Twilight would have said she was used to the sight before her, one of endless blue, but that would be a lie. In reality, she had since the first day that she had stepped hoof on that ship she had always attempted to force out the truth from her mind. Such an unusual and out of place sight was one she presumed to never adjust to, to never honestly know the feeling of never stepping on solid ground.
Each day passed in a blur, in such a state that one could hardly call it life. Fatigue was a cruel beast that often blurred her line between reality and dream, as her body slowly degraded from the lack of sustenance and the little sleep. If she hadn’t found a way to grow a mediocre amount of nutrient-rich plants she would’ve died long ago, her magically slowed metabolism weakened her body much so. She hadn’t died, that was the only thing she was honestly sure of.
Sometimes she wished she had. She had until the soil grew rotten and lifeless to find another way. A way which might not exist, if she could be honest with herself. The prospect of eating fish had crossed her mind, yet she had an insufficient amount of time to do so.
Water would be an issue once her filtration system collapsed, it’s construction one of desperation and a stroke of luck. Her throat hurt, she hadn’t drunk in so long, for she only did when she must. These days, nothing much could break her haze of dissociation, her mind floating along an equally vast ocean of bleakness.
Apparently, Tartarus wasn’t a burning, hot hell. It was an endless expanse of blue, a mental cage that locked one more mentally than physically. That key had been tossed into the ocean long ago, and now she was forever stuck here, floating along listlessly.
Written across the walls of every deck on the ship was a simple word, scribbled in haphazard, scratchy lettering. Twilight. She couldn’t forget, she dared not find what would happen to her fragile grip on reality if she were to forget her own name, and so it was written, scratched desperately into every single wall.
She did her best not to remember what had been, friends and family. Such memories merely hurt to hold onto and caused her nothing but grief. Perhaps she would see them again, though she knew not if she could face them after the abominations she had committed. Her plants were reasonably recent….
That detested archaic urge to eat, a plaguing sickness she could not refute. Something errant that moment of weakness owned, and she caught herself gnawing bones.
The alicorn shivered, casting those wretched memories from her mind once more, ignoring the sound of crunching flesh and snapping of bones and muscle. Her stomach heaved, though she dare not puke lest she lose the small amount of energy in her system.
Windy was the temperament of the sea this day, it’s growling gurgle blowing over the deck and into her ears. The depths of the ocean had been moved, pushing the surface in molecular motions. Twilight kept her grip on the helm taut, letting it no move an inch to starboard or port.
As the swelling waves died down, replaced by the gentle movement of the sea below, she finally relinquished her tight grip on the wheel, letting it turn slightly in the light breeze. Snapping a crank just to the left of the oak, she stepped away from the helm, content with the locked state of the rudder.
The sea was calm, and so was she.
Steeping away, she gazed over the stern, admiring the white slush the rudder carved into the waves. All the horizon was encompassed by blue, murky and still. Such a sight had first been haunting; now she merely knew nothing else. The sea had become her, and her it.
Horn glowing sharply for the briefest of moments, a quick sheen enveloped the bottom hull of the ship, an applied layer of anti-fouling appearing across the dull colored steel. Gasping in brief pain, she cut off the flow of energy, her coating costing a substantial amount of her damaged horn’s limiting output.
She glanced down towards the frothy foam from the frantic swath below, eyeing the swirling water.
Her gaze lingered below, her own reflection easy visible, a haunting image that appeared far more evident than it should have been. The face that stared back at her was hardly recognizable, the image that of a sunken pair of fierce violet eyes, dulled by the faded lavender fur and matted indigo bangs, messy and unkempt with faint traces of dried blood.
The horn poking from between that set of dirty, unwashed hair showed it’s age. Bits of alicorn was chipped away, scar tissue pulsing beneath the hard surface of the fixture. Maybe in another life, the appearance may have shocked her into action, but that life was in the past.
She could feel the grime writhe beneath her crusty fur, a sensation almost like that of ants, crawling, chewing on her shriveled and unkempt flesh. The mare broke her stare swiftly, finding the image unbearable, instead of resigning herself to the leviathan ahead, that endless, dark sea.
Fog stuck to the horizon like a tick, sucking away the holy sunlight and shrouding the ocean in a permanent haze that clung to the far reaches of the sea, clumps of gloomy grey clouds pushing further down upon the plain.
It had become hard to imagine how this used to look, when land still reigned over her sight, a dynamic landscape of greens and browns, now taken over by this endless, flat carpet of azure. The world was blue, all of it blue. Everything, just the sea.
She was alone, the lone sailor of this world, an empty ocean, far too large for just her lonesome, yet she knew it was how it would remain. All hope of this nightmare being only that had been shot clean long, long ago. No dream, no ordeal would ever last this long.
The alicorn knew not how long it had honestly been; the world before had faded into nothing but a lurid collective dream, one she had come to accept she would never wake from. Days had blended into months, months into years. It had been so long. She could hardly remember their faces anymore.
Friends and family were that of a distant dream, nothing but this endless, wretched sea remained. Her companion silence, her ally solitude, her soul shared in isolation. Memories of the time before floated by her scarred mind every so often, pushing in an old smell or an image in crystal clear focus. Such colorful pictures were almost too vibrant to handle, causing headaches the likes of which she hadn’t begun to imagine.
Nothing remained but the creaking of wood, the crashing of waves, and the occasional storm of water, filling up the globe even more. It had come from the sky, filling her world with water and chaos, Twilight had not known how.
Stepping away lightly, she trudged along the deck, tail limply trailing against the wood, it’s texture matted and dirty with grime and dried red. The luxury of a shower had been given up long before now, she hardly even thought about such things anymore.
Thirst clawed at her throat, a dry cough escaping her throat. Dispelling the sudden dizziness, she clambered down the deck, throwing open a hatch and stumbling down the stairs. The chamber below was dark, lit only by the dim light from outside.
The wood creaked below her hooves, her limited weight not harming the thick, dense planks as she walked, trudged into a separate room at the stern. Her quarters, a place seldom visited, not even to sleep. She didn’t want to remain in that haunted room; darkness dwelled there.
Inside the room was an uncharacteristic lack of tidiness, large scraps of goatskin, faded and blank stretched across the table, various instruments sitting atop it, dust collected upon both. How useless a map was when everything looked the same. Twilight was tempted to laugh at the bitter irony of that, yet she did not.
Her sense of humor had long since left. Only survival remained now, a trance that encompassed every waking moment and vanished only briefly in her uneasy slumber. Twilight’s gaze meandered out the window as she plunked herself into the torn fabric of her chair, spinning it around to face the outside.
Everything was extraordinarily still today, the plain of blue unmoving and the sky above blank as a white sheet. Nothing moved, nothing lived. Wind barely caught her sails, even at full mast, the vessel hardly moved.
Had she been in greater straits of awareness, she would have noticed a peculiar movement below the waves, just under the hull of her ship. It was the most gentle of rocking, her chair tipping only slightly to the right.
However, she had retreated into her mind minutes before, the alicorn’s gaze drawn blankly across the horizon, the sun a permanent fixture in the sky. Oh how she longed to see her namesake once more, this sun was unholy.
Darkness never fell, the sun a fixture in the sky where it had been once the world ended. Luck was her only companion, everyone and everything else being swept away in the maelstrom, one she could not wholly recall.
From the trench, a call echoed out, bounding up through the waves and into her ears, a note of condemnation, anger, of rage. The alicorn shivered, not with terror, but with fury.
It was here, the blasphemous, foul wretch that had sunk the world in waves. From the sky, the rains had come, beckoned by the monster in white, the horror from within the darkest trench, the most profound dwelling on the planet.
The Whale.
Without warning, Twilight grinned, smiling at the monster, silent and deep. That time she felt it, the ghost of the deep, that whale. Once again, it sunk below the ship, turning it ever so slightly. Twilight did not move, only smiling toothily at the blue. It had come, yet she did not quake in fear, nor did she tremble in anger.
Intense vibrations resounded from down below, drowning the gentle cresting of waves in an immense storm of unearthly, baritone gurgling growls. Twilight felt the boat shift, pushed from down under by the mighty beast. One may be led to believe it would flip her ship, to condemn her to the cavern of doom inside this mighty sea, yet that would be foolish.
Twilight had come to know that if she had been thought dead, it would have ended long ago, yet now the only cause for existence was this battle, this force of wills between the two. One of the land, one of the ocean.
The boat tipped, yet did not capsize. How was this her prison, the life she had been left in? It did not want her death; it wanted her suffering, her soul. White as the palest ivory, spotted with the blackest of onyx, the whale remained, haunting her waking dreams with formidable anger. For what else could exist to fulfill such a vile purpose as vengeance?
Rage had overtaken this world of peace, drowning it in a tidal wave of twisted darkness, roiling from the sky and passing land and sea alive. Waters of chaos, such an ocean that could not be comprehended by mere beings of flesh. It existed below the sea. Below the sun.
Her lifeless eyes were forever fixed outwards, hatred immortal, at that grinning, ghostly whale. No matter how many times her soul had been drowned, drenched in the emotions of the whale, the body had remained, her fragile grip on sanity proving rather hard to break. Vengeance gave her strength, the ability to outlast the demon’s malice, the power to shake free of madness. Her body may have weakened, pushed to unnatural degrees of living, but her arcane presence had grown, powered by brief periods of insanity, only to swell back from the brink.
Once again did it crash against the hull, quaking the steel and wooden superstructure above, yet despite this, Twilight gave it nary a flinch, only further staring outwards, further down the horizon. Shaking the walls with it’s rumbling, baritone call, the whale sunk underneath the hull, without another sound.
Replacing the unearthly noises was the faint clacking of dusty metal vibrating against the thick wooden walls. The vessel swayed harder than just the mere waves would cause, stilling as the whale vanished.
The rolling depths of the ocean swallowed it once more, the phantom fading down, into the sea. Twilight turned her gaze from the sun, feeling it vanish, the call of the beast rumbling the wooden hull of the vessel, shaking her soul forever.
It fell, the great shepherd of waves, mixed with a million shades of shadow and white, restless and massive. Alicorn and Whale, nothing else.
Deeper, deeper, the Ghost of the Sea. Deep.
…………………………………………….
This ship is cursed, and so was she. Her back was stuck to the deck, her eyes listlessly staring up into the expanse of dirty grey and green. The sun above glowed in an unholy way, rays of light filtering through the clouds above, glaring down upon the still alicorn.
Twilight didn’t blink, she didn’t breathe. All that could be done was stare. Stare at the sun.
Hunger clawed at her chest, ripping along her stomach with a vengeance. Twilight grunted but did not budge. A ruthless unscrupulousness ravaged her mind, sending sticky red paint along her fur, staining her jawline and muzzle.
Images fluttered through the haze, sending minuscule tremors under her fur and skin, heart hammering away beneath a battered and bruised rib-cage. Hooves marked with age and famine clawed at the unforgiving deck, not finding purchase as she drifted along.
Underneath the unbreakable catatonia, the waves sloshed against the side of her vessel, gently meandering upon the ocean, sails were drawn tight and pulled. Eyes so vast yet so unmistakably vacant and lost, drifted away from the glow, finding purchase against the pale skin of a book.
What a simple thing, that of a book. Ink and paper, so unassuming yet masking turmoil and anguish that would break a mind, a being far more complicated than mere paper and pen.
Dusty and old, it laid on the faded deck, the dark brown oak a sharp contrast to the bright red of the book’s cover. Not a hint of its blood-red hue had wasted away with time, remaining as ever presently bright as the day it had come to rest on her desk.
Twilight did not reach for it, her eyes remaining fixed to the transparent cover, sharp as a tack, yet blank as a sheet. Sweat drew a line down her fur, the perspiring liquid seeping into her skin, an itch arising, one she refused to scratch, instead focusing on that cursed cover.
Silence reigned, yet her compulsion to flip through those blighted pages continually grew within, an uncontrollable curiosity that harkened back to the mare she had been. Hooves quivered against splintered boards.
Twilight was suddenly acutely aware of the fluttering of sails, the sloshing of waves, the dull shriek of the gales. Gulping hard, she pushed herself upright with shaking arms, lip quivering and eyes glistening. Unsteadily she gripped the book with her ragged hooves, not trusting her magic with the accursed tome.
Whimpering lowly, the broken alicorn carefully and tentatively undid the primitive metal latch holding the text shut, the clacking of weak metal pounding against her eardrums unnaturally. Breath coming in short bursts, Twilight weakly flipped to the first page.
Initially, her eyes merely gazed upon the full black letting, mind not grasping the elaborate inscriptions after the eternity it had been since she had seen such. Eyes flickering absent mindedly, every sensation became incredibly enhanced.
Suddenly the deck pricked against every hair that touched it, stinging like fire ants and burning her flesh. Wind buckled against the masts, shaking splinters loose, the fragments crashing into the space around her. Twinges of agony laced through her hearing, the overwhelming brine collapsing her ears. She hardly acknowledged the pain, eyes glued to the words on the page.
“I never expected to be a sailor.” Lost in this liquid desert, she remained, unyielding to death.
Twilight’s concentration broke forcefully, shattered like windows in a great storm, fragments slamming into the earth with the tremor of a cannon. The mare collapsed backward, breath heaving in her chest as she fought back haunting memories, demons she had long since buried down in that book, that wretched, vile book.
The mare shivered, eyes crawling shut as her heart hammered away in her chest. Twilight was tempted to cry, yet no tears fell. Cringing powerfully, she attempted to shut out the agonizing recollections, to stem the tide of emotion rising within her, however, she could not control this river, it's rage untapped and unquenchable.
Erupting from within her like a geyser, the memories burst forth across her vision, sending the alicorn reeling over, spine spanning taut and wings fanning out. Twilight screamed her throat hoarse, body seizing up and spasming in a fit of agonized motion, bumbling, mumbling torrents of words spiraling out of her mouth in an unintelligible frenzy.
"Twilight, where are we?" The voice was scratchy, uncharacteristic fear in its boyishly feminine tone. It was washed away in a jumble of voices and chaotic cries. Waves slammed against the hull, pushing her off balance, yet she made no indication of this. “I don’t want this, do you?!” The voice nearly cried, sobs escaping it weakly, before fading out. It was harsher, more desperate than the first question.
Twilight choked on a breath, voice squealing quietly, horrid sensations racing across virtually every muscle of her battered body. The alicorn grit her teeth, violently gnashing them together as she rubbed her hooves against her skull.
Voices, distinct, from the first cried, yet did not answer. The first voice merely sobbed, the sound of scampering wood echoing across the sea. The sounds of swell gradually succumbed, falling to the unsightly sobs and pleads of this haunting vision.
Magic clapped against her ship, acting on its own as it’s owner panicked and writhed along the deck, screaming out hoarsely with all the might her throat could muster. The wind took leave of the sails, spinning the ship around and back, pushing against every swell in the sea.
Crying weakly, she curled into the fetal position. The voice screamed in her head, guttural and terrified, before being violently cut off. Her stomach heaved, muscles spasming in revulsion.
The book slid, clipping against her fur. She screamed, guttural and maddening. A spark of magic escaped the tip of the alicorn’s horn, slamming the book shut, the voices ceasing along with it. Twilight breathed hard, falling down and shaking.
The sun stared back once more, this time through a haze of clouds, painting the world a dark and murky combination of grey and mud. Twilight’s hooves had gouged marks into the deck, deep. Her hooves ached, however, her ears and brain throbbed so much worse.
Just in the very back of her mind, she could feel it. Awakened like a starving beast, eager to devour whatever lay nearby. Twilight listened, the sounds of ocean overwhelming her as they had once done.
Dense, bone-like protrusions flashed in her vision, colored in splashes of red and gray. A flash of steel, lanced through the vision and into her head, spearing the train of thought and sending the alicorn sprawling, lifeless, listlessly staring ahead.
Famine surged, madness quaked. Muscles buckled, bodies shake.
Hunger ravaged. Hungry, oh, so hungry….