Fluttershy wandered aimlessly through the twisting darkness of the Everfree Forest. She couldn’t remember the last time that she ate, but her mind and body were too numb with confusion for her to take notice. The trees moved with the shadows and the sky was swallowed up in a spiraling veil of darkness and branches. It had been growing increasingly difficult to differentiate between dream and reality and the places where the two mingled and merged with one another. The voices that called her to this place had grown ever more present and they had been telling her more and more, going deeper and deeper. All around her stretched an infinite number of hallways of oak. Occasionally something alive would move in the distance, but would soon be swallowed up by the forest. Something told her that they didn’t want anything to interrupt the glimpses that she could catch through the gaps in their hallways. Through the gaps in the trees she would see images and forms; hear whispers. Each hallway had thousands if she cared to look through them all, and the more that she saw, the clearer they became and the more sense that they made. They were an infinite number of puzzle pieces to a vast and unsolvable puzzle, but they were ordered and from her days of wandering she had come to a certain amount of understanding. The trees were never showing her purely facts, but possibilities. It made sense that they would show her more than just one possible future, but they also showed her more than one past; more than one set of events leading to where she now was. There were a few specific shards of the story that always stayed the same, but everything around and in-between those points frayed into uncertainty. She could not comprehend what this meant, but something told her she was scathing upon knowledge greater than any pony before her could have hoped to obtain; some cosmic truth; something divine that she was never meant to come into contact with. It was bigger than her; bigger than the trees; bigger than the war and the chaos around her. And she hungered for it.
A day or two passed in this fashion; Fluttershy wandering and secrets unraveling. Once she saw her own death in the hallways; disoriented and starving; desperate and depraved. In fact she didn’t just see it, but felt it. She was the memory of herself from a different time, but found herself back before her death with foreknowledge that changed the course of events. Or so it seemed to her, but the workings of the world had long since become difficult to decipher. Whatever the nature of the experience, it prompted her to find food and water before continuing her trek through the infinite eternities.
Several more days passed. She didn’t need to stop for sleep since the world of her reality and the one of her dreams had become one and the same thing. Or maybe she was always half asleep and half-conscious in a sort of trance. There was no real way for her to tell. Whatever the case, her visions were growing more lucid. No longer were the forms vague and immaculate. No longer were the voices just whispers either. Sometimes she heard voices she recognized, sometimes not, and sometimes the voices were… odd; voices she recognized in life but had been changed either by the past or the future. Pieces slowly slid into place and the scope of possibilities began to take shape. Often it was like an hourglass where events on either side of her spread out and became less specific the farther out that they were, but no matter where she looked, there was always a couple of subtle focal points woven through time; two threads. At first they appeared to be one and the same since they mostly existed in the same places, but it soon became clear that one of the threads diverged in several places. One of the most noticeable ones was just before the chaos broke out in Ponyville. The first thread behaved as it was supposed to and events happened the way she remembered, but in the second, those events just never occurred and life went on like nothing had happened. It didn’t make sense, but it was true. She decided to follow the second thread through the forest of hallways to find out why. It wasn’t an easy task, considering how confusing the visions were already, but she managed to track its subtle nuances through its own path. Most of its events were just as she had known the world to be, but some things were ominously different. Several times the second thread and the first would cross each-other and follow the same path, but they never stayed together for too long.
What seemed like several more days passed. She couldn’t tell time anymore, but such things had little meaning in this place. Things started to become clearer, but make even less sense at the same time. With every answer she received from the trees, she also received a larger question to be answered. What she did understand though, was that the second thread was not the world she had come from. The first thread was the thread that she remembered, and she decided for a time was what she should understand as true, but the more she wandered, the less that seemed like it was right. Something just didn’t sit right with her. If the truth were so simple, why would the trees have shown her all of this instead of just the thread that was true? If the world of her memories was all that was true, then why was there more than one thread? As much as she didn’t want to answer these questions, something compelled her to continue her search. What she found sickened her. The thread that she knew from her memories wasn’t the first thread. The places where it was inconsistent with the first thread weren’t just places where the two differed, but places where her thread fell off of the other’s position. The second thread was neatly placed right in the center of the hourglass. Her thread, on the other hand, split of at key points and coiled around the other.
What did that mean? Was her reality imperfect? Was any of it even supposed to exist in the first place? Was she even real? Would the thread continue to warp and unravel itself among the infinite number of other possibilities? Was that what this whole thing was; an hourglass to contain possibilities that diverged from the true reality? Did anything truly exist at all? These among an uncountable number of other questions swam around her head, but none of them had answers. She started to feel like she was being watched and evaluated. She felt eyes everywhere and nowhere. What was this? Why was she being shown it? A new question occurred to her. What if this is just a big test? What if something just wants to know how she will react to this knowledge. Maybe she was just put here to be watched. These thoughts passed through her head all at once and she threw up the meager contents of her stomach. What if she was never real to begin with? What if her memories of this false world never existed at all? What if they were just fabricated before she was put here? What if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if, what if. The world was so surreal. How could she know anything for sure anymore? It was then that her memories started to become one with the world she glimpsed around her. She couldn’t let anything she thought that she knew influence her. Something was watching her. She had to run, run far away. She ran through the hallways, down corridors, away from the shadows only to be greeted with more of them. Panicked, she made the mistake of looking through the trees for possible pursuers. Instead she saw visions of the past, present and future, but they weren’t just that anymore. It was real. It was just like when she had died. She was no longer just seeing the glimpses, but living them. Only this time she was in a cellar far away from the forest. Somewhere that something terrible took place. It wasn’t Pinkamena’s basement though, the colors were all different. There was far too much color; fabric. The color was fabric. Not normal fabric made of cloth, though, the fabric was made of skin. Just as this horrific realization was dawning on her, it was drawn to her attention that she wasn’t alive anymore. She was part of the fabric; part of the flesh knitted together. The place vanished and was replaced with a steel room covered in bloodstains. This time though, she wasn’t herself at all. Rather she was a child; one who was bleeding to death on the floor. She could see another child in the corner. This one was a boy who was disemboweled and far faster fading from life than she. She didn’t know who he was, in fact she had no memories of her life at all, but she knew that he was important to her; the most important thing in the world. She reached out and began to crawl toward the boy with the crazy notion that she could somehow stop him from dying. Part of her knew this to be an impossible task, but she had never experienced anything like this before. Even though she could not remember her life, she knew that it was nothing like this. It was innocent and serene. She couldn’t comprehend that the child, no, that the boy that she loved could so easily die. She had to save him, but slowly her vision faded and she was somewhere else. No she wasn’t just somewhere else, she was sompony else. This time she was a young colorful pony in a blank white room. She had been here so long, so very, very long. The walls were an entire universe to her. Then she was somepony else once again; an Alicorn on the moon. She was a male, and a very old one at that. She couldn’t quite get the details right in her head, but she knew she was waiting for her son and that she had been waiting for an unbearably long time. One day she knew that he would come to her, but this wasn’t right. Something was terrible, horribly wrong. He wasn’t really her son. She didn't have a son. She was never really on the moon, in fact the person who she was never really existed in the first place. But who was she then? Where was she? She couldn’t see.
It felt like so long that she was lost in the forest; in the memories that weren’t her memories. The world kept changing and she kept changing until she was convinced that she was nopony at all. She felt a tug though. The branches could speak and they told her where to go. With no other direction to take, she followed them. For what seemed like an eternity she followed them until they led her to a place she remembered. The memories were hers again and she accepted them back, but with them came fear. She was no longer lost, but her period of being lost in her thread had left a terrible mar among the memories in the places she had never looked. All around her were ways she could have died; a gruesome fall; a violent suicide; a slow painful crawl down an empty dirt path to nowhere. In all of them madness had taken her, and it was returning. She couldn’t deal with the reality that was not reality. Just when she began to slip though, the branches reached out and shielded her eyes from the secrets that lay beyond. The world was closed and the wood would not let her see. For the first time in forever she could see her own hooves in front of her again and be certain that they were hers. She stumbled forward aimlessly, worn out from the weeks of wandering. The trees directed her as she walked and eventually she came across a small clearing with a moss covered stone in its center. Crawling onto it, she slept back in her secluded sanctuary for the first time in so very long. She dreamt of hallways.