The Humiliation of Quirkby AchaianChapters1: The New Place2: Voice3: Unobstructed Darkness4: Dawn of a Black Day5: Dominion of Kindness6: Paragon of Beauty7: All Will Be Shaken...8: ... Until Only The Unshakeable Remains1: The New PlaceThe New Place He was not particularly impressed by the town as he soared above it; wandering among the thermal drafts he saw the slower life of a smaller town and was moderately bored. The vibrancy, although at first unapparent, would perhaps reveal itself in time. That, or he would create excitement enough to entertain himself. Why he had left was another question altogether, one that could be answered in unsatisfying small parts or not at all. Realistic motivations, much like the truth, were always harder to come by. What mattered to him now was that, at long last, he could leave his past behind- if only for a moment’s time in the discovery of a new place. All he possessed was the simple desire of forgetting himself; for everything else he would let chance roll the dice and the result would be satisfactory to him. Below, he saw the ground where he had left his brother behind, and he let that troublesome thought slip from his mind as the breeze commanded his subconscious attention and the bursting thermal drafts raised him higher into the cloud-studded sky. He had done his brother a favor, anyways, even if he was unsure of what it actually was. Now was the time to leave them and all of that trouble alone. He would not think of it again from now on. There were quite a few buildings that he passed over, but he emigrated from them as surely as he had felt the need for isolation. In the northern horizon, the sun to the left on the cusp of descending, he could see a forest in the distance- a welcome riparian change of pace. Further into the west it grew darker in the maladroit and ominous trees, but there seemed to be a bit of a glade calling him in the north distant half-light. Eager to forget himself, he sought the potent promised comfort of the pond ahead and the rest assured by the harmony of silence. From the clouds the blue-green pegasus tumbled lazily, taking care only when it appeared he was close to disaster, doing the minimum necessary to avoid contact with the leaf-bedecked trees. Landing, he looked about: he was at a pond now, a pool of water that resided flat in the half-light that approached dusk. It was quiet, a blessed thing for him, that natural ambience residing in the glade the best possible excuse for noise in his world. He would not stand now to hear any other voices: no, none other sounds that could possibly mean things and especially not his own voice above all. He would sooner drown himself in the still pool. Trees ringed the pond, oaken and willow and many more he could not name; the glade seemed to have an enchanted air about it. Their leaves had not yet dulled with the seasons; many were still a deep green made all the deeper by the leaving light. Brushes and other plants periodically aligned themselves in the picture, mute flowers giving other shades to the ambience. The pool itself was shaped like a semicircle bowed in just so- like a fuller crescent moon- a peaceful curve of liquid slicing through the glade. The soft grassy banks ran from the trees to the pool, which was flat- no rippling, no disturbance- and he instinctively desired to be like it in the moment. Yes, he greatly desired to be at rest, to cease turbulence and assume a more graceful form, and immediately. His patience for life’s maladies had fast come to an end; it had brought him here after all, and did that not mean he could then rest? He walked slowly up to the edge of the crescent of the land’s bulge, the grasp wisping around him and softly caressing him, firing nerves that had no desire to be conductors of more tension. Blowing around, the wind ruffled him; the air was cooler in the glade and the sun had no presence here. It had set perhaps, or was merely not visible; either way he cared not. His pulse slowed; he lay down at the edge of the smooth pool, seeing many things across reflected in it. There was a weeping-willow tree anchored by a rock near the shore, crooked and drooping, and all the others seemed to steal its semblance in the reflection. He took a long time examining them: though distorted, he found it oddly appropriate that all things should be concealed by the nature of the world and hidden, with their shapes changed and colors variable in the silvery star-shone beams. Those selfsame stars did not stay in place either, and in two months’ time they would be rendered unrecognizable. Sad sentiment though it was, it was nevertheless better any previous rendering he had conjured. Now the breeze was in the trees, and the sliding of the leaves filling the space with blanketing noise from there to unknown horizons. Blue and light and green in the glade dominated gently; it was all soft and colder colors blissfully sapping conflict; the grass was cool and dew-soaked and he could feel it transporting uncomfortable heat away. He could not have asked for any more tranquil environ; it was a great mental exhalation. A life of exhaustion had brought him here; exhaustion would keep him there as long as he was able to be. He would sleep… fade… evaporate, like the water drank up into the full air and be nothing more than a piece of the world with no wonder as to itself, no thoughts; he would not think but would still be; sensations of worldly amity would replace thoughtful being. It was the grandest peace he had ever known. The state of bliss could not last forever. 2: VoiceVoice There was one voice, and it was Harmony. It swept him up in the notes; the chords carried him; the melody amazed him; what he felt was quite unlike anything gone before. The movements of sound-waves through the variable elements of air and water and life diminished none of its beauty: the perfect perception of his ears was immutably wonderful. It trembled mightily; it was rendered perfectly, gracefully, a soft and somehow minute vibrato that exuded simple gentleness. He had never been more in awe until that moment, and it only magnified as time passed. He reached out- almost as if he could touch it, feel it and be touched and inspired in turn, and then- Gasping, he awoke in the grass; he stood up in realization and a soon-sinking disappointment. It had all been a dream, a miserably wonderful dream, and he would never hear the voice again. There could not be such a pure thing, and certainly not for him. The urge to weep overwhelming, he staggered back onto the ground and stared at the pond. Gradually, his gaze wandered from the far bank to the nearest one, the new image on the very closest edge, and he saw for an instant a blue-green reflection- Mourning sorrow boiled over into rage as quick as lightning, and he struck the water and shattered the reflections; he threatened to scream and had to clench his mouth shut not to do so. Agonizing fury! He was filled with the inexpressible rage of a titan, but the volatile feeling could not remain so in him for long. With another instant’s passing, the rage condensed into the more familiar and pathetic if not poetic feeling of loss and shameful guilt. It had been nothing but a dream and a construct of the unconscious mind’s impetuousness, nothing more but proof of the self-hatred. A minute of grieving passed; choked tears silently shed into the cool dark earth. Perhaps he could- he had heard it, after all. No, he growled mentally, verbally a guttural uttering, hardening himself with what little lingering mental fortitude he had not exhausted. Never again. He was very miserable, and he was therefore incensed for a long time. His grief was borne out onto the earth in the most original fashion: like bloody offerings his tears soiled the earth; the deliverance of pain onto him demanded release. Then- for a second- he thought he had heard the divine voice again. He began to plead with his mind not to drive him madder than he could bear, but the sound would not stop. However, appealing to his mind could provide no relief: his ears were the ones supplying the gloriously maddening melody, and his ears did not lie. He was reluctant to believe, almost to the point of deaf denial; although once he understood he immediately sprung off the ground in impassioned panic, determined to find apparition of harmony in sound. For even in that pain he was able to recognize the truth and healing, even if it was beyond his understanding. His misery came to the forefront and it was swept aside by a small hope, and even that small hope was magnanimous enough to delay and destroy the onslaught of agony. To hope is to live; his life was small now, but it was existent and its fading would not come, indeed, not yet. He started walking and the notes hinted at a form in the air, cascading like a brook out of the trees into his ears. It seemed to come from everywhere at once and inside himself. With great restraint, he circumambulated the pool with attention to detail the highest priority, but he gained no clue to the voice falling in rhythm onto him. He was at the edge of the glade now, the seeping blackness of the forest beyond ominously opaque. But the voice was calling him; the song was clearer in the dark… He rushed into the shadows; the silent woods were now organs of the sound delivered to him. It was drawing out a word now, words now; through every note it vibrated agonizingly slow: Hic sum te vocare… Frenzy gripped him, energy coursing like magma in his veins; a fantastical primal feeling innervated him; it was electrifying. The tempo changed; it was headed to a heady drumming now, ever-quicker on-and-on, or perhaps it was his heart beating. Trees whirling and the leaves rasping, he was lost- No, not again! He could not lose the voice; it was paramount to hope itself! Death was lurking in every shadow, waiting to devour his being if he stopped, if he could not find that magnificent paragon. He was whipped by unseen plants and branches as he ran through the vaporous night, yet no stupor could seize him in his running while the song seized him. Eius paci vocatus es… Hints of luster beguiled the searching eyes, the voice was close- mortally close- and he was ever within its bind! He could have been running in circles for all he knew, but the pool had been left behind for certain. Crashing through invisible shrubbery, the Indian-ink doused air obscured his vision until all sensation could only be derived through the weight of the earth and the coarseness of the plants brushing and the fresh smell of life in night-bloom and the taste of purity in the air, but most- most of all- the sound, the indefatigable chords convulsing his being! Pro te est vocare… It rang, amplified; it danced in the woods and in his mind; building through crescendo- or perhaps it was his perception- and the climax was near. There was no light in the forest, and he stumbled as he ran slipshod through innumerable obstacles and gloomy voids; the voice had stopped- halted! But it was only for a moment, as it was nearing the very end. And if he could not find it before the finale… It was closing- it was now!- There could be nothing afterwards save for grieving despair if he did not find it- Et se invenies. He burst back into the glade on the opposite bank of the pool he had occupied, and she- the mistress of sound, harmony’s bearer incarnate- stood his former station nobly; engulfed in moonlight she stood proud yet modest, a silhouette of grace. The last note faded with awe into columns of beaming light, and as it did she noticed him. Her gaze shied from him, but she could not hide herself. He could not speak the words to describe it. He could not find his voice. 3: Unobstructed DarknessUnobstructed Darkness She fled. An urge rose to his throat to plead with her to stop, but he strangled it before it could leave his mouth. He would not break that barrier. The unbroken chain of silence chafed against his desires, but his stern memories could not give ground. She had fled directly into the east where the sun would rise in many hours’ time, and the void of sound left behind seemed almost criminal. It could only have been his presence that made her stop the brilliance waving in the air, though, and that weighed on him further as he morosely returned to the bulge of the crescent by the pool he had first lain by. It was all just another miserable experience that he would have to forget. Nothing more. He closed his eyes and lay back down. He was devoid of any semblance of hope in that moment; a kind of apathetic self-disgust and piteousness rolled through his mind until he could not stand to exist in that darkness. He raised his lids, and the sight was no happier than his depressed mind. Trampled and crushed grass was abundant in the murky midnight, products of his exalted suffering. He may have left the causes of his hurts behind when he had consciously discarded all previous memory, but he had discarded any joy he had carried as well. The glorious song was now far absent from his mind. It would have been such a meaningful recollection; only the ending was a harbinger of regret. There would be no compromise between him and his atrocities, though; he could not preserve blank peace and anything of the previous life. He would have to forget. The bereavement of his past would have to pass. Fortunate for his fate, but not for his mind’s state, tangible reminders of something that was true were inerasable. It was the faintest light that bled out in the trees, that kept him moving… but it was still light. And in the stars’ disguised shining, he could distinguish- or perhaps it was the flicker of life in the distance- a print on the earth, a means of tracking. He would go back into the forest, back into the black-shadow, but for a long time prior the injustice of life would rot and rankle in his soul and he would think many terrible things. At last- after he had nearly asphyxiated in the sickening atmosphere- he set himself upright, and tentatively turned to track the timid indentations. It was a small victory, but it paled compared to the enormity of all the cutting, vorpal dissonance he had lurking just inside himself. The denial of unholy sentiments could not go on for long, and the fear in the shadow it cast manifested itself every time he thought he had lost the diminutive and flighty trail. Hope’s predilection was always that of success, though, and he stayed on the path. As long as he was supplied, his hope could not be blotted out. Burning brighter, his skills sharpened in the low ambience of the night’s dank and soporific image, but there was no chance of him stopping now, not when the path was clear and unambiguous. There was another print, and up ahead a broken branch that indicated the angelic pegasus's passing; further on there was a small indentation and scuffing in the grasses that indicated she had paused and observed the night for a while; and he did the same, guessing his position. He was completely and utterly unaware of his whereabouts now relative to the sun and moons’ ambulations, and he could not perceive accurately the stars studding, ringing and illuminating the void, but he was not bothered. He had been utterly lost even before he set out, in a mental way, and now that he had found a purpose he was surefire and he felt better about himself than he had in memory. Of course, he would only let his memory stretch back so far before it would run into a black unnavigable abyss. But that was no matter now; he had a place in this new-imagined world and that was to follow these tracks onto their end and… what? Find her? That seemed to be the logical end of the tracks, indeed, and certainly something else would follow after that. He could not get too far ahead of himself, or he might lose what was clear and obvious in front of him. Letting fall the matter, he took to the trail again. The hardest exercise by far was identifying anything in the murk. The plainness of the upset trail taken was easily and readily obvious to him, but vision out of all the senses had decayed in the passing of time. Sound was gloriously vibrant: owls, crickets, water-droplets falling in rhythms of variance, the crunch and snap of twigs with the soft steps he took. The night air prescribed no less sensation: it was cool and moist and hydrating; it relaxed the lungs and he was able to breathe easier. Smell was a phantasmagoria of foreign flowered scents; those same night-blooms sometimes subtly and sometimes soaringly ruled the air. All amplified the tentative touches determining the tracks, yet sight refrained from intensification. He continued on for a short while, gradually increasing his pace, and his awareness heightened until he was confident that he would find her soon- very soon. His pulsing veins quickened and cleared; the pure flow of energy was ecstasy, and around the next edge or corner he would find her, he was sure. Turn around a bend he did, but he slipped as an indefinable crack sounded; there was a great movement of the night’s disguised object, and he was pinned beneath what could only be a massive branch. He was trapped completely; the wooden mass was crushing him back to the ground. He could not move away, even though he struggled with great will and passion he could not. He could only breathe, lie down, and wait for grim exhaustion to take him. The long night was an aeon, and it was not long before monochromatic tendrils of shadow crept back into the conscious of the mind. The snares they sinisterly set were loaded with the most caustic venom, poised to spring, yet already diminishing what light that had assumed the fading specter of hope in his mind. It was growing cold in the bitter darkness. Light threatened to die inside of him. 4: Dawn of a Black Day“A moral man is one who reacts to temptation as soon as he feels it in his heart, without yielding to it…” -Sigmund Freud on The Brothers Karamazov ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dawn of a Black Day “Oh my.” As usual, those words were an understatement of the severity of the situation at hand. Normally, the sight of an explicitly bruised and deathly haggard-looking pegasus trapped under a cracked and fallen tree trunk would cause at least a sharp inhalation of shock, but she was more prone to muted reactions. In all likelihood, the unfortunate pegasus had been trapped there all night and into the current early morning: visible scrapings on the earth, the wood and the body wedged between them indicated a long, torturous, and fruitless struggle to escape crushing confinement. Eyes closed, his ragged breath was barely audible over the morning radiance of sound in the forest. It was much brighter now than in the forsaken night; the twisting streams from the morning sun had passed him by, leaving him in a merciful modicum of shade in the illumination around him. She moved closer immediately to determine his condition; by all measures he was far from well, yet his biggest malady was the trunk pinning him to the ground. The earth was uneven and broken around him and the log had fallen at an angle, saving him from a more untimely but perhaps more merciful demise. Nevertheless, he would succumb to any number of morbid conditions if he was not moved out from under the trunk soon. Help could be reached, but it would be too long coming; she had to work some solution now if she was to be sure of his safety. “Hello?” She stepped in closer, doing her best to rouse him gently with voice. To do so now would be far from easy, as she was not a very vocal pony by any means, and he appeared to be caught in a mortally bound sleep. “Can you hear me?” Her soft voice had no effect. With the lightest touch, she put a supporting hoof to the side of his face and he gasped- a quick, saw-bladed intake of breath- and his eyes jacked wide open with a broad primordial intensity born of terror and sick desperation. She did not recoil, but she was concerned; and her worry for him was magnificent enough to overcome the surprise. Yet she had touched him! He was experiencing catharsis now; the touch had vivified the remainder of life in his damaged body and tortured mind. She was the singer! She who possessed the splendor of grace in voice had come to him, but he was trapped and would soon be a claimant of death’s embrace; it was the only possibility foreseeable to a ravaged mind. “It’ll be alright.” Liar. “Can you talk?” He nodded, but did not reply. She was innocently confused to the strange reaction, but continued regardless. “I can try to move the trunk, but I’m not very strong, so you’re going to have to tell me if I’m taking the pressure off you, please. If you think that’s a good plan, I mean.” She added, drawn inwards for a moment on the ghost of a hint of an offensive attitude. Contrary to her apologetics but in cohesion with her concerns, she fluttered around to the other side of the log, out of his vision, and began to push. Despite her saying so, she did seem strong enough to be able to move the crushing log somewhat, if only with great strain and effort. She heaved, stopped for an instant; it was a mighty drain on her small physical reserve of strength; breathing hard she moved it a few inches, but it only caused him more pain- she was crushing him underneath it! “Is it working?” He growled instinctually with a primal determination; the trunk was cutting into his air, but his words would not pierce that selfsame atmosphere- no, not while he still drew breath, yet he would only draw breath for a swiftly diminishing time under the titanic weight. Scraping the ground, his mind flashed in and out of blackness momentarily- again- if he would not speak he would face imminent death and all the fear of the unknown country. Short, cracking thoughts echoed thundering sounds as the trunk began to seize out of its supports. “Stop!” he gasped, his voice hacking from lack of use. She stopped immediately, ran back around. It was too late for him. The trunk had not crushed him, but long silent shrieks of miserable frustration wracked through his mind regardless. The screams of memory, the thousand misdeeds and the unmistakable crime that wrought his torment were there- in the present!- No, he had not been crushed by the trunk, yet the long and demonizing past that he had left behind was recalled instantly at the sound of his own voice, and grim hatred of his own self funneled through it into a macabre concentrate more horrid than any wrath yet poured out. He was a factory, a distillery of self-hatred, and he had been left to mature towards his sick conclusion in a night that had only added shadowed hate and the inky blackness of despair to the concoction. The eyes remained the only intelligible indicator of the torrid upheaval within, a plagued and furious dual globe that now stared at she who had brought him promises yet inebriated him with pain. “I’m sorry!” She saw immediately the trouble she had caused, and threw herself against the other side of the twisted-thick log. While she was straining on against the weight, he could only look on blindly with miserable hate in his eyes and curse silently. She had brought this onto him; she had caused the greatest Humiliation to be scarred on him; with an explosive and exhaustive push the log fell off of his beaten form and his sinister growl was lost in the crashing and the exhausted pants of she who had saved him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated as soon as was able to move herself to his wounded side; blood and blue-black bruising disfigured his coat where the trunk had crushed him. “I’m Fluttershy.” His mind was chaos's nexus, but somewhere in forgotten memory and the gasping relief of decompression an old habit triggered and he spurred a phrase of an older time: “My name is Quirk…” His vision was fading rapidly, she was doing something to him; what little perception that was not pain was taking its leave. She was touching him, flashes of pain penetrated him like needles through his nerves. She was saying something- he could feel it only in the barest distance- the long mind’s agony was coming to a shorter end- “This might hurt a little bit…” Sharp! A pain stabbing, he was about to scream out against it, and then- then- nothing; blessed blankness. He thought he could hear something in his dreaming, but it was only a mirage, a soundscape. 5: Dominion of KindnessDominion of Kindness Gentle rays of sunlight cascading through an unseen ceiling contrasted harshly with the rough wounds concentrated on Quirk’s torso, which was bound by bandages but brutally beaten nonetheless. The inarticulate and gradual process of comprehending the waking world around him was nearly a trial beyond the means of his tired soul, yet by some act of forgotten mercy he was able to cognize the softly illuminated room he occupied. It had no place in his memory, not the one he had recently created and not the one he had left behind. He could not react to the golden light and the streams of warm air through the open window, for he was weakened to the point where any movement was a mountain and any thought a paradox. All he could handle were his open eyes and the visions they gave him. There was a table next to the bed bound by the rays of the sun-shrined window, with soft and ephemeral curtains billowing slowly into the room refracted with the morning’s glory. There was a door shut across the length of the small space, delicately raveling with finite patterns slightly blurring with the waking of his mind. There was a wood-boarded floor, but it was precisely and intensely secured against any variety of movement; it would not bend nor shiver under any pressure. Deeply rendered air gave the room a sense of weight and solidity yet also of the incomprehensible smooth gentleness that it carried; the atmosphere was thick and rich with a singular vibrancy he could not identify. The totality of the scene could not be perceived merely from his eyes, however. Under a warm series of sheets, he was much more scarred than the room could imply, with many deep and damaging bruises and cuts as results of his night under the constricting log in addition to the destructive mentality that he knew so well. He felt every second pass, with wonder and with pain, for he had not yet remembered himself despite the pointed pricks and dull varying thuds heightening his nerves to raw stimulation. He looked dazed; he was not clearly in the present, even onto the moment that the door swung open the world retained vagueness. Fluttershy entered with a pitcher of water and a roll of bone-white gauze in hoof, and by quick and unfortunate degrees his expression changed from blankness to a grim and wincing visage at memory’s return. She took interest in his mood change- at least, she did not take offense or confusion- and instead she looked on with great compassion. “I’m sorry, Quirk, but I didn’t feel safe moving you all the way to the hospital. You slept nearly a whole day. Are you in a lot of pain?” “What do you know about pain?” The rough and rasping yet quiet and unconventional answer caused a deliberation on Fluttershy’s part, but she did nothing untoward. To the contrary, she moved forward on the matter, getting at the heart of her feelings. She confessed to him, an honest and complete outpouring of her worry. “It’s my fault that this happened to you. If I hadn’t of been so shy, then you wouldn’t have tried to chase me. Can you forgive me?” “No.” The blunt and rather final answer did not offend Fluttershy, but caused her eyes to swell with tragic emotion and imminent moisture. She lowered her face in shame, whispered “If that’s what you think is fair.” and left the room swiftly. He had no way of knowing that she had fled back to her own room, or that she had collapsed onto her bed and was weeping violently, releasing bitter and painfully passionate tears at her own undeniable guiltiness in his suffering, or that for the possibility of his well-being she would sacrifice a great deal of her own. For she had wondered and feared for the longest day if he would be alright when he woke up, if he woke up, and the terrible conclusion that the blame was hers had come to her swiftly and had taken residence as if it was a morbid skeleton in her mind. She had even gone as far to make a resolution to herself to allay her own fears and shyness out of fear of hurting him, yet some inevitably remained. Quirk had had the chance to arrest any of her suffering before it took a stricter hold, yet he had chosen deliberately to prolong it. Fluttershy had worried and cared for him all the night, to her great emotional detriment without an ounce of regret. If he had known, his feelings and his decision would not have been different. He was consumed by an atrocious menagerie of malicious feelings himself, but his actions were nonetheless inexcusable in any case. Soon, she returned with bleary eyes and a face that she would wish to hide from Quirk, but was unable to do so regardless of his weakened state. It was necessary that she change the bandages, and despite the hurts she now possessed she found the idea of shirking her responsibilities to him for her own sake to be abhorrent. She choked on unspoken words and intense regretful guiltiness; the sickness inside herself was a malady that originated in a profound mercy, yet they were not the same and one was not a necessary product of the other. There was yet a split to be made, a solution to be found, something gone that had not been thought of. Slowly, softly, murmuring kind apologies she went as she unwound and rebound the tight strips with delicate care. Regardless of the maximum gentleness she achieved, it was nevertheless the unfortunate fact of life that he would suffer as one result of the healing. But he shouldn’t have to… It was my fault… She was thinking now of things in that line of reasoning as she closed the wounds and left the room. Must he experience pain? Some spiteful individuals hurt by his disgraceful abandonment of the emotional consideration of others would say yes. They would postulate that only through suffering could he understand why he should not inspire it. No doubt he deserves consequences, and no light ones, for his actions. Through agony, they were really saying, lies the path to redemption. It is, after all, an understanding that brings about the desire to not advance pain, is it not? It is harsh, but does it not work? Troubled by the remembered rhetoric that seemed insecure in a dreadful way, Fluttershy found herself heading into the midday forest to seek the solvency of a moral solution. 6: Paragon of BeautyParagon of Beauty It was a quiet revolution at first, as they all tend to be. It started with a dissonance. The smallest voice of minute discord in a forum of the mind softly, cunningly spoke, and gave motion to a life of tiny instruments with chords of malice. They spread about stealthily through the great senate of the mind, and by slow degrees all who listened succumbed to the bizarre and malicious inferences they suggested. It was a Nightmare of reason; the temples of the mind began to crumble at their very foundations: those who tended them. They had heard the lies whispered and shouted amongst the truth, and they had failed to distinguish them. The senator’s judgments had become ludicrous; the orators had become demagogues; the harmony stripped and broken, yet still a single voice cried out: “Is pain not a thing to be avoided? Can there not be good without it?” Fluttershy was unsure of the quorum in her mind rejecting the proposition, yet her conscience, though wracked by shared agonies, agreed- if it was not shouted down by the “common sense” of others first. It was a deeply disturbing disagreement, and she began a methodical stroll to relieve some of the tension. The sun was shining, it was by all measures a glorious day, yet turmoil had found its way in. And what is pain, anyways? She knew it to be a reaction to stimuli, in the most biological sense. But was suffering as a result of an action, as opposed to mere pain, an unnecessary wrong and wounding of the self and others? Or was it an exercise in humility and humbleness that would prevent hurts in the future? Some shouted for the affirmative, that an eye for an eye would stop the cycle, but Fluttershy was already blinded and she knew not what she saw and she comprehended not what she heard and her feelings were all awry and what was good was gone and all understanding went with it! And she was not so sure, and the voices kept shouting. Surely some good had come out of suffering, though. Had not the pain of sympathy inspired many great things? Did not the relation of pain in another to pain in the self cause a desire to avoid that malady in all persons? Yet suffering had created a great many who believed themselves unredeemable, and did it not often just as much fail as succeed? It was an uproarious argument; the senate convulsed; it was a fundamental question of thought and morality far beyond any peak that was comprehendible, and the debris that came crashing down the calamitous mountain that hosted the debate threatened to slide her away into a black and murky inescapable chasm. She stopped walking at the edge of the forest. There were birds there, and they were happy, and simple, and pure; they sang their songs without suffering. If they were not happy, then would they be sad? Fluttershy did not know the answer, but she instead rephrased the question more formally and particularly: was evil the absence of good or was good the absence of evil? Was evil the disruption of harmony or was harmony the lack of evil? What was bad? She sat, and considered the songbirds. The song was harmonious, definitely a good thing. But if she were to heft a rock at them and disturb it (her stomach churned at the thought; she was not one to do such an unkind thing) would the silence be worse than the song? She nodded to herself; it definitely would be worse. Yet the silence in itself was not a bad thing, she realized; the conundrum remained unsolved in that singular situation. Fluttershy would have to become grander in her consideration to gain a universal understanding. She supposed that there was nothing, and that the nothing was a blank void of space with absolutely no thing to call it home, with no light and no shadow and no earth. Would that be worse than the silence of the birds? It must be- for if the birds were silent in one moment, they could always sing again in another, but if there was nothing then no good and no harmony of any kind could exist. It was true that silence was sometime welcome, but that always existed in contrast to the noise when it had become overbearing. Even things that she considered bad could not exist in the void, yet what did that have to do with suffering? It seemed to suggest that what existed was good, for good can always come of existence no matter the circumstance, and what was evil was… what? The birds whirled around in joyous circumferences, calling to each other. Fluttershy paused on her reflections, and was warmed by their play for a minute of thankful solitude. Then it came to her: the undefinable realization, the moment of understanding. Evil was nothing, evil was no thing; for evil was pushing toward a black void of nonexistence, pushing towards entropy and infinite coldness, and did not negative emotions do the same? Did not always the good go toward the preservation of life instead of endless destruction? Did not suffering and pain push toward those most horrible of occurrences, the slaying of the self or others and death, the demise and end of all perception? The queasiness of the last bit of her thought was prevalent for a moment, but was quickly overtaken by a brightening dawn of understanding- that was it! She could help him without hurting him! With a slight squeak of excitement she took to the air with a swift deliverance in mind, the philosophical wonderings had produced an applicable solution to the pit of painful feelings that Quirk had become. If he can let go, he can learn how to stop hurting himself! Fluttershy’s exuberant conclusion drove her swiftly toward her cottage, and although most would have considered it odd that she cared not what he had done to her, that was simply the justice of her being. Author's Note 3/29/13 I would very much appreciate it if you would tell me whether you felt this chapter is out of place or not. I keep getting conflicting reports and can't make a firm decision whether to rewrite this chapter or not. 7: All Will Be Shaken...All Will Be Shaken... Quirk thought it strange that she should be attractive. It was not a matter of specific importance to him; no- not in the least- he had known many mares that were deemed striking, and he did not consider it a feature that merited an especially singular attention. Solely was it a matter of incongruity, that she should be a diminutively quiet beauty and infinitely gracious yet a harbinger of sick pain to him. She was talking to him now in an excited voice, yet she never reached that plateau of decibels that would indicate excitement from any other. He didn’t deem her words of any specific importance; his attention was inbound on his own abyss and he paid no heed to her words- at least, not yet. “And if you can forgive yourself, then you’ll stop feeling terrible!” Fluttershy finished with an expectant happiness displayed; eagerly she waited for his response. “And why should I trust you not to hurt me?” His voice was unusually quiet to match hers, but in all other things it contrasted: it rasped in guttural pains; it was weak and unexcited; it thrilled the nerve but chilled the bones. Fluttershy paused, considered with a surprised worry the maligned intent of Quirk’s words. “If I hurt you, what would I gain from it?” “You have only inverted the question.” The sick-rasping voice lost a measure of patience. “Answer it.” The next answer was faster. “If I hurt you, then I would feel bad.” The focused plagued orbs sneered. “Sympathy.” He said it with a tone of contemptuous loathing, but he did not contest the answer- and yet- yet there was a hint in his voice, of something else, some regret… “What have you ever seen from me to indicate that I am worth saving?” “Everypony has some good in them.” “And what have you seen from me to place me among all the others?” He was lower, growling; his anger had risen to become a cold roughness. “What do you know of me, whom you first saw only hours ago in a forest? How do you know that I am not the exception to the rule?” “You came to me when I was singing. You saw that it was good, didn’t you?” “And if I only came to extinguish that goodness?” She could have stepped back, recoiled, shut him away or abandoned him, turned him out at the suggestive threat, or done many other seemingly justified things besides, but she stood straight before him and did not falter at his ominously mortal words. “Then you would just be hurting yourself. Nopony actually likes being hurt, they just think they do sometimes, because they think they can distract themselves with other pain. I’ve had friends tell me that my singing is very good, and I think it’s just ok, but that’s still good because they like it. Everypony likes a good song occasionally, and you wanted to see me singing.” “Your singing is unique.” The rasp replied. Despite the words, it refrained from being a compliment- it was more aptly termed an observation- yet it was still peculiar to hear from him; previously it would seem that he should not care. “I think that you’re causing yourself pain that you don’t need to experience.” Fluttershy forwarded on a suspicion. “You don’t deserve to suffer, not you or anypony else.” It was the most authoritative thing she had ever said to him, but unusually she had no qualms about it. Confidence and proof drove her to certainty in a higher principle. “Who are you?” His ragged breath took some time to catch up with his thoughts. “Who are you to judge me, to deem me worthy of not writhing in agony for every last instant of my life; you who know none of my past?” “I’m sorry to disagree, but I’m not judging you. I’m treating you like I do everypony else, and nopony deserves to suffer and especially not like you are right now. You’re physically hurt and it looks unpleasant to be like that, and that’s mostly my fault, and I’m very sorry for you and I’m trying to do what I can, but you’re also hurting inside yourself and I think that might be a lot of your pain. All of us are hurting inside ourselves a little, and we could all use some relief.” “What if I stole your voice? If I took your unique talent that your friends treasure and made it common, until every last one had heard it and they no longer considered you special or valued it in any way over any other?” Fluttershy replied immediately, without thought or hesitation. “That would be very nice of you. To spread it, I mean. If they really like my singing that much, then they ought to hear it until they’re satisfied. I’m afraid that I’m a little shy about sharing that, which is why I ran away from you. It might be nicer of you to ask permission first, but that’s only a suggestion.” For the first time, the wounded face turned from a grim-sickening disturbance to an expression of sheer incredulity- disbelief- he could hardly comprehend what he was hearing; the next statement came with finality and foreshadowing determination already possessed and now set into motion. “Then I will not.” He staggered suddenly out of bed, to the tuned gasp of shock from the mare that cared for him. 8: ... Until Only The Unshakeable Remains...Until Only The Unshakeable Remains “You have to stop! You’re going to cause yourself permanent internal damage!” “You are in the past now.” Quirk didn't pause; he was shaking along the path with the occasional grunt of intense pain; he had gotten halfway out the door before he had collapsed the first time. He was in no fit state to continue: every step taken drained the reservoirs of his lifeblood. Fluttershy was dancing around him, desperately attempting to persuade him to stop his mad conquest while simultaneously refusing to arrest him with force. He tripped again and his head was cut clean, a great straight scar on his face erupted; he merely growled it away despite the vicious blots of blood falling to the earth. “You shouldn’t do this to yourself! You don't deserve it!” Quirk ignored her, pulling himself onto unsteady hooves with no sign of determination fading. Feminine tears mirrored his life dripping out into the earth; she looked on, standing at his side she pleaded for mercy for his own self. “At least stop hurting yourself, even if you won’t stop hurting me!” “I will not take what I do not deserve.” Fluttershy glanced back for a moment at the horrific trail he had left behind, a scraped mess of his willed walking tainted with unmentionable dark red-black stains. “Please…” She begged, and it was not so much pleading as a whimper. “I can’t stop you; you have to help yourself before I can help you.” He moved on; his vision was a hemorrhage of marred perception and his bodily agony interfered with what little was left undisguised to his sight, until he could see naught but a great harsh-white blur of the sky and sun. The ground was trembling, quaking, seizing, but he rose again and his campaign of suffering was uninterrupted. She looked on with sympathetic wrackings of her own body as he crawled and limped along; his saw-bladed breath was increasingly ragged and pathetic; with every miserable step taken she felt a stab ever-closer to her heart. He was a wreck beyond sane comprehension: bandages still lingered on his body to cover the most garish wounds, yet the mutilated mind shone horrifyingly through. The blackness of his corrupted soul seemed to have consumed all his being and Fluttershy could only look on with a sickly kind of worry- nothing that she was capable of could cease his destructive will. He would have to want healing of his own accord. Nothing else would suffice. With broken steps and halting breaths, Quirk made the torturous journey back- all the way back to the pool- she was fearfully amazed that he had not passed out yet, but he was reaching the end. He was on cooler grass now, the inner crescent of the pool greeted him with tremulous ripples as he lurchingly approached, his movements just enough to disrupt it the slightest bit. “Please don’t do this to yourself!” She shattered suddenly, weeping behind him. She could have looked away, yet somehow she found the strength not to. Quirk took no heed of it. He crashed onto the shore as his effort exhausted, head inches from the water; the exorbitant effort to bring him there had cost him all and his corrupted mind could conceive of no other thing than the bottomless pool before him. And the pool! Infinite depth, a transparent harrowing mass that had no substance- no, it seemed not to be real- his breath caught for an undefinable moment, for the longest instant he did not breathe. There was nothing in the invisibly deep abyss, a terrible blankness that called him; in that vast and perfectly clear liquid there was a void and the void promised him peace, yet it inspired a screaming horror somewhere in the darkness of his mind. There was no end to it, no end to the darkness; it would devour him left unchecked. And it called to him!- it called softly with a magnificent cold tone; whispering it suggested cathartic rumors of black nonexistence. It commanded his will and only the tiniest minority of his consciousness was wracked with terror because of it. The rest took the depth in awe, sought to become a part of the crushing abyss that so morbidly and tantalizing beckoned. He could muster no resistance; it was calling him… he would go to it and be nothing… it would liberate him from life and all the pain… “Please stop...” The desperate phrase shattered the mirage of infinite death for a moment; he saw his face reflected on the water’s surface. He screamed: it was a long, drawn-out and piercing, wrenching and painful cry, but for the first time something passed from his mouth that sounded natural to his guardian. For there was a face in the water, and it was his face, and half was covered in blood and half was covered in tears and perspiration mixed and split diagonally. With that horrific expression he had observed himself; he saw what he had become and the imminent void he would enter if he did not change. No! Not this way! The baptism of blood was only halfway complete, but no longer would he submerge himself into the black depths to complete the profane immersion; he was terrified. The horror was too much for him. I don’t want to go like this… Behind him, Fluttershy stood with her stained face of tears, all attention forward on him who had sounded natural for the first time, as her care had always been. She was ready, eternally ready, to help him- but he had to allow it. He had to want it. I want to be… “You have to let go of your suffering. It won’t do you any good now.” She whispered, the last of the tears rolling off her face into empty air. I want to live… “You’re the only one who can really help you...” She wiped an errant tear off her face, revealing a clean and determined expression. I want to love… “...But I will help you as much as I can if you let me.” Her declaration strong, she moved to his side, looked down on him with great sympathy and concern and an uncontested capacity for kind understanding. Fluttershy had spoken and exhausted the last ounce of her passion and certainty; she felt quite like fainting or fading into sensation in the aftermath of emotion but she refused to deny the demands, the virtues of her kindness. Quirk lay there for a minute more, the tears and blood flowing freely from wounds of body and mind. Tremulously, and quite unintentionally at first, with great terror and deliberation, he had changed the most miniscule portion of his perspective- a rock in a wall reaching beyond the sky- a drop in the temporal sea- the gears were set irrevocably into motion; the switch thrown could not be undone. Yet one obstacle towered still. “I can’t wash myself clean.” He sounded pathetic, weak; he was humiliated in utter completion now; no longer did his voice enrapture minds and inspire subduing fear; he had lost his pain but none of his guilt. “I can’t fix what I’ve broken.” “I believe that you can; I believe in you.” She reached down into the water, and it was just a pool now; there was no illusion of death and drowning for either. She poured cold, gloriously clean water down his face and it provoked a sharp inhalation- she was washing away the blood- she was washing away his sweat and tears- he was cleaner, if only the slightest bit. “You…” His weakened voice trailed off. “I can help you start, if you’d like me to.” "I remember; I hurt you..." "I forgive you." “Can you take me back?” Without a further word, as gently as she was able, she of great delicacy lifted him up and placed him perpendicularly slung across her back. Heavy burden though he was, she bore it happily. Morning in the forest was much nicer than the night of a few days past had been; even the once wince-causing breathing of Quirk seemed to have grown more peaceful as Fluttershy carried him. She could not tell if he was conscious or unconscious; he seemed to be seeing things that were not there, but she was confident that all would work out for the better. At long last, his life of pain had been absolved, and only the recovery remained. Out of the forest and back up the path to the solitary cottage she carried his healing mass, back into the room where he had lay in sleeping and in agony and in waking, but never in isolation. The breeze reigned through the ethereal curtains. it was calm now in the house; the long journey to recovery had begun. He seemed not to be lucid, yet she took a wet cloth to his face and started gently scrubbing the liquid remnants of turmoil away regardless. He breathed a little faster for a minute, until it seemed that he had gained a modicum of consciousness again- and he spoke, softly, quietly- she had to lean in to hear his words: “Will you teach me how to sing?” “I promise that I will, as soon as you can.” Thank you... He would have said, but he was already dreaming. He sank further into the blankets and into a deep slumber, his eyes closed and he exhaled rattlingly, satisfyingly slow; he went back to sleep. Now,for the first time, he let himself heal. No more would memories slip from his grasp: He would treasure this, think on it, and all the trials and troubles and joy... He would remember them.
1: The New PlaceThe New Place He was not particularly impressed by the town as he soared above it; wandering among the thermal drafts he saw the slower life of a smaller town and was moderately bored. The vibrancy, although at first unapparent, would perhaps reveal itself in time. That, or he would create excitement enough to entertain himself. Why he had left was another question altogether, one that could be answered in unsatisfying small parts or not at all. Realistic motivations, much like the truth, were always harder to come by. What mattered to him now was that, at long last, he could leave his past behind- if only for a moment’s time in the discovery of a new place. All he possessed was the simple desire of forgetting himself; for everything else he would let chance roll the dice and the result would be satisfactory to him. Below, he saw the ground where he had left his brother behind, and he let that troublesome thought slip from his mind as the breeze commanded his subconscious attention and the bursting thermal drafts raised him higher into the cloud-studded sky. He had done his brother a favor, anyways, even if he was unsure of what it actually was. Now was the time to leave them and all of that trouble alone. He would not think of it again from now on. There were quite a few buildings that he passed over, but he emigrated from them as surely as he had felt the need for isolation. In the northern horizon, the sun to the left on the cusp of descending, he could see a forest in the distance- a welcome riparian change of pace. Further into the west it grew darker in the maladroit and ominous trees, but there seemed to be a bit of a glade calling him in the north distant half-light. Eager to forget himself, he sought the potent promised comfort of the pond ahead and the rest assured by the harmony of silence. From the clouds the blue-green pegasus tumbled lazily, taking care only when it appeared he was close to disaster, doing the minimum necessary to avoid contact with the leaf-bedecked trees. Landing, he looked about: he was at a pond now, a pool of water that resided flat in the half-light that approached dusk. It was quiet, a blessed thing for him, that natural ambience residing in the glade the best possible excuse for noise in his world. He would not stand now to hear any other voices: no, none other sounds that could possibly mean things and especially not his own voice above all. He would sooner drown himself in the still pool. Trees ringed the pond, oaken and willow and many more he could not name; the glade seemed to have an enchanted air about it. Their leaves had not yet dulled with the seasons; many were still a deep green made all the deeper by the leaving light. Brushes and other plants periodically aligned themselves in the picture, mute flowers giving other shades to the ambience. The pool itself was shaped like a semicircle bowed in just so- like a fuller crescent moon- a peaceful curve of liquid slicing through the glade. The soft grassy banks ran from the trees to the pool, which was flat- no rippling, no disturbance- and he instinctively desired to be like it in the moment. Yes, he greatly desired to be at rest, to cease turbulence and assume a more graceful form, and immediately. His patience for life’s maladies had fast come to an end; it had brought him here after all, and did that not mean he could then rest? He walked slowly up to the edge of the crescent of the land’s bulge, the grasp wisping around him and softly caressing him, firing nerves that had no desire to be conductors of more tension. Blowing around, the wind ruffled him; the air was cooler in the glade and the sun had no presence here. It had set perhaps, or was merely not visible; either way he cared not. His pulse slowed; he lay down at the edge of the smooth pool, seeing many things across reflected in it. There was a weeping-willow tree anchored by a rock near the shore, crooked and drooping, and all the others seemed to steal its semblance in the reflection. He took a long time examining them: though distorted, he found it oddly appropriate that all things should be concealed by the nature of the world and hidden, with their shapes changed and colors variable in the silvery star-shone beams. Those selfsame stars did not stay in place either, and in two months’ time they would be rendered unrecognizable. Sad sentiment though it was, it was nevertheless better any previous rendering he had conjured. Now the breeze was in the trees, and the sliding of the leaves filling the space with blanketing noise from there to unknown horizons. Blue and light and green in the glade dominated gently; it was all soft and colder colors blissfully sapping conflict; the grass was cool and dew-soaked and he could feel it transporting uncomfortable heat away. He could not have asked for any more tranquil environ; it was a great mental exhalation. A life of exhaustion had brought him here; exhaustion would keep him there as long as he was able to be. He would sleep… fade… evaporate, like the water drank up into the full air and be nothing more than a piece of the world with no wonder as to itself, no thoughts; he would not think but would still be; sensations of worldly amity would replace thoughtful being. It was the grandest peace he had ever known. The state of bliss could not last forever.
2: VoiceVoice There was one voice, and it was Harmony. It swept him up in the notes; the chords carried him; the melody amazed him; what he felt was quite unlike anything gone before. The movements of sound-waves through the variable elements of air and water and life diminished none of its beauty: the perfect perception of his ears was immutably wonderful. It trembled mightily; it was rendered perfectly, gracefully, a soft and somehow minute vibrato that exuded simple gentleness. He had never been more in awe until that moment, and it only magnified as time passed. He reached out- almost as if he could touch it, feel it and be touched and inspired in turn, and then- Gasping, he awoke in the grass; he stood up in realization and a soon-sinking disappointment. It had all been a dream, a miserably wonderful dream, and he would never hear the voice again. There could not be such a pure thing, and certainly not for him. The urge to weep overwhelming, he staggered back onto the ground and stared at the pond. Gradually, his gaze wandered from the far bank to the nearest one, the new image on the very closest edge, and he saw for an instant a blue-green reflection- Mourning sorrow boiled over into rage as quick as lightning, and he struck the water and shattered the reflections; he threatened to scream and had to clench his mouth shut not to do so. Agonizing fury! He was filled with the inexpressible rage of a titan, but the volatile feeling could not remain so in him for long. With another instant’s passing, the rage condensed into the more familiar and pathetic if not poetic feeling of loss and shameful guilt. It had been nothing but a dream and a construct of the unconscious mind’s impetuousness, nothing more but proof of the self-hatred. A minute of grieving passed; choked tears silently shed into the cool dark earth. Perhaps he could- he had heard it, after all. No, he growled mentally, verbally a guttural uttering, hardening himself with what little lingering mental fortitude he had not exhausted. Never again. He was very miserable, and he was therefore incensed for a long time. His grief was borne out onto the earth in the most original fashion: like bloody offerings his tears soiled the earth; the deliverance of pain onto him demanded release. Then- for a second- he thought he had heard the divine voice again. He began to plead with his mind not to drive him madder than he could bear, but the sound would not stop. However, appealing to his mind could provide no relief: his ears were the ones supplying the gloriously maddening melody, and his ears did not lie. He was reluctant to believe, almost to the point of deaf denial; although once he understood he immediately sprung off the ground in impassioned panic, determined to find apparition of harmony in sound. For even in that pain he was able to recognize the truth and healing, even if it was beyond his understanding. His misery came to the forefront and it was swept aside by a small hope, and even that small hope was magnanimous enough to delay and destroy the onslaught of agony. To hope is to live; his life was small now, but it was existent and its fading would not come, indeed, not yet. He started walking and the notes hinted at a form in the air, cascading like a brook out of the trees into his ears. It seemed to come from everywhere at once and inside himself. With great restraint, he circumambulated the pool with attention to detail the highest priority, but he gained no clue to the voice falling in rhythm onto him. He was at the edge of the glade now, the seeping blackness of the forest beyond ominously opaque. But the voice was calling him; the song was clearer in the dark… He rushed into the shadows; the silent woods were now organs of the sound delivered to him. It was drawing out a word now, words now; through every note it vibrated agonizingly slow: Hic sum te vocare… Frenzy gripped him, energy coursing like magma in his veins; a fantastical primal feeling innervated him; it was electrifying. The tempo changed; it was headed to a heady drumming now, ever-quicker on-and-on, or perhaps it was his heart beating. Trees whirling and the leaves rasping, he was lost- No, not again! He could not lose the voice; it was paramount to hope itself! Death was lurking in every shadow, waiting to devour his being if he stopped, if he could not find that magnificent paragon. He was whipped by unseen plants and branches as he ran through the vaporous night, yet no stupor could seize him in his running while the song seized him. Eius paci vocatus es… Hints of luster beguiled the searching eyes, the voice was close- mortally close- and he was ever within its bind! He could have been running in circles for all he knew, but the pool had been left behind for certain. Crashing through invisible shrubbery, the Indian-ink doused air obscured his vision until all sensation could only be derived through the weight of the earth and the coarseness of the plants brushing and the fresh smell of life in night-bloom and the taste of purity in the air, but most- most of all- the sound, the indefatigable chords convulsing his being! Pro te est vocare… It rang, amplified; it danced in the woods and in his mind; building through crescendo- or perhaps it was his perception- and the climax was near. There was no light in the forest, and he stumbled as he ran slipshod through innumerable obstacles and gloomy voids; the voice had stopped- halted! But it was only for a moment, as it was nearing the very end. And if he could not find it before the finale… It was closing- it was now!- There could be nothing afterwards save for grieving despair if he did not find it- Et se invenies. He burst back into the glade on the opposite bank of the pool he had occupied, and she- the mistress of sound, harmony’s bearer incarnate- stood his former station nobly; engulfed in moonlight she stood proud yet modest, a silhouette of grace. The last note faded with awe into columns of beaming light, and as it did she noticed him. Her gaze shied from him, but she could not hide herself. He could not speak the words to describe it. He could not find his voice.
3: Unobstructed DarknessUnobstructed Darkness She fled. An urge rose to his throat to plead with her to stop, but he strangled it before it could leave his mouth. He would not break that barrier. The unbroken chain of silence chafed against his desires, but his stern memories could not give ground. She had fled directly into the east where the sun would rise in many hours’ time, and the void of sound left behind seemed almost criminal. It could only have been his presence that made her stop the brilliance waving in the air, though, and that weighed on him further as he morosely returned to the bulge of the crescent by the pool he had first lain by. It was all just another miserable experience that he would have to forget. Nothing more. He closed his eyes and lay back down. He was devoid of any semblance of hope in that moment; a kind of apathetic self-disgust and piteousness rolled through his mind until he could not stand to exist in that darkness. He raised his lids, and the sight was no happier than his depressed mind. Trampled and crushed grass was abundant in the murky midnight, products of his exalted suffering. He may have left the causes of his hurts behind when he had consciously discarded all previous memory, but he had discarded any joy he had carried as well. The glorious song was now far absent from his mind. It would have been such a meaningful recollection; only the ending was a harbinger of regret. There would be no compromise between him and his atrocities, though; he could not preserve blank peace and anything of the previous life. He would have to forget. The bereavement of his past would have to pass. Fortunate for his fate, but not for his mind’s state, tangible reminders of something that was true were inerasable. It was the faintest light that bled out in the trees, that kept him moving… but it was still light. And in the stars’ disguised shining, he could distinguish- or perhaps it was the flicker of life in the distance- a print on the earth, a means of tracking. He would go back into the forest, back into the black-shadow, but for a long time prior the injustice of life would rot and rankle in his soul and he would think many terrible things. At last- after he had nearly asphyxiated in the sickening atmosphere- he set himself upright, and tentatively turned to track the timid indentations. It was a small victory, but it paled compared to the enormity of all the cutting, vorpal dissonance he had lurking just inside himself. The denial of unholy sentiments could not go on for long, and the fear in the shadow it cast manifested itself every time he thought he had lost the diminutive and flighty trail. Hope’s predilection was always that of success, though, and he stayed on the path. As long as he was supplied, his hope could not be blotted out. Burning brighter, his skills sharpened in the low ambience of the night’s dank and soporific image, but there was no chance of him stopping now, not when the path was clear and unambiguous. There was another print, and up ahead a broken branch that indicated the angelic pegasus's passing; further on there was a small indentation and scuffing in the grasses that indicated she had paused and observed the night for a while; and he did the same, guessing his position. He was completely and utterly unaware of his whereabouts now relative to the sun and moons’ ambulations, and he could not perceive accurately the stars studding, ringing and illuminating the void, but he was not bothered. He had been utterly lost even before he set out, in a mental way, and now that he had found a purpose he was surefire and he felt better about himself than he had in memory. Of course, he would only let his memory stretch back so far before it would run into a black unnavigable abyss. But that was no matter now; he had a place in this new-imagined world and that was to follow these tracks onto their end and… what? Find her? That seemed to be the logical end of the tracks, indeed, and certainly something else would follow after that. He could not get too far ahead of himself, or he might lose what was clear and obvious in front of him. Letting fall the matter, he took to the trail again. The hardest exercise by far was identifying anything in the murk. The plainness of the upset trail taken was easily and readily obvious to him, but vision out of all the senses had decayed in the passing of time. Sound was gloriously vibrant: owls, crickets, water-droplets falling in rhythms of variance, the crunch and snap of twigs with the soft steps he took. The night air prescribed no less sensation: it was cool and moist and hydrating; it relaxed the lungs and he was able to breathe easier. Smell was a phantasmagoria of foreign flowered scents; those same night-blooms sometimes subtly and sometimes soaringly ruled the air. All amplified the tentative touches determining the tracks, yet sight refrained from intensification. He continued on for a short while, gradually increasing his pace, and his awareness heightened until he was confident that he would find her soon- very soon. His pulsing veins quickened and cleared; the pure flow of energy was ecstasy, and around the next edge or corner he would find her, he was sure. Turn around a bend he did, but he slipped as an indefinable crack sounded; there was a great movement of the night’s disguised object, and he was pinned beneath what could only be a massive branch. He was trapped completely; the wooden mass was crushing him back to the ground. He could not move away, even though he struggled with great will and passion he could not. He could only breathe, lie down, and wait for grim exhaustion to take him. The long night was an aeon, and it was not long before monochromatic tendrils of shadow crept back into the conscious of the mind. The snares they sinisterly set were loaded with the most caustic venom, poised to spring, yet already diminishing what light that had assumed the fading specter of hope in his mind. It was growing cold in the bitter darkness. Light threatened to die inside of him.
4: Dawn of a Black Day“A moral man is one who reacts to temptation as soon as he feels it in his heart, without yielding to it…” -Sigmund Freud on The Brothers Karamazov ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Dawn of a Black Day “Oh my.” As usual, those words were an understatement of the severity of the situation at hand. Normally, the sight of an explicitly bruised and deathly haggard-looking pegasus trapped under a cracked and fallen tree trunk would cause at least a sharp inhalation of shock, but she was more prone to muted reactions. In all likelihood, the unfortunate pegasus had been trapped there all night and into the current early morning: visible scrapings on the earth, the wood and the body wedged between them indicated a long, torturous, and fruitless struggle to escape crushing confinement. Eyes closed, his ragged breath was barely audible over the morning radiance of sound in the forest. It was much brighter now than in the forsaken night; the twisting streams from the morning sun had passed him by, leaving him in a merciful modicum of shade in the illumination around him. She moved closer immediately to determine his condition; by all measures he was far from well, yet his biggest malady was the trunk pinning him to the ground. The earth was uneven and broken around him and the log had fallen at an angle, saving him from a more untimely but perhaps more merciful demise. Nevertheless, he would succumb to any number of morbid conditions if he was not moved out from under the trunk soon. Help could be reached, but it would be too long coming; she had to work some solution now if she was to be sure of his safety. “Hello?” She stepped in closer, doing her best to rouse him gently with voice. To do so now would be far from easy, as she was not a very vocal pony by any means, and he appeared to be caught in a mortally bound sleep. “Can you hear me?” Her soft voice had no effect. With the lightest touch, she put a supporting hoof to the side of his face and he gasped- a quick, saw-bladed intake of breath- and his eyes jacked wide open with a broad primordial intensity born of terror and sick desperation. She did not recoil, but she was concerned; and her worry for him was magnificent enough to overcome the surprise. Yet she had touched him! He was experiencing catharsis now; the touch had vivified the remainder of life in his damaged body and tortured mind. She was the singer! She who possessed the splendor of grace in voice had come to him, but he was trapped and would soon be a claimant of death’s embrace; it was the only possibility foreseeable to a ravaged mind. “It’ll be alright.” Liar. “Can you talk?” He nodded, but did not reply. She was innocently confused to the strange reaction, but continued regardless. “I can try to move the trunk, but I’m not very strong, so you’re going to have to tell me if I’m taking the pressure off you, please. If you think that’s a good plan, I mean.” She added, drawn inwards for a moment on the ghost of a hint of an offensive attitude. Contrary to her apologetics but in cohesion with her concerns, she fluttered around to the other side of the log, out of his vision, and began to push. Despite her saying so, she did seem strong enough to be able to move the crushing log somewhat, if only with great strain and effort. She heaved, stopped for an instant; it was a mighty drain on her small physical reserve of strength; breathing hard she moved it a few inches, but it only caused him more pain- she was crushing him underneath it! “Is it working?” He growled instinctually with a primal determination; the trunk was cutting into his air, but his words would not pierce that selfsame atmosphere- no, not while he still drew breath, yet he would only draw breath for a swiftly diminishing time under the titanic weight. Scraping the ground, his mind flashed in and out of blackness momentarily- again- if he would not speak he would face imminent death and all the fear of the unknown country. Short, cracking thoughts echoed thundering sounds as the trunk began to seize out of its supports. “Stop!” he gasped, his voice hacking from lack of use. She stopped immediately, ran back around. It was too late for him. The trunk had not crushed him, but long silent shrieks of miserable frustration wracked through his mind regardless. The screams of memory, the thousand misdeeds and the unmistakable crime that wrought his torment were there- in the present!- No, he had not been crushed by the trunk, yet the long and demonizing past that he had left behind was recalled instantly at the sound of his own voice, and grim hatred of his own self funneled through it into a macabre concentrate more horrid than any wrath yet poured out. He was a factory, a distillery of self-hatred, and he had been left to mature towards his sick conclusion in a night that had only added shadowed hate and the inky blackness of despair to the concoction. The eyes remained the only intelligible indicator of the torrid upheaval within, a plagued and furious dual globe that now stared at she who had brought him promises yet inebriated him with pain. “I’m sorry!” She saw immediately the trouble she had caused, and threw herself against the other side of the twisted-thick log. While she was straining on against the weight, he could only look on blindly with miserable hate in his eyes and curse silently. She had brought this onto him; she had caused the greatest Humiliation to be scarred on him; with an explosive and exhaustive push the log fell off of his beaten form and his sinister growl was lost in the crashing and the exhausted pants of she who had saved him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated as soon as was able to move herself to his wounded side; blood and blue-black bruising disfigured his coat where the trunk had crushed him. “I’m Fluttershy.” His mind was chaos's nexus, but somewhere in forgotten memory and the gasping relief of decompression an old habit triggered and he spurred a phrase of an older time: “My name is Quirk…” His vision was fading rapidly, she was doing something to him; what little perception that was not pain was taking its leave. She was touching him, flashes of pain penetrated him like needles through his nerves. She was saying something- he could feel it only in the barest distance- the long mind’s agony was coming to a shorter end- “This might hurt a little bit…” Sharp! A pain stabbing, he was about to scream out against it, and then- then- nothing; blessed blankness. He thought he could hear something in his dreaming, but it was only a mirage, a soundscape.
5: Dominion of KindnessDominion of Kindness Gentle rays of sunlight cascading through an unseen ceiling contrasted harshly with the rough wounds concentrated on Quirk’s torso, which was bound by bandages but brutally beaten nonetheless. The inarticulate and gradual process of comprehending the waking world around him was nearly a trial beyond the means of his tired soul, yet by some act of forgotten mercy he was able to cognize the softly illuminated room he occupied. It had no place in his memory, not the one he had recently created and not the one he had left behind. He could not react to the golden light and the streams of warm air through the open window, for he was weakened to the point where any movement was a mountain and any thought a paradox. All he could handle were his open eyes and the visions they gave him. There was a table next to the bed bound by the rays of the sun-shrined window, with soft and ephemeral curtains billowing slowly into the room refracted with the morning’s glory. There was a door shut across the length of the small space, delicately raveling with finite patterns slightly blurring with the waking of his mind. There was a wood-boarded floor, but it was precisely and intensely secured against any variety of movement; it would not bend nor shiver under any pressure. Deeply rendered air gave the room a sense of weight and solidity yet also of the incomprehensible smooth gentleness that it carried; the atmosphere was thick and rich with a singular vibrancy he could not identify. The totality of the scene could not be perceived merely from his eyes, however. Under a warm series of sheets, he was much more scarred than the room could imply, with many deep and damaging bruises and cuts as results of his night under the constricting log in addition to the destructive mentality that he knew so well. He felt every second pass, with wonder and with pain, for he had not yet remembered himself despite the pointed pricks and dull varying thuds heightening his nerves to raw stimulation. He looked dazed; he was not clearly in the present, even onto the moment that the door swung open the world retained vagueness. Fluttershy entered with a pitcher of water and a roll of bone-white gauze in hoof, and by quick and unfortunate degrees his expression changed from blankness to a grim and wincing visage at memory’s return. She took interest in his mood change- at least, she did not take offense or confusion- and instead she looked on with great compassion. “I’m sorry, Quirk, but I didn’t feel safe moving you all the way to the hospital. You slept nearly a whole day. Are you in a lot of pain?” “What do you know about pain?” The rough and rasping yet quiet and unconventional answer caused a deliberation on Fluttershy’s part, but she did nothing untoward. To the contrary, she moved forward on the matter, getting at the heart of her feelings. She confessed to him, an honest and complete outpouring of her worry. “It’s my fault that this happened to you. If I hadn’t of been so shy, then you wouldn’t have tried to chase me. Can you forgive me?” “No.” The blunt and rather final answer did not offend Fluttershy, but caused her eyes to swell with tragic emotion and imminent moisture. She lowered her face in shame, whispered “If that’s what you think is fair.” and left the room swiftly. He had no way of knowing that she had fled back to her own room, or that she had collapsed onto her bed and was weeping violently, releasing bitter and painfully passionate tears at her own undeniable guiltiness in his suffering, or that for the possibility of his well-being she would sacrifice a great deal of her own. For she had wondered and feared for the longest day if he would be alright when he woke up, if he woke up, and the terrible conclusion that the blame was hers had come to her swiftly and had taken residence as if it was a morbid skeleton in her mind. She had even gone as far to make a resolution to herself to allay her own fears and shyness out of fear of hurting him, yet some inevitably remained. Quirk had had the chance to arrest any of her suffering before it took a stricter hold, yet he had chosen deliberately to prolong it. Fluttershy had worried and cared for him all the night, to her great emotional detriment without an ounce of regret. If he had known, his feelings and his decision would not have been different. He was consumed by an atrocious menagerie of malicious feelings himself, but his actions were nonetheless inexcusable in any case. Soon, she returned with bleary eyes and a face that she would wish to hide from Quirk, but was unable to do so regardless of his weakened state. It was necessary that she change the bandages, and despite the hurts she now possessed she found the idea of shirking her responsibilities to him for her own sake to be abhorrent. She choked on unspoken words and intense regretful guiltiness; the sickness inside herself was a malady that originated in a profound mercy, yet they were not the same and one was not a necessary product of the other. There was yet a split to be made, a solution to be found, something gone that had not been thought of. Slowly, softly, murmuring kind apologies she went as she unwound and rebound the tight strips with delicate care. Regardless of the maximum gentleness she achieved, it was nevertheless the unfortunate fact of life that he would suffer as one result of the healing. But he shouldn’t have to… It was my fault… She was thinking now of things in that line of reasoning as she closed the wounds and left the room. Must he experience pain? Some spiteful individuals hurt by his disgraceful abandonment of the emotional consideration of others would say yes. They would postulate that only through suffering could he understand why he should not inspire it. No doubt he deserves consequences, and no light ones, for his actions. Through agony, they were really saying, lies the path to redemption. It is, after all, an understanding that brings about the desire to not advance pain, is it not? It is harsh, but does it not work? Troubled by the remembered rhetoric that seemed insecure in a dreadful way, Fluttershy found herself heading into the midday forest to seek the solvency of a moral solution.
6: Paragon of BeautyParagon of Beauty It was a quiet revolution at first, as they all tend to be. It started with a dissonance. The smallest voice of minute discord in a forum of the mind softly, cunningly spoke, and gave motion to a life of tiny instruments with chords of malice. They spread about stealthily through the great senate of the mind, and by slow degrees all who listened succumbed to the bizarre and malicious inferences they suggested. It was a Nightmare of reason; the temples of the mind began to crumble at their very foundations: those who tended them. They had heard the lies whispered and shouted amongst the truth, and they had failed to distinguish them. The senator’s judgments had become ludicrous; the orators had become demagogues; the harmony stripped and broken, yet still a single voice cried out: “Is pain not a thing to be avoided? Can there not be good without it?” Fluttershy was unsure of the quorum in her mind rejecting the proposition, yet her conscience, though wracked by shared agonies, agreed- if it was not shouted down by the “common sense” of others first. It was a deeply disturbing disagreement, and she began a methodical stroll to relieve some of the tension. The sun was shining, it was by all measures a glorious day, yet turmoil had found its way in. And what is pain, anyways? She knew it to be a reaction to stimuli, in the most biological sense. But was suffering as a result of an action, as opposed to mere pain, an unnecessary wrong and wounding of the self and others? Or was it an exercise in humility and humbleness that would prevent hurts in the future? Some shouted for the affirmative, that an eye for an eye would stop the cycle, but Fluttershy was already blinded and she knew not what she saw and she comprehended not what she heard and her feelings were all awry and what was good was gone and all understanding went with it! And she was not so sure, and the voices kept shouting. Surely some good had come out of suffering, though. Had not the pain of sympathy inspired many great things? Did not the relation of pain in another to pain in the self cause a desire to avoid that malady in all persons? Yet suffering had created a great many who believed themselves unredeemable, and did it not often just as much fail as succeed? It was an uproarious argument; the senate convulsed; it was a fundamental question of thought and morality far beyond any peak that was comprehendible, and the debris that came crashing down the calamitous mountain that hosted the debate threatened to slide her away into a black and murky inescapable chasm. She stopped walking at the edge of the forest. There were birds there, and they were happy, and simple, and pure; they sang their songs without suffering. If they were not happy, then would they be sad? Fluttershy did not know the answer, but she instead rephrased the question more formally and particularly: was evil the absence of good or was good the absence of evil? Was evil the disruption of harmony or was harmony the lack of evil? What was bad? She sat, and considered the songbirds. The song was harmonious, definitely a good thing. But if she were to heft a rock at them and disturb it (her stomach churned at the thought; she was not one to do such an unkind thing) would the silence be worse than the song? She nodded to herself; it definitely would be worse. Yet the silence in itself was not a bad thing, she realized; the conundrum remained unsolved in that singular situation. Fluttershy would have to become grander in her consideration to gain a universal understanding. She supposed that there was nothing, and that the nothing was a blank void of space with absolutely no thing to call it home, with no light and no shadow and no earth. Would that be worse than the silence of the birds? It must be- for if the birds were silent in one moment, they could always sing again in another, but if there was nothing then no good and no harmony of any kind could exist. It was true that silence was sometime welcome, but that always existed in contrast to the noise when it had become overbearing. Even things that she considered bad could not exist in the void, yet what did that have to do with suffering? It seemed to suggest that what existed was good, for good can always come of existence no matter the circumstance, and what was evil was… what? The birds whirled around in joyous circumferences, calling to each other. Fluttershy paused on her reflections, and was warmed by their play for a minute of thankful solitude. Then it came to her: the undefinable realization, the moment of understanding. Evil was nothing, evil was no thing; for evil was pushing toward a black void of nonexistence, pushing towards entropy and infinite coldness, and did not negative emotions do the same? Did not always the good go toward the preservation of life instead of endless destruction? Did not suffering and pain push toward those most horrible of occurrences, the slaying of the self or others and death, the demise and end of all perception? The queasiness of the last bit of her thought was prevalent for a moment, but was quickly overtaken by a brightening dawn of understanding- that was it! She could help him without hurting him! With a slight squeak of excitement she took to the air with a swift deliverance in mind, the philosophical wonderings had produced an applicable solution to the pit of painful feelings that Quirk had become. If he can let go, he can learn how to stop hurting himself! Fluttershy’s exuberant conclusion drove her swiftly toward her cottage, and although most would have considered it odd that she cared not what he had done to her, that was simply the justice of her being. Author's Note 3/29/13 I would very much appreciate it if you would tell me whether you felt this chapter is out of place or not. I keep getting conflicting reports and can't make a firm decision whether to rewrite this chapter or not.
7: All Will Be Shaken...All Will Be Shaken... Quirk thought it strange that she should be attractive. It was not a matter of specific importance to him; no- not in the least- he had known many mares that were deemed striking, and he did not consider it a feature that merited an especially singular attention. Solely was it a matter of incongruity, that she should be a diminutively quiet beauty and infinitely gracious yet a harbinger of sick pain to him. She was talking to him now in an excited voice, yet she never reached that plateau of decibels that would indicate excitement from any other. He didn’t deem her words of any specific importance; his attention was inbound on his own abyss and he paid no heed to her words- at least, not yet. “And if you can forgive yourself, then you’ll stop feeling terrible!” Fluttershy finished with an expectant happiness displayed; eagerly she waited for his response. “And why should I trust you not to hurt me?” His voice was unusually quiet to match hers, but in all other things it contrasted: it rasped in guttural pains; it was weak and unexcited; it thrilled the nerve but chilled the bones. Fluttershy paused, considered with a surprised worry the maligned intent of Quirk’s words. “If I hurt you, what would I gain from it?” “You have only inverted the question.” The sick-rasping voice lost a measure of patience. “Answer it.” The next answer was faster. “If I hurt you, then I would feel bad.” The focused plagued orbs sneered. “Sympathy.” He said it with a tone of contemptuous loathing, but he did not contest the answer- and yet- yet there was a hint in his voice, of something else, some regret… “What have you ever seen from me to indicate that I am worth saving?” “Everypony has some good in them.” “And what have you seen from me to place me among all the others?” He was lower, growling; his anger had risen to become a cold roughness. “What do you know of me, whom you first saw only hours ago in a forest? How do you know that I am not the exception to the rule?” “You came to me when I was singing. You saw that it was good, didn’t you?” “And if I only came to extinguish that goodness?” She could have stepped back, recoiled, shut him away or abandoned him, turned him out at the suggestive threat, or done many other seemingly justified things besides, but she stood straight before him and did not falter at his ominously mortal words. “Then you would just be hurting yourself. Nopony actually likes being hurt, they just think they do sometimes, because they think they can distract themselves with other pain. I’ve had friends tell me that my singing is very good, and I think it’s just ok, but that’s still good because they like it. Everypony likes a good song occasionally, and you wanted to see me singing.” “Your singing is unique.” The rasp replied. Despite the words, it refrained from being a compliment- it was more aptly termed an observation- yet it was still peculiar to hear from him; previously it would seem that he should not care. “I think that you’re causing yourself pain that you don’t need to experience.” Fluttershy forwarded on a suspicion. “You don’t deserve to suffer, not you or anypony else.” It was the most authoritative thing she had ever said to him, but unusually she had no qualms about it. Confidence and proof drove her to certainty in a higher principle. “Who are you?” His ragged breath took some time to catch up with his thoughts. “Who are you to judge me, to deem me worthy of not writhing in agony for every last instant of my life; you who know none of my past?” “I’m sorry to disagree, but I’m not judging you. I’m treating you like I do everypony else, and nopony deserves to suffer and especially not like you are right now. You’re physically hurt and it looks unpleasant to be like that, and that’s mostly my fault, and I’m very sorry for you and I’m trying to do what I can, but you’re also hurting inside yourself and I think that might be a lot of your pain. All of us are hurting inside ourselves a little, and we could all use some relief.” “What if I stole your voice? If I took your unique talent that your friends treasure and made it common, until every last one had heard it and they no longer considered you special or valued it in any way over any other?” Fluttershy replied immediately, without thought or hesitation. “That would be very nice of you. To spread it, I mean. If they really like my singing that much, then they ought to hear it until they’re satisfied. I’m afraid that I’m a little shy about sharing that, which is why I ran away from you. It might be nicer of you to ask permission first, but that’s only a suggestion.” For the first time, the wounded face turned from a grim-sickening disturbance to an expression of sheer incredulity- disbelief- he could hardly comprehend what he was hearing; the next statement came with finality and foreshadowing determination already possessed and now set into motion. “Then I will not.” He staggered suddenly out of bed, to the tuned gasp of shock from the mare that cared for him.
8: ... Until Only The Unshakeable Remains...Until Only The Unshakeable Remains “You have to stop! You’re going to cause yourself permanent internal damage!” “You are in the past now.” Quirk didn't pause; he was shaking along the path with the occasional grunt of intense pain; he had gotten halfway out the door before he had collapsed the first time. He was in no fit state to continue: every step taken drained the reservoirs of his lifeblood. Fluttershy was dancing around him, desperately attempting to persuade him to stop his mad conquest while simultaneously refusing to arrest him with force. He tripped again and his head was cut clean, a great straight scar on his face erupted; he merely growled it away despite the vicious blots of blood falling to the earth. “You shouldn’t do this to yourself! You don't deserve it!” Quirk ignored her, pulling himself onto unsteady hooves with no sign of determination fading. Feminine tears mirrored his life dripping out into the earth; she looked on, standing at his side she pleaded for mercy for his own self. “At least stop hurting yourself, even if you won’t stop hurting me!” “I will not take what I do not deserve.” Fluttershy glanced back for a moment at the horrific trail he had left behind, a scraped mess of his willed walking tainted with unmentionable dark red-black stains. “Please…” She begged, and it was not so much pleading as a whimper. “I can’t stop you; you have to help yourself before I can help you.” He moved on; his vision was a hemorrhage of marred perception and his bodily agony interfered with what little was left undisguised to his sight, until he could see naught but a great harsh-white blur of the sky and sun. The ground was trembling, quaking, seizing, but he rose again and his campaign of suffering was uninterrupted. She looked on with sympathetic wrackings of her own body as he crawled and limped along; his saw-bladed breath was increasingly ragged and pathetic; with every miserable step taken she felt a stab ever-closer to her heart. He was a wreck beyond sane comprehension: bandages still lingered on his body to cover the most garish wounds, yet the mutilated mind shone horrifyingly through. The blackness of his corrupted soul seemed to have consumed all his being and Fluttershy could only look on with a sickly kind of worry- nothing that she was capable of could cease his destructive will. He would have to want healing of his own accord. Nothing else would suffice. With broken steps and halting breaths, Quirk made the torturous journey back- all the way back to the pool- she was fearfully amazed that he had not passed out yet, but he was reaching the end. He was on cooler grass now, the inner crescent of the pool greeted him with tremulous ripples as he lurchingly approached, his movements just enough to disrupt it the slightest bit. “Please don’t do this to yourself!” She shattered suddenly, weeping behind him. She could have looked away, yet somehow she found the strength not to. Quirk took no heed of it. He crashed onto the shore as his effort exhausted, head inches from the water; the exorbitant effort to bring him there had cost him all and his corrupted mind could conceive of no other thing than the bottomless pool before him. And the pool! Infinite depth, a transparent harrowing mass that had no substance- no, it seemed not to be real- his breath caught for an undefinable moment, for the longest instant he did not breathe. There was nothing in the invisibly deep abyss, a terrible blankness that called him; in that vast and perfectly clear liquid there was a void and the void promised him peace, yet it inspired a screaming horror somewhere in the darkness of his mind. There was no end to it, no end to the darkness; it would devour him left unchecked. And it called to him!- it called softly with a magnificent cold tone; whispering it suggested cathartic rumors of black nonexistence. It commanded his will and only the tiniest minority of his consciousness was wracked with terror because of it. The rest took the depth in awe, sought to become a part of the crushing abyss that so morbidly and tantalizing beckoned. He could muster no resistance; it was calling him… he would go to it and be nothing… it would liberate him from life and all the pain… “Please stop...” The desperate phrase shattered the mirage of infinite death for a moment; he saw his face reflected on the water’s surface. He screamed: it was a long, drawn-out and piercing, wrenching and painful cry, but for the first time something passed from his mouth that sounded natural to his guardian. For there was a face in the water, and it was his face, and half was covered in blood and half was covered in tears and perspiration mixed and split diagonally. With that horrific expression he had observed himself; he saw what he had become and the imminent void he would enter if he did not change. No! Not this way! The baptism of blood was only halfway complete, but no longer would he submerge himself into the black depths to complete the profane immersion; he was terrified. The horror was too much for him. I don’t want to go like this… Behind him, Fluttershy stood with her stained face of tears, all attention forward on him who had sounded natural for the first time, as her care had always been. She was ready, eternally ready, to help him- but he had to allow it. He had to want it. I want to be… “You have to let go of your suffering. It won’t do you any good now.” She whispered, the last of the tears rolling off her face into empty air. I want to live… “You’re the only one who can really help you...” She wiped an errant tear off her face, revealing a clean and determined expression. I want to love… “...But I will help you as much as I can if you let me.” Her declaration strong, she moved to his side, looked down on him with great sympathy and concern and an uncontested capacity for kind understanding. Fluttershy had spoken and exhausted the last ounce of her passion and certainty; she felt quite like fainting or fading into sensation in the aftermath of emotion but she refused to deny the demands, the virtues of her kindness. Quirk lay there for a minute more, the tears and blood flowing freely from wounds of body and mind. Tremulously, and quite unintentionally at first, with great terror and deliberation, he had changed the most miniscule portion of his perspective- a rock in a wall reaching beyond the sky- a drop in the temporal sea- the gears were set irrevocably into motion; the switch thrown could not be undone. Yet one obstacle towered still. “I can’t wash myself clean.” He sounded pathetic, weak; he was humiliated in utter completion now; no longer did his voice enrapture minds and inspire subduing fear; he had lost his pain but none of his guilt. “I can’t fix what I’ve broken.” “I believe that you can; I believe in you.” She reached down into the water, and it was just a pool now; there was no illusion of death and drowning for either. She poured cold, gloriously clean water down his face and it provoked a sharp inhalation- she was washing away the blood- she was washing away his sweat and tears- he was cleaner, if only the slightest bit. “You…” His weakened voice trailed off. “I can help you start, if you’d like me to.” "I remember; I hurt you..." "I forgive you." “Can you take me back?” Without a further word, as gently as she was able, she of great delicacy lifted him up and placed him perpendicularly slung across her back. Heavy burden though he was, she bore it happily. Morning in the forest was much nicer than the night of a few days past had been; even the once wince-causing breathing of Quirk seemed to have grown more peaceful as Fluttershy carried him. She could not tell if he was conscious or unconscious; he seemed to be seeing things that were not there, but she was confident that all would work out for the better. At long last, his life of pain had been absolved, and only the recovery remained. Out of the forest and back up the path to the solitary cottage she carried his healing mass, back into the room where he had lay in sleeping and in agony and in waking, but never in isolation. The breeze reigned through the ethereal curtains. it was calm now in the house; the long journey to recovery had begun. He seemed not to be lucid, yet she took a wet cloth to his face and started gently scrubbing the liquid remnants of turmoil away regardless. He breathed a little faster for a minute, until it seemed that he had gained a modicum of consciousness again- and he spoke, softly, quietly- she had to lean in to hear his words: “Will you teach me how to sing?” “I promise that I will, as soon as you can.” Thank you... He would have said, but he was already dreaming. He sank further into the blankets and into a deep slumber, his eyes closed and he exhaled rattlingly, satisfyingly slow; he went back to sleep. Now,for the first time, he let himself heal. No more would memories slip from his grasp: He would treasure this, think on it, and all the trials and troubles and joy... He would remember them.
