Wisp

by Night_Shine

1. Freed from the Cruelty of Time

The eternal question that everyone must someday face, a silent predator which stalks them all of their lives and waits in the desolate shadows of life’s hardest moments, is the question of the meaning of their own existence. Some define their purpose as a clever plan to cheat Time himself; they focus so much on extending the future that they forget to live in the present. Some others refuse to face the question, turning a blind eye to the predator as it slowly eats away their dwindling time. But both of these are naught. What is mine? I can only hope that someday I possess the wisdom to answer that question…but for now, I walk the eternal road of Time and savor every moment, as it will never come again.

Night Shine presents

W I S P

They are the most important method for understanding the very nature of intelligent beings; they are simple fantasies that nopony remembers nor cares for. They are shaped and designed completely by the mind; they are unfamiliar and unknown to that very same mind who gives them the gift of existence. They are the only window into their host whose image is portrayed with complete veracity; they tell useless tales with useless characters in useless settings. They are an inherent property of intelligent beings that all share; they are the most mysterious of subjects and no one has ever discovered their purpose. I speak, of course, of dreams.

Though most can only imagine what the possibilities in dreams could ever be, those ponies that possess the power to control and manipulate the mind can examine every aspect of the dream realm. This was the occupation of one stallion, a stallion whose research led him to a discovery so terrible that he took such drastic measures that he drove himself completely insane. Now he has faced the consequences of his own terrible work, trapped within a nightmare of his own creation.

Beneath the black curtain of the starless midnight sky this lone stallion walked, endlessly trotting towards the dawn, a futile dream which lay beyond an unreachable horizon. Far above his field of vision lay an appalling rip in the curtain of the sky, where the moon had been torn from its home, ripped away like a mother from her child; her ever-watchful eye had disappeared over a millennium ago.

A massive armada of storm clouds had gathered over the empty plains. Bolts of lightning flashed at an infinite distance from each other—in such a realm as this, all distances were infinite—and yet even they lacked the power and the courage to break the eternal shroud of quiet that had consumed the landscape and fallen over it like a fog of noxious smoke.

Echoing through the empty atmosphere, the clattering of hooves against stone was the only noise that dared to break the tranquility of the night. Deafening by sheer contrast, it waged war against the oppressive silence of the realm, resounding out across the infinite landscape and into the void of nothingness that surrounded it. The sole defining feature of this landscape, save the never-ending field of emerald grass that waved to and fro in the cool night breeze, was a narrow cobbled path stretching infinitely from nowhere into nowhere. It sliced cleanly through the center of the meadow, cleaving it into two equally endless halves; the road imposed some kind of definition onto the otherwise featureless plains. Thousands upon thousands of rough stones, unweathered despite the passing of Time, were ingrained in its surface, an endless pattern of bleak gray shapes progressing into nothing.

The dead-gray shade of the cobblestones perfectly matched the coat of the empty road’s sole living traveler. Though his body had once exhibited a brilliant array of pale hues which glowed under the moonlight, over the years it had faded to gray, its color draining away with its life.

His sides were bare, of wings and of mark—though he had never possessed wings even before entering this eternal asylum. He had never once tasted the rush of the howling wind as it whirled past, hurling his body through the open air; this stallion's talent, another trait lost into the black abyss of Time, had been based purely in his magical prowess and the pursuit of the comprehension of dreams, one of Life’s greatest mysteries.

Over the countless years spent walking the roads his own mind had betrayed him, burying the essential spark of life needed by all living beings blessed with the gift of self-awareness. The unicorn horn spiraling out of his hairline, a powerful instrument which once wielded great power, was all but empty from disuse…yet rather than falling into that void which had swallowed the rest of his vital traits, his power had scattered into the background, integrating with the realm such that he found himself able to control everything within it, far beyond his previous abilities.

The stallion’s ears, once vigilant sentries perking up from his temples, clung to the sides of his head, withered and deafened by the smothering cloud of silence which had befallen the realm. His mane, long ago an adorably simplistic ball of fuzz that splayed back as if blown by the wind, had fallen flat and dead against the nape of his neck. His eyes, once glowing with the most vibrant and passionate of colors in the spectrum, had faded away completely, leaving him with a seamless and horrifyingly smooth sheet for a face…as if his forehead had reached down and consumed everything but the thin line of a mouth carved into his featureless head.

Many years ago—in a wisp of memory long forgotten—his mouth stretched wide open, capturing the essence of joy; though his voice never boomed, it resonated with a certain noticeable quality of life. Now when it opened, tearing the smooth sphere of his head by stretching his jaw naught but an inch, his voice was a quiet monotone…scarcely more than a whisper on the wind. For countless years it had spoken one phrase and one phrase only:

"Knowest thou thyself?"

Every time he said this simple riddle it was hurled at the other wanderers of the trail, specters who reeked of death; though not spectral in appearance, the only other ponies who walked the road were unwelcome visitors in this lonely dimension. All of them were perfect external reflections of his Self, faded and gray, yet beneath the skin they hid a powerful spirit of darkness he did not share—this darkness composed the core essence of these mindless servants to a master horrifying in nature.

All of these servants had created a morbidly intriguing sort of paranoia in the stallion’s mind; his emotions now were buried as he had spent centuries carrying on the fatal decision to suppress all signs of life, to hide beneath the façade of his own skin. The stallion spent this infinite night wandering the road, searching for his true self, searching for anypony he could trust.

"Knowest thou thyself?"

The answer was always different, no matter at whom he threw the question. At first they stopped and stared with their blank eyeless faces, asking "What? I do not understand..." in hopeless confusion. He had encountered many who turned his own question back against him, snapping "Doest thou?" A rare few took a moment that lasted a lifetime to respond, mulling over the meaning behind the question before daring to respond. Yet, none of them ever knew what to say.

"Knowest thou thyself?"

Such a simple question with such a simple answer; a riddle and a game, the solution to which he had implanted so deep within his brain that he could never forget…no matter how hard he had tried. Likewise, he could never forget the day that he found his true reflection; like all the others it appeared to be simply another lost soul who'd lost his soul wandering the road.

"Knowest thou thyself?"

His reflection sat motionless in the darkness and let slip the words he had not heard for a millennium, shocking him to the core: "Nay, not since the Moonset."

The voice was…different somehow. Peculiar. There seemed to be an element to it which was not present in the monotone that the stallion forced past his lips upon the approach of every traveler. The shriveled heart which had lay dormant within his chest beat again, as he felt...something. Something like a feeling.

As he had practiced countless times in his head, he unleashed the second question: "The Reaper returneth?"

Waiting only a moment for the rising breeze to whistle past, the mysterious reflection said, "The moon rises."

He said it so casually, so easily…not as a glorious hero emerging to break a thousand years' imprisonment, but like one might say as a simple greeting. The one final question that he had rehearsed for centuries on end slipped hesitantly past the stallion's lips:

"Who is the Messenger?"

The response was a riddle he had not planned for, could not remember thinking and did not understand: "The evening hour, the bridge between Day and Night, the fleeting glow of Dawn and of Sunset."

He frowned. Day and Night had been bridged? Now was the exact moment to act; his imprisonment was at its end? The fatal blow struck by Time against his spirit, the slow knife which had gradually nudged its way into his soul to cut out its core, had numbed his feelings to such an extent he could no longer feel Time's passing.

As his reflection stepped forward, finished with its task, the stallion called out "Wait!"

The stranger turned back to face him. Despite that this turn of events had never been planned, despite the fact that they both knew he was to leave immediately, he acted somehow unsurprised by this spur-of-the-moment final request.

"D-does the road end?" the stallion asked, his tongue stumbling over the clumsy riddle he had made up on the spot.

Thunder rumbled in the silent sky. One minute passed, then two, stretching the painful silence. Such was the cruelty of Time, that a moment such as this had passed in naught but an instant and his imprisonment dragged on for an eternity and a day…!

Testing the waters with its voice, the reflection responded with a simple "Yes," not letting any threads of emotion slip into the weave of his single spoken word.

"How?"

Again the word slipped out before he could help it, and again the stranger was wholly unsurprised. Time crawled painfully by as his reflection stared back at him through nonexistent eyes, reflecting on the best method in which to respond.

"Who is incorruptible?"

As if on cue, his reflection vanished in a flash of brilliant light. Ripped through the air where he stood a moment and an eternity before was a mirror, woven into the fabric of space and time.

Not hesitating for a single instant, the stallion stepped forward through the looking glass...one step closer to a final escape from this realm beyond Time, a realm twisted and manipulated by the minds of the many and the few.

Author's Note:

Don't worry if you're confused; you're not supposed to understand it all yet. Everything will be revealed in due time.