Goddammit.

The human held his hand to his forehead. The purple unicorn across from him hastily scribbled notes onto her scrolls, her mouth frowning in concentration. She had already accrued a sizable amount of scrolls that were piled into a perilously teetering mountain off to the side. Upon finishing, she returned her wide-eyed stare to him, a manic grin planted across her face.

So repeated the pattern of the last five minutes, when his fatigued shuffling had startled his lavender cellmate awake. She had woken with her face in a pool of saliva on top of one of her open scrolls, groggily looking about in confusion before catching his movement around his pink, spherical prison. The unicorn's eyes widened considerably as she snapped to attention, fetching a full bottle of ink, a quill, and a blank roll of parchment from the saddlebags at her side. Her last quill still hung in her disheveled mane, unnoticed, forlornly abandoned to its tangled plum prison.

She—it was a ‘she’ if the high-pitched voice were any indication—had garbled out some melodious sentence while smiling widely, but he had just ignored her. He didn't speak alien, and with the forcefield around him, couldn't learn the language enough for her words to matter. Instead he remained silent and took in her odd appearance.

‘My God, their eyes are huge. That looks so goddamn weird it’s not even funny.’ He wondered what sort of predators they had here that necessitated such an evolutionary development. Were they nocturnal? Wait, their eyes were forward-facing. Were they predators?

The man started to bring a hand to his chin in thought before catching a glimpse of something strange. He held his hands out before him as his eyes widened in surprise. ’This is definitely a first. That I can remember, anyway,’ he thought almost bitterly. His hands were cartoons, outlines and all. Freakishly detailed cartoons, but cel-shaded appendages nonetheless. Taking in his surroundings, he noticed the room seemed to shimmer between what seemed “real” and this highly intricate form of art. He was certain the world hadn’t appeared this way when he first arrived. Almost certain, anyway, if his memories could be trusted, and more recent events never really gave him as much trouble as his older memories.

The room continued oscillating between “real” and “animated” with increasing quickness. After one final, heaving shimmer that sent out a wave of warped surrealness, the setting stabilized and left behind the elegant outlines of the same highly detailed animation that had come to represent his hands. Glancing at the unicorn, her eyes no longer appeared disproportionately large. They were still really weird, he decided. ’This definitely is one of the weirder ones I’ve been to. Wasn’t even aware realities could be like this, but this means I’m probably becoming more attuned to this place. I was probably only out for a few hours, in that case.’

He drew himself inward, testing the reserves of his available lifeforce. It still only dripped out in a meager trickle. He sighed in frustration and plopped down on the edge of the small bed on the wall of his cell. He raised one hand off to his side, and wove an all-too-familiar magic through his palm. A small fireball puffed into existence, floating a few inches above his grasp. He simply stared at it, running through a mental checklist to attempt to rationalize his powers’...diminutive effects. The scribbling sound in the background became noticeably more frenzied at his manifestation of the fire. He turned a tired gaze to the unicorn. She was small, much smaller than the blue and white winged ones he had seen earlier. Her head only came up to his chest, whereas the blue one was slightly taller than he was, and the white one towered over him by a foot. He wondered if this lavender one was a juvenile of the species.

“Hey, kid?”

She immediately stood at attention, her pupils shrinking even as her eyes impossibly widened further. She rushed close enough to the forcefield that her nose was almost pressed against it, while the last parchment she was writing snapped closed like a spring-coiled window blind wrapping into itself. She immediately summoned another blank scroll from her bag and stared intently at him.

“Oh, so you like the fact I can talk? I’m sure you find my gibberish endlessly amusing,” More scribbling. He chuckled mirthlessly. “The stranger aliens always do. Non-humanoids always seem surprised I’m sapient.” The purple unicorn failed to conceal her glee at his continued speech. What the Hell, she couldn’t understand him, anyway. “Well, then, dearie, lemme tell you a little story. I’ve been jumping dimensions for a thousand years, now, trying to get home. There was this mess where I had to kill a certain fuckhead god, the God, and then...well, it’s hard to remember.” He focused his gaze on the floating ball of flame, which had brightened to a blue as the edges of it flurried in quicker undulations than before. “So, after I slew the bastard—that part was pretty awesome, killing God—I exhausted the last of my power reviving my friend-”

He paused.

“My friend...what’s her name?” He stared blankly for a few seconds, attempting to forcefully summon the name of the woman who had thrown herself before him, sparing him a final, surely fatal attack. Instead what came to mind were a thousand other memories from a thousand other worlds. She had saved his life. He vaguely remembered saving her from something once before, some horrible fate, but he couldn’t outline the details. All he could seem to remember was that she was important to him. She was a friend. And he couldn’t even remember her damn name.

“GODDAMMIT!” he raged, balling his hand into a fist as the fireball fluttered out of existence before slamming his hand into the wall behind him. The ceramic plates shuddered, but held, a web of cracks originating from the center of his strike. He took a deep breath and resummoned the ball of fire, again regarding the pittance of magic available to him with no small degree of disgust.

The unicorn had blissfully ceased her fevered writing at the outburst, but once he calmed down she lowered her head to her scroll and the maddening scratches of her quills began anew. ’Quills?’The man cocked an eyebrow at the second quill and parchment she had levitated in his mental absence. She was writing on two parchments at once, the annoying scritterscratter of pen to paper performing an asymmetrical orchestra of aggravating ambience to the otherwise unsettling quietude of his present surroundings.

“Whatever. I revived-” he scowled, “I revived my friend after I killed the lousy bastard that was the steward of our fucked up creation. But I used up the last of my power to do so. And that, Ms. Fuckin’ Horse, was not a good idea.” He shook his finger at her, chidingly. He still didn’t know what he meant to acheive by reviving...by reviving his friend, if it meant the destruction of their universe. But he had. And now he was lecturing a lavender horse. Well, why the Hell not? He had encountered weirder things on his journey. No harm in continuing. “Instead, I put all the resurgence of power into...into...” He paused, one finger on his chin in thought. “I just forced it into getting away. I just somehow knew how to do it...And that’s how I made my first jump and had to deal with an entirely new reality that had none of my friends or sisters in it.”

He spent the next 3 hours rambling. It had been hundreds of years since his story last escaped his lips in its entirety, and it was oddly comforting putting into words what he barely remembered everyday. Besides, what harm could it do? She couldn’t understand a lick of what escaped his mouth, and he only remembered fragments, anyway.

“...and that’s pretty much how I spent the last millennia. At least, so far as I can remember,” he added darkly. Her note-scratching was his only response. She paused, her eyes flitting between the two scrolls. She nodded in confirmation to some internal thought.

“You have no idea what I’m saying, do you?” More scribbling, then a pause as she looked at him with those wide eyes of hers, some other emotion having been added to the studious interest. “None of this means anything at all to you.” He leaned forward, putting on the sweetest, warmest smile he could imagine. “Would you like me to tear your limbs off and bludgeon you to death with them?” The sparkle behind his smile could match the gaiety of the night’s dancing stars. “I could even tie up your family and force them to watch your painfully slow execution before gouging out their eyes and letting their last moments be punctuated by their own tortured screaming,” he added gleefully with a playful wink.

After a few seconds of writing, she looked up from her parchments and regarded him joyously, eyes brimming with warmth and smiling back with the same fervor he had just falsely conveyed.

He sighed, burying his head in his hands. “You’re just another floating mote of sentience, a paramecium of fleeting mortality in an endless throng of others, all of them content with their puerile capers through life while they wait to die, until they get to die. One among billions in this reality. This reality is but one in a sea of infinite others. And I’ve only been to a few thousand. And that handful of random realities? Fucking horrifying. People plagued by demons, demigods, monsters, untold horrors numbering far more than the stars in your tiny world’s night sky. And I kill their nightmares for them. It's the one spot of happiness I have in this endlessness. I fucking enjoy it. I happily fight them, crushing numberless objects of unmentionable terror beneath my feet, overpowering them with gleeful ease. I still try to save people. Because that’s what I do. That’s what’s required of me. I have to atone for-”

He stared dully though his open fingers splayed across his face.

“I don’t remember. I don’t remember why I have to atone,” he muttered. “But I’m so sick of this shit. I’m so tired of the fruits of my...actions,” he spat, “Of the fields of dead.” The unicorn had begun to write more slowly, her quills hesitant as she flicked her gaze between her two papyruses and his eyes. “Scared people who I’ve saved, they always try to thank me. ‘You’ve saved us from the Destroyer that has plagued our land for generations!’ they shout. ‘Those demons have laid siege to our kind for millennia, and you routed them in a day!’ they celebrate. ‘Our virgin daughters will no longer have to be sacrificed to the Dark Gods over yonder to ensure the safety of our village!’ they cheer.”

The scribbling had stopped and the mare gazed at him with moist eyes, simply staring in shock and sadness, but he was too lost in his thoughts to notice.

He took a deep breath. “And all it does is piss me off,” he grumbled bitterly. “I don’t care about them, their kind, their daughters. I never wanted to see their fucked up worldt. I just wanna see my sisters again. I just wanna see my best friend...my best friend...Mitchell? Maddock? Marco?”

‘No. NO. You remember his name, just think. In high school, you two spent far too much time at childrens' playgrounds in the early hours of the morning, just talking.’ His friend eventually took his sister out on a date—as her brother, he was fucking livid at that, but she was his sister and he brooked no bullshit when it came to seeing her smile. He had seen the small smile that graced his sister’s lips when she was around his friend, so he had allowed it. His friend had talked him down from a damn suicide. Man, was...Marco? Man, was his friend fucking terrified when he first showed the human the engagement ring. He had made his friend go through with it anyway, because deep down he knew his friend Mick...? Mick? Deep down he knew his friend and his sister were meant for each other. They loved each other. They were the only real friends he had in his fucked up, empty world. But then...what? What was his name? He remembered his sister’s name. It was Salina, right? Started with an ‘s’, anyway. No, he was sure it was Salina. He had called her ‘Sal’ as a nickname. He liked nicknames. What was his friend’s nickname? Michael? No, that wasn’t right.

“I just want to go home,” he wheezed, his hands clenching the back of his skull as he hunched over, trying for the thousandth time to make sense of this unending life, of this unflinching immortality of constant failure.

“Just...let it end. Let it end,” he whispered.

Something warm nudged him gently on the shoulder. He brought his head up slowly and regarded the deep purple eyes that glistened thoughtfully a foot away from him. He carefully reached his hand up to meet her head.

Twilight wrote as quickly as her magic allowed her to without setting the parchment on fire.

The creature had finally begun yammering out his indigenous gab—’its indigenous gab,' she corrected, thinking back to Pinkie from the night before—after pacing through his cell for a few minutes.

At first ‘it’ seemed taken aback by something in its surroundings, but then it did something that temporarily caused her mind to hitch. The being had summoned a fireball, which itself wasn’t surprising; most fillies pick up the spell during Magic Kindergarten (she shuddered, repressing the memories) not too long after they learn basic telekinesis. It was the way the creature did it that caught her interest. Being the embodiment of the Element of Magic, she didn’t need to cast a scanning spell to see the interwoven threads of Chaos and Harmony magic behind the flame. The Chaos threads seemed to be creating a constant explosion, whereas the Harmony threads molded the explosions and kept them in balance. It was a remarkably inefficient way to summon a simple fireball, she noted, but it did confirm what the princesses had told her of the being’s dual nature, and also indicated it could cast both at the same time.

Shortly thereafter, he had begun speaking. ’Voice has a deep timbre to it. I can probably chalk another one up to Pinkie’s frustratingly accurate intuition without requiring a physical examination of him to verify,’ she thought with some regret, remembering the Princesses orders that the being was not to be touched.

The being continued his monologue and she dutifully recorded phonetically every incomprehensible word that escaped his mouth. There was something oddly familiar about his native tongue, but she couldn’t quite place it immediately. ’Oh, yesyesyes! Judging by the frequency of this sound, it’s most likely a preposition or a definite article. Maybe “the”?’ she thought, levitating a second scroll to record possible analogues between their separate languages.

He spoke for close to three hours straight, and about halfway through the nagging familiarity of his language finally flowered into a startling realization. ’He’s speaking a modified form of Ancient Romane!!!’ She was overcome with excitement, as she had taken numerous courses on the language to better translate the older books in the Canterlot Library. She was a little rusty, but between the pattern she had previously recorded and her memories of the old pony language, she had started to translate his earlier rambling even as her ability to compartmentalize her own thoughts allowed her to continue writing his present speech. She found some of it highly unlikely, ’So then I punched an Elder God in the face and he exploded in a sea of green blood that smelled like vanilla, sparing the local star system from being consumed by madness...uhh, right...’ Others left her horrified. ’A shadow magic that turned an entire world into mindless husks that consumed each other, even the innocent fillies...’ She shuddered, due in no small part with how the alien had dealt with it. She wasn’t even sure she believed any of it, but she continued recording and translating as the being ranted on.

She paused. ’I’m going to sever....sever...no, that doesn’t seem right. Cut? Rip?’ She paused, her hoof to her chin, before smiling wildly. ’Tear! You’re going to tear me limb from limb and beat me to death with them! I understood that sentence completely! I wonder what other words I can learn from all this?!’ She smiled widely at the creature, her eyes shining with glee at the possibility of learning something new.

Her mirth was short-lived. As he continued speaking, she wilted inside more and more. She had discovered the magic of friendship after 15 years of life, and it had changed the way she had viewed the world. He had gone hundreds of years without a friend, and yet even still was trying to return to his own worldstream because of the bonds he had made there. But he was forgetting. Names, places, events. How long until he forgot his friends? His two sisters? He was already forgetting his best friend’s name. And the worst part was, he knew it. He knew he ran the risk of losing the only anchor he had in his life, what precious few memories he had of his friends and family.

Tears glistened in Twilight’s eyes. ’Nopony should have to suffer this fate,’ she thought bleakly.

She walked calmly forward through the pink forcefield that contained him. It was an imitation of her brother’s signature spell, scaled down so every guardspony could cast it, and reversed such that it kept things in rather than warding them away while allowing entrance from the outside. The being had buried his face in his hands and was babbling, now, making it hard to catch everything, but she caught his last utterance like a knife to the heart.

“Just let it end.”

She nuzzled his shoulder gently, leaving his black upper clothing slightly moist from her poorly concealed tears. He looked up, his large eyes gazing into hers with stark sobriety and resentful surrender, but there was a spark in them, too. Resolution, she thought. Even as torn as the being was, its brilliant blue eyes still burned with life and a desire to continue.

It slowly raised its arm gingerly and placed its hand gently on her head. It was warm. Hot, even, but with a wild, grinning flame that seemed to dance with the joyous machinations of the stars themselves. She heard a barely perceptible sigh and instinctively pressed harder against his touch, trying as best she could to comfort him. His touch seemed to warm even more.

Had she sensed his sadness? ’Pfft,’ he dismissed the thought derisively. ’Just a momentary lapse. I’m way too fucking awesome to be sitting around and moping. Hell, this one time I punched fucking Cthulhu in the face so hard the shockwaves from the blow forced its green blood to burst from its skin like it was a damn grape in a microwave. Goddamn hilarious, if you ask me. And oddly fragrant. Getting the bloodsplosion washed out of my armpits took a few realities, that shit got everywhere. But damn if I didn’t smell like a fuckin’ flower. I wonder if this reality carries ‘Blood de Cthulhu’ as a cologne. Mark would wingman the shit outta me if I had that when I got back. Of course I’ll get home to see...Mark. Yes, Mark, my bestest buddy ever. And my sisters Jacey and- Jacey and-’ He sighed quietly, willing the frustration away as the unicorn before him pressed her head slightly harder against his hand, her eyes closed.

He would make it. He didn’t know how, but he would. What else was he supposed to do? But for now, he was trapped in this reality until he could figure out what ailed his lifeforce. And in his current state, his inability to communicate did him no favors.

Deciding it was for the best, he spun a magical weave that had become annoyingly necessary in the last millennium. The magic traced its way through his fingers into the unicorn’s brain, hunting through its labyrinthine mental complexity in search of the language center of her mind. As the spell struck home and began mapping her knowledge of language, he smiled inwardly at his success.

He didn’t notice her horn charging up.

She was so distracted by the softness of his glowing touch that she almost didn’t catch the threads of magic weaving through her own mind. Almost. She felt its tendrils arcing through every part of her brain—’Harmony magic,’’—she thought to herself even as the weaves of the magic glistened sickeningly over that thought.

’He’s trying to read my mind. My thoughts. MY MEMORIES.’ Her psyche reeling at her brash stupidity at approaching the creature who was currently violating her mind, she responded by instinct, acting to protect herself. She teleported to the far side of the room, severing the connection he had with her mind immediately. She moved to lower herself into a defensive position before she saw the tattered threads of his magic whip backwards and implode into his chest with a sharp snap, sending him hurtling into the nearest wall. She inwardly cringed as she realized not all of the cracking sounds was the wall caving in under the force of his crash. A majority of them were probably the alien’s bones. After colliding with the wall, he merely slumped down, his chin on its chest and his open eyes staring blankly at nothing. A small trickle of blood oozed out of the corner of his slack-jawed mouth.

’No...’ she thought blankly, immediately scanning his physical signs with her magic. There was no heartbeat, and his brain activity had utterly ceased.

’I...he’s...he’s dead. But I didn’t mean- He was- I just...what have I done!?

She screamed in fear and confusion, casting a spell to teleport her anywhere but here. She collided rudely with the forcefield, forgetting that it warded against magic along with physical bodies in her anguish. She began scratching madly at the field with her hooves, screaming wildly for someone to release her and terrified of what Princess Celestia might do to her for—her eyes reeled in spasms—killing somepony.

A violent wave of thaumaturgical energy washed over her, far more powerful than the magic she had at her command, and she whipped her head around violently to the source. The alien’s body was wrapped in gnarled arcs of white lightning as it levitated off the ground, a whirlwind of like-colored fire spinning beneath it. The fire shot up in powerful gout of flame that knocked Twilight to the ground and completely consumed the corpse of the alien.

She shook her head to clear it after the blast. The world was still spinning around her when she registered a familiar voice spoken in her own language.

“Hey, kid.”

She looked up from her position on the ground to see the alien crouched next to her, a look of concern on his face, of all things. Her mouth widened almost as much as her eyes in shock as she began scrambling away from him to the farthest corner of the cell. She began hyperventilating wildly as she pressed her back against the pink forcefield with as much force as her trembling legs could manage. The creature merely chuckled at her reaction.

“Heh, yeah, that’s generally how they all react.” He was still crouched in the same unassuming position across the room.

“Just so we’re clear: yeah, you did kill me. And yes, I didn’t stay dead.”

Twilight's jaw worked soundlessly, the lids of her eyes quivering violently in fear, in terror, as she just began to realize that the creature’s translated monologue might actually be true.

“We can get to that later,” the revived being continued. “In the meantime, I feel introductions are in order.”

He stood up to his full height and pointed a finger at his chest. “My name is Phoenix, for obvious reasons. Well, assuming you have that myth here, anyway.” Twilight simply stared. “Most ponies- poh-nees- pee-puh- pee-puhl- people? Oh, fuck it. Most ponies call me Nix. And you are?”

Twilight simply fainted.

“Oh, Twilight,” a cheery voice giggled from behind him. “You are so goofy sometimes!”

Nix twisted around with blinding speed at the strange voice, instinctively bringing his arms up to protect himself. Instead of warding off the prospective threat, he found himself entangled in a pink blob.

“Silly-filly, if you wanted a hug, all you had to do was ask!”

Author's Notes:

Right, I said this was gonna be a short chapter. I also said I have a problem with pacing a story. The last chapter, this one, and the next one I'm gonna write were all, in my brain, originally meant to be one chapter, but then they got long and each one seemed to have a natural endpoint.

This chapter also ended up a lot more somber than I originally intended. I know I roped a few of you in with comedic relief the first coupla chapters, and this one was supposed to have a second act that was a humorous counterweight to the first half, but it just seemed natural to end the chapter where I did, even if it was a bit too weighty a subject matter for my faltering literary skills. (I totally promise that the "tragedy" tag I've slapped onto this story with duct tape and a bit o' spit comes into play later on. Hopefully, by then, I can write well enough to make it matter, too!)

So, my original idea for "chapter 3" became "chapters 3, 4, and 5". I'm not even gonna try to predict how long chapter 5 is. This was supposed to be a "short" chapter (2k words?), and I ended up cutting it off halfway at 4k+ words.

As always, please temper your critiques of my story as derivative and plain with the soothing balm of beating me violently with my own grammatical errors. If you catch a mistake or a plot hole or something you think would make my story better, by all means, tell me. Any request that I include a red-maned alicorn into the story will be met with a facepunchbloodsplosion via Nix. I'm already skirting the line with unpopular tropes here, no way will I press the issue further. Also, I'm drunk and rambling now, but typing is fun. Wheee!

I am going to have a serious blast next chapter now that Nix can talk to the two princesses...