It felt like one of those dreams where you become aware that you were dreaming and you feel like you've woken up. You get to make choices, talk, do things but realize you can't move and you have no control, and realize that you've woken up in a nightmare. You find yourself somewhere where you don't belong. And you recognize it's not where you want to be.
I remembered a stallion, but forgot his name. He played my body like a cello, when I didn't even know I had strings that could sound so melodiously. The soft bed. The primal sounds. The scent of cinnamon, split through a magical prism into a spectrum no unicorn could comprehend...
I reached with my hooves to catch what fled, but I couldn't move them.
I couldn't move!
As in the worst of dreams, the best of delights changed—
Memory fragmented—the images, the what-had-been-perfect—left a sense of a wonder exchanged for a reality of things forever forgotten.
Calm snuck in like a thief in the night, to anesthetize me, even as palpable wrongness congealed. I fought. I fought being controlled. I fought being drugged because... that's what it felt like... and I always fought.
In a snap of horrifying clarity, my world turned dim monochromatic emerald green. I blinked into the dim glow, at clear globules that lazily floated past.
Bubbles?
I became cognizant that my head pounded. My weight rested suspended on my rear legs and hips, pulling tendons and muscles. Blood rushed downward, throbbing, pulsing in my ears. My sinuses congested. Worse, something snaked up my nose. In my mouth, I noticed something equally horrible, square, corrugated, and hard. With my tongue, I rubbed and pressed furiously but it wouldn't move. My throat spasmed. Worry rushed in. Don't gag.
Don't.
Please don't.
I was supposed to be asleep. Anesthetized, I gathered.
I manifestly was not.
If I lost the fight, I'd surely inhale—
Did the tube go into my lungs? Stomach?
Both?
I could only squirm as I realized other openings had merited invasion.
I bit down. The tube crinkled like shrimp shells despite its rubberiness. I pressed down with my front teeth. My jaws ached, but I couldn't bite through.
I breathed; thick and viscous; not air!
No, not drowning. Not drowning. Not drowning... Not drowning...!
...Nightmare.
Of course it was.
Why did my subconscious whip me like this? Did I believe that I was so undeserving that I needed to torment myself? I'd found happiness, arguably friendship—undeniable pleasure.
I'd learned this about myself—that I could find these things.
My magic(!)—forgotten, suddenly remembered: I pressed against a tremendous mental weight—
Not realizing—
No splendors of magic!
Blue and purple phosphenes blinded me. Pain thrust blue-white jags through my eyes like hot needles, and a migraine bloomed. I'd lost my connection to the magic pulse. All my splendors, drained away.
Not. Possible.
You can break out of a nightmare, right? Right? When you realize it is one. Right? This was one.
Right?
What else could it be?
...
I felt like I'd never be happy again.
...
"Let me go!" I screamed, a scream that sounded only in my mind. My voice did not work in the green nightmare. Vocal cords didn't work when drowned in liquid.
The green, fragments of what I'd lost, the lack of control—it pressed in, crushing me.
Because.
Deep inside.
Certainty grew that...
I'd experience this horror until the moment I died.