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// The Abyss 
// Story: The Mind Enchanted 
// by the7Saviors 
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I've all but stopped counting the days I've spent locked within this white prison. 

These four walls have become my entire world, and I've begun to wonder if I actually prefer it that way. This place is familiar—even moreso than my own home in Canterlot. There's comfort in familiarity and when I think of the capital city of Equestria I no longer feel that kind of comfort. I've had quite a lot of time to think about a great many things, and I've come to one overarching conclusion, one bitter truth I've come to accept.

I'm lost.

I don't know myself at all and the world beyond these walls terrifies me. I first came to realize this after the recommencement of those torturous treatments. It had been my hope that Silver Lining would give up on that barbaric practice and find an alternative treatment, but alas, despite her repeated failures to produce favorable results she has persisted.

The reprieve I'd been granted before had been a tragically temporary respite. It was an abatement carried out while I underwent further examination and observation. Once she's gathered a satisfactory amount of data regarding any and all changes in my mental state, I'm once again forced into that room. I'm forced to once more sit upon that chair and scream my throat raw as pulsing waves of thaumic energy scorch and scatter my already tenuous grip on reality.

Eventually, something in my mind is shaken loose, and the memories begin to return but they're all wrong. The images are broken and disjointed and conflicting like multiple existences crammed into one mind. Ponies I've loved, places I've lived, lives I've touched, and those whose lives have touched me in turn. None of it matches who I am or rather who I thought I'd been, and yet all of these experiences are precious to me.

I don't want to let them go and yet they slip away from me, only to return more abstract and confusing than before. I can feel my very identity unraveling at the seams and yet the Doctor continues to throw that wretched switch. In her misguided attempts to make me whole again that mare has broken me utterly, and yet she has the audacity to tell me that it's all for my sake. That it's for my own good.

Realizing this, I can't help but let out a laugh—a bitter cackle full of madness and confusion and despair. I laugh and scream and laugh and scream, and the voice laughs with me. We laugh together as my restraints are put back into place and the orderlies drag me back to my white prison. We laugh well into the night and the tears continue to fall long after Celestia has brought about the next morning.

I'm left alone to try and pick up the pieces but try as I might to put the disparate puzzle of my mind back together, nothing seems to fit as it should. All of these images—all the sights and sounds and sensations—none of them match. There are too many memories and yet somehow not enough to paint a clear picture of who I'm supposed to be. The crime which I've committed is now just one query in a veritable sea of questions to be answered.

When Doctor Lining inevitably arrives for her examination and asks if I've recalled anything I'm at a loss for what to say. I want to scream, I want to laugh, to cry, to commit terrible acts of violence entirely unbecoming of a proper Equestrian citizen. I entertain the idea that such behavior was the cause of my detainment, but the thought is quickly discarded and lost amidst the endless tide of fleeting notions that cross my deteriorating mind.

I know that my crime isn't so simple as mere violence. I know that what I've done—what we've done—crosses a line that should have never even been approached to begin with... but curiosity is a wily thing. Curiosity can lead to discoveries both terrible and wonderful and oftentimes as a scientist, you might never know what type of answer you've stumbled across until it's too late.

For some, curiosity leads us along by the nose and we happily allow ourselves to be dragged into the unknown, heedless, and ignorant of our fate. We take risks, and sometimes those risks are rewarded. Sometimes the path we walk leads us into the light, and at the end—in the end—we're lauded as geniuses. Heroes and heroines whose names and deeds are etched into the annals of history. 

But sometimes that path pulls us into an abyss from which there is no escape. We lose ourselves and cast aside everything we stand for, and in doing so we're demonized as psychotic, demented, raving mad... dangerous. We're seen as nothing more than a menace to society that needs to be put down or locked away from the rest of the world. We're villains to be feared and hated by all, beings understood only by those who reside in that same dark abyss.  

It wasn't violence that sealed our fate, but curiosity. A question that we wanted—needed—an answer to. It started as an idea, a simple thought experiment, and it was meant to be nothing more than that. But we were curious. Far too curious. We were curious and we both had the means and the minds to sate that curiosity... and so we tried. What started as a simple thought experiment became something much more than we ever could have prepared for.

Doctor Silver Lining wants to know what we remember, but what we remember can't be described or explained in words. What we remember can't be defined or understood because it was never meant to be. What we remember is an experiment... a test that had gone horribly, horribly right. We succeeded where we believed most would have failed had they thought to attempt the same and we paid a steep price.

Now we're here, demonized by society, shunned and cast aside by the ones we love, deemed a madmare by the populace, and made so by the doctor who was supposed to restore our sanity. It seems so funny in hindsight. We were destined for greatness, for that aforementioned path of light, but a single thought—one errant idea—was enough to drag us down into the abyss.

In the end, all we can do is laugh at Doctor Lining's questions. We cackle and chuckle and snicker and guffaw like the madmares we are. Out of the corner of our eye, we see him there behind the doctor and her orderlies, our somber little purple friend. He stares back at us with sadness and pity in his eyes and that makes us laugh all the harder. Doctor Lining scowls a deep and consternated scowl but that only adds to our sick mirth.

And when the laughter finally dies down and our white prison is left in a strange, uncertain silence, we politely ask Doctor Lining if she has a mirror she can spare.