Sonar blinked thoughtlessly at the figure on the stairs. “You must be so very confused. I suppose that I have a fair amount of confusion as well…” He just stared at the pony speaking to him… Misty? He felt like he knew her.
“My name is Sonar Moonshadow. I… hold on, sorry,” He lowered his head into his hooves, another wave of nausea washing over him as his newly seeing eyes adjusted to his surroundings. “I think I’m here for… you?”
Misty gave a knowing smile to Sonar, walking over to the table in the cottage and taking a seat. “I know you’re here for me. I’m very impressed that you were able to get here. Not a single pony during my time in this realm has successfully completed the Interstellar Rift.”
Interstellar. Rift.
Everything came back into his mind at full speed – the cave, finding the Nebulith Etherbloom, the feeling of his horn heating up more than it ever had before, and most importantly, Fire Bolt. Sonar lept to his hooves, instantly regretting it as a painful headrush made him close his eyes momentarily. “You have to help us! There’s- I have to-”
“I know,” Misty Seeker cut him off solemnly, using her magic to lift a cup of tea to her lips that wasn’t on the table before. “Before you fret, I can assure you that your friends are taking very good care of your body.”
“My BODY?” Sonar’s jaw dropped, a sense of dread forcing its way into the pit of his stomach, and Misty just laughed, wide-eyed. How could she possibly be laughing?
“My apologies! You’re alive, I should have explained.” At that, Sonar relaxed a bit, but not much. “You are not physically… here with me. Your mind has been released from your body and has been guided to me by your own magic. Usually, we call that death, right?” Sonar Moonshadow nodded after a moment, slowly remembering what his studies had taught him about the spell. “Well, your mind does leave your body when you die, but it is not your magic that guides you elsewhere. It takes a very powerful unicorn to guide his own being into a plane beyond his own, let alone complete a spell that keeps his body breathing on the other side.”
He felt like she was trying to stroke his ego, and he awkwardly looked around the cottage. “Nopony ever has done this before? I find that incredibly hard to believe.”
“Ah, I did not say nopony. I’ve only been here for… oh, I don’t know…” She reached her hoof up to the empty wall beside her, a calendar materializing under it as she flipped through the pages. The characters and numbers on them, however, were complete nonsense and unreadable. “I believe your world’s time stopped right at the… one hundred and twenty years mark? I really just got here.”
Sonar felt like his brain had melted inside of his skull. An awareness of his existence being simply metaphysical caused him to realize that he did not feel. He sensed the carpet under his hooves and could understand that there was air in his lungs as he breathed, but… he couldn’t find the words to describe his own being.
“Were there others when you got here? And what exactly is here?” He spoke up after a moment, taking a seat on the carpet. When he blinked, however, a second chair had appeared next to the table, so he relocated.
Misty shook her head. “It’s just me. I am unsure, though, when I first got here it seemed as if I wasn’t the first. This is going to be a long, long story, okay? Do you want some tea?”
Sonar Moonshadow nodded, and when he blinked again, there was a warm cup of Jasmine tea between his hooves on the table – his favorite.
Jelly Splash and Sapphire Swirl were speechless. At one moment, they were all under a state of terror as they watched their friends being consumed by a powerful magic, and in the next, the two of them were seemingly alone in a calm, quiet darkness.
The unicorn illuminated her horn once again, only to find that Fire Bolt and Sonar Moonshadow were no longer laying at the base of the Nebulith Etherbloom. After casting a simple brightening spell, the cave lit up just enough for the two of them to locate the ponies.
On the far end of the cave, they found the pegasus and the unicorn, hooves outstretched as if they were attempting to comfort each other from within their slumber.
“Are they breathing?” Jelly Splash asked nervously before yawning with a tremble, and Sap took a few steps closer to examine the rising and falling of their chests.
“Yeah, I think they’re fine. What do we do now, though?” Sapphire Swirl sat down next to Fire Bolt, running a hoof through her mane and checking for any bumps or bruises on her face. A gnarly scrape had scabbed over on her chin, almost invisible against the crimson of her fur. “Oh, Boltie. I hope you’re okay in there.” Sap whispered almost silently.
“I truly have… no idea. No clue at all. I’m sorry,” Jelly Splash replied, guilt evident in her voice.
“Not your fault,” Sapphire shook their head. “Not at all. Are you tired? I can keep watch if you want to get some rest.”
Jelly couldn’t help but yawn again at the suggestion, extremely sleep-deprived to the point of nausea. “If you don’t mind,” She was already stretching out onto the damp moss of the floor, just a few feet from the other unconscious ponies. “Wake me up if anything changes… um, or if you get scared.”
Sapphire Swirl found that to be very sweet of her, and smiled in response. It wasn’t long before the sound of Jelly’s breathing went from quick and paced to slow and relaxed, and Sap wondered how exhausted the unicorn had to be in order to actually fall asleep during this crisis.
Sap’s lighthearted nature made keeping watch over everypony an easy task; they killed time by flying around the cave, examining the greenery that hung from the ceiling (also taking the isolation as an opportunity to curiously taste the plants, which they quickly regretted), and trying to jump from rock to rock with further distance in between each one.
Another bout of menacing laughter echoed through the cave once more, but this time, Sapphire was not as petrified as they were earlier and almost found it to be entertaining. When they looked over to check on the ponies, however, they found Jelly Splash to be fully awake and sat up, eyes wide. “That one wasn’t a spell. Somebody’s here.”
“It was a potion,” Misty explained; Sonar Moonshadow was entirely captivated by her storytelling to this point. “I was never great at potions, but I stupidly used my own mane when it called for organic material. I don’t know why I did that, I guess I thought that it needed a part of me to be able to find my parents.”
“Wait, you used your own mane in a potion you found in the ancient texts?” Sonar gawked, shutting his mouth as he realized the rudeness of the statement. “I’m sorry. I just… I would be too scared!”
Misty Seeker smiled. “Ah, but you would’ve done it right. It was my own fault for messing it all up… Anyways, the minute I mixed it together, something weird happened. I… I can’t remember what it was,” She seemed to be lost in a memory despite her inability to conjure one. “I don’t know how he got out.”
“...He?” Sonar Moonshadow probed after a few moments of expectant silence, and Misty grimaced.
“Well, that’s where the real story begins. There’s something that takes the form of a pony and tricks real ones into… horrible things,” She frequently paused and thought about her words as she spoke. “He tricked me. He tricked everypony. Weirdly, the one thing that did come with me from your world is the book of potions I found him in.”
The book she spoke of levitated with the work of her magic, landing squarely on the table between the two. She flipped the pages open, landing on a tattered recipe for disaster, literally. Sonar squinted to read the book, but like the calendar, it was entirely scrambled nonsense. “I don’t get it. How did you… do this?”
“Oh, how foolish of me! I don’t know why I thought a pony who’s never seen his own two hooves could read this. I’ll read it to you.” Misty giggled to herself as if that made any more sense.
“Wait! First, can you explain this a little bit?” Sonar interjected.
“I can try.”
“Why can I see? What is up with all of this?” He asked eagerly, using his newfound ability to hold intense eye contact with Misty.
“You are just your mind, remember?” He nodded. “We do not conform to the basic aspects of reality here. There is no reality here. Your unconscious mind has created a body for you to reside in, to comprehend your surroundings. If it is your deepest unconscious desire to see, well, then…” Misty Seeker put her hooves in the air as if this was common sense. “You see.”
“I wish my unconscious mind remembered to include how to read. This is just plain silly,” Sonar huffed, and Misty burst out into a fit of laughter.
“Well, of course, with some discipline, you can do just about anything you want, really. I’m not even technically a unicorn,” As if to prove her point, a plate of carrots materialized on the table between them, and she started to crunch on one of them as Sonar slowly started to notice the strange color patterning on her horn. “With fair limits, of course. Now listen up, I’m going to read to you until you conjure the ability to read yourself.”
His earliest recorded sighting being on the moon documented by Her Highness Princess Luna, Τζεστερβονεσ is believed to exist far beyond ponykind’s understanding of time and space. This creature, abbreviated in Princess Luna’s notes as ‘Bones,’ is observed to possess the ability to warp reality as he sees fit, presumably for entertainment. No other motives have been found nor researched. The relevant notes taken by Her Highness are as follows.
Excerpt 1, dated four years after Banishment
“...and just when I find comfort in the isolation of who I have become, I cannot help but feel that there is somepony watching over me. It is in [Princess Celestia’s] nature to foster the lost, and I am confident that despite the circumstances of our separation, she has not forgotten me. However, this gaze does not feel like the eyes of my beloved sister.”
Excerpt 2, dated two months after Excerpt 1
“There is a malevolent force here. I am inclined to believe that I am sensing the darkness of [Nightmare Moon], but I continue my fight to keep her at bay. This frequency that I keep encountering does not match that of the evil within my own true self [...] though perhaps, I am simply desperate to separate myself from the ugliness inside of me.”
Excerpt 3, dated nine years after Banishment
“I saw [REDACTED] just a few moments ago, with my own two eyes. I truly must be losing my mind in this cold. She was brutalized when I was just a young filly, and returning to the trauma seems to aid my shattering mental capacity. If this is my experience after just a few years, I do not know that I will survive almost one thousand more. [...] There it was, there she was! I promise on my heart, no matter how blackened, that the trotting hooves and tail of [REDACTED] just disappeared behind some of the rocky terrains. I shall investigate.”
Excerpt 4, dated one hundred and thirty-seven years after Banishment - Note: Several pages between 3 and 4 have not been recovered.
“The illusion of the broken bodies of [Equestrians] do not bother me anymore. Each time I find somewhere else to philosophize and write, there are a dozen more by the time I wake from my rest. I have known that they are not physically tangible for several years now, and I feel that desensitization is my only way to cope [...] I cannot fathom why my brain has chosen to show me such horrors in an attempt to rationalize my surroundings, however, I must find solace in the understanding that the true Equestrians are safe and sound under Celestia’s rule.
Sometimes, their poor crumpled frames will reanimate for just a moment to blink at me, or to bare their sharp fangs. If I prove that I do indeed understand the consequences of my path of destruction, will my mind finally be satisfied?”
Excerpt 5, dated four days after excerpt 4
“This is wrong, it is sickening. The stench of death is a new addition to my condition. My magic is futile, although it has indeed weakened significantly since my arrival. Another recent development is the sound of laughter [...] it sounds strikingly similar to the laughter of [Nightmare Moon]. Must I be tortured for over eight centuries more? I understand, I’m sorry, I will never return to the darkness.”
End of record.
“That’s… it? How do we even know that Princess Luna wasn’t just going bananas up there?” Sonar resisted feeling disappointed.
“Going… bananas?” Misty tilted her head.
“You know, losing her mind. Going crazy. Hitting the looney bin, you name it. Is there any actual proof of this, um…” Sonar’s magic flipped the book to face him instead, and while he was delighted to learn that the English language was registering in his brain as his eyes received the input, there was no way for him to even attempt to verbalize ‘Τζεστερβονεσ.’ “Hey, I can read! Cool!”
“What? Read one of the entries to me,” Misty’s jaw dropped in disbelief, and when he successfully recited the second excerpt of Luna’s journal, she shut her mouth and opened it again like a gasping fish. “How did you… I was not able to alter the conditions of my being until several decades into my time here! Sonar Moonshadow, you are far more powerful than you believe you are,” She almost seemed nervous now, apprehensive to get on the bad side of a unicorn who had only just arrived in her home realm. “I suppose you shall keep reading, then, to find the answers for yourself. More tea?”
He didn’t think he’d drank more than half of the cup of Jasmine, but he was nonetheless not surprised when he looked down to find that the teacup had disappeared.