There's No Escape. · 6:38pm May 21st, 2020

I open my eyes and sit up, gasping as air painfully began to fill my lungs once more.

Another failure.

I look down at my torn shirt and frown as the large gash across it finishes healing, the only remnants being dried blood that covered my lower body.

I'm going to have to buy more, great.

My eyes shut as I mentally mark off laceration, a frown forming on my face as I realize I have no more left to do. Or at least, no more that I can think of.

"Didn't work?"

The voice was familiar, annoyingly familiar. I ignored it as I stood up and turned around, walking past the alabaster mare without a glance.

"Jayce." I stop as the harsh tone reaches me, a bland look on my face as I turn around.

She looked angry.

"How much longer will you do this to yourself?" she demands, eyes surprisingly shiny for a change. "Drowning, burning, suffocating, beheading, so many deaths I've lost count! How many more will you try until you give up? How much more will it take to convince you that you cannot die?"

"I was going to try drowning again," I replied, voice filled with nothing, no emotion, no...anything. "Figured if I tie myself down and die repeatedly, my lungs will fill beyond the point where they can regenerate."

Her face is horrified as I finish talking, almost comically so. "Jayce please listen to me. You cannot die here, you never will. It doesn't matter how you try, you will always come back!"

For the first time in a very long time, I feel something almost furious fill me up, a rage in my heart.

It's almost as I remember feeling when I found out the truth of Equestria, and how my being here was no accident as I was told.

"I was like you once," she said, a memory long forgotten flickering behind her eyes. "A battery for Equestria for feed upon, until eventually I became that which I empowered. When I first arrived here I wasn't even a Pony, that came much, much later."

"A...battery?" I asked, unsure, unknowing on how to feel as Celestia's sad eyes met mine. "I...I don't understand."

"My subjects believe that magic comes from within us, that after expending our mana reserves that it simply comes back after rest. But this isn't true. The truth is that Equestria on its own is a powerless world, magicless and empty of life. It is only through that which it takes that allows the land to prosper, and for magic to exist at all. Humans are filled with magic, abundantly so. With one Human, Equestria can stay alive for millennia. And as it was with me, now it is so with you."

"You were Human?"

"I was a woman," she replied, nodding. "I...I don't remember my name, I scarcely remember what I looked like. After a time the power within you begins to run out, and you will change into what I am now."

I shook my head furiously. "I won't be like you! I won't let this place use me!"

"You have no choice, I'm sorry. You won't age, and you will never be allowed to die. It won't let you."

"Watch me."

It took a long time to realize just how honest she had been. But one day I got very low and ended it all...and woke up a few hours later, healthy and whole.

There was no escape, the land I was trapped in wouldn't allow me die. It would slowly drain me over millennia until I had nothing to give, and then it would make me like Celestia.

But I refused to allow it, I refused! And so I kept on trying, day after day, week after week, year after year.

I would never stop. But maybe that was what it meant to be Human.

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