She Shall Wonder Her Own Hell For All Eternity
The cyan pegasus opened her eyes, and all around her was the inside of the Cloudsdale Weather Factory, one of her first jobs. Also where she got her fame.
But, why can’t I remember my name? She asked.
“Rai----! Don’t worry, you’ll be okay! Just hold on! You’ve got to hold on!” She heard someone call out.
“Who... are you? Who is ‘Rai’?” She asked, looking around weakly. Her stamina was weak. She felt like curling up and just... taking a rest.
“Ra----ash! Just run towards my voice, alright?! Don’t go into the light, follow my voice!” The voice seemed to originate from behind the Rainbow maker. Ancient pegasi was scrawled on it. Her Ancient Pegasi was rusty, but it might have spelt out ‘LEAVE’. It was next to the exit, so maybe a literal translation wasn’t what was needed. She went through the door, and found it was too dark for her to see. Soon, however, the room was lit up with a purple aura.
“D-sh! Just keep following my voice, okay?! You’ll be okay, I promise!” Convincing words, but the surroundings of the mare were... disturbing.
A table with unidentifiable guts on it, miscellaneous organs splattered around the room, a few eyeballs... And a knife, which had now found its way into her wings. She screamed with the pain, but soon it subdued. Just enough for her to move on. She looked to the knife, and the hilt had Equestrian carved into it.
“HURRY!” She tried to get it out, but found it was too deep, and she couldn’t dislodge it herself.
“Ra---bow, are you okay!?” The voice asked.
“...It hurts...” She responded, as she continued to follow the voice down a long corridor. “It hurts...” She said again, tears in her eyes. She walked down down until she saw a sign.
In Equestrian, it read Turn Back Now.
“No.” The pegsi muttered, “I need to know who this voice is.”
The sign shuttered, and the punctuation changed.
Turn. Back. Now.
“No.”
Turn. Back. NOW!
“No.”
TURN BACK NOW!
“NO!” Then, everything went black. The knife sunk deeper, causing a gasp from the blue pegasus, but then it vanished. It wasn’t in her wing, and it wasn’t on the floor, but crimson blood flowed from the spot it was in. Then, she was in the same hallway. She slumped her shoulders, and walked back to the room she despised, wondering if anything had changed, seeing how the sign vanished. As she walked, her form grew darker, and darker. Every 10 paces, though, a bar of light would go over her.
“It’s far too late to save her.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have her now. Her soul belongs to me.”
Who are they talking about? The pegasus wondered. Who does who belong to?
“Let ‘er go, then!” A new voice asked. This voice flared her rivalry blood. Did she know this new voice?
“I’m afraid Ra----bow D--h has made a dreadful mistake, fueled by your actions. She-” There was a long pause of silence. She reached the end of the hallway, and a knife chopped off her right wing, causing her eyes to grow wide and tears to form. The knife wrote something on the stained wing, before clicking on the floor. The knife was just a normal butcher’s knife, but the wing now had ancient Pegasi written on it.
Too bad.
“---less she can see through--- I will keep her. If she can get through the Hell I went through, she has my permission to live. If she believes herself to be dead at the end, then she’ll wander her own Hell for all eternity. So, I’d say my goodbyes now, before she shares my fate. Oh, and it’s too bad about your friend. But then, it’s your actions that led her to an early tomb under my reign. But, just like me, she’ll go undocumented.”
The cyan pegasus’ eyes widened. Were her friends to blame? The strange rival, the one who was trying to help her? But most importantly, was she dead? She expected more, but no such luck. She looked down at her now crimson dipped wing, and picked it up. She heard her blood splatter on the floor with each step, but she had to follow the voice. She needed to know what happened. Why it happened. Who was at fault. She trusted the voice that claimed to have ownership over her life more than the others at the moment, but she shook it off, and walked into the newly formed stairwell. Another knife found its way into her other wing. The pain was numbing, but she couldn’t feel anything else anyway. It’s a good way to make sure she wasn’t dead.
This knife read Relive.
“Relive what?” Then, another voice entered her mind.
“My Faithful student, what happened to the Element of Loyalty?”
“She had an accident in the Everfree Forest, and now she’s in a c-” It cut off.
The Everfree Forest? But this is made of stone... She thought, feeling her surroundings. She began down the path, trying to think of what it had meant, why she received only the bare minimum info on what was happening. Sure enough, she felt her way, still getting used to her now black coat, to a hole, which she fell down. A full hour passed before she could open her eyes. Now, she had her colors back, but in front of her was her idol, Spitfire. Her golden coat and fiery hair, however, looked paler than normal. Just as the cyan pegasus opened her mouth to ask the icon of a pegasus something, she stuttered, and slipped into unconsciousness again. When she woke up, she found she was in the same place as before. The Cloudsdale arena.
“Girls, it has been a month. I don’t think she’s waking up.” A prissy voice said, sorrowful, “I think it’s time we accept she’s gone.”
“No!” A handful of voices shouted, “D--hie can do this! She just needs more time!” This was the first good news the pegasus had heard the entire time she was in this place. But, was she really gone a whole month? Then, her wing was cut off by the ‘Relive’ knife, and it wrote something in Ancient Pegasi, again.
This time, it read Rainbow Dash, Please!
Picking the wing up, she began to walk out of the arena. Not five steps later did the wing become lighter. She looked over her shoulder, and her eyes went wide when she saw it lost all her feathers, leaving only Please! to be read. She felt fatigue eat away at her vision, but she couldn’t give up. Not yet. She continued down the path, and when she saw the exit of the arena, and she felt the wings vanish. She quickly looked for them, but found they were no longer in sight. Her eyes were wide, and she felt sadness flow through her. She sat there, and cried. After a few hours, she got up, and slowly walked out, expression grim. She was going to find whoever did this, and kill them.
Music to go with this part.
“As they say where I’m from... Ax, candle, and rope.*” She heard the voice she was looking for, and galloped after him, rage evident in her face. She was so busy with chasing after the voice, that she didn’t notice small wings growing back on her. “Yes, that’s right... Come follow me**...” She charged past the waiting room, and through the entrance hall. She busted out of the stadium, and froze. In front of her was a familiar griffin, and an orange earth pony looking out at Cloudsdale. The Earth Pony had a hat on top of her long blonde hair.
“...I thought you’d die before me, Dash...” The griffin said. Despite having her back to her, she could see the griffin was trying to not cry, but failing, “Didn’t you promise me that? Then you had to go and get cursed, didn’t you? You couldn’t depend on me to help you! How uncool can you get?!” The griffin took off, leaving the blue pegasus alone with the orange earth pony.
“...Ah guess we’re even, then... Ah didn’t get to read tem books with ya’ll, and ya’ll didn’t git to show me how ya’ll look in a hat... And ya’ll never did pay for the cider I snuck your way, didja? Well, I guess ya’ll paid back wit that prank on Big Mac. Ah know this is mighty premature of me, but Ah’ll be out of town for a few months, and Ah don’t know when the Doc’s’ll pull ya’ll. It has been two years, Dash. How have ya’ll been? Ah hope that bastard hasn’t completely broken ya’ll. Just remember sometin for me, alright? That, no matter wut happens, Ah’ll always be your friend. Even if you are a bit over confident, you’re still the best friend Ah could ask for. When, not if, WHEN you beat that sonuvabitch, Ah’ll give ya’ll all the apple cider you can drink. I hope that’s enough for not bein’ here when you wake up, Dash.”
Just as the pegasus went out to embrace the earth pony whose name she could not remember, she was teleported
“Nu-uh-uh! You won’t be taking her away from me!” She heard, and her objective became clear. She had to kill this man to escape. She knew she was still alive. She needed to know just who the Earth Pony was. Who the voices were. She wanted to wake up, and smile as they embraced her.
Now music to go with this part. Major flip flop***, if I say so myself
But that wasn’t going to happen. She found herself at the southern entrance of Canterlot, surrounded by people she knew from life. To her left, was a yellow pegasus with pink hair. She approached the mare, but she simply said the Ancient Pegasus word for ‘D’. It was after she vanished did the Pegasus notice she had knives in her flank, obscuring her cutie mark on both sides. It said ‘HELP’, in Ancient Pegasi. She continued toward a building, and tried talking to the winged unicorn with a magnificent mane, and she said the Ancient Pegasus word for ‘I’. To her left was another winged unicorn, with a more night oriented theme to her. This one muttered the Ancient Pegasus word for ‘W’.
The cycle continued of familiar face with no name until she approached a blue stallion with a darker blue mane. Like the rest of the faces she had seen, he looked familiar, but she couldn’t say who it was exactly. He shouted the ancient pegasus word for ‘K’, and she was knocked out due to the noise. She awoke in a discolored Canterlot, seemingly inverted compared to the normal colors, and she walked past the 12 ponies that had given her the letters, did they begin murmuring. It was soft at first, but as she continued to walk, they began to say it louder and louder. It was a simple question, but one she could not answer.
“Who are you, kid?”
“Who are you, kid?!”
“Who art thou, child?”
“Who are you?”
“Who... are you?”
“WHO ARE YOU!?”
She blacked out.
Who... am I? She wondered, as she woke up. In front of her was a mare, full of life, but not of color. She smiled as she walked down the path to a tower. It was a strange tower, but then she couldn’t remember seeing any other towers. She followed the mare, and found a sign outside the entrance to the tower. It was difficult to read, being worn by time, some parts being marked out completely.
Rainbow? If you’re reading this, then we’re sorry. We’re so, very sorry. We didn’t mean to hurt you. We just wanted you to s..............****onfident. We never wanted you to get hurt. We never wanted you to get cursed by a being from another dimension. We never wanted you to lose three years of your life. I... we... don’t know what else to say. We’re sorry, we never wanted this to happen. That spirit said we’d forget about you, just like how he was. But, we all know we won’t. We’re your friends, Rainbow Dash. Come home. We miss you. Applejack misses you. Scootaloo misses you. I miss you. Please, just wake up so we can hang out again. Please, don’t die. Please, win for us. No matter how hard things may seem, know that your friends are always there to protect you. You can beat him! I know you can.
Your friend, Twilight Sparkle.
This perplexed the pegasus. What was a friend? What did she mean by ‘we didn’t want her to get hurt’? Was this not life? She wondered. She walked into the tower. She was greeted by grey clouds surrounding a machine that had a magnificent hue of color pouring out. From the side, there was an entrance with some gibberish on the side. She entered, and fell into a room illuminated by purple light. The blank slate of a pegasus did not find anything wrong with the room. It was covered in a red, liquid substance, and remains of ponies were scattered around. But, none of this phased the pegasus. She began walking south, it being the only direction she could take. She reached the end of the hallway, and found a sign.
TURN BACK NOW!?
YES or NO?
