Time Lost
Ch. 11: Down the Rabbit Hole
Disclaimer: I do not own the right to MLP or any of its related characters.
The evening sun beat down on Big Mac’s back, heating his red fur and the wooden barrels he carried into the barn. The shade was a welcomed relief from the heat. The sound of high pitched chuckling was an unusual sound, but welcomed none the less.
The familiar hippogriff and an unknown grey unicorn were sitting on the rough bales of hay. Sheets of parchment lay hazardously around the pair. Luke wore a rather amused expression while the grey unicorn flustered loudly, “But we can look through to other dimensions! That would kill the competition!”
“Yeah,” the feathered colt said slowly, “I get it. I really do, but if the barrier becomes unstable it could either be used as a portal allowing some unholy abomination onto the Earth. Or the barrier was acting like a form of protection and sucks everything into that dimension or into oblivion.”
“Oh come one! What is the chance of that happening?!”
“Uh how many ways could the barrier fail?”
“42.”
A thin claw scratched the top of Luke’s head, “What are the chances it would succeed?”
“A little.”
Big Mac tossed the barrels to their proper place among their brethren. His ears swiveled at the hippogriff’s next question, “How little are we talking Entropy?”
“Like five-ish,” Entropy shrugged.
“5-ish percent?”
“Yeah.”
The pair looked awkwardly at each other. The red workhorse went about his work of organizing the work bench since Applejack was too good to put tools back in their proper place. There is a white outline for a reason! Luke finally spoke up, “We could do my idea on the properties of light both as a wave and a particle.”
“But that’s so boring,” the other colt wined falling backward in announce.
The hippogriff sighed, “It seems like we’re at an impasse dude. How do you want to solve it?”
A light bulb appeared over Entropy’s head. Big Mac would normally question this sort of thing, but he gave up making sense of things years ago. “We can play a game.”
Before the two boys could continue, the red pony’s deep voice said, “Try not to take too long suppers almost finished. And- uh – Entropy, what time do you need to be home by?”
Said pony turned his green and red eyes to Big Mac, “Right around dark. Why?”
“Suns starting to go down,” the large pony said with a wave of his hoof to the open door. “Do ya need me to walk ya home?”
Entropy shook his head in the negative. “Nah. I’ll just teleport. It’s far faster and more fun.”
The workhorse wanted to question how a colt could know that level of spell, but decided just to wait outside and make sure the little guy didn’t walk off without supervision so close to the Everfree Forest. He continued out into the yard and towards the well. Dryness from today’s chores was tickling his throat and a cold drink was in order. He could still here Luke and Entropy the farther he moved.
“Alright. What’s the game?”
“First, we’re both betting for the other’s idea.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be funner that way,” the grey colt announced.
“Funner isn’t a word,” The hippogriff’s flat tone conveyed his annoyance at the butchering of the English language.
“Screw you and your proper words! Second, we’ll be performing the oldest competition between two males to decide,” the unicorn’s voice rose higher.
Big Mac scratched the back of his head, picturing Luke doing the same thing. Said Luke asked, “And that would be?”
“Measuring!”
The red pony swore the crickets were even confused by their lack of sound. “I don’t get it,” Luke and Mac asked in unison.
“You know,” Entropy tried to think of the right words. “Two guys, they want to prove who the bigger male is. So they measure stuff.”
A soft smacking of a talon hand against his feathery head emitted from the open barn door. “The expression is measuring dicks. And No we are not doing that.”
“Males use to measure dicks! That just weird!”
“Yeah, so let’s do something else and never speak of this again,” Luke’s voice sounded firm on its position.
“Wanna flip a coin?”
“Sure.”
The older pony outside the barn wiped a red foreleg across his brown, “Thank Celestia… That was getting weird.”
“Dammit.”
“So it looks like we’re going my idea,” Entropy cheered, flashes of multicolored lights filtering from the barn.
“Sure are,” the hippogriff tried to no show his full disappointment. He knew deep down that this would fail so horrible. But he gave his word. And Luke Skywalker was a man of his word.
“Well I best be hitting the old dusty trail,” the grey colt said, stretching and poppy his tiny bones.
“Kay, catch yo-“
A blast of air and confetti flew from the barn door, the large workhorse decided to check up on the hippogriff. What he found was the grey feathers and blue fur covered from head to hoof in glittering confetti of every conceivable color. The amber eye was held tightly shut. Big Mac watched the pink tongue poke from out of the sharp beak. Thick splotches of wet glittered stuck to the appendage, ignoring the violent sputtering of Luke trying to dislodge them.
“Ya’ll alright?”
Loud spitting and garbled cursing where thrown at the red pony. His response was a low chuckle before dragging the young hippogriff into the bathroom to help get the glitter out of his ruffled feathers.
The results were mixed to say the least. Luke was now confetti free, but glistened under the dining room lights. “Wow, Luke,” Applebloom smiled towards the unfortunate colt. “You sure are sparklely.”
“Uh-hu.”
“You sure shine in the light.”
“Not funny Applebloom.”
“Are you a vampire? Like one of those in Applejack’s books,” Applebloom shot a smug look towards her older sister.
“Now when did ya’ll read mah Twilight books?” Applejack grounded her teeth.
As the two girls bickered, Luke looked towards Big Mac, “Please tell me Twilight isn’t a thing here and the vampires don’t sparkle in the sunlight?”
“Nope, it’s real.”
A cold wave of existential crisis crushed against the small feather and furred body. “When was this a thing?”
“Couple of years ago.”
“How did Twilight take it?”
The pony shrugged his large shoulders in response. If there was anything to take out of this discussion was that Luke was going to use this new knowledge to do the one thing he could think of. Twilight jokes!
The rest of the night’s festivities involved less horrifying topics and a large amount of denial from the two males in the house. But an early bedtime was in order, leaving the young hippogriff alone inside the large room. His single amber eye glistened with the pale light of the moon.
He waited, patiently in the cold light for the slow breathing of the farm’s other occupants. Something was nagging at the of Luke’s mind. Something deeper than a forgotten choir or random thought.
It felt cold. A single piece of ice was being held at the base of his brain, sitting on what would be considered the medulla oblongata. He pressed the palms of his hands against his forehead. It was there, sliding through the folds of his grey matter like and ethereal phantom of some bygone era.
Getting closer.
Dropping his talons, Luke scanned the room before him bathed in pure blue light. His single eye caught every detail; the crumpled paper littering his desk, the blue crystal wrapped in bronze wiring, a few batteries and the scribbled notes noting the properties. If he squinted his eye just right, he could just make out the tiny burnt holes in the room’s wall papers.
Closer.
A trickling of adrenaline pushed its way into the tiny heart. The sounds of rapid thunder bashed against his small ribcage, filling his limbs with tingling numbness. The Flight or Fight reflex as he recalled it. The muscles within the hippogriff’s lithe frame tightened in anticipation.
Closer.
Luke’s fingers tightened, feeling the quilt rolling in his grasp. The clawing darkness hiding behind the folds of his brain made its way closer to the center of the cerebellum, to the center of what he was. That cold darkness felt all too familiar.
Here.
Tight fingers wrapped around the back of the young colt’s thin neck. Without so much as a squawk, he was dragged through his quite, bedding and into darkness.
Shapes of indescribable nature pushed on the peripherals of Luke’s eye. They twisted and turned before his vision. They danced within their shadows. An unconscious nature to their dance felt all to alien to the world of reality.
Still, the hippogriff fell further and deeper into the indescribable flowing of sights and utter silence.
Then, hard concrete pressed against Luke’s prone body. His stomach and chest felt the unnaturally warm surface under him. Raising his head, the colt scanned the strange place.
“That just lame,” he lamented. Around him were a series of long piping running along the walls and above his head. Steam spilt from several loose intersections of metal pipes, giving the place an eerie feeling.
“You know, ripping off A Nightmare of Elms Street is really, really, lame,” the high pitched voice echoed around his feathery head.
A soft slurping splash hit the concrete flooring. Luke wiped around with lightning speed to find a bloody moldy grey pile of skin and blood. It oozed puss and coagulated blood causing the bile to rise in his puffy cheeks.
Another splat warned the young colt of another pile. The swollen, dead skin around a thumb leaked yellow puss around the all too small nail. More and more piece of rotting flesh fell from some unknown source high above his head
“Yeah, I’m not going to fall for that,” the colt muttered to himself, turning towards the opposite side. “You’ve got to be kidding me!” When he looked towards the only other option of travel, the same trail of sickly putrid flesh met his amber eye going in the exact opposite direction.
Looks like I’m stuck between a rock and pwned city, with a defeated sigh, Luke begrudgingly moved towards the left. Through a series of undulating, shifting metal pipelines of questionable origin he traveled. An air of foreboding grew with each passing step. Deeper into the folds of metal, iron and heavy air the colt pushed. The air grew thick, almost chocking his lungs. Sweat poured from his skin, the heat an inclination towards the gates of Hell itself.
A deep pit of fear pulsed in his stomach, far beyond any realm of reality. This was a deep cold that burned within his very being.
Taking a left, Luke stood before his absolution. A round circular room, its dark brick walls covered in layers of sickening slime of questionable nature. It smelt of copper, rotten flesh and the harsh acidic stench of broken down tissue. Twisting trails flowed towards the black drains, sliding across the porous ground.
What caught the single amber eye was the creature slumped against the only clean wall. From the deepest part of the hippogriff’s mind, he knew the warped visage of his human form. The right arm was held against the brick work. The red pulsing muscles and bone stretched to impossibility, adhering to the rough material through thousands of writing muscle fibers. Orbs of white with wide irises of all conceivable color glared at the outside world. From the torn twisted fibers, gasping with sharp broken white shards reflecting from their pitch black maws.
The human’s body was bent in several angles, an unsettling misshapen mess that was painful to the eyes. From the right pant leg, a slug of miss-mashed pieces slipped from the fabric. The poor light revealed the shattered pieces of white calcium held together by black viscous that lightly bubbled before the young colt’s eye. Behind the blood stain clothing writhed an uncountable shifting shapes, as if countless hands clawed desperately against the fabric in a desperate bid for freedom.
The face pulled Luke’s eye. The once circular dome was pulled to an obscene angle and length. The creature’s mouth was jagged, pulled up and across the left side of his face. Rows upon rows of shifting, broken, corroded teeth glistened from the gruesome pit of perdition. The one remaining eye held a mesmerizing light. Something of harsh hue the human mind could not fully comprehend. Behind that single eye was a type of bright substance that resembled some otherworldly intelligence.
Luke mouthed wordlessly. He looked into those lights of beyond life. I looked into those dead lights… and I saw something to horrifying to put into words. It was at the edge of eternity. A thing beyond time and space looking in on the small fragile mind with an intensity beyond human comprehension. My words dry within my, stilling my tongue from speech.
“What the fuck is that?”
Never mind.
The horrific thing shifted from his position, the warped lips twisted in the imitation of a smile. “We are many.”
Luke scanned the area to ensure there was nothing to jump out or grab him. “Okay. Is there anything else you abomination of everything unholy in the universe?”
“Now that just rude,” the mutated human said. His voice slithered across the air, piercing the holes the hippogriff called ears. “You don’t have to be an ass about this.”
The beak fell in incredulity, “You tried to kill me in my dreams and you’re telling me I don’t have to be an ass about it! F**K you!”
The humanoid reached out with his only free arm. The hand was twisted, black talons reaching out to render the helpless flesh. The child blinked in silence, watching the being struggle against his organic bonds. When it tired, the humanoid stared angrily at the smaller creature before him. The focus of his ire stared blankly at the amorphous human shape, “You done?”
The being snarled at the hippogriff, but he remained silent.
“What are you exactly?”
“We are many. We are the dead who cannot pass from our indescribable prison beyond life,” The being’s voice was harsh, broken words slipping from that so horrid a mouth. “You do not see Us. We, who live in the shadow of your life, We are your death.”
“What does that even mean?” The young child’s voice snapped. “It’s all bullshit and metaphors with you. Speak English!”
The impossibly designed creature before him tilted his head. The sound of bone grinding against bone played across his ears. “You don’t understand. But you will. In the end, your death will free us. That is why you have to die. You are the last. The only connection to that time before Chaos became sentient and Order sent her emissaries to this world.”
Luke wanted to yell something, but the cold hard speck drew in the darkness assaulting his mind. The vision before him deteriorated in a foggy mess of colors and harsh stench of death. The harsh laughter of the monstrous image of humanity followed the young child.
“Beware child! Beware the world of Order! You are not off it and they will make you an enemy! It is by blood and bone the truth exists! And they will fear you for it!”