"How could you?" she whispered.

The man stared at his hands as his fingertips began to dissolve into glowing embers. This was it. He’d used up the last of the lifeforce. He was going to die, finally, and the universe would be unmade in the process. Then it, and him, would be reborn anew, alone.

No.

As his hands dissolved into motes of dull orange light, shifting and dancing off into the white sky, he looked at her. Lucy. She was beautiful, hair falling across her porcelain features in black ringlets. Her leathery wings shifted uncomfortably on her back, and her dark brown eyes were wide with shock as she saw him slowly slipping away. They lifted to meet his gaze, surprise replaced with hurt. She slapped him, sending off a small cloud of embers as his cheek greyed.

“How could you?!” she repeated, her voice ragged. He had dragged her soul back from the edge of the abyss, forcibly, and put it back into her broken body. He had healed her body. He had given her back her immortal life. He had exhausted the last of his power to do so. And now she was about to die again. He hadn’t thought that last part through. She had laid in his arms, growing cold. He had refused to lose her that way, but now...

No.

There was another way. He could feel it, just beneath the surface, pressing against him. He didn’t have to destroy. He just had to use the power for something else. A gamble.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice devoid of emotion. Most of his body was gone, now, ash swirling through the white mists of a heaven despoiled. Her eyes welled up with tears. He hated that look. “I’ll make it back. I promise.”

Her face twisted with grief as she reached out for him, but the last of his corporeal form was gone, and his ashes slipped through her delicate hands.

“Phoenix...” Lucy slumped to the ground.

With measured grace, Celestia approached the entrance to her personal chambers. The two guards standing to either side of the wooden double doors stood a little straighter as they saw her round the corner, and saluted sharply as she approached. She smiled kindly and nodded her head to each.

“At ease, my little ponies.”

They dropped their salute but kept their rigid posture. Celestia’s horn glowed and the doors to her chamber opened. She shut them quietly behind her as she walked towards the server cart next to the dark hardwood table in the center of her bedroom. As the doors clicked shut, she immediately slumped and trudged over to a grouping of pillows at the table’s edge. She unceremoniously flopped down and immediately pressed a hoof to one of her temples. The princess sighed slightly, eyes closed and hoof massaging her head.

Her Minister of the Treasury had cornered her. Not that she had been avoiding him, really, so much as moving his written requests for a formal meeting towards the bottom of the substantial pile of paperwork she dealt with every day. The innocently titled ‘Expenditure Requests for the Grand Galloping Gala’ sheet always ended up finding its way to the very bottom of the pile. For the past few months. Without fail.

After her Treasury Minister found her, the day had proven far more wearying than it otherwise would have been. As was often the case, these days, she found herself more exhausted than she had in her earlier years. At the very least, she had her suppers to herself. She levitated the silver lid off of the platter on the server’s tray, and immediately wrinkled her nose. Steamed whole carrots, alfalfa, some brussel sprouts, all garnished with a few daisies. Hardly food fit for a princess. She used telekinesis to slowly push the cart away from the table before she noticed a second, larger platter on the bottom.

Celestia allowed herself a tiny smirk. She levitated the second platter to the table and removed the lid, revealing an exorbitant, multi-layered cake dripping with pink frosting. ‘Ah, Sayla Vee,’ she thought, inwardly thanking the maidservant from Prance who had again snuck her dessert beneath Luna’s nose, ‘you really do know how to show a princess a good time.’ She delicately cut a small slice off of the cake and hovered it before her, twisting it in the air as she examined it carefully. Celestia paused, her gaze flitting between the slice and the rest of the cake, before the sun princess grinned widely and buried her muzzle into the cake on the platter. The demure slice she had levitated floated softly in the air, quietly observing the genocide of its progenitor at the mouth of a very hungry princess.

Even if her Treasury Minister had finally found her, the rest of the day hadn’t been all that bad. Oh, goodness, Devil’s chocolate! She truly did enjoy helping her little ponies, and she was able to help quite a few today. The strawberry frosting! A light, fruity, fluffy flavor, the perfect counterpoint to the dark chocalate! The Royal Court was in recess until Luna took up her duties at nightfall, so she should be free to spend the evening in relative quiet. Must she really chew? Was it not enough to just drown her taste buds in this sweetened tidal wave of chocolate, strawberry, and sugar? Yes, not a bad day at all. Her snout dove more deeply into the cake as her eyes began to glaze over; the day’s worries began to slough off her shoulders and the anxiety began to leave her tired bones as she feasted. Yes, things weren’t so bad at all.

Her eyes shot wide as she felt a jolt of chaos magic tear into the harmonious fabric of her kingdom. Specifically, the harmonious fabric of her bedroom.

The Void. The place between realities. The man didn’t belong here. Just maintaining his form in this place drained a great deal of his renewed lifeforce. From extensive experience, he knew that the longer he remained the less power he would have upon arrival. He hesitated still, searching the myriad pulses of light that glared joyously in defiance of the uncreation between worlds. He focused on one, the weaves of its worldstream flowing and undulating and overlapping in a symphony of order and chaos. This would do.

He pressed towards it, willing his form through the Void. The reality grew brighter as he pressed into it, doing his best to heal the rifts left in his wake. His vision grew brighter, almost blindingly so, as he pierced this world. Even after so long, the human felt giddy. He had a good feeling about this one. In spite all odds, could this be it? Could he have finally made it back?

His mind was consumed by a searing white light, and he did his best to patch up the weave of the existence he had just pierced. He smiled to himself as his form materialized into the Universe he had chosen.

He stopped smiling as his head slammed into a marble wall. It cracked much less than his skull and the vertebrae in his neck and spine. He collapsed onto the soft floor, twitching.

‘Every. Fucking. Time.’

The man groaned. Well, gurgled. Groaning was quite difficult when it felt like his crushed larynx shared space with his pancreas. He instinctively reached inward, attempting to draw on his regenerative powers. He was able to heal the mashed neurons of his brain enough to remember that his lifeforce still needed time to attune to a new reality.

If his lungs were working correctly, he would have sighed. The fact that he wasn’t already attuned meant he hadn’t made it back. Not yet. In that case, he should make sure everything made it through intact. He tried to reach for the hilt of one of his two swords. His left leg flopped about happily like a beached fish. Great. Neurological damage. Should be healed soon enough. In the meantime, he tried flopping his left leg around. His hand immediately reached up and ran across the rough cloth hilt of his katana. On a whim, he repeated the process with his right leg. The limb spasmed dutifully at his brain’s command. Well, now he just felt foolish. He tried just using his right hand. It obediently stroked the pearlescent hilt of the zweihander at his other shoulder.

‘Muramasa and Excalibur,’ the human mused. ‘Of course they’re alright.’ The damn things were obviously more unbreakable than he himself was. He didn’t bother to check on his two pistols. Despite the soft carpet beneath him, their bulky forms dug into his ribs, affirming their presence. He also didn’t bother to check on the black leather duster Odin had given him, either. Even he couldn’t destroy the damn jacket.

He tried inching his eyes open. He failed. Damn world was bright. Damnably so. He already hated it. Even still, he forced his eyes open and began taking stock of his surroundings.

’A bedroom,’ he thought. Probably nobility or someone who—judging by the room’s size—was far too rich for their own subjects’ good. Not the ideal place to materialize. Marble walls, one of which was now slightly cracked. Regal red carpet. Oversized bed with sheets that bore a silken sheen. A large balcony with semi-transparent, waving white curtains on the far side of the room. A dark-varnished chest of drawers polished to a mirror’s shine, and a huge vanity mirror to its right.

He was starting to think it was not really looking good on the ‘please don’t randomly dimension-jump into an important person’s bedroom’ front, so far. Between him and the bed was a dark-colored wooden table, upon which sat a silver platter stacked with various baked sweets. A metallic server’s cart bore a multitude of unpalatable vegetables to the side. Aside from the cart, everything in the room had an intricate air of craftsmanship, as if it were all the masterwork of some poor sap that sold his damn soul to create something to curry favor with a greater power.

Definitely royalty. He hated royalty.

And then there was the unicorn.

White coat, weird, multi-hued floaty mane that the man figured would probably poison him with gamma radiation if he touched it. Decorative golden horseshoes. Aww, its owner even gave it a nice tiara! He’d never seen one with wings before, but c’est la vie, there was a first for everything. After this long, he was too used to all those firsts.

The winged unicorn stared at him with open shock, knelt down on its four legs in front of a crumb-addled platter of destroyed cake. Its wide eyes warily watched his every weary movement as the neurons in his neck finally healed, enough for the man to haltingly stand up with all the grace of a marionette dragged from its wooden torpor and awkwardly forced onto a cardboard stage to entertain children. He stuttered about with clumsy jitters until something caught his eye, ceasing his movements immediately. Next to the unicorn's face, a bright yellow aura encompassed a very large piece of cake drowned in pink frosting, no small amount of which had accrued around the unicorn’s lips.

‘Alright, so unicorns and cake. That’s new. Should I just assume the unicorn’s owner is retarded for not feeding her correctly?’ He immediately ran down what little he knew of the creatures from his travels. Magical animals, and in most of the places he had been, exceedingly rare, and usually violent and powerful. He could probably assume that he was dealing with a wizard, at the very least. The bastards loved their mythological pets. Although they don’t usually feed them cake...Still, a few minutes after a jump, a wizard might actually pose some danger to him. It wasn’t so much the painful death by lightning and fire he was worried about. He had become desensitized to pain long ago. However, being kept as a personal toy in a pocket dimension until he learned how to break out? He shuddered, vaguely recalling ten years spent in one such prison seven hundred years ago. He realized he should tread carefully. But still, why cake?

He paused, a random thought clawing at him suddenly. Should he leave a note detailing proper equine diet, or just assume that horses in this reality, and by extension, unicorns, subsisted on a different diet than the few worlds upon which he encountered them before? He might even be thanked for promoting the nutrition of the local crazed wizard’s pets. Or he could just assume that peasants were going to chase after him with pointy farm implements and torches while their insane Wizard-Lord drove them onward in a harried hunt, cackling madly and shooting lightning from his fingertips as virgin sacrifices fueled the mage’s dark magics. From his personal experience, the latter option was the most likely one. The unicorn, meanwhile, simply stared openly at him as the piece of cake began surreptitiously settling on a platter behind the creature.

‘Right, really don’t want to deal with a unicorn-powered Spanish Inquisition. Ideally, I should slip out of here undetected. First thing’s first, make nice with the pet so it doesn’t arouse unnecessary suspicion. And hope to Christ it can’t raise some sort of alarm.’

He stumbled cautiously to the cart with the silver platter of vegetables, his head dancing awkwardly upon his ruined neck like a bobblehead doll, and plucked out a carrot.

“Easy, girl,” he cooed softly, clucking his tongue. “Easy. No need to whinny or buck my skull in or gore me with your horn or warn your master that some weirdo just popped up in his private bedchambers.” His hand waggled the carrot slightly. “You hungry? This’ll probably be better for you than that, uh, cake they gave you.” His voice still emanated softly, but the unicorn’s eyes narrowed slightly, almost imperceptibly. He was hoping the reaction was just because his sentences were all slurred and borderline incoherent as a result of his cranial injuries.

“No, no,” the man intoned as gently as he could through numb lips, “there’s no need to be defensive, or loud. Here, you want this?” He wagged the carrot again for emphasis. “Here, take it.”

He gently tossed the carrot towards the creature. It floated slowly through the air, tumbling with untold grace, before smacking the unicorn in her flank in the dead center of what appeared to be a tattoo of the sun. It bounced off and thudded dully to the ground at her hooves. The unicorn’s head snapped back, regarding the carrot, before the creature turned its gaze back on him. Its eyes narrowed further, their vibrant light magenta chilling as surely as the final moments of a cold winter’s sunset before the onset of the night. As the unicorn stood, its horn began glowing a gaudy yellow color, and the man could only stare in shock as its mouth moved.

The words that it—that she—spoke sounded terribly melodious to the human, in spite of being completely incomprehensible. He registered the glow of her horn before things clicked. The man sighed. He was going to have to figure out a way to jump dimensions without his brain being turned into oatmeal by hardened objects upon his arrival, first and foremost, but he was sure of at least one thing else.

“Goddammit, definitely sentient.” He gritted his teeth while still trying to smile concedingly to the unicorn, holding his hands up in surrender even as he began to feel tendrils of the her yellow magic attempting to entrap him.

‘Run.’

* * * * *

Ridge Dancer sighed. Another day, another ten hours she would have to stand outside of Princess Celestia’s door. She hadn’t wanted this job, honestly. It was an unspoken truth among the Guard that Princess duties were no honor, but more a punishment for insubordination. Anypony worth their salt already knew that the princesses were more than capable of defending themselves, far more than any guardspony could. She was only here as a result of her...brash behavior.

She shifted her hooves impatiently, the weight of the Celestial Guard armor chafing uncomfortably as her mental processes began to dread another day of banal inactivity, another day without meaning as she merely maintained the status quo and desperately held onto her flagging resolve to do absolutely nothing. As a filly, the thought of standing around aimlessly for hours on end would have driven her to madness. As an adult—she forcefully demanded her psyche accept the mantle of “adulthood”—she would suffer any anathema that her superiors thought necessary, chief among them the defense of the Princesses. She just wished her task was not so painfully monoto-

The gold-trimmed door behind her exploded violently, splinters of wood pirouetting chaotically through the air in her peripheral vision even as she was vaguely cognizant of her own trajectory roughly matching their own. Years of Guardspony training subdued her shock, however, and her own natural instincts kicked in as she began gracefully tumbling through the air and along the ground, dispersing the force of the impact as she landed firmly on her four hooves without injury. Not bad for a unicorn, she thought to herself. At least until something heavy and dark collided with her, sending her tumbling a few more meters, a curse escaping her lips as pain shot through her right hind leg, punctuating the grisly, audible snapping sound of one of her bones fracturing.

She screamed inwardly, desperately quelling a vocal expression of the immense pain that suddenly wracked her hind limb. She clenched her jaws and willed her instinctual tears back into their wells as she tried to move her leg. She gasped, the torture shooting through her mangled limb as flagrantly as the hiss that escaped between her teeth. In some muddled part of her mind she had already begun planning violent retribution against the foe that had spun her into such excruciating torment.

She lifted her head in a desperate attempt to make sense of her surroundings amidst the chaos. Immediately, she was impacted violently by wave after wave of vertigo, and she again did her best to disregard the lancing pain in her hind leg. When her focus finally centered, she realized she was pinned to the ground, eye-to-eye with one of the oddest creatures she had ever seen. It was completely without fur save for a bright shock of a spiky, strawberry blonde mane atop an otherwise hairless head. Its face was flatter than a pony’s, its cream-colored skin accentuating an open-mouthed look of what appeared to be shock, though it was difficult to tell on such an alien face. For a moment, time froze, and it stared at her as wide-eyed as she probably gawked at it, an otherworldly light seemingly playing behind its pale, ice-blue eyes like a candle fluttering in a mild breeze.

“Seize the intruder!” Celestia’s voice boomed out from somewhere behind her.

Her command seemed to startle the creature on top of her back to reality, and he quickly shifted his weight to lift himself up, his left leg brushing against her broken limb. She yelped briefly before cutting off her voice, trading her vocal sign of weakness for a glare of burning ire.

Glancing at her leg, the hairless monster’s features seemed to soften for a second, before his odd face took on a decidedly sheepish expression.

The strange creature whispered a few guttural, foreign words in a tone she could almost swear was apologetic before his hand slapped down rudely on the flank of her broken leg. She screamed in agony and embarrassment before she felt bolts of icy-hot electricity flow through her limb. There was an uncomfortable, though painless, sensation of her leg bones shifting and popping, and then both the pain and the electric current had disappeared.

The monster repeated a handful of unintelligible words, this time more softly, before in a blur he had leapt off her and took down the hallway in a curiously fast streak. Princess Celestia and a few of the uninjured guards galloped right behind him in hot pursuit.

‘Oh...that thing did not just slap my flank,’ she thought murderously as she stood up, testing her leg. It felt fine. She hauled off down the hallway in the direction the monster took.

* * * * *

Really? a soft voice rasped through his mind. You can barely channel any lifeforce at all and you stopped to heal the broken leg of one of the things now chasing your primate ass down?

He ignored the voice. The yellow aura began to surround him again, but he caught the filaments driving the magic and mentally bent the threads one by one, as best he could. The lifeforce that drove his power was having difficulty adapting, as he couldn’t sense any of the leylines of quantum or relativistic power that had hummed throughout all the other worlds he had visited. Instead, every attempt to physically manifest a portion of his lifeforce felt...ungraceful. In lieu of finesse, every droplet of soul he could feel drip into his pool of usable energy he flung mindlessly like a bullet at the magic weaving he assumed was trying to trap him in a telekinetic field, redirecting the threads into nearby walls and causing pufts of dust to shoot into the air as the telekinesis spells impacted into the stone and plaster.

One thousand years and you’re still this soft? Muramasa continued.

‘They’re a bunch of weird sentient horses, and me stumbling about with a broken goddamn neck fractured one of their legs. Did you expect me to just let them ship the poor thing off to the local glue factory just because of my clumsy ass?!’ he argued with the voice as he leapt over a silver-colored server’s cart, abandoned in the middle of the hallway as its original bearer cowered against the wall in the commotion. He spun midair after clearing the obstacle, connecting with the cart in a roundhouse kick that sent it spinning into some of the guards following him. They flew into the air like pins at a bowling alley.

How many of those ones did you just send to the glue factory? the voice mused cynically as he completed his spin, landing on one foot and subsequently reintroducing his face to the floor’s red carpet as his neurons took their damn sweet time regenerating. The carpet genially responded to his face with gratuitous carpet burns before he scrambled crudely to his feet and rocketed off further down the hallway.

‘You can fuck off any time you want, now, Masa,’ he admonished coolly, as more guards poured out of side hallways into his path and the same yellow telekinetic threads began showering around him in increasing intensity.

That’s not my name, you know. And you’re going out of your way to make things difficult. Again. The voice was reproachful. It often was.

‘Fine, then. New plan. You wanna play?’ the man thought.

Well, it has been several decades since you even drew me. It’s so terribly dark here in this sheath...

‘I’m serious, Masa.’ He juked around a couple more shocked servants that erupted from side halls, drawn by the commotion. ‘You cut any of ‘em, I’ll feed your ass to Cal.’

Tch, very well, human. His sword sulked. He didn’t know how a sword could sulk, he just knew it did. The large white one is gaining on you, by the way...

The man cursed. He was still having trouble healing himself. He drew the katana over his left shoulder haltingly, still running as fast as his maladjusted physical form allowed him in this place, and began landing non-lethal blows with the blunt edge of the katana on the heads of any guard that got too close. He stopped sending his lifeforce after each magical thread he could sense, and instead focused every ounce of power available to him into the half-healed neurons in his neck, knitting them much faster and vastly increasing his dexterity. After his counter-barrage ceased decimating the golden yellow threads of telekinesis, they gathered strength and shot forth all at once with a sense of hungry urgency. He allowed himself a half-grin, letting the magical strands almost reach him before he spun quickly, using the momentum to flash the katana around with blinding speed. Every golden tendril that had formed suddenly split in half, the recoil of being stopped immediately carrying through the threads straight back into the summoner. The big white horse screamed in anguish at the sudden backlash of magical energies. The pursuing guards halted suddenly at the pained cries of what he could only assume was their leader.

He stifled a momentary stab of guilt as he sheathed his sword. Severing threads like that could result in a nasty headache, or worse. The white unicorn shot a hoof to her head instinctually, trying to stave off her sudden migraine. Her light violet eyes narrowed as they met his, promising a great many fates worse than death blahblahblah. Whatever, it wasn’t the first time he pissed off royalty. He’d be gone in a few days time, anyway. He twirled around to continue his flight but connected solidly with something dark blue, stunning him slightly. He spun on reflex to dodge around whatever it was, before the loudest voice he had ever heard assaulted his eardrums.

“CRA’DENEI DE SHEY FAH RA’LUNEI!!!!!”

The force of the voice flung him back against the nearby marble wall, fracturing it far less violently than it did his own spine and skull. Again. He’d been at the receiving end of dragons’ roars that carried less force than that voice.

Quick, cut her!

Through muddled thoughts, the man commanded the sword to remain in its sheath. Its annoyed sigh echoed through his mind.

His body twitched uselessly on the ground before being dragged up the wall in a blue aura of telekinesis. Through blurry, malfunctioning eyesight, he managed to make out the vague form of a midnight blue unicorn almost as large as the White Cake Demon who started this chase in the first place. He focused what little remained of his energy reserves into healing his optic neurons, slowly bringing his dark-colored assailant into focus.

It held a similar form to the white one who had just given him chase—a disgustingly short chase, one of his bitter thoughts chastised—possessing the horn of a unicorn, wings, and a flowing mane that seemed to contain the entirety of a clear night’s sky, twinkling stars and all. He paused on its mane for as long as he could, staring in fascination and almost hypnotized by its countless constellations, before being rudely interrupted by reality. The blue winged unicorn-thingy began its unintelligible shouts again, pulverizing his bones against the already ruined wall. It was only with what small modicum of lifeforce he could muster that he managed to prevent his eyeballs from liquefying, which allowed him to see the white unicorn-thingy stumble up behind the blue one, all pretense of mercy gone from her twilight-tinged eyes. Then she started yelling in the same incoherent horse-language that the blue one was employing to shatter every bone in his body to great effect.

‘So, here I am. Again,’ he noted dryly. ‘Another world, and more pissed off natives that I’ll probably have to end up killing.’

The white one’s shouting escalated, her mouth moving in ever more animated and quick motions to voice her displeasure. And still caked with frosting. But, he noticed, one globule of pink frosting made more exaggerated movements than the rest of her mouth. He snorted to himself as subtly as he could, desperately trying to ignore what were probably chocolate crumbs pelting his face.

You’ve made such a good impression this time that maybe they’ll kill you straight away. It’ll be funny to see how they respond to that... The human wished his sword would shut up.

The chunk of cake frosting continued its animated journey through its pointed denial of physics, still clinging on to the corner of the white one’s lips in spite of her increasingly animated manner of speech. He snickered a bit, before catching himself. He’d rather not be tortured along with being put to death. The blue one caught his temporary outburst of mirth, however, her shouts becoming noticeably more piercing in their intensity. Honestly, even he didn’t know how every bone in his body hadn’t shattered beneath the shockwaves of her railing, but he was distracted as the frosting on the white one’s lips continued to egregiously violate all physics he was aware of, flailing around randomly with every apparent curse that escaped the unicorn’s mouth.

Finally, as if on cue, both of them ceased talking simultaneously, trading their lecture for stern, regal looks he recognized from a few realities in the past that could be roughly translated as, “YOU DONE FUCKED UP NOW, MANG.”

So crass.

‘Fuck you.’

Case-in-point. Also, you should have cut her.

’...you say that about everything.’

I’m a sword. It’s what we do. The human ignored the katana. He’d chanced upon thousands of worlds, and was host to experiences the likes of which his kind could only dream about. He’d still never seen anything like that blob of frosting on the white unicorn’s lips. How did it remain attached?

As if sensing the man’s disbelief, the sweetened globule finally released its tenuous grasp on the corner of the white one’s lips, dropping with no small aplomb into the dark blue floating mane of the smaller winged unicorn. There it simply stuck. He stared at it intently. A wholly inconvenient voice barreled through his mind like a freight train crashing through suburban housing.

His other sword finally broke its silence. Let them leak cake! Cal boomed, poorly mimicking the feminine voice of the man’s pearly captor.

He couldn’t hold it in any longer.

He laughed so uproariously that the hardened gazes of every pony present were immediately replaced with looks of dumb confusion, his white and blue unicorn captors trading nervous glances at his sudden outburst. This, in turn, only made him laugh even harder, as the blue unicorn’s mane seemed to pick up energy from its owner’s bewilderment, flailing the pink frosting blob about even faster. Tears were forming in his eyes, and even if the unicorn’s lack of focus had made the blue field of telekinesis disappear from around him, he was doubled over, clutching his sides as the laughter further exacerbated the injuries to his ribs, and completely incapable of even contemplating escape.

His laughter was only mildly subdued by what sounded like a ferocious, throaty growl, and in between his halting guffaws he looked up to see that one of the guards was not paralyzed by confusion. It glared at him hatefully, and as the last vestiges of his laughter played their course, he realized in a sudden moment of clarity that he recognized the pale green eyes glaring at him from behind the centurion helmet on the horse’s head.

You probably shouldn’t have broken its leg. Just cut it somewhere important and be done with it, Masa lectured as the guard’s horn glowed a dark green. He pushed the blade’s protests to the back of his mind as he bore the angry equine’s assalts. He wished he hadn’t remembered being sent through several very thick, very painful marble walls before he blacked out, the guard-horse-thingy glaring at him the entire time through furious, light jade eyes as the blue and white big unicorn-things merely looked on, seemingly amazed by the brutality of the situation.

‘Another day, another reality that isn’t home,’ he thought miserably before darkness took him.

Author's Notes:

Oh, hey, so here I was getting drunk one day (err, *every* day, actually, but I digress), ruminating on how a lot of people told me I write awesome and should make a story, so I did. I haven’t written a story since 8th grade, which was well over a decade ago. This is my first go at fanfiction, since I never even read the stuff until a few months ago, and then only because of damnable pony influence eating its way into my psyche like some sort of twisted, lovable, pastel-colored body-snatcher monstrosity. Oh, and it’s a HiE fic with a deliriously overpowered Gary Stu OC.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’m kidding. (Not about the HiE/OP OC stuff. That trainwreck is derailing as we speak and I continue to write.) I already know what’s going to go wrong; namely, everything. But, hopefully I can write this Trail of Tears well enough that you’ll all enjoy the ride. Oh, and all those people that said I could write well said so a few years ago. I’m horrifically out of practice. For the love of GodCelestiaBuddhaPhoenixEtc., please critique the Hell out of my work so I can get better, and you all can get a better story. (Yes, I know I use too many commas. And parentheses. And I’m writing most of this drunk off my ass.) Not using prereaders/editors since, uh, newish to the community and I have no idea who any of you are, but I’m hinging my efforts on the fact that I’m an anal retentive bastard to avoid most common grammatical errors.

So, that’s pretty much it. Updates will happen...when I write them? Probably not regularly, I’m out of practice, but they will happen; trust me, I’ve got a very, very long story planned out, I just have to trudge through the details to get there, and who knows how often I’ll get distracted by new characters that pop up and demand that I write them out of nowhere (Ridge Dancer, I’m lookin’ at you)

TL;DR: I’m a terrible writer and/or person, hope you enjoy the gnarled, eldritch abomination of literature I’m going to hack out for you. Yes, you. Not that other guy, just you specifically. The one reader I’ll have actually gotten after going through the effort of writing this. Because you’re special. And I’m drunk, so I like people more. Cheers!

~Firefeng