I didn't have the heart to tell Twilight that I was kind of hoping she was right. I wouldn't have minded some company on this insane journey through time. Rather than dwell on that thought, I started to do what Celestia instructed and closed my eyes as I tried to focus on maintaining my self-awareness. I have no way to describe what that actually entailed, or even knew if I was doing it right, but the ritual commenced regardless.

I could tell because I heard Luna start to incant, and the words coming out of her mouth made me all kinds of uncomfortable. I didn't know how I knew, but I knew those words weren't English or Ponish. Maybe it was because there was this weird musical lilt to her voice as she spoke or maybe it was because I'd been expecting it, but, unlike when I was listening to Moon Dancer's story, I was fully aware that this was that same eldritch speak.

Then came the familiar hum of magic being cast—yet another musical sound that quickly ramped up in volume and turned into an eerie aethereal howl that drowned out Luna's arcane words. The sound grew louder and louder and it took every bit of self-control I had to concentrate on my sense of self and not open my eyes and look at what was going on. Somewhere in all the noise, I thought I could hear Twilight screaming something, but before I could really register what it was, there was a strange tugging sensation in my everything.

It happened once.

Then twice more.

And then I was quite literally and violently yanked into a kaleidoscopic nightmare of thoughts, memories, and experiences that were very much not my own. For a long, terrifying moment that seemed to stretch on for eons, Salvatore completely ceased to exist. There was no Salvatore. There was only a screaming alicorn, and then a horrifyingly familiar abomination of flesh and shadow, and then some pony cultist, and then a griffon geezer, and then—

Salvatore!

SALVATORE!!!

And then... Twilight?

And then, just like that, everything snapped back into place.

I was still caught in a nightmarish cosmic spiral of shifting existences, but now I was... detached from it all somehow. In actuality, it didn't feel all that different from when Twilight delved way too deep into my memories that one time. And speaking of Twilight...

That was her, right? That voice...?

I tried to speak—to call out to Twilight, or anyone, really—but I couldn't find the words. I had no voice with which to call out. I tried to move some part of my body, but that, too, was missing. I was pretty sure what I was seeing wasn't due to my own eyesight either. Everything was just.. one big roiling mass of thoughts, experiences, and emotions, and I was just along for the ride, unable to stop or even partially control any of what I was going through.

After trying to make sense of my current state of existence for what felt like a good minute or so, I eventually gave up. I was aware of the fact that I was aware, and that would have to be enough for now. I had the vague sense I was moving in a certain direction, so I focused on that. The moment I did, everything around me seemed to smooth out in a way I couldn't really describe. The swirling chaos of abstract sensations grew more... coherent? Stable? I don't know. It just felt like there was a clear path forward, just like Celestia had alluded to.

Now that the surrounding madness had been reduced to a dull roar I could focus on what was actually happening around me. I stretched my new abstract senses out, seemingly without even thinking about it, and what I felt and saw would've left me speechless even if I could talk. I could see it all—the entirety of this Equestria's timeline laid out before me like some kind of temporal map of events. Granted, it was a map that constantly shifted from one event to another, but I could still see it all.

Holyshitholyshitholyfuck... What the actual fuck am I looking at right now?!

If I still had a heart it would've been beating out of my chest right at that moment. I was detached from the madness of my surroundings, yet the shock was still visceral and overwhelming. I somehow understood how to navigate this... whatever the hell this place was, to the point that I could hop from one existence to another to live out some rando's entire life in a mere instant if I wanted to.

And yet, I couldn't make heads or tails of how I knew what I knew or even how to explain it. What's more, holding on to any one existence was impossible. The memories came and went like fleeting dreams lost within the subconscious mind. The idea of and attempts at remembering so many lives was so daunting anyway that I just stopped trying after the first few millennia. I was so overwhelmed that another thousand years or so passed me by before I realized that I was pretty much omniscient.

I was every single sentient and sapient creature that ever lived on this rock and yet I was also a distant observer watching from afar as history continued to reverse course all the way back to the beginning. I could see it all, but I couldn't control any of it. All I could do was watch, and watch I did. The experience should've been way too much for my simple human brain to handle—and in a way, it almost was—but my brain wasn't entirely human anymore.

I was freaking out, but not so much that I'd lost all reason. In fact, as more and more ages passed in mere moments, I started to get used to the sights and sensations of flying backward through this Equestria's time stream. As I gradually calmed down, I tried to reach out to Twilight again but got no response. If I focused all my attention inward, though, I could feel her presence somewhere nearby. I could almost feel her watching me, like her eyes were burning a hole through the back of my head.

It was a strange and uncomfortable feeling, but not unwelcome. The fact that Twilight was with me in spirit if not in body did wonders to ease most of the tension. There was still trepidation, but it started to take a backseat to the twisted mix of numb shock and utter fascination I felt as I continuously tried and failed to process the ludicrous situation I was in. I couldn't help but think back to when I was just a lowly customer service rep in a shitty call center.

No ambitions, little cash, failing eyesight, dead-end job... oh, and let's not forget the debt piled up from unpaid payday loans. That was me. Just some sap coasting through life, content with the status quo and his probably shitty lot in life, looking back. It was what it was... until Discord ripped all that away from me. Discord. A fictional character from a multimedia franchise meant to entertain and educate children.

Yeah, I know how things turned out, but that fanbase was entirely unintended. Point is, the fact that this was really happening should've been so far outside the realm of possibility that it didn't even warrant thinking about. Fanfiction was nice. Fun. HiE stories were fun to read from time to time, but that's all they were supposed to be. I wasn't supposed to be whisked away from Earth in the literal blink of an eye to die a pathetic death in a world that was supposed to be a fictional land of friendship and harmony and tolerance and whatever other happy horseshit Equestria was made of.

But Discord hadn't given a shit about what was and wasn't supposed to be. He'd just plucked me from my boring life and killed me by proxy. Intentionally. I hadn't really given it much thought since the incident in the ship—which already felt like ages ago by now—but Discord had intentionally killed me. It didn't matter if he knew I'd come back, that was still fucked up no matter how you looked at it.

I'd certainly gotten the short end of the stick, winding up in a nightmare made real, where I died. And then I died again... and again... and again. Knowing my luck and sheer incompetence, I'd probably continue to die many more times in the not-so-distant future, whether by bad luck or stupidity or both, only time would tell. And that brought me back to my current predicament—the latest in a growing list of unbelievable events I'm being dragged into.

From a half-blind desk jockey to an intangible mass of thought hurtling backward through the time stream of an alien world to steal knowledge from a primal eldritch deity. It wasn't how I saw my life going, but as horrifying as everything had been up to this point, and as much as I wanted to complain about it all, in this moment, I couldn't help the bit of child-like wonder that washed over me as I watched thousands of years pass in an instant.

Though I couldn't hold on to the memories of the lives I invaded, I was certain I'd never forget this experience as a whole. It freaked me out at first and for a good while after, but now I was captivated—enthralled even. Thousands of years quickly became tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. I watched civilization grow more and more primitive as time rewound. I watched the intelligent races of the world devolve further and further into their mindless ancestors.

I watched the land change drastically. I witnessed the weather grow more savage, the terrain become more unstable, and the atmosphere itself grow more uninhabitable. Beasts that once roamed the land crawled back into the primordial oceans of a still-forming Equus.

And then I saw it.

It was only for a moment, but I saw a glimpse of what I knew in my currently non-existent bones was the Old Night. I caught sight of it just as it cursed the blazing sun above and burrowed its way into the still-cooling crust of the earth below to begin its long, death-like slumber deep below what would eventually become Equestria. It wasn't long after that horrifying sight that my journey through the annals of history came to an abrupt end, and the end of that journey wasn't anything like I was expecting.

I'd wondered how my meeting with Ubbo-Sathla would go. I'd thought about it more than once during my temporal road trip but hadn't come up with any concrete ideas of how it would go. Maybe it was because I'd had the privilege of lucidity during my experience. Maybe it was because I was too distracted by what was going on around me and I was simply caught off guard. Whatever the reason, I hadn't expected everything to suddenly go all dream-like and hazy.

I was still lucid, but my head felt heavy and it was like I was trying to think through a thick fog in my mind. I mean, I didn't have a head at that moment per se, but still, the feeling was there regardless. It truly was like I was in a lucid dream where I could still think and had some control over my actions, but I had to focus really, really hard to do either. If that wasn't bad enough, I had to deal with the bubbling mass of writhing ooze directly in front of me.

Ubbo-Sathla... was bigger than I expected.

Way, way bigger.

It was so big that I couldn't get a proper read on the scale of it and could only guess that its viscous, writhing bulk had to be a mile wide in diameter at least. The thing sat in a massive lake of its own vile primordial ooze and even without a nose I could just tell that the giant tub of cosmic jelly reeked like nothing else ever had or would again. The moment I regained most of my bearings and laid my metaphysical eyes on the disgusting deity all the child-like wonder I'd felt earlier went right out the window, replaced by horrified fascination and a weird sense of reverence.

I had come face to face with a literal god right out of the mythos. It was something I'd secretly always kind of hoped would happen despite knowing it never would. Now that it was happening, I wanted nothing more than to get the hell out of there. It wasn't because I was terrified for my life or anything, but rather it was the sheer sense of wrongness I felt. The instinctual revulsion. I hadn't expected the feeling to be so strong considering what I was turning into, and yet I couldn't help it.

The strange urge I felt to venerate the thing didn't help matters. I wanted out as soon as possible and, remembering what I'd come here for in the first place, I pulled my gaze away from the Unbegotten Source as a whole and focused on looking for the giant inscribed stelae that were supposed to be lodged in its titanic glutinous form.

That was when I noticed what I initially thought was slime oozing off of the creature's body and splashing into the ooze. Upon closer inspection, I realized it wasn't slime. There were small, wriggling things being squeezed out of the larger writhing, wobbling mass at a constant rate, and as those things continued to drop into the lake of ooze, I could see them crawling out of the lake, only to burn and boil to death once they reached the still partially molten rock at the lake's edge.

The planet's crust was still forming, but that didn't stop Ubbo-Sathla's hideous spawn from making their way to shore. The whole thing was incredibly unsettling and I would've shuddered if I wasn't just a roaming ball of consciousness. Needless to say, I returned my attention back to the task at hand and kept searching for the monuments that promised hidden knowledge.

It didn't take long to find them as though the stone slabs weren't that big, that was only relative to the massive bulk of the amorphous blob that was Ubbo-Sathla. That, and despite Ubbo-Sathla's constant twisting, twitching, and squirming, the stelae didn't move all that much from where they stuck out. And once I'd found them... I couldn't look away. I looked from one to the other and somewhere in the back of my mind, I realized that I couldn't tell how many slabs there were.

One moment, there seemed to be a countless number of them and I marveled at how I'd missed them at all to begin with but then I looked again and though I knew there were multiple stelae, it felt like I was looking at just one big stone slab. I noticed the unnerving shift in perspective. I acknowledged it, accepted that it was weird and off-putting, and I moved on. That wasn't what mattered to me at that moment. No, what mattered was what was engraved on the face of each stone slab.

Well fuck me... it actually makes sense... kind of...

And it did.

I didn't know how or why just yet, but I could, at least in part, understand the meaning behind the... well, it wasn't text exactly—not in the way I would've normally understood if I was still fully human. I'm not sure how to explain exactly what was inscribed on the stelae, but suffice it to say, I was able to derive meaning from what was there, even if only somewhat. A bunch of things suddenly clicked into place, cosmically speaking, just as was probably intended.

And, just as intended, I understood more about what I was becoming, among other unrelated secrets I didn't currently have the words to describe. Well, more like words weren't enough to describe the knowledge. I couldn't glean everything I needed to know, but it was a hell of a lot more than I had to go on before. Gaining the knowledge itself was a strange experience. It was sort of like I was being shown an image that triggered a memory or idea that I'd long since forgotten and once I remembered it, the memory stuck.

There was more to it than that, a lot more, but that was the gist of what it was like to read the giant stone slabs. I knew now that, though Ubbo-Sathla looked like a mindless mass of slime from outer space, it was intelligent to a degree that honestly frightened me. It had known full well I was there and that I would arrive even before Luna enacted the ritual, and apparently it was cool with the whole thing.

For an ancient eldritch god that can drive someone mad with a glance, Ubbo-Sathla's pretty chill... who knew?

...Still smells bad though.

It didn't speak, sure, but it didn't need to. It was less about words and more about concepts and meaning and intent and a bunch of other abstract things that didn't fully make sense to me even now. I caught something about aligned angles and a child of nuclear chaos returned to the fold, which was a bit worrying. The "nuclear chaos" bit was a stretch but, again, didn't have the proper words for a direct translation.

I'd been surprised when Ubbo-Sathla spoke to me, not having been prepared for a conversation with the Matriarch of All Monstrosities. I was even more surprised when Twilight's presence, which I'd completely forgotten about until now, suddenly vanished. I was confused at what was happening at first, but quickly realized she'd disappeared and how that couldn't possibly be a good thing. That sentiment was only strengthened when everything around me started to flicker and distort like I was in some glitched-out simulation.

Around that time I felt a familiar tugging sensation, but unlike when I was pulled into the time stream, this sensation was weak. It happened only once more before the tugging stopped altogether. Even worse, I was starting to rapidly lose my lucidity, and the fog in my mind was growing stronger by the second. That was when the panic really set in, but before I could get too worked up, the mass of squirming slime before me suddenly reached a giant, viscous tendril out and—

And then I was flying forward through time at a speed incomparable to my first trip through history. This time I had no control whatsoever. Whatever had happened, it was clear this was no leisurely stroll through the time steam. This was an evacuation. Something had happened, and Ubbo-Sathla, presumably realizing that, had done something to send me back to where my body was still hopefully sitting in the ritual circle.

I barely had any time to worry about what I'd find upon returning when my consciousness slammed back into my waiting body with the force of a bullet train. The shock of it sent me reeling and I felt my back hit the cold hard stone beneath me as I cursed out loud in surprise. Disoriented by the sudden shift from incorporeal mass of thought to physical body, it took me a few seconds to recover, but not much more than that.

Not sure if it was the panic or simply a matter of how my mind was altered by what I'd learned, but I was able to regain my footing far faster than I was probably meant to. I quickly sat up from where I lay and scanned the chamber, noticing several things very wrong with the situation in quick succession. The first thing I noticed was the altar where Celestia's skull was supposed to be. It was still there, but the bleached alicorn cranium had been entirely caved in, the golden flames in its eye sockets nowhere to be seen.

"What... the f—"

My shocked exclamation was cut off by a wet gurgling sound coming from somewhere behind me. I turned and saw the second thing I noticed. The comically large tome that had been sitting atop the podium was now lying open and face down on the ground, its cover splattered with blood so dark in hue it was almost black. The origin of the blood liberally painting the book, the podium, and the floor around both was obvious; it belonged to the midnight blue alicorn lying next to the book and had been spilled courtesy of the open gash in the mare's neck.

Luna was clearly still alive if the noises she was making were any indication. I stared at the mare, finding myself more dumbfounded than anything else. The fleeting question of how she was still alive flashed through my mind briefly, but then I noticed something else I hadn't before. The flesh around Luna's neck was gradually knitting itself together even as I watched. It was a slow process, but the bleeding had evidently already stopped. Still, Luna didn't rise to her hooves for whatever reason. Our eyes met then, and I was caught a bit off guard by what I saw.

Rather than the agony or desperation I expected, I only saw rage, resolution, and a hint of relief as she laid her eyes on me. Before I could gather my thoughts on just what the hell had happened here, Luna's horn lit up and a weak but furious voice rang through my mind.

"Salvatore... must hurry... treacherous madmare... caught by surprise... couldn't break the ritual... killed my sister... took Twilight... I... will be fine... be right behind you, but... you must go... hasn't gotten far... get her back... get... her back... Salvatore..."

The telepathic spell appeared to be all Luna had left in her, as the alicorn eyes rolled up and she passed out the moment the spell ended. A pit opened up in my stomach as I looked around the chamber and realized the stone double doors were wide open and Twilight was nowhere to be seen. She'd been with me when I was traveling through time, so it wasn't a stretch to imagine that she might've been in a similarly vulnerable state during the ritual.

The question of why I alone was spared lingered in the back of my mind. There was also the innate understanding that I'd changed physically in some way, though I wouldn't know how until I looked in a mirror or something. Still, all of that was shoved aside as I scrambled to my feet and made my way to the open doorway. I had no idea what was going on or who had taken Twilight or why, but I wasn't going to sit around and wait for someone else to do something about it. Not this time.

This time I had the knowledge to go with my newfound power, and I would make liberal use of that power if it meant getting Twilight back. I didn't what would happen if she died while I was still alive—assuming the ultimate goal of whoever kidnapped Twilight was to kill her—but I didn't plan on finding out. I was still just a fledgling chaos spirit with fledgling chaos spirit magic and I didn't know all the ins and outs, but I knew some stuff and that stuff would have to be enough for now.

Guess it's time to see what the Salvatore brand of chaos looks like...

Alright, in the interest of not having such a horrible cliffhanger linger for too long, I've decided to write one more chapter of this story before I move on to the next story down the line, so rejoice, I guess.