that didn't dissipate. Her vision swam trying to focus, a name slid through and surfaced. Celestia. It hung there in the there there, heavy, weightless, important but oh so elusive and untamed, a thread that forbade it to follow to the source. Lingering in an unformed sequence of events, smoke curling through a multitude of holes in the wall.

I take your hoof
We walk towards where the roses once grew

She remained standing for a moment longer the needed, and then she walked. Not with a purpose, not with any solid thought, just to fulfill the purpose of the ground which existed beneath her and the hooves of hers that had to move, one hoof in front of the other, rhymes of something living in the automation of a slow walking, slow waking half-functioning function. And her motor skills grew a little bit steadier with in each step, and in each sip, sluggish still but no longer foreign, her body had remembered itself.

Her mind did not obey this command.

Streamed, disconnected, flowing out, her consciousness ticked and tickled between half-thoughts. She eyed the details around her without truly understanding them. Just looking. Observing for the sake of doing the sake for the sake which go going with no conclusions and no connections, fragments of the input without cohesion.

The grey stretched vast and unending before her, black dirt in a plain of grey pocked with irregularities of eyes which caught on but did not focus on, snowy fallen thinly Koch snowflakes of dust shaken from old worn cloth and vanishing before it met the earth in broken magnet.

A turn and sight of the cliffs which rose on either side of her, barely visible through the fog which cloaked and draped the void in impenetrable through which loomed those colossal and ancient, unyielding edges jagged in cruelness unearthen material stretching beyond far above far away, peaks swallowed by the cum-semen of the cliffs merging with the void to no end.

The size of which dwarfed her into a minuscule ant before her, the enormity pressed against her like the tip pierced her chest in an oppressive weight. But she hadn't stopped walking the entire time. A graveyard dwelled in animal pelt.

She took another glance another gander to her life where her eyes played tricks on her perception and her eyes moved and surveyed the pulsing cliff which bent into contours of shifting shapes that didn't exist, normalcy uneasily returning and glancing to a balance not balanced, a manageable never safe.

There was a brief thickening in the snow, briefly, a flurry which danced in the air and didn't wish to contact with the solid like the fog which grew denser and more intoxicating, eating away at the sightline enigma, swallowing edges of the cliffs and she pondered of nothing and walked not thinking just doing.

And shall I see You once again?
And see the flags of the blackest kingdom?
And shall I turn towards the dusk?
And dream of dust and broken ships?
And shall they sink without a sigh?
And line the deeps and banners sleep
And winds blow still and clouds amass
So with a knife, or with a cross

The insect world is silent

She walked for a while in a moment, time was stretched and pulled taut in one direction all uneven like scribbles and snapped loose in another. Steps slow, now with a steadiness in the action as her limbs were cooperative though the thoughts lagged behind greatly, all in the shadow of the fog in the cold thick air heavy and still and solid frozen pressure in this atmospheric stray.

Then as summoned by the persistence upon the will of the path made in purple trails, a structure then emerged in the distance, faint at the first eye pointed like a mirage was forming in the void, but its outline sharpened as she drew close, a library, a bibliotheca of what was once a vast structural epic.

It stood in the rocky ground, half-buried by the stones, with the sheer will of time which pushed it down and the ash the final nail which sealed it in the coffin. The walls, which were once proud and brown in with the richness of fresh wood, bygones of the grey and lifeless sunken into itself, those wooden slats which had no shine and no warmth, and their grain etched with the scars of abandonment and the perpetual devastation of the lands it now resided in. Unspecified.

She approached, an exhalation of breath which added to the white fog like a ghost that dissolved into the winter eve. She stopped before that weathered wall, so close enough to witness the grooves in the wood, where once delicate lines had splintered under pressure in weight. She raised her hoof and pressed it against the surface.

The texture was rough, raw, like bark that was stripped too early. Slowly she moved the hoof, tracing the unevenness in the jutting planks hampered by the snow, she followed the memory that was etched inside its surface of interior shelves lay dormant.

And she felt it.

Beyond the wooden crust, beyond the layers and the angelic dust motes in the inside of the walls, went in and out and out was the intangible, a scent which ghosted through the mind like fresh wood just cut. She knew it, but she didn't know why.

A came with it a memory stirred, fragmented, indistinct. A fire. Heat and smoke and the roar of something immense and horrible. A library for wanderers. Was it this library? She couldn’t be sure, but the image rose unbidden, searing with a sharpness that snapped in a clear image, and for a moment she saw it, the library engulfed in flames, its timbers screaming and screening as they collapsed downward into the blaze.

And above the inferno an impossibly tall and impossibly thin wooden cross rose from that inferno, which stretched endlessly into the heavens, warped and twisted and grotesque, the surface charred but faintly glowing with some limited passion. Crucified upon it was something purple, undulating with wings, unnamable of limbs, animal and twisting unknown to the the. The vision of it tightened harshly around her, pulling her inward and then it vanished, gone faster then smoke dissipating.

She tried to hold onto it, to think harder, to grasp and pull that memory back to the front of her mind but it escaped and slipped away, dissolving into the foggy landscape of her brain. She was left with nothing but the smell of wood, the roughness eager on her hoof, and the sting of color pressing against her back.

And she lingered for a moment longer, her hoof on the wood before it too slipped away from the weather and silent ruin standing. She turned her hoof to face her, as small plates of snow fell on her hoof, tiny and dissolving into her fur.

In her nirvana
In her nirvana

In the locust storm born out of horses' thighs
Spills flies and totems
Seen the ink spread
Whilst the tombs of great trees
Open again for me and thee
The lilies unfold
Conjured Nazareth out of mounds
The precrescent rain
A maze of breathing samphire
Sunflowers and honeysuckles
Bark of the wooden caskets on ice
Armen eyes
Twisting dandelions from time into tidеs
Naked as the day you were born

Faces of the grass go lengthening The lengthening faces through the ice and the sun Faces lengthen go lengthening faces Into lengthening faces from the branch to the grass With buried heads they stand in full view Eyes sliding of the faces up and up Slide up the faces and up the sun And up the faces go lengthening faces Eyes are sliding above the tall and peaceful grass Faces of the grass go lengthening The lengthening faces through theice and the sun Faces lengthen go lengthening faces Into lengthening faces from the branchtothegrassWithburiedheadsthey stand in full view Eyes sliding of the faces up and up Slide up the faces and up the sun And up the faces go lengthening faces Eyes are sliding above the tall and peaceful grassFacesofthegrassgolengtheningThelengtheningfacesthrough the ice and the sun Faces lengthen go lengthening faces Into lengthening faces fromthe branch to the grass With buried heads they stand in full view Eyes sliding of the faces up and up Slide up the faces and up the sunAndupthefacesgolengtheningfacesEyesareslidingabovethetalland peacefulgrass

Author's Note