//------------------------------//
// Chapter 7 
// Story: The Book that had Never Been Read 
// by Unwhole Hole 
//------------------------------//

	An indeterminate amount of time passed. To Dinky, it could have been a matter of mere hours- -or a matter of weeks. Time did not seem to flow normally for her anymore. At first this had been unnerving, but surprisingly even to her she had grown used to it and now considered the vast swaths of blank, empty time to be a normal part of life. 
She had read the book again. She did know how many times. Each time it produced the same result: she would reach the end, only to find that she had forgotten everything that she had just read- -and read it again, attempting to recapture it, to try her hardest to finally make the greatest story that she had ever read stay permanently within her mind. 
So, finally, she found herself once again sitting at her desk. The book was in front of her, and although she had just finished reading it she had not yet started to go through it again. In this rare pause, she simply stared at it, feeling her anger growing. 
“Why?” she asked. “WHY?!”
Suddenly, she felt herself reaching up. With a scream that sounded like it was coming from someone else, she swept her small filly forelegs across the top of her desk, causing all of its contents to fly across the room. Ink spilled on the floor, and a picture frame containing a picture of her, her sister, and her mother shattered on the floor. The book, of course, went with them, and as she saw it leave the desk Dinky immediately felt a surge of regret.
“No!” she cried, kneeling down to where the book had fallen. It had very nearly landed in a puddle of ink, although for some reason the ink had spread around it without touching it, as though it could not bear to approach it. 
“I’m sorry,” said Dinky, gingerly picking up the book and inspecting it for damage. “I didn’t mean to do that.” 
As she lifted it, though, she noticed something strange that made her instantly pause. The hair of her mane stood on end, and she felt strangely cold. Immediately, she lifted the book into the light of her lantern. Although exposure to even artificial light had now become blinding and agonizing, Dinky opened the lantern’s shutter and ignored the pain behind her eyes as she inspected the book.
It had fallen open to the back cover, where the checkout card was. It was not a part of the book that Dinky had really looked at; after all, there was no text there, save for the card with her name written on it. 
Except that it was different. Her name was still present, just as Spike had written it- -but it was on the second line of the card. 
Dinky blinked, confused and wondering if she was somehow hallucinating. She was sure that she had seen Spike write her name on the first line, and point out that she was the first pony to check the book out. She had seen it like that several times since- -but now she also remembered that her name had always been the second, that there had been another over it. 
This should have been hopeful, the idea that there was another pony who might know what was going on and that could help her. Seeing the name only made Dinky’s heart sink, though, and she felt a physical feeling of dread spreading through her entire. 
The name was not written in Equestrian. Dinky had no idea what it was written in; it did not even look like the strange text that now covered seemingly endless pages of notes that she had created again and again, different every time, as she read the book. Dinky had studied those notes well in between reading the book, trying to unravel the mystery despite Starlight’s warnings, and she knew that she had never seen letters like that before. 
They were simultaneously simple and more ominous than the others. They scrolled across the top line of card, written in an ink that had long ago faded to a dull rusty color. Even a date seemed to be written, but it was not in any numbers that Dinky could decipher. 
“Who…who are you?” asked Dinky after a moment. No answer came, though, because the answer was already apparent: the name was written in the book.
Dinky fell silent, and for a long time continued to stare at that name, feeling her mind go blank. It was as though she could almost read it, just like she could almost remember the contents of the book. As she strained her memory, though, she began to notice black spots forming in her vision. They started around the name, and began to swirl and writhe as though Dinky were staring into some blinding and toxic yet somehow unseen light. 
She did not look away, though. There was no reason to. Even if she went blind, she knew, she would still be able to read the book. Sight was not necessary to comprehend it. 
Despite the burns forming on the inside of her mind, though, Dinky did not lose her sight. Instead, she lapsed into unconsciousness, the effect spending several days awake brought to a head by the final stress of this new development. 

The water was neither choppy nor still. A wind of some kind appeared to be blowing, giving its surface a number of small waves that disturbed its murky, yellow-brown water. The whole surface seemed alive, and yet some aspect of its repetitive motion almost seemed mechanical and oddly dead. 
It was in this lake that Dinky found herself. The shore was now far distant, and the salt-grass was now a barely visible strip of green on the furthest periphery of her vision. The rest was murky brown water that seemed to extend outward in every direction.
Dinky was treading water, but she had no idea how deep the lake was. Its silty surface could have been mere inches away from her hooves- -or it could have been miles below. The only way to know would be for Dinky to push her head beneath the water and dive down deep, but the thought was to terrifying for her to even consider it. Even being up to her neck in the opaque water was vaguely but profoundly disturbing.
“Hello?” she called, momentarily struggling to stay up. “L- -Luna? Are you there? I- -I don’t know how to get back to the shore!” 
There was no response. There was no sound, really, aside from that of the water sloshing on top of itself. There was not even the sound of the breeze, because there was no real wind. 
Several minutes seemed to pass before a response of a kind occurred. For a moment and out of the corner of her eye, Dinky thought she saw the surface of the water distort. She turned toward it in time to see a ripple spreading outward before being quickly consumed by the small waves. 
Then there was another one, and another. This time, to her horror, Dinky saw what they were: the narrow, bony backbones of some kind of long, strange creatures breaking the surface just slightly as they moved through the water. Dinky had no idea what they were: the water was to murky for her to see anything other than the skeletal portions of their backs. 
More came, and then all at once seemed to vanish. Dinky felt something hard and bony touch her leg, and she screamed. She had no realized that it was not just water. There were things in it- -and they were bad thing. The only solution she knew was to head for the shore, but it was so far away. There was no way she could swim fast enough, and she did not believe that she had the endurance to return. 
That was when it came. Dinky did not so much see it as she was aware of its presence. The water seemed to darken, and it shifted, with the surface of the water suddenly swelling and threatening to inundate Dinky. She cried out and struggled to keep her head above water as it passed beneath her. 
It was not just large. It was vast, and incomprehensibly so. Larger than any sane creature of the sea, or even any ship. Dinky had no impression of its shape, but she knew that it must have been miles wide and miles deep, its body stretching downward in what she now realized was the profound and near-infinite depths of dark water.  
There was no way to know if it saw her, nor did it matter. Dinky doubted it could see, or doubted that it even had the capacity to perceive. There was no need for it to. It simply moved, and through that motion it was now threatening to consume Dinky, a tiny speck on a surface that it was probably not even aware of. 
For a moment, Dinky went below the water, choking on the slat and muck and flavor of metal. Several things seemed to press against her, and it took everything she had to surface again. That was when she saw the sky. It was no longer dark: instead, it was ablaze with a horrible red light, lit by two enormous crimson suns. Dinky screamed as she realized that while she stared up at them, they stared back into her and laughed as they waited for her to tire and for the water to pull her beneath one final time.