Concepts & Creations: The Silence · 8:37pm Feb 28th, 2021
There are, to my eternal shame, two stories in my library that I never finished. Looking at things as they are, I know I probably never will. So I've decided that, at the very least, I'll describe what my plans were for those stories. Today we begin with what I had hoped to be a horror epic. It was inspired by a great many things, but none so significant as the Silent Hill franchise, to which is as intended as a tribute.
The Silence is set in an AU where Equestria knows no unpleasantness. Ponies don't know any of the stronger negative emotions, and what negative emotions they do feel – jealousy, grudges, etc. – are short-lived. This is the very reason that Equestria is such a happy, warm, prosperous place. The other races have simply assumed this is because ponies are a naturally pleasant species. They are wrong.
Shortly after Luna's banishment, Celestia decided that the best way to prevent future tragedies of any scale would be to rid ponies of all their negative tendencies. Alas, she couldn't find a way to eliminate those tendencies outright. They are too natural, to ingrained in biology and psychology, to just disappear like that. So instead she concocted a whole new approach: drain the negativity continuously. She erected a great, subterranean vault of massive proportions, then filled it with a special enchantment. Any negative emotions a pony felt would be sucked out of them and into the vault. It had a planet-wide reach, meaning no pony would be missed no matter where they were, and the affect was so subtle that they wouldn't even notice. Granted, it was a weak pull, so sometimes if the emotions were strong enough they'd still be made manifest in a pony's actions, but never for long. This is why, for example, Rarity can be jealous of Fluttershy only to lose that jealousy after a few short days and some kind words. Alas, the enchantment only worked on ponies; Celestia was unable to find a way to make it work on more than one species, and had neither the resources or time to make multiple vaults.
Still, for Celestia the greatest problem appeared to have been solved. Ponies were being good to one another, wars were ending, and a new age of peace came to be. She assumed it would last forever. After all, emotions lack any physical form, so they could be stored in the vault indefinitely. And that's where things should have stayed.
It turns out that filling up a single space with endless negativity can lead to unwelcome side effects. The negativity took form. It grew. It festered. It gained a certain, animalistic awareness. It was alive, but nothing more. Merely existing, and continuing its eternal task of taking in more negativity, becoming denser. One might think that it would grow too big for its confines, but Celestia had made the vault perfectly. It would never break, never allow anything out. There was only one connection to the outside: The Siphon, designed purely to feed it more corruption. So it grew denser. And denser. For a thousand years, denser.
And then Chrysalis and Discord find it. The changelings discovered a cave system within Equestria and, in exploring it, eventually found the surface of the vault deep beneath the world. Intrigued by the reports, Chrysalis went to investigate personally. Discord noticed her presence in Equestria immediately and followed to see what she was up to. After capturing and de-horning the Queen, he decided to take a much closer look at the vault.
The combination of Chrysalis's negative mindset and Discord's probing caused a reaction: the Maw noticed and tried to suck them both up. In that moment, Discord got a look inside the Vault. At this point there was so much condensed emotion and power that time and space had warped within, allowing him to see the future and understand one thing: the world was doomed. He was doomed. In that instant, the only hope left was for the information he'd gleaned to be shared with those who could do something to stop it. But he couldn't escape the Maw. He was going to be consumed. So, in a last-ditch gamble, he pumped every ounce of information he could into Chrysalis and let her escape.
The combination of chaos magic with the Vault's boundless negativity gave the thing within newfound intelligence. And powers, powers that allowed it to bend time and space beyond its regular boundaries. Now it could reach beyond the Vault. Now it could make negative energy to feed the Maw. And with enough negative energy, it may finally be able to escape.
There were many ideas in the works with this story, including a lot of writing challenges. For starters, each story arc was going to be themed around a stage of pregnancy. Within the Vault is the Womb, within which the intelligence – which I referred to as "God" in my notes, likely a direct reference to Silent Hill 3 – pulled the strings. Facilitating this was the Siphon, which connected the inside of the Vault to the outside in what was originally meant to be a one-way feeding of negative energy, but which is now capable of also pushing that energy out. The Siphon has no physical form and can move beyond time and space, thereby allowing it to open up anywhere to spill out its negativity. Within the Siphon was The Maw, which converts the negativity gathered from the outside into energy for God (this is what killed Discord).
Another aspect of the challenge was a wide variety of perspectives. Every chapter would have one specific character's perspective. That character's perspective could not be used for any other chapter of the given arc, and could only happen twice in the entire story. It was a vastly complicated challenge on my part and a prime example of my ambition getting the better of me.
At any rate, the Siphon would begin pumping Equestria with condensed negative energy, which would promptly corrupt the world with physical alterations. There would be two world states: The Pale and the Veil. In the Pale, God's attention is elsewhere and the Siphon is not present. This is about as 'normal' as life can get in this new, ruined Equestria. The entire world appears whitewashed, muted and dull like an old photograph. Time ceases to affect things in The Pale; there are no monsters or threats beyond the natural like, say, falling off a cliff.
The Veil is a dark, wasted caricature of the landscape. It is of limited size and scope, but gets bigger as God consumes more negativity and grows stronger. The Veil only appears in places where the Siphon and the Maw is currently focused, during which time the creatures begin to appear and threaten all.
When transitioning between the Veil and the Pale, sound doesn't exist. This causes the Silence for which the story is named. All of these elements are referential of Silent Hill: the silence is the equivalent to the sirens, the Pale's faded coloration is a nod to the Fog, and the Veil is akin to the Otherworld.
Then there are, of course, the monsters. Unbeknownst to the ponies, the monsters are themselves characters that have succumbed to the Veil, usually through death. The monsters themselves are recreations of the lost creature's personal fears and anxieties. And because space and time are warped within the Veil, it's entirely possible for a pony to be threatened or even killed by their own monster (see Suri Polomare in Chapter 2). In the instance of more basic fears certain monsters become recurring, like Heights (Chapter 2), Hunger (Chapter 3), or Thunder (Chapter 4). Characters with more personal or particularly strong fears or anxieties tend to produce more unique monsters, such as Scootaloo (Chapter 2) or Rainbow Dash (Chapter 5). I had planned some particularly deadly "boss" monsters for specific characters, including Rarity (Chapter 7), Derpy, and Pinkie Pie. There was also going to be heavily recurring Super Monster, essentially The Silence's version of Pyramid Head, which would have been Spike's monster (which made a brief appearance in Chapter 7).
If all those names are worrying you, I can confirm that yes, all these characters die at some point. In fact, I only had two characters who were guaranteed to survive the events: Filthy Rich and Diamond Tiara. I wanted Filthy to be the one to end the madness, which he achieves through a fierce determination to save his daughter. This too is a nod to the Silent Hill franchise, which puts at the center of its tales some kind of familial bond as the protagonists motivation: a father looking for his daughter, a daughter seeking her father, a husband in search of his wife, a soldier hunting for his little brother. But aside from Filthy and Diamond, every character in MLP was potentially on the chopping block.
Another major player would be Princess Luna, albeit in a tragic way. Her connection with the metaphysical reality of dreams gave her unique properties, so when The Maw eventually consumes her she does not die. Instead she lives on in omniscient torture, granting God the ability to see all that is happening at once and vastly expanding the scope of the Veil. Despite existing in an all-encompassing agony, Luna is also able to communicate to others in various, if incomplete or unclear, ways. For example, she communicates with Discord in the first chapter, feeding him the information he then provides to Chrysalis. She also attempts to communicate with Apple Bloom by interjecting words in a letter she finds in Chapter 11. And in Chapter 7, she speaks to Cadance through a mirror. Luna spends the story acting as a sort of guide, constantly trying to nudge ponies in the right direction to end the madness.
The most important character – the protagonist, really – is Chrysalis, who undergoes a lot of development. When she first realizes what is happening, Chrysalis schemes to use the situation to her advantage. Specifically, by getting rid of the Princesses and the Element Bearers. She thus devotes her time to trying to lure them into bad situations or bring the bad to them. Since Discord armed her with knowledge of the situation, including what will happen in the future, she gears everything towards ruining Equestria as much as possible so that, after she defeats God with her knowledge and saves the day, her changelings can become the dominant race of the world.
The problem is that Chrysalis doesn't have all the knowledge at once. It comes in pieces, forming a little at a time in ways that make the whole picture unclear at first. As she continues with her plans, more and more of the whole story get clarified in her head. At first she uses this merely to advance her goals, convinced that she can manipulate things to her advantage.
Then, Chrysalis sees something that brings everything to a halt: she encounters her own monster. With the nature of The Veil and the knowledge put in her head, Chrysalis knows that there is no way this monster can exist if she were actually going to survive to see the end. She has witnessed her own mortality and inevitable doom, and it is closing in sooner than she thought.
Armed with this new awareness, Chrysalis's goals change drastically. It's no longer about making sure her changelings come out on top, it's about ensuring they survive at all. And if she is going to die, then she has to do everything in her power to make sure that someone else can stop God in her place. After much contemplation and letting more knowledge trickle in, she eventually comes to the conclusion that if the world is to be saved, Filthy Rich will be the one to do it. But only if things happen in just the right way to make it so, and she's already gone about sabotaging that outcome. Thus does she begin manipulating things once more, this time to make sure that the right ponies are in the right places to ensure the best ending... though that often means allowing them to die.
None of this would be seen in chronological order by the reader. Because time and space are warped in the Veil, the Chrysalis who appears in any given chapter could be either an enemy or an ally depending upon when in her personal timeline she is from. Sometimes it would be the future Chrysalis just trying to save the world. Other times it would be past Chrysalis trying to cause mayhem. On rare occasions the two would even appear together, the future Chrysalis attempting to thwart past Chrysalis's plans. Chrysalis would also be in regular contact with Luna, particularly when she needs help to understand what she needs to do next. The original plan on my part was to make her situation the great mystery of the story, only to be answered near the end just before she finally sacrifices herself as the last puzzle piece to make sure Filthy Rich and Diamond Tiara do what they have to to save Equestria.
Obviously, this entire concept was overambitious of me, and I ended up abandoning the project when I realized that it was too large for my original goals. I have since come up with a new way to handle the concept, one that is much shorter and less complex that I hope to someday write as an original fiction. The general concept remains the same, but the new version would be written as an anthology of short stories set in the same universe, where clues are set within each story to reveal an overarching narrative if the reader is savvy enough to put the pieces together.
Still, I greatly regret that I was never able to finish The Silence. It was an interesting exercise in plot development. Ultimately a failed exercise, but I learned a lot from the attempt. I especially enjoyed imagining up the monsters that were to exist within the story, and I created many that never got to appear in what was published. No doubt some will be re-used for the original fiction should I ever get around to it.
That's all for now. Next week I'm thinking I'll put down my aborted plans for my other unfinished story.
While I'm not much into horror, I won't lie, this sounds fascinating.
Yeah, this seems like it would definitely work better as original fiction, since I'd have to suspend my disbelief pretty hard to believe that Celestia would be foolish enough to set this up. Not to mention the nonlinear narrative with constantly bouncing perspectives, the evil protagonist, and the train of fan-favorite character deaths. I highly doubt it would've gotten very much support among a wide readerbase.
Fascinating concept, but I can see how it fell through. Good luck with the second try!
True this was ambitious but i can guarantee if you had managed to pull off this deep and rich narrative this would've been a great story and might've earned a spot on the "featured stories" list and might've had other writers use your story as a blueprint for their own Spin-off stories in your universe much like how "Silent Ponyville's" author gave fans a way to use their own "Silent Ponyville" stories in his universe. However I am looking forward to your re-imaging of your original "The Silence" idea. Best of luck to you
5463986
I'm inclined to agree with this statement. I'm sorry to say that this variation of horror has never been my cup of tea—especially within the context of MLP. At best, I could've seen myself making it to Chapter 7 before the one-two-three-four punch of Rarity, Derpy, Pinkie and Spike would've made me give up the ghost.
My personal biases aside, however, this sounds like it would've been absolutely amazing if you'd managed to pull it off. It might not have been my sort of thing, but the premise alone is Feature Box-material.
It's a right shame that it won't see the light of day—at least, not in its originally-intended form—but at the very least, I'm happy to hear that you've garnered a lot from the experience. Best of luck down the line!
:)
EDIT: I'm an idiot; I somehow gave myself the impression that the story as a whole remained unpublished. If there are any discrepancies between my assumptions and the reality, I apologize.
I'll admit, I was sad to see this blog, it's kind of a nail in the coffin ya know? Inner demons and fears are kind par the course for the human experience, and I find it intriguing when those things are given physical form, the idea of physically overcoming your "dark side."
Good to get a bit of closure.
5463986
Can't say I disagree with that. It never really hit in the first place, and I wasn't surprised. Even as an original fiction, though, the way I tried to write just wasn't going to work. The new format would I think, be a big improvement.
5463985
5463987
It was certainly fascinating to me as I was dreaming it up! Alas, I let the stars in my eyes blind me to the realities of the medium.
5464016
I'm afraid not. I already wrote more than 100,000 words of it and it hardly garnered any attention. It might have gained a cult following among horror writers over time if I'd kept it up, but in terms of widespread approval? I'm doubtful.
5464026
Well, you wouldn't have really known that those characters were dead, unless you happened to already understand that seeing a character's monster meant their death and could connect the monster to the character. I don't think I'd explained that yet. I think by the time I stopped writing at Chapter 11 the only characters directly shown to have died were Rainbow Dash, Suri Polomare, Discord, and Flash Sentry. I might be forgetting somepony; it has been years, after all.
Alas, it never saw the feature box, nor did I expect it to. The base concept is too complicated to be quickly grasped, so it would require a dedicated audience to wait for things to clear up over many, many chapters. And that's before we consider that it's a brutal, bloody horror full of hideous abominations against nature.
5464254
Yeah, I figured I should write this one as a final goodbye to the original concept. I didn't want to leave those who had read it hanging, you know?
Wow. That is a hugely ambitious galomph of a concept. And that art is incredible! That all sounds like it has a ton of potential. I’m sorry it never quite found its audience, and that it was ultimately put to rest.
I can hardly wait until you post the remake of this excellent story. Though it was ambitious, it truly was a powerful story. Thank you for taking the time to write even just a bit of the story, and taking the time to explain it here.