Reality is relative
A black penguin looked inquisitively from the bedroom door.
He did not know fear yet he was cautious. The sleeping form on the nest expanded and shrank in a dull, continuous motion. The moonlight peeking between the velvet curtains bathed the room in a violet glow, painting the surrounding world with a strange aura of loneliness and bequeathing upon the scene a sense of longing. It was as if the world was standing still, holding its breath and anticipating the events to come. The moon’s luminosity made the curious mass in the bedroom seem familiar and inviting… Excessively and disturbingly so.
The purple equine did not know fear yet she was cautious…
The additional presence in her abode had caused her to shake off the last desperate vestiges of sleep and had put her senses on high alert, making her hooves involuntarily grip her bedsheets out of nervousness. The strange entity continued looking into her room, standing in a frigid, upright position. Thankfully it did not seem to have malicious intentions. The moonlight swathed the room with night’s colours and shades of black and blue drifted across the walls, the little pony felt the world shift beneath her. It was an unsettling feeling, gradual and certain like one of her plastic boats being carried away from one of the land’s many shores by the riptide. Something had distinctly changed, but she couldn’t quite put a flipper on what. The purple pony kicked off the straw that was covering her and slowly rose from her nest, hoping to confront the intruder.
Small but complex objects were strewn about the dark room, models and contraptions of various shapes and designs of baffling reflected the moonlight and the black penguin felt the intimate pull of the ocean from under its feet. The peculiar figure on the bed removed its covers and lifted itself up on its four legs. Trepidation filled the black penguin’s heart at the sight but as the creature made no further move, the black penguin hesitantly entered the bedroom making sure to avoid the toys scattered around the floor so as not to stub either of his two hooves. After he made sure that the purple pony was not alarmed or otherwise distressed by his actions, the black penguin inspected the little filly’s room around him.
The walls were plastered with a uniform hue of a subdued lavender, matching the colours of the sizable bed which had found itself against the wall opposing the door. He could make out a few short bookcases brimming with overused tomes extending under the lone window which allowed the full moon’s effulgence passage. Providing the room’s only source of illumination, the starlight shone on a small desk opposite the rectangular window which rested on the wall facing the bed’s headboard with a mahogany stool comfortably snug under it. The purple penguin regarded the objects on top of the desk carefully but the moonlight could not quite reach them and a thick haze seemed to have settled in the light’s absence.
The suit wearing biped had finally entered her den and the pale light trickling through the crudely carved circular hole in the wall now lay against her mysterious guest’s form. The black and white filly observed the entity closely, trying to discern its nature. The beast had a body similar to that of a black and white avian, however its wings were oddly misshapen and could not possibly hope to allow flight. The purple filly was quite sure she had never heard of such a creature, but before she could examine the rest of the strange individual, she noticed the murky smog clouding the edges of her vision.
As the purple penguin tried to inspect the desk’s misty landscape further, his surroundings began to lurch, constantly fading and changing in the fog, reshaping the room to the light’s whims. Familiar desks with ink-blotted parchments appeared around the room, half covered in odd, dark ballroom outfits with black and white plumes stuck to them. Objects and visions from long forgone pasts as well as faded trinkets from the memories of varying resplendent futures appeared before him, filling his breast with an unknown heartache before shifting and vanishing into the obscuring fumes flowing from the room’s boundaries.
Panicked, the black and white filly spun her head left and right to observe her burrow. Varied assortments of what she could tell were delicious fish had appeared in numerous piles around the floor. Large figures stalked the edges of the smog, sending chills up her spine. Charts and bizarre constructs, filled with data could now be seen about the hovel’s floor and although the black and white pony recognized the data, she was filled with concern as the knowledge to whether she had produced it seemed to be lost in the murky bogs of her mind.
The purple avian and the black and white equine stared at each other, their wavering forms shaking as the grey gaseous walls encroached on their positions. Unanswered questions clung to the air, making it heavy and viscous and even as the edges of their universe drifted closer, the purple and the black and white figures could only look at each other as a silent processing and understanding passed between them. Everything was collapsing much faster now. The edges of the world disappearing more and more rapidly. The two amorphous beings rushed towards each other and the centre of their realm at a desperate pace. They needed to be together, to have at least a stranger’s companionship at these final moments.
Both shapeless consciousnesses now knew terror. Both would eventually experience it again. The black and white one would learn to overcome it and in some cases even inspire it in its enemies, but that same fear would cause the purple one to eventually draw its final breath between the jagged peaks local to its home. The two neared one another and stretched, striving to have their shapes meet at this reality’s core.
Mad whispers and cackling smiles flooded the surrounding nothingness and visions of ponies and penguins filled the vacuum of thought. Each one the same yet each one disparate in essence, having different wills and thoughts that all came flooding into the unifying stream of awareness that existed in the mind, mixing together into incomprehensible babble leading to a crescendoing final realization. It was all so close now, so close to that one insight that would cause everything to make sense, that complete understanding of the machinations of time and reality. The mind cracked a smile and broke into giddy giggling, so close now, almost there, to that beautiful apex…
A purple hoof brushed against a black flipper.
A gut wrenching tug was felt and the mists of memory cleared from her mind, finding her utterly alone.
Her perception was once more clouded by the clarity of reality and any scrutiny she might have retained for recent events was scrubbed away by the will of her diamond hard, undiplomatic sanity. There would be no semblance of remembrance left, her mind needed to make sure of that if it was to remain intact. Her natural inquisitiveness initially put up some resistance but no other part of her would allow it lest they be shattered.
So there she stood, alone in her room, one hoof in the air. For several moments she tried to remember exactly why she had woken up and assumed such a position, but she eventually gave up. The purple filly slowly lowered her hoof down on the solid elm of her floor and haltingly, as if afraid, crept her way forwards towards her room’s entrance.
Twilight Sparkle looked inquisitively from the bedroom door…