From the West They Came

by Not That Anon

VI – New Perspectives

I heard a snapping noise and the bat I saw was gone, banished from the room in the universe’s least normal log cabin. The chaotic abomination in front of me flowed more than turned, until I found myself once again staring into its unholy core. Its mouths opened, resuming the deafening assault on my senses.

“That’s surprising,” it whispered louder than a thunder “I expected to never see you again. Let’s find out the cause of this sudden intrusion.”

Without a warning, the creature’s thoughts barged into my mind, probing for the answers that weren’t there. I felt as if a spiked, slimy tentacle wormed its way into my brain and started mashing my memories and my sense of self into a paste. It couldn’t have taken more than a fraction of a second and yet by the time the monster was finished, I felt dirtier than after the two days that my squad had once spent in the Fillydelphian sewers, waiting for relief troops to liberate the city from Celestia’s army.

“I accept.” A commanding flash of Light shined from within the nearby luminescent power. The gentle glow that surrounded me promised that all will be well and all manner of things will be well.

I gathered the courage to look up at the Light. Just like the last time, the Truth burned into my eyes. Unlike the last time, however, I didn’t look away; instead I focused my thoughts on a single lost ship that tried to sail west. Our ship. Many of the runes glowed even brighter, the connections between them imprinted deep into my retinas. I hoped that the stack of pages that I prepared before taking a spoonful of Midnight’s potion would be sufficient to write them down.

“I will join you, too,” a third voice will say.

“You? I can’t believe my ears! All seventy seven hundreds of them,” the disgusting mass mumbled. “Bah, I can’t stand talking to you like this.” A bundle of tentacles and arms procured a thick dark blue cloak mottled with black spots and threw it over the empty chair. The cloak remained suspended in the air, draped over an indistinguishable silhouette. “How exciting! I can’t wait to see what physical form will you choose.”

“You have always lacked subtlety,” the Third-who-will-be-First will one day whisper, smiling with a shimmer of the stars above. “But it indeed will be our first meeting. To commemorate the occasion, I would like to propose a new rule.”

At that very moment, a surging wind picked up and blew me from the table. “That will be enough for now. I believe you will have a job to do and a ship to command,” I will hear, and disappear.

---

I opened my eyes, feeling strangely dizzy. The bright marks were more faded than I had hoped, but if I was lucky, perhaps I could still commit the key ones to paper. I grabbed the quill in my mouth and reached for one of the pages.

I thought that – after what I’ve just seen – a long time would pass until something surprised me again. When I saw that every page has already been filled, I just stood there, unable to come up with any sort of a response. The mouthwriting was firm and precise but unmistakably mine. I flipped a couple pages to confirm that every scrap of paper in the stack contained one carefully drawn sigil.

I shook my head. I didn’t know how many of the runes had been transcribed but even if I missed some, it was unlikely I’d be able to spot the differences before my sight returned to normal. Not to mention that my amnesiac self somehow used up all the ink in the inkwell. I got off the bed, threw my officer’s coat on me and–

Every inch of the walls was covered in runes.

Most of them were written in blood.

After that, I saw the other hints. The tip of the quill had the brownish color of dried blood. A similarly-tinted puddle could be seen on my bed, where my left front hoof used to rest. I raised it to assess the damage near the suspected cut but all I found was an inconspicuous scab on the inner side of the leg, just below the knee.

I stumbled twice before unlocking the door. I really needed some fresh air.

Outside of my cabin, Midnight was arguing with a group of distressed sailors. One of them brought a crowbar. Thankfully, their expressions softened when they saw me walking towards them. Midnight, on the other hoof, silently cursed and stepped between the group and me.

“See, I told you he just needed to rest. Ask Sawbones, those were his orders in the first place. Now go bother somepony else, there’s nothing more to see here.” As she was talking, a pair of dark glasses materialized in the thin air and slowly levitated until they rested on my eyes.

“That’s a relief,” the tallest member of the group said. “But we still would like to know what are we supposed to do today.“

“I’m sure you can figure it out yourself.” Midnight waved her hoof. “And if you can’t, come back tomorrow morning. Long Vigil will be busy for a while,” she added with a seductive smile and a sway of her tail.

I almost crumbled under the jealous glances of the stallions and some of the mares in the crowd but the bluff had worked; the group dissipated in moments without anypony asking any other questions. As soon as the last sailor left the corridor, Midnight practically shoved me back into my cabin with her magic. She let herself in and locked the door behind her. Sadly, her behavior from just a moment ago was nowhere to be seen.

“I can’t believe that you wanted to show up on the ship like that! If anypony else saw your eyes they’d –“ Midnight looked at the walls and raised an eyebrow “– never mind, I see you’ve been busy. Is that… blood?”

I had a lot of things I wanted to say so I chose to start with the most obvious one, “Good evening, Midnight.”

“What? Ah yes, good evening to you as well, Long Vigil.” She inhaled, closed her eyes and slowly exhaled. “You’re right, we won’t get anywhere by rushing things. Come closer,” she ordered more than asked, pulling her hat back to reveal her face.

Midnight’s telekinetic grasp took off my new glasses. She made a few steps forward, stopping so close that our snouts were almost touching, and stared deep into my eyes.

“Wonderful!” she whispered to herself.

I smiled and whispered back, “Yours are very pretty, too.”

Midnight jumped back and puffed up her chest. The act looked very natural. I doubt that anypony who didn’t spend their pre-war days as a stage director in a theater would notice the slight exaggeration in her moves that betrayed the facade.

“I’m talking about the history we’re uncovering here, look!” she said with a visible – although not entirely honest – irritation as she levitated a small mirror to me. The fading runes that I could see everywhere weren’t just my imagination. Not only were they visible from the outside, they made my eyes glow like candles.

“These are the same symbols as the ones painted on the walls,” she concluded.

“So how long was–“

“Twenty six hours,” Midnight didn't even look back, absorbed by the symbols lining up the ceiling. “It's a good thing you woke up when you did, I'm not sure how much longer could I keep those ponies from barging in and seeing –“ she stopped, turned around and gestured at the walls “– all of this.”

I rolled my eyes. “No, I didn't bleed out writing these. Thanks for asking, though.”

“You're alive, right? Means that the potion's healing properties worked.” Midnight shrugged. “Had you been suffering from a heavy blood loss, you wouldn't be making sarcastic remarks.”

I sat down and sighed. “Flawless logic, as always. Do you know what these runes could mean?”

“I'll work on it. It’s complicated,” she said.

“Complicated, huh.” I raised a brow. “Even though Sawbones almost figured it out on his own, and as far I know he wasn’t trained by the Princess.”

“His ‘almost’ nearly cost us our lives,” she snapped back.

“You see, even the language it's based on is sometimes ambiguous, as pre-unification unicorns had a loathsome affinity for poetry,” she added, “but this dialect takes it to another level. Every sentence gets its own, unique symbol. Understanding them requires finding the root rune, which is usually a well-known noun or a verb in unicornish, and then examining the surrounding patterns for other familiar chunks. Relations between individual words are marked by their orientation relative to one another and stroke direction. Sometimes, additional stylistic structures are added to balance the sentence. They can’t be directly translated into Ponish but omitting them is an error that, for example, causes an otherwise harmless invocation to rip your ship apart instead of calming the waves.”

“That’s all interesting but –“ I yawned “– I can already tell that none of these sigils could substitute a good night’s rest.”

“I’d advise against staying here for long,” Midnight warned me. ”It may not be safe.”

“In that case, I’ll have to spend the night in the mess hall.” I glanced at the bedding. My initial estimation has been true; the bloodstains made it look like somepony was murdered in their sleep. I couldn’t take it with me.

“Aren’t you forgetting about something, hmm?” She pointed at her face.

“What are they still glowing?”

Midnight nodded and said, “No weaker compared to when you left the room.”

“I’ll stay on the deck, then. The issue with the eyes should fix itself before anypony finds me there.”

“An officer sleeping in the rain like a drunkard. Just lovely. And what if you run into another group of sailors waiting for their orders? No, –” Her horn began glowing “– I have a better idea. Don’t move.”

Midnight put down her notes and closed her eyes. In a flash of a dark blue light, I saw reality being unmade before my eyes. The room, the ship, the sea – all of them gone without a trace. The concept of time lost its meaning as the seconds stretched into minutes and hours. Suddenly, an unknown force found me in the space between dimensions and pulled me forward. Once the magical grasp weakened, the world manifested itself again. I blinked in confusion. Somehow I could feel that the process took less than a second.

The spell turned my cabin into an unlikely laboratory. Rows of safely secured bottles and extracts were lining up the walls while books and magical contraptions took up the rest of the place. The level of detail elevated this illusion over most I’ve seen during the war.

Midnight staggered to a wall. “It’s not an illusion, and we’re not in your cabin anymore,” she added. “It’s an experimental spell that the Princess dreamed up. Teleportation. She saw a kelpie in a sailor’s dream perform it once and spent the rest of the month trying to recreate it.”

“So we’re–”

She nodded. “Make yourself at home. Ideally without touching anything, but you can take the couch. I'd love to stay to, hmm, chat,” she added with a playful grin, moving closer until the golden glow reflected in her own eyes, “but I need to make sure your scribbles aren't threatening the ship.”

Comments

[Starlight Nova]

11392008
Then what does that make astronauts?

[Starlight Nova]

Ancient pony legends say that the Royal Sisters came from the west.

Why not just ask them?