Hotspur
I never meant for this to happen
When I chipped in for that march.
How was I to know
Dawn Patrol had shared his fears
With the lovely Littlemoth?
That he could not keep silent
And she feared what would come
From news of Princess Luna.
Peridot could not
Have picked a worse time
To be her miserable self.
As night fell,
But before the moon rose—
We are so far from home
That such nonsense is true—
Littlemoth decided
To take her rising fear
And do something with it.
Misfortune aided her
In this grim quest of hers.
A Mookin cow was skulking
Through the dark of Myinnkyun
Avoiding pony eyes.
The only one who saw her
Before she swam away
Was poor old Peridot
Who she knocked to the ground.
Most Nightmares, like I,
Train to enter dreams
But some are born to trot
Those strange, ethereal paths.
Littlemoth was one,
Flitting into Peridot’s head
Avoiding the slumbering mind
Guiding the slumbering body.
Like a foal, she stumbled
Wearing another’s fur.
Tripping over Tommyrum
Splashing off the dock.
Then she set the old mare
To paddle far away
Until she awoke too far
And too tired to return.
Then Littlemoth sought out
Good Moonstruck's company
Giving her an alibi
From moonrise to dawn.
Forgive me, Shooting Star.
We Nightmares must tread soft
More so, with Luna gone.
Would that I could share
The kelpie’s innocence
The Mooken’s ignorance
And Littlemoth’s foul crime.
But it is far too late
This town was but a house of cards.
Little scraps of fear and hatred
Balanced against each other
Propping each other up.
Peridot swam away
And down, down it went.
We make war with the natives.
We make war with the sea.
We make war with each other.
From war we’ll not be free.
Our rage and anger bellow
And wrack like a typhoon
And thus begins the twilight
Of ill-fated Myinnkyun.
Hotspur says:
That Littlemoth used her dream powers to take over Peridot's body and send her on an endless swim. Pretty straightforward, and it even attempts to explain the possible time discrepancy. The versifying's a little choppy, but I like the introduction of rhyme in the last eight lines very much. I'll buy this one, too.
Mike
The final stanza of this piece is an excellent piece of rhyming poetry, and the piece as a whole worked pretty well as a poem, which made me like it.
Here, we have:
Hotspur was the nightmare
Palei Hantu was a minotaur cow
The drunk’s story was true
Palei Hantu knocked out Peridot
Littlemoth murdered Peridot with her dream powers
Littlemoth spent the night with Moonstruck to create an alibi
Peridot was sleepwalking, which was why she tripped over Tommyrun
This piece would be great, if not for one huge flaw – Tommyrun explicitly says that Peridot tripped over him at half past midnight, but moonrise in Equestria happens at sunset every day, because the Moon literally brings out the night, and the Sun the day. This makes it impossible for Littlemoth to have done what she did when it would have had to have happened.
I like the ideas behind this one. Painting Peridot as a character to be sympathetic towards is interesting, though it doesn't seem to correlate well with the other towns folks opinions of her. Another issue is the timing between when Peridot was hypnotized into drowning herself and Tommyrun's account of the story: it was before the moonrise for Littlemoth, but half past midnight for Tommyrun. I suppose it's possible that he, being drunk, mistook the time, but without the author explicitly saying so it appears to be more of an oversight. This chain of events also doesn't explain why Tommyrun saw two unicorns.
As an aside, the writing style in this one is really solid. I especially enjoyed the rhyming of the final stanza. My only complaint is that the pronouns got mixed up between the three females Littlemoth, Peridot and Palei Hantu. Stanza 2 ends with Littlemoth, then skips to a nearly unrelated event that is Palei Hantu and Peridot bumping into each other before returning to Littlemoth midway through Stanza 4. It was a bit confusing at first glance.
I loved this section:
However, as 6463421 points out, it doesn't quite make sense with what we know of Equestrian astronomy. Unfortunate.
This one works well, but it's rather simple. I wish more effort had been put into the poetic aspect of this entry. I'd love more visceral imagery, more use of metaphor, more significance placed on line breaks rather than just having them there for the sake of verse.
6462771 6463421 6469577 6473380
Thank you all for commenting on my... well, let's be charitable and call it an attempt. Basically, this was thrown together a few hours before the original deadline, and I never found the time to revise it afterwards. This may explain the blatant contradictions and lack of polish, especially the free verse, an area in which I have little experience. Still, thanks for the commentary.