CHAPTER 1: When a Dimensionally Displaced Teen is Dying a Tediously Delayed Death.
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In the forsaken reaches of a world long lost to the maws of desolation, there stood a statue of ancient origin, an enigma carved from pure black onyx and amethyst geode. This monument, solitary and solemn, presides over a land gripped by ruin. The terrain beyond its serene vigil is a nightmarish tableau, where the ground itself has turned traitor. Spanning the surrounding lands, malignant, cracked, and shattered crystals jut from the ever-churned earth with their subtle, dim glow—a sprawling network of twisted, malformed broken spires, their cracked surfaces slick and grotesque as if the very sky had wept them into existence in some cataclysmic folly of teleportation gone awry.
This accursed landscape seemed to recoil from the monument, leaving a sanctified perimeter untouched by the crystalline affliction or even the barren dead-lands. Here, within this hallowed circle, the air remained a bastion of purity, untouched by the venomous chaos that reigns beyond. The atmosphere outside this tranquil enclave howled with the fury of poisoned winds and acidic vapors, painting a stark contrast to the calm within the last vestiges of an ancient domain.
The grass upon the ground was lush and green, the flowers wild and free grew and died and grew again as they had for ages upon ages; the little trickling brook rising from the statue's feet fed the small, shallow, crystal-clear pond, all within the little circular meadow of peace amidst the raging hell that pervaded the beyond.
The monument stood there at the center of that meadow, a lifeless form of black rock and purplish-blue crystals, a carved visage born from the world itself and not from some eldritch origin among the stars. She stood there, placed as both sentinel and guardian of the last sanctuary, a silent host holding at bay the relentless assault of corruption that seeks to encroach upon this last untainted refuge. Her placement was meant as a bulwark against the decay, a beacon of hope once meant for eyes that now would never again behold it. Here, amidst the calamity of a dead world, the statue remained standing despite nature's chaotic and tortured wrath, a steadfast holdout in the eye of a perpetual storm.
The crystals fused with the landscape both near and far from the monument suddenly increased in their glow a hundred-fold, some lighting up with eldritch flames from the cracks within their smooth-as-glass surface, crumbling in on themselves into nothingness as their integrity failed, others exploded from the sudden influx of energy, wrecking the already thoroughly ruined landscape and damaging the bonds of space-time where they once were, leaving broken afterimages that would kill a person if they had been looking upon such an event at that very moment, even from far, far away.
The crystals stabilized as on the far horizon a veritable volcano erupted as one of the larger crystalline formations was sacrificed to maintain a balance. A pop of displaced air above the meadow broke the cycle, and all the crystals went dim with barely a hint of glowing left behind as the distant newborn volcano raged on.
A bipedal form covered in filth fell from the sky into this haven; the air crackled with a tangible energy at their place of origin over the one place on this dead world that wouldn't kill the poor creature within moments of its arrival.
And for the first time in millennia, a voice was heard in the meadow.
It was a long, broken, and blood-curdling scream.
The fall would have killed her if it hadn't been for the pond, and even then, her leg was certifiably broken. She had been in the locker, that damned coffin they had made for her and stuffed her in. The last bell had rung, and no one had come to get her out. The janitor, passing her locker with his noise-canceling headphones blaring death metal at closing time, had been the last straw. She had cried and cried, but he either didn't hear or pretended not to, and she hadn't known which was more horrifying to believe.
She had given up all hope at that moment; they had won. She would die from exposure to rotten blood, urine, and excrement, killed by toxic septic shock by the time morning came. She wasn't strong enough to break free herself, and the janitor was the last person in the building who could have saved her from the death sentence that the bully trio had wreaked upon her.
She wouldn't live to see if any consequences for her death would fall upon them in turn, if at all, and she had cried out from her very soul at being denied basic justice, justified vengeance. Who else would die after her from their petty hatred if they got away with it?
It was unacceptable, and she had broken under the yoke of her despair. Then something had changed; she saw a vision, a vision that was itself broken, more broken than even she was. Something damaged had tried to connect itself to her and failed; its long tendril forcibly retracted and took her with it, freeing her from her prison... She did not know how she knew this; she just did.
Her first attempt at breathing free air had been pain unlike anything she had ever felt up to that moment. Her skin burned, her lungs burned, everything burned. Every taste bud in her mouth had died, and the scream she let loose was everything she had left in her as she fell.
She had hit the water of the pond, and her leg had snapped when it proved only shallow enough to reach her waist where she landed. She had fallen backward and become submerged before forcing herself to get up on one leg and cough the water she had inhaled out in sputtering gasps as she screamed and screamed. She wanted to pass out, but if she passed out, she would die from drowning, so she screamed instead.
The acid upon her burned skin ate away at her as she screamed some more and tried desperately to wash away the refuse, the burns, and the acid itself from her body.
She tore off her clothes as best she could and hobbled her way to the pond's edge to get her ruined pants off and away; all of it needed to go, the filth had soaked its way into everything, even her underwear, and the acid furnace she had just come out of had done the rest. She lay on the green grass of the pond's edge and wept, naked as the day she was born, her blurry vision staring up at a greenish-yellowish sky. With a whimper, she slipped back into the water of the small pond to find her glasses; if she waited until the adrenaline was gone, she would never be able to force herself back into that now filth-filled water.
She was beginning to despair when she found them, well, at least half of them. One lens was better than no lens, and she needed to see in order to find help and get to the nearest hospital. Hobbling out of the pond, she looked down at her left leg.
Yup.
That was broken. At least the bone wasn't sticking out. But she might be bleeding internally. She finally took the time to examine her surroundings, and she froze as she stopped screaming at every breath she took and saw the surrounding land through the storming greenish-yellow fog that occluded the sun from view, casting the dead world in a dim light.
She had only one conclusion.
She was dead, and this was hell.
She hobbled back away from the crystal-strewn acidic landscape in some attempt to come to grips with what she was seeing. It had to be a hallucination, but the pain was all too real in every breath she took, in every shift of burnt skin. The smell of her burnt hair, which had been singed all over and now brittle bits even broke off from acidic exposure.
Her back met stone, and she turned around only to fall on her rear with a hoarse cry of pain from her broken leg. She met the black stone eyes of the statue, and for a time, they stared at each other.
Taylor broke her gaze away from the carved statue of the winged unicorn; other than the hellscape of the world around her, that was the only thing worth staring at. She didn't really have anything else to do.
It had been a day and a half, and she didn't know how she was still alive.
She had a fever, she had no food, she had water but only from the little trickling brook of water that rose from the horse statue. She had fallen into the pond covered in filth and whatever the air outside this bubble of safety was made of; she didn't dare touch it, much less drink it, as she was in bad enough shape as it was.
She couldn't eat the grass, although she had tried to eat the flowers—to little success. She was running on empty and had taken to just observing the statue that was her only companion here.
She had tried to leave the bubble around the statue, "tried" being the key word. The skin on her left hand had come off in the water of the pond as she desperately tried to get the acid off of it.
She had come to the conclusion that she had escaped death only to delay it by a mere day or two. She had done everything she could to see if she was some sort of cape with teleportation powers, maybe that was how she had gotten here, maybe she was just in some quarantine zone somewhere that was uninhabitable because of the acid air, and she could leave as she had arrived.
No dice.
She could feel where something was supposed to have been, but when whatever had brought her here had snapped back to its source, it had torn whatever was supposed to be there out before it could properly settle in... and she was very disturbed to understand this and not know how she knew it.
Powers were bullshit, and apparently what was supposed to be her power was just as weak and as broken as she was. At least it tried to give her a way out of the locker before it broke and left her here in this forsaken place she was very sure she was not supposed to be.
The weird broken vision she had in the locker told her that much; she also wasn't supposed to remember it, but she did.
More hints that her would-be power, or whatever made it work, was inherently damaged somehow. Just her luck.
Although she was thankful for the few extra hours of life to live, if only to contemplate all her mistakes, remember her best memories, and pray to God for rescue and that if she was able to muster a shred of faith when she died, that He would count it in her favor and let her soul go to wherever her mother was. She didn't really know a lot about religion, but she was dying, and she was willing to admit that she was scared and had very few distractions to avoid facing that fear.
One of those distractions was the statue.
It was like a Greek's rendition of what every seven-year-old girl thought the prettiest horse would look like, with cartoonish proportions that were subtle yet still supporting the figure's mature appearance and stern look. The winged unicorn was wearing battle armor, with a sword sheathed upon her back, and her expressive face was stern yet calm as it stared across the little pond and out at the ravaged hellscape beyond the safety of the bubble around it.
The bubble of safety was circled around the equine. Something she did not believe for one second was a coincidence. It was made of black onyx and what Taylor could only guess was amethysts; the pure onyx stone made up the body while the amethysts made up the mane, eyes, and tail of the equine. The armor was cut from the stone but bore the impurities of onyx like battle damage, differentiating it from the toned beast that wore it.
It was some sort of horse, so Taylor could only assume some cape had made it, maybe a shaker or tinker because of the safety bubble it made for her to die in. Maybe it was multiple capes and normal people who had made it before leaving it here.
Who knows.
It didn't really matter to her anymore; she could feel her fever getting worse, and she knew she didn't have long to live. Her legs were both swelling up, her broken one especially bad. She could see the infections setting in, later than she expected honestly. The burn wounds should have made infections a lot worse a lot sooner, but maybe the acid bath caused a delay.
She didn't know and kind of didn't care anymore.
At night, the crystal landscape had a dull, headache-inducing glow, and she had been unable to sleep because of the pain she was in. She had stared at the statue instead and counted the number of sparkles in its mane, pretending they were stars because the acidic haze made seeing the actual stars impossible.
She was still getting sunburned though, figures.
She had made a flower crown and placed it on the statue's head; she thought it seemed fitting somehow. She hadn't really had anything else to do but be miserable. She had shivers now, and she knew that once the fever made her delirious, if she wasn't already, that would be it.
Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars.
She only wished she could have said goodbye to her dad, even if he had purposely been avoiding her after her recent growth spurt. He had become an absent father, but she still loved him, even if he no longer wanted to care for her because it hurt to look at her. She regretted not explaining the bullying in full; she had told him it was happening but not how bad it had been. She hadn't dared tell him about her mother's flute; she didn't want to know what he might do to her or the people who broke it and defaced it in his anger if he found out. She still remembered the drunken rage he had gone through after the funeral, before Emma's family had stepped in to help, before she had gone to that summer camp and the Emma she thought she knew died and was replaced with an imposter.
There was nothing more sobering to a child than to realize that you could be truly afraid of your own parents. She couldn't give her dad a reason to drink again. She just couldn't.
And now she wouldn't even get to say goodbye.
She hurled the water she had forced down a few minutes prior and gave up trying to clean up her mess; her hands were shaking too much to properly cup the water from the brook. She really didn't think she had long if help didn't arrive.
she was pretty sure help wasn't coming.
She could drown herself in the pond, but she was too stubborn for that. Her mother would be ashamed if she did and Taylor would meet her with at least the pride that she had stuck it out to the end and not given in or given up hope that she would somehow survive. She was strong enough to die with dignity and she would not let anyone take that from her if she could help it.
She found it funny, how nobly morbid she got when facing a long and drawn-out death.
With failing strength, she crawled under the statue and leaned her back against one of the rear legs, the little brook bubbling up at her feet as she leaned back and accepted that she probably wasn't going to be moving from this spot before the end.
After a few minutes of just lying there, she must have blacked out.
Because she was suddenly face-to-face with the statue, except she wasn't looking into stone eyes. The large bluish-green orbs certainly weren't stone, and they were staring back. She felt like she was being read like a book, her entire being on display, her soul bared before those eyes.
She couldn't move.
The equine's eyes blinked.
A voice whispered in her head.
"Ye believe so little in mere faith, young one, yet the merest sliver of it hath brought you and I face to face.
Ye believe so little in friendship, young one, and justly so, for ye have faced the corruption and death of sisterly love. Yet you blind thyself to the gift of love and friendship with others for the actions of one broken, twisted child.
And now ye lay dying at my feet, and your embers of faith and cry for friendship even at death's door doth stir me from my long slumber.
Do not think that mere chance is this, for it is not chance that placed your arrival here in my realm.
The maker ordained it for a purpose.
Therefore, I think that the maker will not call your soul to judgment this day, Taylor Hebert."
The equine reared up and glared into Taylor's eyes with both pride and anger, and a great laugh issued forth from the horse's mouth as she physically spoke in a booming voice that shook Taylor to her core.
"YE THINK TO DIE BENEATH MY BARREL, YE STUBBORN CHILD. YE THINK TO PASS ON HERE IN MY DOMAIN. MOTHERLESS. NEARLY FATHERLESS. YE THINK TO DIE HERE IN AGONY, WITHOUT FRIENDSHIP? WITH LITTLE LOVE IN THY LIFE? EVEN AFTER YOU HAVE CROWNED ME WITH A CROWN WORTHY OF MY LEGEND! EVEN DESPITE THY PAINS OF BODY?!
NEIGH!
I SHALL BE THY FRIEND, THY CONFIDANT, EVEN THY MOTHER IN PART IF YE ARE WILLING!"
The creature put all four hooves on the ground and breathed out in a huff, seemingly calming down. Taylor still couldn't move, although tears were streaming from her eyes; every word the horse said rang true in a way that should have scared her, she couldn't even think of them as false.
Was this what being mastered felt like? Her tears were of wonder and not fear, yet she felt as if she should have been afraid in this instance.
"If you would be willing to accept me as such, then accept what I provide to thee. You will understand when the moment comes. Ye could stir a dead world from slumber, Taylor Hebert. If you awaken the sleepers, you will find true friends who will never betray you."
She could have friends. True friends? Truly? Someone wanted to be friends with her; more than that, something was willing to be a partial mother to her? This was an illusion, a lie, a dream, a daydream, a fevered delusion. It had to be, yet every word spoken settled into her mind like an immovable fact. Whatever power the horse was using made sure she understood that every word spoken came directly from the heart.
She was utterly terrified at how not terrified she was at this. She was supposed to be dying.
Not… This. Whatever this was.
"You can reawaken the magic of friendship bound to this wounded world; the dying embers stirred into a mighty flame just from accepting this simple truth, dear child."
The creature waltzed forward until its eyes were nearly all that Taylor's vision could see.
"I AM LUNA! I am the princess of the celestial moon, the guardian of the young and their dreams. I am the starry night filled with wonder; I am the guide to those lost in the dark. I am the lady of righteous vengeance. And I wish to be your friend, and your savior in your hour of need, Taylor."
Taylor felt the dream begin to fade.
"All you must do is accept my wish to help you Taylor… and become reborn."
She woke with a gasp as her inhalation caused her body to be wracked with pain; she was definitely still dying, but she wasn't dead yet. Even if she wasn't in septic shock, she would still have succumbed to starvation eventually. That dream wasn't real; it couldn't be.
Yet, no matter how hard she tried to dismiss it, the fact that it was real would not leave her. She shivered in fever as she lay there, trying to parse everything. She didn't even pretend that she fully understood what was going on. She had no idea what most of what the horse statue—not statue—said to her meant. Only that her name was Luna, she wanted to be her friend, to save her from dying. Even more than that, she offered to be her family, a mother in part, she had said.
What did that mean?
A drop of something landed on her head; it smelled like the most delicious thing she had ever smelled in her life. It smelled electric, it smelled like healing, like acceptance, it smelled like a bunch of concepts she was very sure should not in any way have smells.
She forced her aching body to look upwards, the stone teats of the statue were leaking a golden fluid. It seeped from the stone with no clear source and gathered at the stone tips before dripping down upon her. Taylor stared up at the impossible sight for a moment as another drop fell and landed on her chin, she felt her stomach spike in hunger pains even as her brain informed her under no uncertain terms that anything she ate would not stay down.
Not that she would be eating… that. Although there was nothing else to eat here but grass and flowers and she couldn't eat either. And it smelled so good, she tried to taste the drop on her chin, but her tongue was swollen and refused to cooperate. She tried to raise her hands to reach the golden nectar gathering on the stone teat, but her arms refused to move. She glared at the dripping stone edifices for another minute before coming to a decision. She was already naked, so embarrassment rang as a hollow excuse even in her own mind.
She wanted to live.
This Luna wanted to be her friend? And offer herself as some sort of weird statue horse adoptive mother. Like some twisted take on the story of Romulus and Remus? Alright then, another crazy thing to add to a growing pile of crazy things.
She wanted to live.
Screw it.
With the last of her strength, a dying Taylor raised her feverish body up and straightened her back. She turned her head as far as she could and then latched onto the equine statue and sucked the golden nectar into her mouth.
Energy exploded through her body as she suddenly had the ability to shift her position to better feed from the source of her new strength. Pleasant tingles prickled across her body as the chill air of the meadow suddenly no longer bothered her. She slowly shifted to all fours as she felt the swelling in her limbs disappear while she kept feeding. She couldn't stop and had lost all track of time. She felt the flow of nectar slow and quickly latched onto the other source in a blissful haze as she kept consuming the golden fluid that flowed from the stone.
She felt her broken leg snap back into place and placed her weight on her fully healed leg as she kept drinking. Finally, she was full; she collapsed onto the ground in bliss as she stretched her shoulder blades and limbs out and felt herself falling asleep.
She felt better, yet also weird, but in a very good way. She felt like she could sleep for days; she had missed sleeping the last two after all. Maybe if she slept, she would see Luna again. She wasn't opposed to that, even if she probably should be. She had questions: How much food was in the statue, and how long would it last? How did she get home from this place? Where was this place in the first place?
She had barely even noticed her hooves as slumber took her away from exhaustion's grasp and to the land of dreams.
(Authors Note)
Hi everyone! Spring semester is finally over and I will be finishing the rewrite of The Wreck this week.
Also Thought I would just leave this new story here without any further explanation.
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This Chapter was updated for grammar and spelling purposes as of 02MAY2024.