"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust."  Perhaps an inappropriate saying regarding loss of life. For it's true that all things come from water before fire or earth.  The tradition of burying the dead, at least in Equestria, wasn't established until the Equestrian expansion into landmasses without abundant seas.  Prior to that, they modeled death after birth: Into water one shall go, after out of water one has come.  It was there, beneath the gentle waves of Death's ocean, that Twilight lay.

Submersed in dark, soft water, she rested her scarred and abused soul in her abyssal niche at the bottom of the ocean, nestled next to her deceased friends in life, surrounded on all sides by the resting souls of billions that she had never met before.  Twilight, of course, wasn't looking around and perceiving this, for her death was indeed a peaceful one (far from what she deserved, some might say), but the occasional entity would be shepherded down or up and away by an envoy from the ocean.  Unlike life, everyone had a place down there, and so many spots were empty and waiting to receive someone new.  

Twilight Sparkle's soul didn't quite look like those around her; for hers was wounded very gravely.  Large patches of skin were missing. She had no teeth, and each time a miniscule change in the water caused a current or flow, one could see the lacerations in its body, sometimes so deep that a cut in her belly reached her broken and splintered spine.  She had no hair. No color but a milky, pink skin and a blurry purple eye; her other was so damaged that she just kept it closed most of the time.  So many scars, so much pain that she had to endure, and so much death brought to the little pony that it was a wonder her spirit wasn't brought into Death's ocean floor in pieces.  Perhaps the most noticeable problem with her was the fact that she quite literally had no heart.  Her chest cavity had been torn open from the inside, and the heart plucked away like a ripe fruit to be eaten.  Few beings can rip the heart from one's very soul, others in the sea who had been tortured to death over a period of years still had theirs, but Twilight had lost everything that was ever important to her.  Death had been the only kind gesture of a hostile existence, and it was rest that she desperately needed.  But of course, a soul that has committed atrocities so terrible as hers, wouldn't simply be allowed to sit and sleep.

The soul that was once Twilight' Sparkle's opened its eyes to look around.  Sometimes it did this, and she wasn't the only soul that couldn't sleep.  There were others wandering about, though they ever spoke to one another; speech refused to travel through the water.  Twilight never left her space, though. She enjoyed it there.  Her friends were there with her, even though they all were asleep, but at least she could be with them.  Rarity wasn't present, and that always caused Twilight a great deal of grief. She just wanted to hug her friend and apologize, to see her one last time and know that she was okay.  Each of Twilight's friends' souls received a scar above their heart from their interaction with the unicorn (though each one carried their own wounds from lifetimes spent), and Twilight wanted to address each one.  Even as her own colorless, sundered body nearly fell apart in the ebb and flow of the ocean of death, she brushed the hair, kissed the wounds, and made comfortable the souls of her friends.  They were the only treasures from her world that she was allowed, and she cherished them beyond everything.  

The routine didn't take long, so Twilight found herself sitting back in her space and slowly sinking back down onto the ocean floor.  She enjoyed it there, and though her emotions and her senses were all heavily deadened, she could still feel the gentle caress of ocean life.  It is perhaps a little ironic to say that Death's ocean is a lively place, but the souls that go there all need to be tended.  Luminescent fish, with shapes beyond alien to the unicorn, would flutter in on wings and water jets, cleaning her wounds and comforting her just as she had for her friends, and they did so for every single soul out there.  Twilight relaxed, feeling the sweeping of anemones and moss massaging her body below as fish and eels and other fantastical creatures swam in and out of her shredded form, slowly placing it back together.  They never made any real progress, but Twilight always felt restored while they were present, so she welcomed them.  She would usually fall back to sleep as they worked, waking up in what felt like a century or two to an unchanged world, but this time the fish and creatures simply stopped moving after a while.

A single pulse drummed the water, sending every single fish scattering, shutting off the light from the anemones beneath, and frightening the ocean of Death down into an even more lifeless state.  Twilight felt fear for the first time since her life, and she sat up straight to try and identify the pulse.  She had never felt that pulse before, but lo and behold it came again, this time more powerful.  Twilight could hear a force tearing through the water and maliciously pursuing something, but it wasn't like any peaceful sound she had ever heard come from the celestial fish that existed beneath.  This was a far different noise.  Twilight looked up, hoping to see it coming, but the darkness consumed everything beyond fifteen feet from her face.  

The pulsing was eventually replaced by a deep, core-shaking drone; an ancient and passionless language that only the ocean seemed to understand.  The tone was so low and deep that one could almost count the time in between sound waves as the creature spoke, but its voice wasn't what was to be feared.  As it spoke, the ocean surrounding the voice tentatively came back to life, reigniting the pale blue luminescence of every single creature at the floor.  This revealed an appendage merely thirty feet or so away from Twilight, clearly moving toward her and clearly with the intent to take her.  The appendage could only have been described as a tentacle of some colossal octopus or squid, but it was far more alien than that.  The tentacle was adorned with the color of milky blood, inconsistently spread across its scaly surface, and as it approached Twilight knew what it wanted.  The ocean seemed to fear this thing; light avoided it and even Twilight found herself sitting on an empty patch of the ground with her friends having been brought a few feet away from her.  Once more she was alone, threatened by some terrible force, and cowering in the one last place that gave her comfort.  She shook her head, tried to yell "no" at the creature, but it just kept advancing toward her.  Its movements seemed to take an eternity, yet it was gaining swiftly upon her all at once, so she did the only thing she knew to do; she swam to her friends.

Twilight found herself wrapping her forelegs around Rainbow Dash's waist, burying her face in the unconscious pegasus' neck, and begging her to wake up.  She shook Rainbow Dash violently, screamed, even slapped her, but she couldn't wake the dead for any reason.  Twilight looked over her shoulder and saw the tentacle behind her, stretching out and revealing its underside to her.  She threw vision away and to another friend, diving toward Applejack as quickly as she could in the viscous water.  

"Please, AJ, please wake up.  I need you right now I need you AJ!  Please!  Please wake up!  I need help!"  Twilight found herself looking down into Applejack's peaceful face, screaming into the water and hearing only the vibrations that her futile attempts at waking the dead mare made within her body.  Applejack's hair seemed weightless in the water, and it was as if she was surrounded in a calming aura, but Twilight Sparkle's fate was left only to the ocean.  She looked back once more, knowing that she was absolutely helpless, and wanting at least to see her fate coming.  The tentacle had unfolded itself, gaining twice the area before her and offering an almost peaceful resolution.  In lieu of suckers at the bottom of this tentacle, the thing was equipped with arms.  They had four elbows each, a wrist that connected a palm with two thumbs on opposite ends of each hand, and five individual fingers with seven knuckles each.  The revolting limbs looked as if they belonged to dragons once, covered in the same milky red colored scales and armed with claws that could puncture steel.  The arms held themselves out to Twilight, clawed hands open and welcoming the unicorn's soul.

Twilight sat on her haunches, holding a submissive stance and crying freely into the water.  She was hysterical, shaking her head and weeping loudly in the presence of the envoy before her, begging it to leave her alone.  "Please don't take me!  Just let me sleep, please, I just want to sleep, please don't take me.  Please..."

The tentacle wouldn't take "no" for an answer, though, and it reached out to grab Twilight.  She struggled, of course, and swam again to her friends' sides in an attempt to summon their help once more.  Now she was yelling at the top of her lungs, though still not making any noise, and still not rousing her friends from their slumber.  Her begging became frightened gibberish, and the abomination took Twilight's body in its grip.  She felt the claws dig into her open wounds, gripping her from inside and out and pulling her away from her friends.  Her screams, if traveling through air, would have brought even the most hardened warrior to yield, but the creature dragged Twilight away from her peaceful world, and took her, flailing, into the dark abyss of the water.  She never once ceased to fight, but she found herself unable to move as the tentacle slammed her against the ocean's surface.  She could see light, and it burned her sensitive eyes and skin, and she could feel the water stretching around her, cutting off the peace of the ocean as if it were a bubble taking her away from the depths.  She screamed and fought, trying to escape the creature, trying to wrench herself out of the light, out of the heat and the pain, out of the noise and the nauseating smells, but she only found herself writhing, screaming, and thrashing about in bed.  Her eyes opened and she looked about: Silk sheets, a quilt with the entire royal history of Equestria, and a very fine oak bed frame sat in her midst, and she sat upright.  

The air was cold and filled with aromas, all of which brought Twilight to the verge of throwing up.  The light burned her eyes so much that she couldn't see for a few seconds, and the sound of hoofsteps running toward the room buffeted her ears like sledgehammers on stone.  She looked down at her hooves, seeing them back together; purple, and otherwise returned to the state they had been in before her death.  Her body was violently shaking and tears were flowing freely.  Someone threw open the bedroom door, only to see the most miserable creature in the entire world; a being whom not even death would allow to sleep.