You know, I sometimes think that I'm the punchline to the joke that is the universe. Sure, I've ragged on about this all a lot lately, but I've had my body stolen by a crazy unicorn, been: blown up (twice!), bludgeoned, unfortunate enough to have fallen down stairs, scalded, and attacked by dogs. That's just in one day. More recently, I've nearly drowned, found out my real body has undergone a magical sex change, and suffered a psychotic episode involving a room, a corridor, and some sort of demonic representation of Lyra as a result of fighting a unicorn biomagical memory backup. I have no other choice but to go to Equestria through a gateway that reflects upon the state of mind of the first pony to enter it. If I'm not the punchline, at the very least I'm a key part of that joke.

The first thing I remember seeing in that subspace highway is a room. It's not just any room though. It's a very familiar five-sided room that I've been in only once before. Those four imposing stone walls are all still there, and the drywall that I tore apart is exactly as I left it. Unlike my previous visit, however, the room terrifies me. It isn't just all this mysterious rust everywhere, or the smears of blood radiating from the aquamarine wall. It's the implication of what I did.

I don't know when Twilight Sparkle and Fluttershy finally join me. I am too busy hiding beneath my hooves when I hear a choked scream and somepony dry heaving. “This isn't me. I'm not like this.” I mumble over and over. “This is not a reflection of who I am! I don't want to be here!”

“Soren, what is this place?” Twilight's voice is but a hoarse croak.

“Get me out of here,” I whimper, peeking out from beneath my hooves. I'm not completely sure, but I'm pretty sure Fluttershy mirrored my sentiment.

“If this isn't a reflection of who you are, explain this to me.” Twilight manages to pull herself together and put on a sterner tone. “We're not going anywhere until you do. This—” She sweeps her hoof to indicate the room. “—is not the result of a sane mind or a safe individual. If you're dangerous, you better believe I'm not going to take you anywhere but a secure facility where you can't hurt anypony.”

“I don't want to think about it!” I cry out in fear and frustration. “If I say it out loud, it makes what happened real!”

“What did you do?” Her voice takes on a paranoid, almost accusatory quality. It just makes me feel all the more guilty.

“Twilight, that's enough!” interjects Fluttershy in her classic don't fuck with my friends or pick on those weaker than you tone. “He's clearly as afraid of this place as we are. He can't be all bad if this place scares him so.”

“Don't you see Fluttershy?” Twilight pleaded. “A healthy mind wouldn't produce such grim imagery!”

“Because clearly having my brain rewritten is healthy!” I whimper, pushing myself up onto all fours once more. “You wanna know what this place is and why it scares me? This room is the embodiment of my mind!”

The look of confusion on their faces says it all. “But you just said that this wasn't you...”

“It isn't,” I say weakly. “This is what this mind overwrite is doing to me. That rust is the corrosion of who I am! That blood? The guilt of what I may have accidentally done when I blacked out yesterday. Back when we were on Skype, after I screamed and went silent? I found myself alone in this room. That one different wall there—the one with that big iron door? That was partially hidden behind what seemed like regular drywall...

“So I did what any trapped individual would do. I tore my way out... Only, I don't think the corridor on the other side was really the way out.” I sniffle and hiccup. “I think... I think that was really the way into Lyra's memory imprint—the source of her voice inside my head. Only, when I went into that corridor, I felt like she was attacking me... She'd become this big monstrous... thing, and the corridor became all wrong...

“I was sure she was trying to kill me!” I try to keep myself from breaking down into sobbing, but only partially succeed. Tears are streaming steadily down my face now. “She was only trying to defend herself from my intrusion, but I lashed out trying to protect myself and I—” My voice catches in my throat, and I begin quivering on the spot. “I think I killed Lyra's memory imprint! I'm not a bad pony, I swear!”

The two mares exchange conflicted looks. On one hoof, they look like they pity me for all I've gone through, but on the other, I can tell they're not completely sure they can trust me. I wouldn't trust me either if I just confessed to murdering a mental imprint of another pony trying to overwrite my own mind, which I kind of just did. What is the punishment for murder in Equestria anyway? Or do memory imprints even count?

I'm not sure how time is actually passing in this silence. All I know is that the longer I sit here, the more anxious I become. So what if Twilight said that nothing can actually hurt us here? What if what she said was based on the accounts of mentally whole individuals? I feel my mane bristling at the base of my neck. Surely that can't be good.

“I honestly have no idea what to think.” Twilight says flatly, finally breaking the silence. “I know you think you were acting in self-defense, but that doesn't excuse what damage you might have done to Lyra's own neural pathways in addition to her memory backup. I want to trust you, but knowing that you could do something like this, even in self-defense scares me.”

I stare down at the floor as I digest her condemnation. “I don't blame you.”

Something soft and downy brushes the tears away from my cheek, and it takes me a full minute to realize that it's Fluttershy. She's actually trying to comfort me with the soft but deceptively rigid feathers on her wing. When I look into her eyes, I'm reminded why she bears the Element of Kindness. “I can't even begin to imagine what you must be going through.” Her voice is as soft and reassuring—motherly almost.

“Don't you think I'm some kind of monster after hearing what I did?” I ask in disbelief.

“I take care of all sorts of animals,” she offers with an infectious smile. “I know only too well how unpredictable animals can be when they're hurt and cornered. I can no more blame you for listening to your survival instincts than I can blame a fox for stealing a chicken.”

Surely I must be dreaming. I could swear Fluttershy just completely overlooked the fact that I murdered the voice in my head. I mean seriously, cornered animal? How can she be so understanding now, yet so timid before. I can hardly comprehend it, even if she is the bearer of the Element of Kindness.

“Hush now quiet now...” sings a voice in all of the darkest corners of the room. There's something chilling about the way the words seem to echo before they're actually spoken. The fact that the voice is so childish is just as creepy. It's just not natural, and it's making my mane bristle up and down the back of my neck. “It's time to lay your sleepy head...”

“Can we please get out of here?” I cry, just managing to avoid screaming.

“Hush now, quiet now... It's time to go to bed.”

“No seriously, like right now!” I say again, my voice edged with panic. “All we need to do is go through that door there, right? So let's go!”

“Soren, what's the matter?” Twilight inquires, visibly concerned.

“Hush now...”

“Can't you hear it?”

“Quiet now...”

“Hear what?” Fluttershy replies, confused, but also panicking slightly. She looks about the room warily and moves closer to Twilight. Yes. Panic is good right now.

“It's time to lay your sleepy head...” This time, the singing is definitely closer.

“That singing!” I shout. “Somethings coming, and it is singing that creepy fucking lullaby!”

“Hush now... Quiet now...”

The two mares exchange a concerned look as my eyes dart around the chamber. How can't they hear it? It's fucking everywhere! Don't they know how much danger they're in?

“For you will soon be dead...” the child-like voice sings cheerfully. As if to punctuate the end of the song, I feel something hot and sticky splash down onto my muzzle. With only a bit of eye-crossing, I see a large gobbet of meat and blood slowly sliding off of my my face.

Warily, I turn my gaze upward toward the ceiling, were there one. Where there should have been a ceiling, there is a vast darkness. The only thing in that dark expanse is a pair of bright yellow pinpricks seemingly so close and far away all at once. My blood turning to ice, I scream and bolt for the door.

“Soren!” Fluttershy and Twilight call out.

Apparently, mental projections of doorways in subspace are every bit as solid as doors in real-space. Forgetting to open that hulking iron door, I slam face-first into it, not even leaving a dent. I wish my face felt the same as the door probably did. Instead, it feels like someone slammed me into a door... Oh wait.

“I'm O—” I try to rise to my hooves but fail miserably. The room won't stop spinning, and someone replaced my leg bones with gummy-worms. “—kay. Yeah.”

“Soren?” Twilight calls out, waving a hoof in front of me. I try to focus on all five of her faces, but they just keep dancing around. Sit still damn it so I can look at you. “Soren!”

“I think I'm gonna lie down for just a little bit.” I say dumbly, going completely limp on the floor. “I don't think I like this ride.”

My heavy lids slam shut over my eyes, and I can just barely make out Fluttershy's voice. “Oh dear... This is not good Twilight!”

So yeah, did you know that running face-first into an iron door hurts like a motherfucker? Amazing, I know. I don’t even care where I am right now, that’s how bad it hurts. The headache I’m sporting makes me feel like opening my eyes would be suicide, which it might very well be. Who knows what’s watching me, waiting to kill me the moment I open my eyes?

Still... There’s something wrapped around my hoof that feels an awful lot like fingers. Why would that be? There are no hu—wait a minute. I’m in Equestria now, aren’t I? But then, if I’m in Equestria, that means...

I sit up and force my eyes open. “YOU!” I snarl. “You did this to me! You’re—Who the fuck are you?” I bring my free hoof up to my face as a sudden burst of pain washes through my skull. I feel like I should know the human sitting beside my bed, holding my hoof in her hand, but my mind is drawing a blank.

The human girl in front of me looks terrified, as though I’m about to strangle her. I know I want to strangle somepony, but for the life of me I can’t figure out who. How exactly would I strangle anypony in this condition anyway? Hooves are hardly conducive to such behavior, and this splitting headache is making it impossible to even focus on magic.

Now that I look at her, I get this strange feeling that I should know her. Her short brown hair and glacier blue eyes are so familiar, and were I human, I might even find the softness of her face and her trim body appealing. The fear on her face does nothing for me though... Wait, if I were a human? Wasn’t I one originally?

I’m so confused right now. How can I have memories of two different childhoods, but not know whose they are, who I am, or even how I got here? Oh wait, some of it is coming back to me now. Not a lot, but I remember I used to be human... but then I wasn’t. A lot of bad things happened to me when I became a pony. I think I killed someone, too.

I frown, looking the girl softly in the eyes. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what came over me.” I apologize. “I’ve been kind of stressed lately, and now there are a lot of gaps in my memory. Where am I?”

The human girl doesn’t speak. She doesn’t look terrified of me any more. Instead, she looks so very sad. Am I sick? Is that it? Am I dying? Is she sad because I’m dying? Or is she sad for some other reason?

“Oh good, you’re awake!” A voice from the doorway draws my attention from the girl. Standing in the doorway is a unicorn stallion with an amber-yellow coat, and a brown mane. Dressed in a lab-coat and a stethoscope dangling from around his neck, this bespectacled pony is definitely a doctor. “With the amount of head trauma you’ve suffered, we were worried you weren’t going to wake up at all.”

Head trauma, eh? Yeah, that sounds about right. Falling down a flight of stairs and a phone bludgeoning you will do that. “How’d I get here, doc?” I ask anxiously. “My memory is chock full of holes and contradictions.”

“Your friends said that you had an incident in something called a—what was it?—subspace highway when they dropped you off. They said you had some kind of psychotic episode and ran headlong into a big iron door.” That sounds vaguely familiar. Some friends though. They drop me off and don’t even stay to keep an eye on me? “It’s a rather good thing they brought you in. If they hadn’t, I might not have found the unusual growth in your brain.”

“That sounds pretty bad. Did I get that from running into the iron door?”

“It’s most likely that the growth was present prior to running into the door. In fact, I’m almost certain that it is responsible for your psychotic episode.” The doctor frowned. “I’d have removed it for you already, but your friend Ms. Twilight Sparkle said that somepony has been playing around with body-swapping spells, and that the growth—though it’s more of a tumor really—is actually a manifestation of the other personality, meaning—”

“I AM NOT A FUCKING TUMOR!”

Author's Notes:

Re-edited 11 July 2017