From the private logbook of Decadent Design, Captain HRH Aurora Dawn.
I cannot believe that I am awake, or that I ever was. That which I just saw, it was something of foolish fantasy, and yet it was also so real!
Great Uncle Frost Step died twenty moons before my birth. He was my inspiration as a foal, what modern ponies term a ‘role model’, and I studied his voyages with ceaseless fascination. Those log books and journals and newspaper clipping were all that I knew of the stallion, and I lamented the cruel reality that I should never encounter him muzzle-to-muzzle without first being taken by the cold grip of eternity. The closest I ever came to knowing what he looked like was a portrait made in his middling years, back when he was a sea captain about to explore the islands of the Celestial Sea. It was drawn by a member of his crew on paper already yellowed with age at the time, rough and colorless and poorly angled as the mare in question was still new to her craft, though I understand she became quite famous in her later years.
That is what I saw tonight. A paper cutout, somehow made three-dimensional and hideously proportioned, with unnaturally stretched legs and a muzzle so sharp it could cut diamonds. It awoke me from my slumber with the rustle of its stumbling gait, and I was so driven by shock that I failed to scream as I very much wished to!
The thing stood in the darkness at the foot of my bed, staring at me with intense unpleasantness. It appeared every bit as puzzled by my existence as I by its own. Yet the more I returned its heavy gaze, the more a perplexing familiarity tugged at my strained and struggling psyche. Its mane, black like coal, shifted as if some foal were constantly drawing, erasing, and redrawing the lines in a perpetual cycle of dissatisfaction with the final image. Its eyes, though devoid of any living light, pierced into my heart as surely as any cold, unfeeling blade. I gazed upon that three-dimensional caricature of a two-dimensional squiggle and felt, with ragged confidence, that I must be in the throes of a nightmare!
Still, the familiarity would not leave. At last, I made the inconceivable connection: this thing appeared in the same manner as the portrait of my long dead great uncle given life. I could only gasp in wonder and terror, trying to imagine what magic, be it wicked or blessed, might have pulled this figure of my foalhood fantasies and dreams to this, the world of the living.
And then
And then the sound came. It came to my ears with all the softness of a whisper, yet in my mind it crashed like a mighty gong. My head shook with the reverberations such that I feared it might shatter as glass! I folded my traumatized ears and attempted to cover them with my hooves, but the noise was no mere auditory sensation. No, it was being fed mercilessly into my brain, drilling in and scratching at my every nerve ending. It was only after several seconds of endurance and the gradual fading of it that I understood the racket was that selfsame ringing tone that had been coming from the crack in the Matti Ths Aioniotitas all along.
My skull was aflame with itching! I swear to Celestia herself that the very grey matter encased in the protective layers of my skull was being rearranged. Cut, tucked, tightened, loosened, squished, squashed, plucked, poked, pushed, packed, pressed, mangled, mushed! I tried to shriek, but again, no sound could leave my throat. Was it fear? Was it some diabolical form of mental domination imposed upon my mortal form? I had no way to be certain. I only knew, with a certain hideous confidence, that there was indeed no sound at all in my cabin. I was alone with this thing beyond equine minds, utterly at its mercy.
The colossal, mind-shattering gong stopped, and the instant it did I heard something else, something wholly unexpected:
“Who are you?”
Reality was absurdly silent, but the words existed all the same. They were damnably strange, heavy yet off, as if the speaker could not settle on a tone or volume and thus uttered every syllable in a different manner. So flabbergasted was I by this development, so stunned by the ongoing shock, that I barely realized the question had been asked.
Until it came again: “Who are you?”
I stared at the entity, unable to formulate an answer. The absurd paper reality stared back, my uncle yet so clearly not. I recall my own name gradually, painfully forming in my mind, as though a jagged hook had sunk into the folds and crevices of my soul and pulled it out from the depths.
“Decadent. Dawn.”
This thing could read through my mind like an open tome. I had so many questions, all muddled and pushed aside by a single voice in my head screaming at the blasphemy to go away, go and leave me in peace! Yet my silent cries went ignored, or perhaps unheard.
Though it took not a step closer, there came the traumatic impression that the paper phantom had moved closer, was looming such as to make me a mere shadow to its painful magnificence. I possessed the disturbing sensation that it was scrutinizing me, little more than a lab rat under a microscope, the researcher holding just out of view the fine, sparkling point of a dissecting blade. Instead of a cut, however, I felt a rushing, swelling sensation, as if my entire body might explode from some powerful internal pressure. I was being fed something, not in any physical sense, but in the realm of my sensations and subconsciousness.
It was an urge. A simple yet powerful desire that momentarily took up every fragile edge of my awareness:
“Go away.”
Two words. Two simple, pathetic, easy words. Yet it was not words that I felt crushing my existence. I cannot explain the gargantuaness of that instinct and animal need pushed so forcefully into my soul by an entity whose very existence defies comprehension. It caught me in an iron grip and squeezed so tight that I became overwhelmed, weeping and shuddering and paralyzed in my bed.
Now I sit here, writing in this journal and feeling with every fiber of my being that I must leave this place. The expedition, the Matti Ths Aioniotitas, the Frozen North, all of it! Yet what I feel now is a mere shadow of the horror that had so powerfully gripped my heart, and I begin to wonder if it was not all just some morbidly fantastical night terror brought on by the mystery and stress of this mission.
I am torn between duty and desire. Were the former not such an important element of my entire existence, I might already have surrendered to the latter and ordered the ship east, into the ever-clawing storm and away from this monstrous place. But I am a captain of Her Highness’s Royal Air Navy, and as much as it pains me I cannot allow mere emotions to dictate my actions. I will see this investigation through, and in a day’s time laugh at the absurdity of being so torn up by the phantom apparitions of a mere dream.
That being said, I think I will inquire to Rusty about those occultist safety measures. Call it succumbing to weakness, but for my own comfort I shall indulge.