Candle
By RealmOfMereShadows
“I rise from the deepest abyss. Bones crack from my own stiffness, legacy from Time, cunning and mischievously flowing down the stream down to the pit of death. The pain blinds the weak, and only I... survives the shadow that lurks within us all, as, unlike my faerie sister, I was gifted with the weakness of the mortal flesh so that, despite my immortal soul and spirit, I was bound to strive for darkness, and forbidden tales and knowledge of yore.”
The pain stabbed my flank like myriads of sharp needles, avid for my regal blood. Heart pounding forth in my chest, my head reeled and jerked from the dust laying between me and a floor I couldn’t see. Black and dreary like a weary midnight, the pitch-black night enshrouded my eyes, wrapping myself into a veil of darkness and creeping shadows.
Yet, I couldn’t give in to the night for it was far too soon.
My will gave me the strength to wrestle a tiny violet light from the maw of the night itself. A simple, fragile candle, lit and febrile on its small brass candlestick, melting and fainting, at my hooves waiting. And its light soon wouldn’t be. Indeed, time was dripping, and promptly the dark would spree.
Horn alit holding up the dying flame, I walked forth the black. Silence in my ears and a sour taste marring my tongue, my mane, usually flowing and fluttering over my shoulders, dropped straight over my face. No wind was there to push it away from my eyes…
Lifting a hoof, hoping some breeze would slither down my ears to give my back my sense, I moved aside a lock of midnight blue hair…. And for once I wished… No, I craved for that I didn’t.
Darkness is a wicked and rueful, yet merciful spouse… a rampart hiding us from what remains beyond its veil. Yet, would you still call it in such rewarding way if the lid itself was closing on you, dripping on your hide a darker than black goo reeking a carnivorous instinct that rose every one of your very hair on your skin? Darkness… a cage without bar that seizes your mind to lock your own self into a torture, either physical or mental, but a torture that will always leave you scarred for a lifetime… An immortal lifetime in my case. First, it gets to your hooves, shaky and unsteady. Second, it crawls up your limbs, like ants fighting up the blood within your veins, begging from all their might to swarm your sides. Third, it grasps your spine and lingers your back up to your neck. Fourth, it snatches the heat from your face, bleaching your features with a bubbling blurter of fear… And, only then, it clutches your heart into a deadening clench, an evil anchor keeping dragging you down forever the pit where fears lie… where demons dwell… and where you thought you had all of it locked up for never meeting them ever again. This is the abyss of your own true mind.
“Luna…” a scrawny and somehow antic voice called, drawling away in the darkness. “… where are you…”
Darkness wasn’t a wall. It was only a frail glass. A murky black window opening on the untold, the uncountable, and the untreatable. Eyelids closing up over my revolted eyes, I preferred focus myself over what I could still fathom; something different than far-fetched and crooking shadows swallowing the light, my small flame fluttering over its damp wick. A droplet of wax ran down its side and I watchfully spectated it fell it over the candlestick down to the black beneath my hoof.
“Time. Is… Ticking, Luna.” it laughed. “Count. Each. Drop.”
Darkness is a cage which, even cold like ice, shatters your soul, makes you want to tear up your barding, fur and skin to free yourself from this burning feeling in the hollow of your chest. This basic instinct to fly away from the pain and emptiness. This wish for a scorching light to bathe you. However, darkness is stronger, it has always been as light is only an epiphenomenon, such as life.
At this very moment, I was burning from beneath, wishing that I could scream as I couldn’t even squeal. I supplicated my hooves to run away, but it would mean blowing out the candle and be prey to what lurked beyond the veil. And I wished I could stop watching. Yet, when everything was black, how could sompony tell if he was sleeping or not? Closing his eyes or not?
I realised I was trapped with and by my own stupid little fears.
I told you… darkness was swindling. And playing it would always be, a game of smoke and mirror, a game of mind and deceit.
From the dark slowly descended a large unformed tongue of black. Lowering until it nearly touched my muzzle, it then steadied. Droplets of shadow hurtled down and bit my fur like acid. Even though my eyes weren’t enough to pierce the cloak of darkness, I saw it move from beneath, like a parasite worm weaving below the skin of the bed-ridden martyr. Paralyzed by my own terror, I let it swirl and slithered around me like a snake with jet-black scales.
Two turquoise glowing eyes and a wide shark-teeth smile fought its way up to the surface of this nether, and riveted on me. I dropped my stare and tried closing my eyes. I found to my stupor I couldn’t.
Skin itching, mane crawling, ears frizzling, I looked at it and fell into the jealous glare of my sister. Eyes missing, her mane was falling into clumps, while many of her teeth were losing up in her mouth, scarred with a rictus of masochistic pain.
“Your moon hurts me.”
I cried for help, but no sound reached my ears, my voice withering in my mouth as a tasteless sludge blubbered down my throat, choking me. It went into my lungs and stomach, and solidified into a crippling concrete. Hacking my hooves around, the candlestick fell out of my magic grasp and shattered on the ground into shards of brass. The candle spread its wax over an invisible floor and rolled in my direction.
I took it between my shaky hooves and tried to put it back on its broken support. Burning wax melted and glued over my fur. Tears rolled down my cheeks. And suddenly, the coldness stung my side.
Snuggling up my flanks, cuddling me with hooves colder than death, the wreckage the apparition was flowed over my hide like an overwhelming and tenebrous blanket… An overly attached girlfriend that had given in to insanity, craving to fulfil her own animal desire like a mare in heat, sucking me out of my warmth, hopes, and life. Her sharp teeth maw neared next to my nearest ear, nibbled it a little, leaving a few deep and bleeding marks…
From the depths of hell rose a numbing, almost violating whisper…
“I don’t want to die Luna, so you’ll have to.”
Closing my eyes to a knife blade-width, tears flowing more than ever, I looked down at the bottom of the broken candlestick as the candle’s flame snapped into a greyish smoke next to me. Yet, before the dark could gobble me up whole, silencing me forever, I saw a last time my own reflection, smiling…
And I wasn’t.