TPeaceful Repose

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Horror

A pony wakes up in a strange room chained to a bed, with a princess who needs his help.

• Suicide / Self Harm
• Death
• Twilight
• Rarity
• OC

Undome Tinwe · 2.1k words  ·  60  4 · 1.4k views

Today we’re going to be having a look at Undome Tinwe’s Peaceful Repose, which is a story… not from the Nightmare Night in April contest way back in 2019 (which apparently has no winners, from what I can tell). 

Now right off the bat, the story does a few interesting things in the juxtaposition of its title and the contents of the story itself. The title doesn’t seem to agree at all with how the story is tagged, and even the description could be interpreted as a story from virtually any other genre. But remember that we’re talking horror, so in this case this is a great thing. Because a part of horror is the unexpected, and I think that’s a central theme in this story, one way or another.

Let’s hit it. 

The plot of the story is quite simple at first. An unnamed pony wakes up chained in a basement somewhere, with only Princess Twilight to answer his questions.

Before we continue I have to address something interesting that this story does. The story is structured in such a way that places Twilight as a narrator, yet not in a typical manner: there are no quotation marks throughout the story, and Twilight’s voice is the only one we can hear.

This unique narrative distinction works incredibly well for this story. To me, we seem to be in Twilight’s head while at the same time seeing what unfolds through the eyes of the stallion, and that’s pretty neat in and of itself.
Anyways, on the plot. The story pretty quickly asserts a questionable scenario to draw the reader in: why is this pony here, and what does Twilight want with him?

From here the plot complicates a little. It turns out that Rarity and Twilight have married, but Rarity came down with an incurable disease. Twilight, in her desperation to save her, stumbled across a forbidden form of magic: vampires.

That’s right. Twilight turns Rarity into a vampire. But it doesn’t stop there: Rarity doesn’t just need blood to survive, she needs the life force from the blood. Meaning that Twilight’s going to have to find some live stock to keep her lover alive. And that’s exactly where this stallion comes into play.

I will say that the inclusion of vampires was… absolutely not where I thought this story was going. And I’ll be honest here and say that the entire time, I really didn’t know where the story was going. And this again is a good thing, because it adds a sense of unease to this story that not many others have.

Perhaps this story isn’t exactly scary to me in the sense that it’ll keep me up all night, but the dread that just weighed down on me is impossible to downplay. Right off the bat you get this sense of unease that something’s not quite right here and the author does a wonderful job of keeping that unease up throughout the story.

I guess I can say that I felt a sense of… I don’t know, disappointment seems harsh but I lack a better term at the current moment, when I got to the vampire section. Again, the payoff was brilliant and everything else was super strong, but this kind of hung me up a bit.

I can probably attribute this to my earlier point that I had a hard time seeing where this story was going to go. I guess this conditioned me to expect extravagant reason, or something so far out there that it’d be an epic climax, and ‘vampires’ was just a tad bit disappointing.

But I digress. Everything else in the story was really good and I didn’t feel let down by this at all. 

I’ll focus this bit on Twilight as she’s really the only character we get insight on. And I have to say she’s done brilliantly. Twilight retains quite a bit of her show personality here and it shows, which is always a great thing.

We can see that Twilight even has reserves about what she’s doing, and that’s understandable given that she’s the Princess of Friendship. Yet on the other side, we can see that Twilight has lost herself to this method and has convinced herself that this is the right thing to do.

Much of her lines to the unnamed stallion reflect this. She lays out her viewpoints and cites the ultimate motivator behind her actions: love.

And she’s not the only one she’s convinced. We find out that Rarity herself was appalled by what Twilight had done and had tried to comit suicide, forcing Twilight to restrain her and forcibly feed her blood until she could ‘convince’ her otherwise.

The entire thing is quite sadistic when you look at it, but that’s the point of the story. Twilight’s convinced herself that what she’s doing is right and just, and nothing can convince her otherwise.

The only sentence that I got hung up on was this one:

I told the lies I needed to get them to let me take Rarity to my lab and not bother me until it was all done, and then I got to work.

For the sole reason of that my brain is screaming at me that there should be another ‘to’ after ‘needed,’ but after reading it a few times I think I can live with it the way it is.

Other than that… I really didn’t notice too much prose wise.

I suppose the argument could be made that a bit of the story feels like the “villain lays out their entire plan to the trapped hero” cliche, but I think that’s just a flaw of this style of narrative, because there really isn’t another way to get the motivations of Twilight across. And since those motivations are such a good part of this story I don’t know if I would do anything different here.

And the double spaces weirded me out at first, but I understand their placement: their there to imply “dialogue” from the stallion that we don’t see. I can think of a couple other options here but I guess I ended up getting used to them in the end. 

So all in all, this was a nice little piece that seems criminally underrated. I enjoyed the premise of everything and was kept engaged throughout the entire piece, and while some of the plot points didn’t appeal to me, I can confidently say that I really did like this piece. Great work, author! 

If you’re looking for a nice little dread piece about Twilight and can get behind the non-typical style of narration, I’d highly recommend you to read this piece.

Really liked this piece, and while again it probably won’t be giving me nightmares or keeping me up at night, I may return to it time and time again. Great work!

Plot: 8
Characterization: 8
Prose: 8

Average: 8