Daily reminder + Story that is too short to post · 1:34am May 25th, 2013
The right choice is the right choice.
Releasing a short Luna story that I crafted as a "I can so find a legitimate reason to write in second person!" type thing. I barely scrape by one thousand words and am torn between actually publishing it as a story or just blogging it.
Either way, I can assure you you won't like it. It has worst princess in it.
If you are looking for a Luna story you will like, try Sky's The Limit by JazzTeeth. It's on pastebin and is also an AIE, which are your trigger warnings for those oddly sensitive to such things, but it's also highly inventive, deeply characterised, emotionally evocative and funny as hell. Here, quote time:
>You laugh into your glass of wine. "Has anyone ever told you you're a very nice individual?"
"Of course."
>"I can tell you right now they were lying."
Oh, it's greentext too. Snob away, pls.
...
Meh, what the hell. Too much effort to make a story. Here:
You open your eyes.
It is dark and it is raining. The air stinks of dirt and the scent of far-off candles. The branches of a nearby tree slap together, creaking as the wind pushes through them. Droplets splatter across your face and watery mud trickles along your underbelly.
You are running, lungs heaving as you gasp for breath, each motion breaking the hold your drenched mane has onto your neck. Each hoofbeat clatters out loudly as the nail strikes cobblestone. It hurts, but you don’t slow.
Canterlot Castle is up ahead, and you are racing towards it. The white-marble minarets are sullen in the darkness; it is new moon, and the froth of clouds above swallows all the light that’s left. Rivulets of water flow across your face, cutting into your eyes. They sting. Sweat.
There’s a door ahead, outlined in a halo of yellow light. You angle towards it, hooves slipping off a forming puddle. You skid and bang into it, and then, pushing off, you raise your hooves and bang again.
You pause, briefly. No sound of movement beyond. You ram yourself into it, drumming as loudly as you can. Your coat squelches as you impact, pain lancing along each limb. You have to hurry: you don’t know how much time you have.
You pause again as you hear the sound of rattling beyond the door. Your ears flick back, forwards, around. Your stop breathing, and concentrate wholly on listening.
The street behind you is silent. The sound of the roaring wind and rain striking off the cobblestones have gone, leaving an emptiness behind, an absence where a sound should be.
The door opens, and you close your eyes.
You open your eyes.
Before you’s an open door, a confused mare and an utterly empty street behind her coated in layers of darkness. Her eyes meet yours, her head bobbing as she pants out her exhaustion through a wall of yellow teeth.
You close the door, bolt it shut and run.
The armour you’re wearing is heavy; you toss your head, throwing the helmet off, and waste a second struggling out of the chestplate. Your added speed makes up for it: you practically fly down the hallway, with only the echoes of your running racing ahead.
It’s lighter in here, with burning torches illuminating the walls: purple mainly, with a red rug rolled out like a tongue across the white floor. An occasional pony trots out of a passage attached onto yours; you dance past them, the rug bunching up beneath your swivelling hooves.
A few call out to you with a name that is not yours. You do not slow; you run, until their cries are far behind you. None follow.
There’s a bang, loud like thunder. Three more follow it, like the thudding of your earlier knocking magnified past all ability: a pulsating strum of sound that ends in a crack of sundered wood.
The door just gave. You increase your stride, reaching deep into your body’s reserves, muscles pounding and aching and yet still going. Tiles crack beneath your hooves, shattering under every downbeat.
You’re running out. There’s not enough. A voice from behind cuts out mid-word. You turn a corner, blood streaming down your side from where you rammed into the wall, utterly unable to stop yourself. A unicorn appears before you, white and female and with a vivid turquoise mane. Sheets of paper float around her like bees about a hive.
You close your eyes.
You open your eyes and twist, papers tumbling mid-flight. A guard skids past you and they slap onto his skin, sticking to his sweat. You concentrate, and explode in a flash of white light.
You recongeal a way off, at the tip of one of the towers. Your horn flashes again, repelling the darkness and revealing the room’s unused: dust coats the furniture and air, like frozen insects drifting aimlessly through the dark. Your eyes swerve about as your head turns. There: a curtain. White light wraps around it, and the fabric parts.
The world outside is darkness and two great, glowing eyes like white moons hanging in the air. They wane, slicing into slivers. The glass shatters inwards as you explode once more.
You’re back on the street, and once more you are running. The water feels hot against your coat, and the wind flattens your mane out to the right, as if tugging you off course.
And then the roaring wind behind you dies without a splutter; the splashing raindrops end without due notice. And all of a sudden, you find yourself floating in a black void of endless ink.
There’s a thrumming noise that sounds without air, echoing in your bone marrow and bellowing through your ears. You explode once more, but reappear under the same conditions: in nothing, whole and total. You scream, and there’s no sound.
You close your eyes, but there’s nowhere to go, no escape or refuge. You are you and you alone.
“Thee.”
You open your eyes. There is blue inside the blackness, a floating colour in the void. It is snarling.
“Release our subject, Nightmare. Thy pollution of their minds shall be tolerated no longer.”
You can’t. You can’t be without a pony, cannot exist without another. They are you and you are them and all are you together.
The moons are waning beneath her billowing aurora, and a spike of vivid blue rises. You feel yourself peeling out your body, feel it growing deadly cold as you’re sucked out of each limb. Feel the twitching life that is not you returning to it.
You feel yourself getting smaller, more frightened. And there is nowhere you can go. The moons are glaring at you, and their intensity feels like flame to your dwindling self, and there is nowhere you can go. But still:
You blink once, the tiny fragment of you left jumping on a single hope, and are gone.
That was very interesting and it reminded me a lot of
for some reason.
1102922
The perspective jumps are certainly similar. I think that handled the horror aspect of it a lot better than I, however.
1102954 True but horror writing seems like it'd be harder to do, haven't read much of it or written any so don't take my word for it.
You're indeed correct with both halves of your image: happy best princess is best best princess. Sad best princess is worst best princess.
> An occasional pony trots out of a passage attached onto yours
I found worst princess! What prize do I win?
More to the serious, this was interesting reading, and it definitely worked well with the second-person format: the narrative unified the distinct views despite the transference of consciousness. Once I realized what was going on with that, I thought it was pretty clever.
Now I'm curious why the Nightmare would have been running toward Canterlot, if (as is implied) it was trying to escape Luna's pursuit. I think there's more of a story here than you've teased us with.
Also, Sky's The Limit was really remarkably compelling despite its format. I can see why you liked it.
… though the quote you gave was nowhere in the story. Is it a multi-parter?
1109408
This
Yep. I completely forgot that other people might not have adapted to navigating pastebins. Derp.
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
It's incomplete and also humanXpony, which remains a subgenre that fascinates me despite all the shiet I wade through