Spirals. All she could see were spirals of a staircase that stretched endlessly upward before her. She could see no end, nor could she see the beginning anymore. The climb was timeless, meaningless. Yet, it was all she had to do. To give up was not an option.
The eerie silence unsettled her, and about every little noise she heard caused her to freeze in terror of the unknown. The only thing she heard with any frequency was that of her hooves hitting the stone stairs. As she distractedly put one hoof in front of the other, she would look at the black cloud below, try to read the scriptures on the wall (written in Greek, the language she didn't understand, if the familiar three-headed dog was to be believed), or recollect about her friends, animals, and Equestria.
Suddenly, the floor before her flattened into a bluff amazingly similar she had been on before.
Upon finding nothing dangerous, she lied down, quietly humming a song her parents sang to her when she was a filly. For the first time in what seemed like forever, she wasn’t afraid of what was around her, just for this brief moment in time. Perhaps it was induced by some mania which had crept into her brain, but she didn’t want to worry about that just now. She slipped away from conscious thoughts and worries and right into a dream.
Fluttershy dreamed of Equestria, the world she left behind. The thoughts of home she’d had earlier came back to her, the faces of her friends smiling and talking to her. She saw Applejack sneaking an apple into the food bowl of a squirrel she was nursing back to health. She saw Angel tapping his paw impatiently while she prepared his favorite salad. She saw Twilight absorbed in her thoughts reading a book, Fluttershy waiting patiently for her friend to look up and notice her existence.
Twilight did look up. Her eyes were full of evil and dripping with blood, as if she had been through a horrible internal torture and was about to pop. She looked directly at Fluttershy, then her gaze shifted back to her book. Fluttershy noticed a symbol on her forehead where her horn should be, seemingly burnt in like a ranchers brand, the same that she had seen several times before in the place she currently was, of a five-pointed star goat head in the middle, and a book with the exact same symbol, only bigger and with a bloody goat head in the center.
Her dream then became twisted and torturous. She and her friends were being hunted like elk. She saw all of their heads on plaques with the symbols around them, similar to the one she saw in her friend's book. To the side lay an empty one. She heard the sinister *snick* of a blade falling toward her outstretched neck. Just as she felt it flay the skin open, she woke up.
She started to cry, her mane soaking wet from sweat and her fragile mind being mentally scarred by something too horrid to bear.
She hadn’t even noticed the cat that creeped up behind her.
The cat grazed her, “Why do you cry, pony?”
“I-I” Fluttershy had managed to studder, “H-how do you live in a world like this?”
“I don’t,” the cat stated matter-of-factly. “When you stay down here long enough, you don’t live... you survive. The reason those hellhounds were chasing me is because I’m a cat. The creatures in this world don’t live; all of them survive running only on their primal instincts. All of the animals who live in this terrible place have some kind of stupid grudge with each other: The dragons, the hell hounds, the serpents, the bats, and the cat.”
Fluttershy’s curiosity had peaked at the cat’s last statement, “The cat? Are you the only one of your kind down here?”
“Yes. Yes, I am. My family was killed by those same hell hounds that you saw earlier, and the dragons killed the rest of my kind that panicked and ran separate ways. I was only a cub at the time, and ever since, the hell hounds have hunted me, haunting me every waking second.”
There was silence for several minutes. She had a feeling that any words of commiseration would only harm what small amount of friendliness was in this beast. Eventually, though, she decided to voice a nagging question she had. “What is under that thick smoke cloud down there?”
That is the last place you ever want to be. It has demons and monsters much worse than what manage to make it here on the cliffs. The creatures that live in one territory can’t go into the other territories. There’s the ones that belong in the bottom, and the ones who belong in the top. The three-headed dragons can go in both, including the Overlord.” He waited for Fluttershy’s questioning glance, then explained, “He’s a giant black dragon that cannot die, at least, I think he can't die, I've never dared to get close enough to be able to study him. Anything else can’t pass through the barrier between territories without burning.”
The silence stretched another few long moments. She decided to venture the first burning question in her mind: “Where are we?”
The cat chuckled—at least, she guessed it was a chuckle. It sounded like a mix between a cough and a purr. “We’re in Hell, little pony.” At her shocked frown, he continued, “It’s not as bad as the surface-worlders make it out to be. You are alive and not screaming in agony, are you not? I have heard many stories of the land above, but none of them seem as welcome to me as knowing what I truly am. You’ll learn that... if you survive long enough to. “What’s your name?” Fluttershy had asked, a bit embarrassed that she didn’t know his name yet.
“My name is Αβδθκαρ, or in your tongue, Abdukar.”
““Where does that kind of name come from?” she asked curiously.
Abdukar chuckled again. “Where from? It’s a Greek name, carried down by my ancestors. From my father, to his father, and to his father, and so on.”
Then, both of them became acutely aware of the sound of flapping wings.
“Fluttershy tightened as she heard a dragon behind the both of them. Turning around, Fluttershy could see the horribly terrifying dragon hovering in front of the both of them. It was a gargantuan dragon with black scales and jagged spikes protruding from it’s wings and back. It had purple eyes and purple highlights on random points of it’s body.
“Pony...” Abdukar frantically whispered.
“Y-yes?”
Terror struck into Fluttershy's heart as Abdukar frantically muttered. “Run. Now.”
“RUN!”
Directly following this pronouncement, the dragon opened its jaws and blasted a purple fire towards them, melting the stone ground that they had just vacated, the two new friends feeling their tails wilt and crinkle from the the wave of heat that wafted over the both of them.
The two swiftly sought to escape the ravaging fire chasing them from behind. They ran into one of the tunnels in the wall, the foreign characters scrawled on the hard rock reading, “Αυτός που εισάγετε εδώ πρέπει να λαμβάνονται από τη θάλασσα των νυχτερίδων.”
The princess of the sun was sitting in the library, sipping on a cup of tea as a golden aura shined around it. When the princess had gotten word of how bad Twilight had been getting in her depression, she dropped everything so she could help her most faithful student.
“Spike?”
Spike had nearly jumped from hearing the princess's voice from the silence while he was dusting bookshelves. “Yes, princess?”
“May I have a word with Twilight?”
“Oh, of course. Let me go get her.” Spike had quickly whisked up the stairs to Twilight’s bedroom door where he gently knocked on it. “Twilight? The princess is here, please come out.”
Twilight said nothing, she just opened the door and groggily made her way down the stairs, with a yellow feather pinned into her mane.
“Hello Twilight,” the princess of the sun said cheerfully, quickly turning into the smile she usually adorns.
“H-hi,” she said abruptly.
The princess’s smile immediately turned into a frown when she heard just how much life had left her excitable student: Twilight’s voice sounded scratchy and quiet; her mane was messy instead of handled with care; she didn’t even seem happy to see the mentor she looked up to more than any other pony in Equestria. Celestia knew then that Twilight needed help... before she did the same thing Fluttershy had done.
“Please, take a seat, Twilight.”
Twilight plumped down, “What did you need, princess?”
The princess tried to put a tender tone in her voice, “I just wanted to talk to you, Spike told me how you’ve been having problems coping with Fluttershy.”
Twilight’s back arched at her friend’s name. She stared soullessly at Spike, then shifted off her chair to the stairs.
“Twilight, please, I just want to help you get better,”
“I don’t need help. I’m just fine. Please, leave me alone.” Twilight stood up abruptly, seeking the comfort of her room once more.
She gave no haphazard goodbye, no words of parting to speak of. There was only a tension so thick that even Spike noticed and kept his mouth shut. As she ascended the stairs, the yellow feather fell from her mane, even Celestia herself shedding a tear.