When he shuts his eyes, the noise starts. They sound like whispers at first, but they become outright; a taunting cacophony.
He can make out glimpses of blood-red scales, claws, and wings.
They speak of deceit, murder, and shattered friendship.
Slotted Spoon jolts awake and grasps his lyre tightly.
He laughs a slight, nervous laugh. and asks for some time alone to compose his thoughts; asking the spiral of outward structure that he really just needs solitude in little notes of whimsy. He scares himself after about an hour of thinking and plucking at stray insecurities in his mind.
He plucks so hard at these strings that they break, and the tension goes slack. He doesn't know what to do.
Concordantly, it goes dark.
Slotted Spoon screams at the top of his lungs before the invisible others burst into gigantic winds of silent laughter.
Some bricks fall in the distance but make no sound. His scream is swallowed by a vacuum of ivy-filled space.
The Nightmarish beast seemingly displaces the booms and they rip through Slotted's ears with a great mute force.
It drains the color from his body and leeches into his mind, probe-lessly. His screams are replaced by maniacal laughs as he becomes a vessel for the beast in an instant.
While his life flashed in front of him, one moment, in particular, persists.
"It is uhhhh..... evident, that is because obviously this thing, I mean the thing is, I mean my point, which is that my lyre, that is the apparent ways I play, or uhhhh- express for various reasons that my lyre playing, being the way that is is for obvious-er oruh... for, various reasons that has uhm, eHH, EHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH-affected this beast! In that; Of course, judging by various and obvious reasons it uhhhhh- I uhm. Uh-huh."
"Uh-huh."
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
Uh-huh.
The gigantic beast explodes harmlessly and skits off into nothing.
The small pony lies there, still a terrible purple from the sanity challenging gaze of a beast from an unfamiliar realm.
The vibrations of the beast's cavernous sighs, sweeps through the heart of an ancient metropolis as it gently leans down to look briefly at the small pony.
Slotted Spoon panics and strums his lyre.
The brief gaze lasts but an hour, for relativity's sake, and shortly after undergoing a terror strange to gods. Slotted Spoon goes. "Uhhhhh-"
His echo is quelched by a lack of acoustic room.
The cosmic being turns, and as its ponderous length scrolls across Slotted's gaze, it continues its lonely vigil, each step taking years and each of its expressions played out over decades of solitude.
The lyre of Slotted Spoon lies silently on the ground naught but a few strings attached to the once magnificent instrument.
Uncountable miles away, the Gargantua laughs...and with a foreboding presence...falls.....into the depths.
"Uhhhhhhhh..." Slotted Spoon murmurs. It echoes out into the distance as he is sent into the throes of a primal flight instinct, but is forced to face shapes that this mumbling mad pony, couldn't literalize.
Slotted Spoon kneels on one worn-out knee.
An old and weary voice whispers to him, but he doesn't hear it.
"You cannot escape your destiny..."
Slotted Spoon says. "Uhhhh, destiny? I uh- that is, I think maybe with some error comes you, with me I mean, uhhhh-"
"No need to stutter, creature. Your song is in its ending. You struggle to find a word to tell the end. But foolishness comes with ease, young one."
The voice shatters into nothing and remnants of its presence float up into the abyssal stature of walls and unsightly mortar.
WHIP WHIP. The sounds of wind whizz past the keen ears of a young griffon.
A nearby companion griffin begins turning to dust, and her talons can feel the gusts below her starting to give way...
This world is ending. And amidst a cyclone of flame, she squawks defiantly as she witnesses her reality be quietly torn apart.
And yet, the wind whips.
She has to hurry.
Unseen immense windows rupture outwards as the sky becomes a cloud of poisonous fumes.
Millions of bricks fall to their predetermined destination at some unseen place where no light shines.
She's already gliding endlessly through the void. It's almost like there is no hope left at all.
A stray rose finds its way into her periphery, and she sighs vacantly, her eyes were trained on it's disintegrating petals.
This wasn't supposed to happen.
Drift off peacefully and let always, the iniquity consume you.
The red pegasus' eyes slowly open again. She is drifting at a cozy terminal velocity.
Her ears flutter at the touch of a falling twig.
She can feel the air get warmer and warmer, subsequently burning her unyielding wings.
Beautiful trees and scales blanket the ravine floor, precise results of a controlled magical explosion.
Some of the walls reach centuries of cubits in the air and trail into the skyline, a vast conformity of strange complexities and twisting caves.
While falling, she looks up and manically bleats. A great depth she's fallen this time. She's liable to take years to get back where she used to be.
But that doesn't matter now, she will get there ultimately, in the end. She might as well take her time. There is no hurry.
Her muscles relax and prepare for another long fall. A nap before the inevitable climb.
She cups her wings over her muzzle to protect against the fumes from the mounting inferno. And off she goes. Down down down, the landscape zips by and everything starts to obscure into a red hot blur.
Time moves so slowly when the world is moving past you, sometimes years go by without her noticing.
It's almost as if she were still, a fetal citizen in the center of an absurdist world.
"UUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHH"
The pegasus hears a distant echo and her ears prick up immediately. Her feathers rustle excitedly. She has never heard anything like it in her life but it passes briefly through her mind like a silent stranger in the night.
She plunges deeper and deeper down the chasm. The walls race by in a blur and before she knows it, she's already miles below her last recalled step on solid ground.
She hears more distant shrieks but pays them no mind. Spiraling ceaselessly downward into the heart of the abyssal gorge.
She has long since stopped noticing the fumes and the pegasus comfortably lays her wings across her back as she yawns, steadily falling.
Lazily, she extends her wings and they slow her descent only marginally.
Her tough hooves eventually clop against a distinct metal, but it is a low dull throbbing sound. The worn metal bears the glow of unimaginable heat and it molten-ly gives way as a solid snow does to a hoof. The chasm beneath is so vast, but she hops harmlessly off into it. Maybe, somewhere amidst the flames, a lost city, is surviving in an evolutionary display of dominance.
In this vast universe in her direct vicinity, she imagines an ancient and forgotten beast, breathing eternally into the heart of the mountain that she fell past a century prior, dreaming of a past forever gone.
Just like hers.
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She spies a small outcropping of grass growing on the vast earthen wall of the chasm and directs her steady fall toward its precarious position.
She butts up against the wall and feels it give in a slight way to her weight.
She is now standing stably on a small ledge of grass. The walls of the chasm race by in the prospectively ponderous distance, the opposite wall moving faster than she's ever seen before in her life. The fine dirt and dust that makes up the outcropping crumble slowly from her weight, creating a small cloud of fetid dust around her.
This feels nice.
An immense tower of earth rumbles with improbable decibels, hidden by a vacuum of cavernous expanse. The tunnel walls maintain their rigorous pace forever into infinity, only to end in the haze and cloud of her eyes' feeble capabilities.
Always Changing. Always New.
She naps and journeys on.
A mountain splits some great distance away, giving way to cracks of oblivion as the giant earth tower plunges forever upward, silently rumbling.
She closes her eyes. And then the figurative bridge to her reality buckles and snaps. The fetid chasm exhales a gust of magma that solidifies mid-air into a wailing mass of lost detritus, trapped as they are before they move onto their final reward, or into the endless void.
Their histrionic howls distant upon the wind.
Some creature, worlds away, has their pleas fall on Death's deaf ears.
Not even Death herself can decide who stays and who goes at this crucial point.
Feeling the very galaxy from which she slept, rumble ominously, she gently slips into dreamland, nuzzling her first glimpse of green grass in a century.
.................................blip