"Oi! Wake up you idiot." The sibilant hiss echoed around the shattered dystopic landscape of the world. Bits of crystal shimmering in every spectrum of the rainbow all glittering on and on and forming nonsense arrangements of lights and sounds.

There were a few diminished fifths playing in the back ground almost deliberately, like someone was faintly plucking a harp out of tune to play a back drop for the soul.

"Damn it. Wake up. You mortals are pathetic. Back in my day, my disciples could kill hundreds of star spawn and get out without a fucking scratch. But NOOO... You had to be useless."

The gem like forms slowly cracked and shattered into thick white pieces, like a massive primordial egg shell.

Like some odd angel, there I sat, looking at him with impassioned eyes. "I need to forget before I can go out there."

The spider facepalmed, or facelegged I guess, driving three legs across his face. "You freaking wimp."

I blinked. Well, it was more of a metaphysical concept. "There are things I don't need to know about the nature of everything."

"Great. Damn you. I was going to make you into a fucking ass kicking machine!" He floated towards me, indeed, lazily swimming through the thought streams.

"What are y-?" I asked before he smacked me.

"Go eat a soul you crybaby. You'll feel better."

The world faded around me, the shattered nigh unrelenting harsh angles of the crystal fractures venturing away from me amidst the streams of my mind. Slowly, but surely, the real world came back to me. Though... jarbled, and with hundreds of memories buzzing through my head like false flies frantically flailing to try and sip the moisture from my body a bounce at a time.

I cracked my eyes open and listened. My body was clean and calm for the first time in a long time. I felt relaxed. I distantly heard the voice of my group... of dare I call them friends? They were the closest thing I had had to them in years...

"So... any particular reason why you decided to have a change of heart about Ivan?" That was Boss. She sounded angry and confused at the same time.

"Do I need a reason besides wanting to stick with someone who could kill something like that?" I could just faintly hear the whiz of the gauges and the levers being pulled. "Did you see that explosion? That leveled all those fucking ships?"

They really needed to relax. Some people were trying to sleep. "Yeah. We got lucky. They gave us enough of the prize money to cover what we had damaged." I could imagine her pausing to shake her head. "Still, you strike me as the type to be driven by monetary concerns."

The voice of the griffon dropped down the point I could barely hear it. "Look. He saved my life. Odds are that if I stick around with him, he'll do it again. And again." There was a long pause. "And I'm not going to leave until I save him from something. It would be ungrateful if I didn't..."

I thought they had stopped talking, or moved out of range, and I relaxed further, almost sinking into the sweet embrace of the bed I was on. "Fine. Stay with us...." Boss sighed loudly from nearby.

The door opened and a cutting sunbeam of light passed through the dark room I was, gracing me with a better look at where I was. I was in my ship, which is what I had figured, but in a room that was far tidier than normal. Heck, I could see the fresh paint.

Boss stood in the light, blocking out from hitting me. "Hey Boss?" I asked, feeling more sane than I had in a long while.

She stopped and stared. "You... are awake?"

I nodded and tried to stretch.

She shook her head. "Don't." She paused. "So... how do you feel?"

To my eyes, she seemed to be dancing around something. "Pretty good..." And then I froze, a still image in my head of exactly why you could make diamonds from solid steel. Or rather, why you can't and why you can.

A long while later I snapped out of it to see Canary napping soundly by my bedside. The gentle rise and fall put me in slight ease.

"Canary." I spoke. It was odd. I could feel him like he was touching my leg, but he wasn't near enough for that.

He jerked to attention. "Ivan?"

"Where are we going?" I smiled lightly. I felt clean.

He merely shrugged. "I think we are going to town or something to try and recruit for the island." He looked at me. "Nice Equestrian."

I blinked blankly at him. "What?" A few faint memories of learning Equestrian via several different places in what I could only assume were various education systems filtered through my mind.

And then, all at once I say a different nose in front of my eyes. Well, several different noses. Beaks, muzzles and who knows what else. Magic...

I could feel the air around me slightly shudder and felt it gently caress everything around me. "Yeah. I was working on it while you guys weren't watching." I lied.

Knowledge. I had knowledge of who those people were before the shoggoth got them. They tickled my mind like swimming fish, each desperately trying to be separate from each other.

I must've blanked out for a minute while trying to literally gather the thoughts together. I was being shaken rather hard when I snapped out of it again.

"Ivan?" Canary asked, dropping me against the bed.

My head cracked against the post. "Ow." I muttered. In that large moment of intense pain I managed to snag a wandering memory.

----

The thrill of the hunt overpowered any qualms I had about hunting that day. The tingle of being stronger, of asserting dominance over those weaker made me glad I was a griffon. The wind swept over my wings and I had never felt so alive.

My prey, the stupid cow, had no idea I was behind her. A single fluid move with my talons cutting into her and she never knew I was there.

I calmly licked my sharp little knives free from the blood, making sure that none of it would stain.

The dull idiot beast's eyes were open and staring and I carefully shut them.

The cow was sweet and tender...

I was a griffon, strong in body and assured in mind.

----

"-en he just collapsed!" Canary squealed.

"Yeah? Tell it to someone who fucking cares. Now what did you do to him?" Catastrophe's voice echoed across the room.

I groaned awake, my head buzzing with everything. I opened my eyes to find that Catastrophe had a large bird, a duck, in her talons, its neck snapped and skewed to the side.

I felt a surge of being connected to her, like I suddenly understood what it was like to be a predator surrounded by prey that I couldn't kill.I could see how powerful she was...

I shook my head. "I'm awake. He didn't do anything." I struggled to tear my gaze off of the bird that lay in the huntress's claws.

Canary nodded frantically from beside me.

"Besides dropping me on the bed frame." I muttered. I shot him a dirty glare.

He responded in kind.

Catastrophe let out a sigh. "I'm going to eat this. Anybody want a bite or two?" She joked.

I nodded. "Can you cook it a little?"

Canary gaped openly at me. "Are you nuts? That's meat!"

I rose out of the bed and tried not to cry at the soreness that invaded me. I carefully kicked the covers off and smiled at Canary. "I've eaten worse." I walked over to the griffon's side and smiled lightly at her.

I felt free. The chains seemed to have lifted off of me. I didn't feel as scared as I used to.

The she-griffon laughed. "Are you sure?" She began walking out.

"Yeah, while you cook it you can tell me where we are going." Equestrian was actually pretty easy. Now that I had two languages to my disposal, Equestrian really was more like English.

----

The cooking system for the entire ship revolved around using the main fire spout at the center to indirectly heat up a few pans.

I made it up on the spot so I wouldn't eat anything too raw.

The texture of meat is fascinating to an equine. It's like... a sensation of wrongness combined with the smooth feeling of blood. The taste was heavily distorted through my taste buds, like throwing the concept of Rare meat into a blender for a long time.

I pushed on through it and focused on the one beside me. "So... where are we going?"

"Little place just shy of being in Equestria. They call it Mustang. Nice ponies. They don't mind a carnivore or two, and it really is probably our best bet to get some builders." She carefully snipped out a portion of the slightly burnt bird out for me.

I nodded like I cared. "Right." I took a bite out of the meat and tried to ignore the semi hysterical laughter coming from somewhere around the spidery portion of my head. "What is it like to fly?" I looked up and away from the ship.

My thoughts were swimming like bacteria under a microscope. A few of the scattered remnants of other minds screamed with memories of soaring through the graceful skies and catching prey; while still others showed of impressive aerial maneuvers.

"It's like... freedom. Pure freedom. When you are in the air, it's hard to care about what the fuck happens to the ground." She stretched her wings out. "I hear out in Equestria that some pegasi never leave the skies. They don't have to worry about hunting food."

Something about the way she said that made me suddenly burst into anger at the mention of Equestria. Where had Equestria been when I was a slave? That perfect land of paradise... Why? Why couldn't I have been there?

She began to slowly lick her claws free from the bird and I barely managed to not watch her.

I was jealous of her. The moon was high over head of us.

And there, on the deck of a rust covered air ship, next to a griffon who probably hated me, dreaming of the sky and trying to make sense of everything that had happened to me, I realized that I felt happy.

I was at peace with the world.

And Catastrophe smirked at me. "You know, equines can't hold their meat that well. Try to puke over the edge?"

I laughed, though I could already tell what she meant. Another thing I needed to fix with this body.

That night, after my stomach rebelled against me and I coughed up all I had eaten that day, I dreamed that I would one day learn what it was like to fly.

I dreamed of a home in Rej.