The Light in an Eye

by Crystal Static

Tap Tap Tap

The Light in an Eye

The wind blows through the branches of the Golden Oaks, whispering its lone song, as the boughs creak and scrape in the night. The full moon shines down through the window, casting the interior of the structure in a muted calm that borders on unease. Up the stairway to the living area, the dim glow of a single candle plays in stark contrast to the shadowy dark below. Residing inside the golden field of light rests a single unicorn, lavender coat shining with a glossy sheen, eyes closed and muzzle slightly open upon the inside spine of a thick volume.

To a pony, a single sound out of the ordinary can disrupt a normal cycle of sleep, the worn hinges of a door creaking, the click of a writing desk's drawer unlocking, the rustle of a raven perching on the branches of the tree outside the window, a lone whisper will awaken most anypony without fail. When Twilight Sparkle awoke in the middle of the night, it would be considered unusual. But then again, barely anything of this night could be seen as usual to the unicorn.

Awake, Twilight Sparkle gently blows out the still burning candle, snuffing it's defiance to the darkness with nary a thought, before proceeding down to the kitchenette for a clear glass of water and a nibble of a limp piece of bread. With a gulp, she finishes her bread and water, and trots out into the main room to stow the book she fell asleep to. Upon reaching the proper section, with a tired flourish of her horn, the tome is rightly where it should be on it's shelf.

A light tapping breaks the unicorn out of her sleep-induced stupor; tap tap tap, and with a start she glances left and right, trying to determine from whence the mysterious sound was unearthed.

tap tap tap

Rapidly she glances towards the basement door, trying to remember if she turned off her equipment when she was last down there. Approaching the wooden barrier, it parts in her way with a decrepit creaking from its rusty hinges. She tries the switch, but with a loud popping noise, the lighting fixtures fail to illuminate the dark stairway into the abyss.

tap tap tap

Drawn forth by the sound, she illuminates her horn and proceeds to slink down the stairs; her slow progress borne from unease and caution. At the bottom of the stairway, resting on the floor, a greatly worn hoof-stitched doll, with loose buttons on what could be seen as its face, and patches betraying it's age. With a sigh of relief, the unicorn trots over to pick up the doll, determined to return it to its proper place on the edge of her work table.

tap tap tap

With a start, she drops the doll and turns to look towards the source of the sound. A carved wooden box, dulled with age, resting near the portal-mirror she was experimenting with earlier that week. Approaching the box, her eyes are drawn to the worn motif carved into the oak. A unicorn kicking up on it's back hooves, like it was startled or showing off, bordered with ivy climbers on the trunks of two decrepit husks that could have once been trees. In the space beyond those trees lie swirls of smoke concealing the hunting eyes of predators thirsty for blood.

tap tap tap

Startled from the seeming trance, Twilight Sparkle shakes her head side to side, before levitating the curious box carefully onto her table. Satisfied that her curiosity towards the wooden object could wait until the morning, she calmly proceeds back upstairs, closing the creaky basement door, and puts her empty water glass in the sink. A great yawn escapes her muzzle as she trots up to her room, and she chuckles about how tired she is. Collapsing into her bed, she quickly falls into a deep sleep.

tap tap tap

The profound tapping reaches into her dreams, the joyful colours in her mind turning uneasy as she starts to toss and turn. She doesn't awaken, but her sleep is compromised in the most interesting of ways. A light fog envelopes her body, distorting the muted dark of the bedroom. Tossing turns to thrashing, and her dreams turn to fear. The fog surrounding her thickens, obscuring her features, and emitting a sinister light. Not really a light, more of an absence of light, a seeping darkness that seemingly drains the light from everything around. The room's colours fade to a greyscale, and the unicorn's quaking intensifies even more.

tap tap tap

The fog becomes thicker, almost solid; as the un-light radiating from it spreads through the room; muting the sound of the unicorn's thrashing.

tap tap tap

The fog fills the room, completely blocking all sight and sound to the interior space.

tap tap tap

As quickly as it came, the fog recedes, pulling into a rectangular object on the nightstand next to the bed; the unicorn's thrashing has ceased entirely as the wooden box snaps shut, leaving the room in a state of eerie stillness. The unicorn doesn't even twitch when the rain starts to fall upon the window pane, moon obscured by a thick layer of clouds.

---

A few hours later, as the clouds clear and the sun rises, the lone figure of an infantile dragon enters the room. Spike pauses to listen for Twilight Sparkle to wake up as she usually does…

Confused by the lack of sound, he climbs onto the bed to wake her, vaguely aware that the blankets are tangled tightly around the unicorn's body. Approaching her head, he tries to shake her awake. Failing that, he spreads open her eyelid and freezes. The unicorn's eye is a dark orb of the darkest shadow, no pupil or iris marring the perfect black circle. With renewed vigor he tries to shake her awake, yelling out in increasingly frantic cries, before stopping and placing her head back on the pillow. He listens carefully for the sound of her breath, but cannot hear a thing. Manically glancing about, he spots a carved box of wood on the nightstand. He crawls over to grab it in his claws. Opening the box, he looks inside; there rests a lone gem, the color of Twilight's eyes before the night, pulsing with a strange glow. Suddenly, the gem turns towards him, as if it were an eye glancing in shock, before crumbling into dust.

Upon the destruction of the gem, unicorn's body shrivels into a dried husk, causing the dragon to drop the box to the floor. The dragon flees the room to get help, not noticing the box resting closed back on the nightstand.

tap tap tap

Comments

[Twilight Shine]

I usually don't read stories like this. Interesting.

[Crystal Static]

6210576 What did you think of it? Good? Bad? Iffy? I would like to know.

~Crystalline Electrostatic~

[Charlie_K]

Alright. This is outright creepypasta material. Making matters all the worse is that I found this while there's stormy weather outside, so now I've got unease outside and inside the house.

I doubt that I could do creepy like this. And I doubt I'm going to sleep well tonight. So help me, there'd better not be a tapping at my basement door tonight!

[Twilight Shine]

6210584 I don't really read dark stories. Which was new for me and I REALLY like it.

[Crystal Static]

6210659 Well, I'm glad that you liked my fic. It was my first foray into truly dark writing, and I feel that I did a fairly decent job, even though I am never satisfied with my works...

6210655 tap tap tap
But in all seriousness, your response was exactly what I needed to hear. The fact that it stirred those emotions in you means my experiment with the psychological aspects of horror worked out well. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

~Crystalline Electrostatic~

[Charlie_K]

6210698
See if you can get Mr. Creepypasta to do a reading of this.

[Crystal Static]

6210732 Sadly (or not so sadly?), I do not know anyone by the name of "Mr. Creepypasta"...

If you could give me a link, I wouldn't mind.

~Crystalline Electrostatic~

[Charlie_K]

6210745

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrCreepyPasta

[Xaldon Ajide]

It seems more a form of assassination I'd put into one of my story's, create a soul jar with a sleep enchantment, the jar being a wooden box, and the enchantment rendering the victim helpless while a third enchantment takes the victims life essence . if the jar is opened prematurely the soul within is destroyed or released depending on how strong or weak it is. Though the connection to the body is permanently severed.

All in all it was good but, I didn't really feel scared when reading it.

[TheWraithWriter]

Hm, thoughts on this? Don't mind if I do!

I normally don't enjoy horror, but I've started making an effort to try things I normally don't enjoy. Homoerotic joke goes here. And as such, I didn't shy away when I noticed this being marked a 'horror' story.

Now, did it scare me? No, but that doesn't mean I didn't like it. The atmosphere is well crafted, the descriptions are colorful which is always something I enjoy, and the story has a neat little idea. The tapping and the box are both mysterious, and I do believe that it's always what you don't see that ultimately scares you more than what you do see. A crying fetus in a sink is unnerving, but a shaking fridge dripping blood, that's fucking terrifying because what the hell caused that? The implications are far worse than anything we could see. The real horror here comes from what we conjurer up in our minds to explain what we don't for a fact know.

So, overall, this is a nice bit of dark atmosphere.

Score: /5

Favorite Line: The wind blows through the branches of the Golden Oaks, whispering its lone song, as the boughs creak and scrape in the night.

Final Thoughts: Tap, tap, tap

[Lord Of Dorkness]

Eh, rather bland.

I've just seen 'strange artifact kills Twilight Sparkle' as a basis for horror shorts too many times and this really didn't bring anything new to the table.

Not badly written, mind you, just really average, cookie cutter premise that kills any enjoyment for me personally. Also a giant missed opurtunity that the strongest arch-mage in generations didn't as much as scream let alone resist.

Would have made more sense with near any of the other M6. Heck, if you really wanted it to be a gut-punch you could have reversed Spike and Twilight for a one-two punch of it making more sense a kid not being able to resist and the added tragedy of him being so young.

[Crystal Static]

6210840 6211650 I was trying to go for the more psychological aspect of the horror genre, versus just trying to scare the reader. Think Call of Cthulhu by HP Lovecraft, it wasn't scary by itself, but the psychological implications made it pretty scary to think about.

6211167 I'm glad you liked it. I'm fairly new to writing, so the opinions of any accomplished writer on this site is quite a lot for me. Thanks for taking the time to read it.

~Crystalline Electrostatic~

[Discord Kantus]

Not bad. Pretty well-written, and only a few errors. Present tense was a bold choice. However, it was quite short and I wasn't really certain what was going on. At all.

[DerpTape]

Sadly, subtle horror writing is an art that is rarely practiced. You have done well to add to the genre.

6211650
In my opinion, a story (or any work of art) should be judged by its own merits. Saying you don't like something because you have seen something that was along the same lines is silly. With thousands of years of recorded history, and over 7,000,000 people alive today, do you really think that there are any easy completely original ideas left? What is created today are variations of themes. And there is really no way to see for certain if your idea is original, the body of My Little Pony fan fiction alone is greater than anyone could read in a single lifetime. ^{Not that will keep me from trying.}

TL;DR : Simpsons Already Did It
South Park: Season 6, Episode 8

[Lord Of Dorkness]

8432059

In my opinion, a story (or any work of art) should be judged by its own merits. Saying you don't like something because you have seen something that was along the same lines is silly. With thousands of years of recorded history, and over 7,000,000 people alive today, do you really think that there are any easy completely original ideas left? What is created today are variations of themes. And there is really no way to see for certain if your idea is original, the body of My Little Pony fan fiction alone is greater than anyone could read in a single lifetime. ^{Not that will keep me from trying.}

TL;DR : Simpsons Already Did It
South Park: Season 6, Episode 8

Isn't it kinda missing the point to use the 'on its own merits' excuse for ignoring flaws, when this fan-fiction story is 100% pulling your heart-strings with the emotional connection you've built up from the source material? 

There's nothing wrong with that, of course. There's some fine stories out there as original as drinking water to hydrate yourself whose whole point is to make you feel a single emotion.

Heck, My Little Pony itself needed five versions to get good enough before most of us on this site started giving a damn! Five!

mlpforums.com/uploads/post_images/sig-4826609.full.png

But that's the problem I talked about with using Twilight Sparkle as... well, the victim in this horror story. She's a once in ten life-times magical prodigy, facing a magical threat she was forewarned about by her trusted mentor figure, has faced at least one ancient horror in the background material since she's living in the library (Luna), and...

Well, she bites it quicker and with less fuss in this story, then a Red Skirt in Star Trek on an away mission.

And... well, that's too blatant heart-strings pulling. Bending the characters backwards, making them hold an idiot ball, so that the story can force the conclusion that Twilight suffers.

Again, flaws that could have been avoided with nearly any other pony in the show, and for me, that AND the bland premise just broke my enjoyment of the tale.

TL: DR — My main gripe was with the choice of main character having no impact on the plot and that's Twilight was used as a clue-less victim against a magical threat, but those flaws AND the too old-school premise made each other worse.

IE, the lack of originality didn't help, but it wasn't my main problem with the story.

[DerpTape]

8432240
Your original post of

Not badly written, mind you, just really average, cookie cutter premise that kills any enjoyment for me personally. 

Is what I was responding to, and since i have seen similar comments many times before, I took the opportunity to rant a bit.

Your response to me was much clearer, and brought up legitimate issues.