"Children!" I shouted, and that was when I realized I could breathe again. The pond water had evaporated, and I was treading through waves of tempestuous currents being broken up against a jagged cliff. "Nnnngh—Foals! What's wrong?! Why is the vision br-breaking?!"
I clenched my teeth as a burst of water shot me into the air. I landed hard and tumbled to a stop atop a bluff of polished marble.
"Nnngh... guh...!" I sat up, wincing. Through tearful vision, I saw a burning sky of melted stars. Comets and meteorites coalescedinto liquid fire, and the grand ocean that lapped up against it boiled with fury. Steam wafted in my direction, and it took shape like an immense promontory of gray rock. Eons ripped by in a second, and that shape morphed into the form of a gigantic equine shadow.
I stared up at it, gaping. I could feel the foals' trembling bodies through my bloodstream. Their echoing sobs rang all around me. Suddenly, the waters receded, and their bodies surfaced all around the plateau upon which I sat. The children were bowing, facing the herculean shadow with their sobs and shivers.
"Please... Please... Madame, forgive usssss!"
"Be merciful, Madame!"
"We're sorry to have angered you! We only wanted to help the eljunbyro..."
"Eljunbyro is a word," uttered a booming voice. I watched, breathless, as the looming shadow bore on midnight-blue eyes, glowing with otherworldly wrath. "I charged you with finding words, and the symbols thereof, not to befriend other seekers."
"B-But she is a component of the ring!" a colt stammered, pointing at me lofty figure. "She is half of the endurance that was reborn!"
"Reborn...?" The shadow mare tilted like a collapsing continent towards my body. With each breath of thunder, the world crumbled beneath and behind me. "How can a pony be reborn if she hasn't died, yet?"
"I don't know who or what you think you are!" I shouted, standing bravely up against the rising bedlam. "But you do not have the right to run these foals' minds into the ground!" I felt like a cricket sounding off into a wave of dynamite blasts, but I nevertheless shouted, "Do you hear me?! These children do not belong to a ring, a symbol, or even to you! Let them go!"
"My children fear me because they respect me..." The cloud's glowing eyes narrowed as twin forelimbs spread out from her like a pair of cyclones. "They know that the journey ahead of me is mine as well, and it is a righteous one. I have freed them from the shackles of war and hatred."
"You have given them prison and called it paradise!" I shouted. "I don't care how big the past is! You have no right to trample these small, innocent lives!"
"If you are indeed eljunbyro, then you should know that pain endures the most in this world," the figure said. Her two limbs billowed in my direction. "Let us see if you are righteous enough to live up to your so-called name..."
Then, with a flash of her eyes, she pierced my gaze. Her forelimbs opened up, and a million miles of war torn trenches soared at me. I flew through splinters, barbed wire, and the fragmented hulls of zeppelins. Unicorn stallions—some tattooed and others not—fought past me, flinging their weapons with animalistic grunts. Shell fragments went off beneath my belly and limbs. My gut opened up in a dozen places, and I tasted vomit while smelling the scent of my own breakfast spilling out of me.
I rolled over into a ditch beside two dismembered soldiers. Ash and shrapnel pelted the mud beneath a flickering sky. I heard another shell falling, whining with a high-pitched howl. Only after twenty of seconds of torment when the shell didn't land did I realize the howl was coming from me. I glanced down at my lower body and immediately wished that I didn't. I couldn't tell where the mud began and my bowels ended. I flung my helmet off and clutched for the shoulder of the nearest medic to me. A soldier's blank stare flew past my eyes, then rotated one hundred and eighty degrees as his decapitated head rolled down into the trench. Up above, a Ledomaritan zeppelin was on fire, being impounded by Xonan manapults. With splashes of death-hot blue, the hulking vehicle tilted to its side and drifted into the earth, sending waves of soil and mangled bodies flying sky high until they became one with the endless flak.
A numbness crept up my limbs, and it was almost more frightening than the stabbing pain. I tried crawling some place, but something beyond my guts was anchoring me to the world. I craned my head back, my pointed horn digging into the ground as I screamed and screamed on top of my screams. I wanted to go home. I wanted to wake up from this. I called for the only name I could comprehend, the name of my sister. I didn't even realize I had a sister. Between the flashes of pain that ricocheted through my undying eyes, I saw her loving face, and I imagined it caressing me, chasing the buzzing of flies and bullets away.
"Nnnngh—Nighty! Nighttttty! Guhhh—haaaaaaaaugh! Nightyyyy!"