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Finalist and judge's top choice in Equestria Daily's 2012 Nightmare Night contest.
Fluttershy has been plagued by nightmares, and Twilight wants to help her get rid of them. But when the bookish mare begins to pry into the depths of Fluttershy's unraveling psyche, she finds more questions than answers. What do her dreams mean? Why won't they stop haunting her? And why does the creature she keeps seeing inside them seem like more than just a simple night terror?
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Read this on EQD. Suspenseful, scary, and mind-boggling all at once. Keep up the good work!
....that image still gives me the creeps.
1536924
You should give this version another look. I may have made a couple edits in some key places...
1536952 Will do. Thanks for the heads-up.
This is creepy as hell. Loved it.
I'll give you this much, it was the only one of the finalists that was actually, you know, scary. Still and all, though, I had three problems with it, two of them probably my own little bits of madness. Problem one...I don't like horror movies/stories that don't explain things. Guessing from the pile of letters towards the end that Celestia clearly knew what...whatever it was, was. And I don't know...personally, I find monsters more compelling when there's a reason, or, failing that, a COMPLETE LACK of reason. Dracula was motivated by sustenence and lust, Freddy by revenge, the Deadites out of shame of not being nearly as awesome as Bruce Campbell. But they had motivations. If it was a mummy's tomb kind of thing, that would've been okay, but it wouldn't let Fluttershy return the watch, so that wasn't it. The other option is the Slenderman kind of thing, where the monster is basically random, but this one clearly had some kind of motive. I'm not saying that everything needs to be explained, but some kind of backstory for what it is/was, even if its in an epilogue, would've been fantastic.
Problem two...is more specific to this particular setting. Why wasn't a letter to the Princess Twilight's plan A? I mean, narratively, yes, I understand, that throws a wrench into the story. But its one thing for humans in a horror movie to think, 'Eh, this apparently demonic prescence is probably nothing, since everyone knows monsters aren't real.' Its kind of another thing for a magic purple unicorn who's personally defeated a pseudo-demonic entity and a freaking Chaos God to not say to herself, 'You know what? Fluttershy seems pretty freaked out by this, and I can't find any information on it. But then, Nightmare Moon and Discord didn't show up much in the historical records...maybe Celestia knows something!" after the first, maybe second time Twilight talked to Fluttershy.
Third, and this is completely my own thing...its attracted to a gold fob watch, and has some kind of affect on time? My immediate reaction was, "Crap, Fluttershy is going to get her ass killed by a renegade Time Lord." Freely admit its random, but felt oddly compelled to mention it.
Again, good overall, and the only one of the finalists that was actually scary, and not so horrifically cliche that the endgame was evident ten lines in. Just...yeah.
Oh, last thing...clarify something, if you could? Did Fluttershy get eaten at the end, or...turned, I guess? Was a bit unclear on that.
Dude, you got robbed. ;_;
It took me until today for the horror to actually strike me. Hard. Seriously. Dammit, author, you kept me awake last night. Stop being so good at this horror thing.
Readers, you have no idea how scary this monster is until you've had a nightmare yourself. And writing cannot express how horrific it is to hear NIGEB repeated over your own death.
If I find a pocketwatch today, Aquaman, I'm coming for you.
Ooh, the title is "BEGIN" backwards. Clever. Very clever.
I'm going to read this right now!
EDIT: Oh my Celestia.
Sweet Celestia of a thousand names.
That was creepy. That thing is going to haunt my nightmares from now on until it finds me.
Thanks a lot, Aquaman.
But, creepy as it was, it was delightfully written. I thoroughly enjoyed its unsettling-ness from start to finish.
And I knew the NIGEB would turn into BEGIN at some point, but that GIF at the end got me. *shudder*
I loved it. Start to finish.
Your Benevolent Dictator,
--TwilitLightning
Edit v2.0:
PS. You sneaky little so and so.
I was unfazed by it at first, but I was wandering through the woods with my dog, Living Tombstone on full blast, and then inside my head, all I could hear was: "Nigeb. Go back. Go back. Nigeb."
Unsettling as heck, but it proves its mettle as a truly terrifying story.
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Yeah, that was weird. Considering how the only story I saw mentioned in the comments of the final result post was mine, ninth place out of ten was a lot farther back than I expected. Guess I had my time in the limelight with Harmony already. XD
Seeing what happened to this story makes me give up all hope of doing stuff to try and get featured.
Grats on winning your husbando's top choice, though.
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I really thought this story was going to kick everybody's ass....
Ah well, gold of judge's choice, as well as the choice of everybody who took the time to write out a full review. I think those informed votes matter to me a bit more than the popular one...
1540150
Yeah. Right up into I try to publish an original novel and make a living off writing. XD
Edit: That isn't to say I'm not immensely grateful for the seemingly unanimous praise the story receives. As I mentioned to a few of my friends in Skype, though, there's a riddle I heard once that's stuck with me for a long time: "Would you rather be an incredibly famous person with no talent, or an incredibly talented person that no one's ever heard of?" I doubt this story is a very good example of that (seeing as it was probably hurt more by its position in the original post than anything else), but the more I look at what the realm of popular fiction today, the more the pessimistic side of me wonders whether that riddle might actually be reality.
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My friends and I often talk about a work's popularity being based on what people want to hear more than the actual skill of the creator 
Again, not quite applying here but...
It's hard not to get crazy pessimistic when it comes to publishing and popular fiction
Pessimism!
Pessimism everywhere!
SPOILERS You haven't read the story? This is the comment section! Get outta here!
----------------------
The whole time...the whole time I was reading how the ponyvillians get killed by that thing and I didnt even know it...all those dreams we're their deaths, just damn
I had to go read those dream sequences again only now they were just chilling, like first you read the dreams and think "What does it MEAN?" and then in the end everything is revealed and all those dreams come rushing back to your memory and you go "...oh fuck."
OK most horror stories have the monster in the beginning attack one of them and then he kills them in different ways and we all know whos getting killed and whats going on.
Here everything is backwards, first we're told how they die and we get all the death scenes starting with the last kill but we don't even know it! Then in the ending the monster is introduced and he attacks. Then you get that mind blown moment "I WAS READING HOW THEY DIE THE WHOLE TIME? THE WHOLE TIME?! Thats just wow I mean damn." Its brilliant! BRILLIANT!
I like the story, it really reminds me of the works H.P Lovecraft.
1539584 Do not give up. If you give up now, you will look back later and wished you hadn't. Giving up is the easy choice, not the good choice.
Best Slendermane story I've read... Good job
I'm gonna read a comedy so I have a smaller chance of getting nightmares...
and that moving pic at the end... I wish there was a pony face to depict what I felt... just.... meep.
Yhw si ti syawla Yhsrettulf taht steg dessessop/desruc?
Taerg yrots, yawyna. I'm dalg ereht's gnihtemos gnimoc tuo ni eht larutanrepus rorroh ernegbus sediseb lla esoht diputs enamrednels sekiladaer.
1540750 I don't think it's quite a Slendermane story, because it has eye socket things, and it speaks.
1541124 .thgir eb "s'ereht" ruoy ekam dna ,tfel-ot-thgir ti od ,sdrawkcab epyt ot gniog er'uoy fI
Dude, this seriously freaked me out. I was connecting all the dots, and then...that image.
I hate you so much, Aquaman. Thanks for writing it.
Eldritch-esque horror! Excellent!
This was superbly well written with excellent descriptions of Fluttershy's thoughts and emotions. You really enabled me to get into her mind as she experienced utter dread, depression, and hopelessness. You made those feelings entirely tangible and quite visceral. Your prose, from the dreams to descriptions of the watch to the monster giving chase, you injected a unending sense of tension in the story that had a pretty nice grip.
You made a wise choice of Fluttershy and Twilight as the protagonists (though honestly, who else would you choose?) and the characterization was brilliant. You made Fluttershy’s transformation throughout the story feel entirely natural and really quite upsetting. The interaction between her and Twilight felt genuine. It was hard to read about Twilight’s dead-set logical mind in tandem with the knowledge that the monster was real, yet that made it all the better. It was a well constructed relationship that you wisely chose not to hinder with the introduction of other characters.
The Slendermane cousin was not bad. You walked the fine balance between describing some horrific aspects about it yet not giving us many details, leaving a lot of its appearance to the imagination. It always carried with it a sense of pure evil and horrifying inevitability. However, a point against it was that I picked up on the "go back" nature of it's killings rather quickly. Now I can tell that some of it you expected the reader to pick up on before the actual characters but I can say that the foresight detracted a little from a few scenes. Also, the dreams got slightly moldy by the time they got to Rarity. I knew who it was and I knew she was going to die in the end and the particulars didn't really matter. I was waiting for the story to hurry and get juicer.
Fortunately it did. When Fluttershy finally realizes what's going on and lays down to accept her fate, the story was impossible to put down. By the time we assume Twilight's POV we know what's coming yet you proceeded to write things expertly despite the predicted outcome. My favorite little description was of the letters Celestia sent back getting more and more frantic as they piled up (I was surprised that Twilight chose not to read those first, this is Celestia we're talking about here, but ah well). The subsequent hidden note somehow still felt chilling despite not having really revealed anything new.
The ending was extremely satisfying, though I still feel like the story could have used some more Lovecraftian elements-- a deeper mythos. Why is the watch in the Everfree? Where did it come from? What purpose does the monster have for its killing? I felt like these were brushed aside a bit too much. (Of course, I also can get very nitpicky...)
This is one of the few stories I liked better by reading it on Gdocs. The white text on a black background, the brilliant switch from italics to plain text in the last scene with Fluttershy (though you still get that here), the change of font on the note—I can tell a lot of care was put into the way it looked and it really added to the atmosphere. However, its looks were hardly essential, and it still reads quite well on FIMFic.
Had I the time to read all the contest stories in the limit, this would have certainly gotten my vote (for what it was worth).
1536952
... Just... just... you know, forget you Aquaman...
So the real order is Fluttershy, Twilight, Rarity, Pinkie, Applejack, Derpy, ...some colt that sounds like Dash's kid....?, then Dash herself last.
1551100
FYI: complete spoiling of everything left unanswered in the narrative lies below.
I intentionally left that progression vague because I wanted to give the reader a chance to imagine on their own why there was a gap between the fifth and sixth of the Mane Six, because I've always been of the mind that fridge horror is a great deal more effective than horror expressed by another party like an author. By the time Rarity was attacked, the remaining three realized that something was targeting them and were suitably more afraid of it--hence Fluttershy noticing that the fear she felt in each dream tended to lessen with each ensuing one for her. Add in the fact that the monster kills everything that knows of its existence (with an exception made for Celestia; benefits of being an immortal goddess and all), and that means that anybody any of them about the monster becomes a target too. Once Rainbow is the last one left, she tries to escape based on what she's pieced together from the deaths of her friends, and a couple other ponies (Derpy and, in the second dream, Rumble, though it's not really important that you know specifically who they are) end up hearing about it. As a result, they become victims too, and inevitably Rainbow can't escape. And thus ends Nigeb's fun-filled rampage through Ponyville.
tl;dr the little colt was Rumble, and it's fine that you didn't know that because it wasn't really critical that anybody did.
I really shouldn't have read this right before going to bed...
Where did the inspiration for NIGEB came from? Or are your nightmares really that messed
up?
Creepy, scary, and worth a second read through.
You've inspired me to write my own horror story, which in truth, I didn't think we're possible (haven't read any Steven King)
Dammit shouldn't have read this at 00:45
I wasn't very scared up until the last section but I had a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that something was very wrong
Then the last section scared the crap out of me!
1551680
I liked this. Even thought I figured out what was going on well before the reveal, it was still a fun ride. I WAS kind of concerned about just how powerful Celestia would be in this. I've read some particularly horrifying stories where even a goddess can die at the hands of things far older than her. I was also curious as to what happened to Spike. Did he just burst open in a magical puff of smoke from the pressure of all the scrolls being sent through him? Or maybe he just went for coffee. Don't know. I can't imagine he wouldn't open any of those scrolls, and thus become a target, unless Celestia had them magically sealed, only able to be opened by Twilight.
Another thing that made me wonder: WHAT exactly did the Creature 'begin'? Was it just the whole "last to first" killing order that was being referred to, or was there a process that began when each pony started to be killed? I imagined the voice of Pinhead from Hellraiser, just before he starts to torture his victims, "Shall we begin?". Begin the feast of souls? Begin screaming, if you have the time to do so? Begin fueling me with your terror? I like to picture it as all of these.
I have to admit though, you let me down on ONE little thing. I was waiting for the subtle hint that anyone ... ANYONE who knew about this creature would eventually be destroyed. This includes anyone sitting in the nice comfy confines of their home reading this story, which they believe to be a work of fiction. It would have had to be done very carefully, but it still would have been neat to find out the killer was an extra dimensional being capable of traveling between space (we already know he can move independent of time). ... or maybe you DID imply that at one point. Perhaps with the Creature jumping out of the screen at the reader, at the end. If that was what you were intending to get at, then good show.
I so regret reading this story just now. If I read it back then when it was part of the write-off, I would certainly give it my vote.
Because this is how a horror story should be written. Not with gore and blood oozing from each page, but with suspense, thrill, and tension. Don't show me decapitated or disemboweled ponies. It's not scary, it's gross.
Let me feel the cold breath on my back, hear the whispers of unknown origin behind me, see the shadow in the corner of my eye. Which is something you did marvelously. The tension was held brilliantly throughout the story - from the first sentence to the very last; the suspense wouldn't let me put the story down; the thrill made me shiver a few times even though I read the story in the morning on train to work. 
Truly a great piece.
One question, though: if I understand it correctly, Fluttershy's dreams had nothing to do with this monster (Slendermane?) actually choosing his victims? Their fate was decided when Fluttershy went into the Everfree and Twilight told their friends about it, right? They certainly were a great plot device though. They managed to keep up the suspense and foreshadowed the fate of the victims, all during the time the reader doesn't even know what's going to happen. Brilliant execution.
I wonder how much of a chance Slendy has with Celestia. After loosing with Chrysalis she seemed to toughen up a bit, throwing some powerful light and dark magic spells in S3 opener.
Also:
Pfft, big deal. Apple Bloom does it all the time.
For some reason this name sounds funny.
EDIT: Aw, I read this story on an ebook reader and the gif file wasn't displayed there.
Nice final touch, so to speak.
If that worked, though, it would be even better than the notebook from Death Note.
I think this is genuinely one of the first stories that has actually scared me - I'm a sucker for Lovecraft's stuff, but I never understood why people described it as horror, so I was under the impression that I just wasn't scared by literature. Good god you've proved me wrong in that regard.
Also, as soon as I saw the gradient hit in the gif at the bottom, I was reminded of that Korean "dongbong ghost" story thingy and I scrolled the fuck out of there.
Oh, it's a gif! O.o I checked this out on gdocs and it didn't do anything, and I said, "I bet if I'd seen that after having read the entire story through, I would have crapped myself." Then I come here and expect to see it and it scared me. D: Damn you.
I am disappointed in myself for how much that ending got to me. Good read overall! Prouda you!
That gif. It gets me every single time.
Also, this has quickly become my favorite creepy story. Very well done.
I totally didn't see that GIF at the end coming. I read all the comments to spoil myself as much as possible (so it'd be less creepy), and when I got to the 'oh that pic freaks me out everytime' kinda comments, I just went 'what's so scary about a watch?' and examined /that/ picture.
When I got to the end I was honestly expecting some creepy writing like 'BEHIIIIND YOOOUU!' so I spent about a minute steeling myself for that. So when I scrolled down and saw...that...I freaked out. Literally spammed my friends with comments like 'dbdffsdi' because I was so scared.
This is definitely the scariest entry imho :P
That was horribly unsettling. Good lord.
I haven't been that scared since Blink.
Oh god.
The perfect song to listen to while reading this chilling story
I normally try to avoid straight up dark stories, because of the possibility that they end on downer notes. After reading this, I was chilled and scared the whole way through. I was confused (before reading the comments) on what happened. I wondered who Fluttershy was dreaming about, and now that I know in the comments, I feel like the worst kind of idiot imaginable that I didn't catch on sooner.
This was better then I anticipated, and wasn't as depressing as I thought it would be, mainly because I had no idea what was going on with the dreams. I am very glad that I didn't read this at 9:30 last night, when I had to walk to my apartment. I would have been downright terrified
I will admit, no horror movie ever scared me, so its funny how a fan fic that started out with cute little ponies would have me shitting myself. Well played author, although you could have did more, like twilight tells applejack, then twilight dies, then applejack tells rainbowdash and have a chain reaction.
Let me get this straight: Fluttershy told Twilight, then Twilight told the others; and last, but not least, she told the princesses about Nigeb.
.
Oh My Celestia!!!!!! You just killed off every main character of the show!!!!!
But seriously though, my skin was literally crawling during all the dream sequences and the big climax; I loved how you spaced out the final sentences with the gif at the ending. I'm very shocked that this didn't win the EQD NMN contest. You sir, are very brilliant at this genre. I applaud you!
2705601
Well, y'know... technically, it did win.
Or at the very least, I consider winning the judge's choice a more valid result than the popular vote, given what the pre-tally reviews were saying and how clearly skewed the results were in favor of the story that just happened to be listed first in the finalist blog post. But bygones being bygones and all that, I'm not really that concerned either way.
Now I don't know if I will be able to sleep tonight. Holy cow what a scary fricken story. Very well written, but very terrifying. Poor Fluttershy...
So...
Imma gonna go hit up that comedy tag now. Before I need to turn on the lights.
Very well written horror, by the way. I noticed imediately that the title was. 'Begin' backwards so I caught on about half way. Nearly had a bloody heart attack from the "holy shit" chills it gave me. Then I made it to the end...
(Disclaimer: I'm not a huge fan of horror and I just pre-read for a few hours. Probably not in the greatest mood.)
So... I kept waiting for it to get scary. It never really did.
The thing about the unknown being more frightening is a classic bit of horror advice, but I don't really think it works here. The whole situation came off, to me, as one giant diablous ex machina engineered to hit every easy bit of horror that it could in a ponyfic. A member of the mane six slowly going mad. Her friends implied to be in danger. The warnings and queries to Celestia going out all too late. It just feels rote, to me, and the inclusion of the jump-scare GIF at the end just comes across as overkill.
I mean, come on. Putting in something like that, to me, is tantamount to saying, "I'm insecure about my writing actually being good and communicating what I mean, so have this thing that does my job for me in an entirely redundant manner." It's a classic jump-scare, but again, it feels like ground that's been thoroughly tread before, a device pulled out at the last minute last in case the reader hadn't been creeped out by that point just to leave the story on a scary note to hopefully leave the best possible impression in the reader's mind.
Telling the story out-of-order was a nice move, I'll admit, but the story goes on for so long (for a one-shot) that I gotta admit I'd already forgotten some of the nightmares Fluttershy had had, which blunted the ending's poignancy. Maybe if you hadn't been so damned coy with information in them, they'd have stuck more. The trouble with denying a reader information is that it confuses the brain on what's important and what isn't, so important details might not stick, as they clearly didn't with me. (Like... seriously, what was the deal with the watch? I didn't understand its part in all this, unless it's just supposed to be the physical vessel for the discount pony Slenderman.)
Bits of the narration kept falling flat, too; some scenes didn't feel very well established or fleshed out as far as physical surroundings go, which I realize might have been intentional to show Fluttershy's state of mind, but if such was the intention, it didn't come across well. I rarely felt like I was really in Fluttershy's head, experiencing the horrors right with her (maybe because I expect first person in these cases... I digress), because the narration would just be blunt as far as emotion went a good deal of the time.
The side-story with Twilight's search for a cure felt a little rote, too. She serves as a foil for Fluttershy here, or at least I believe that was the intent. However, she ends up relegated to spouting exposition and asking questions that we never get answers for, making her feel borderline unnecessary to the story at all (and that's a terrible thing to do to best pony). Honestly, the story probably would have hit harder for me if Fluttershy could have felt more isolated, more cut-off somehow. With some aspect of her support network still intact and functioning and trying to help (even if Fluttershy was being all fatalistic about it), a lot of the story's middle just fell... flat to me. I didn't feel like Fluttershy was really in danger, because she had her friends to help, even if Twilight wasn't really making any progress.
I dunno. Maybe I'm just a picky bastard when it comes to what scares me, but I feel like I was led in a wide circle around the story, barely allowed to glimpse the treetops of its forest, and then expected to feel like I'd walked through a forest because of how sparse the surroundings were. Terror of the unknown is all well and good (and maybe it doesn't work so well on me, says the guy who drove over 2,000 miles this past May to move in with an internet boyfriend he'd only met in person once beforehand), but without some sense of what's going on, the story starts to feel like a child who refuses to open his toybox and share, instead preferring to never shut up about what color the toys are, or some other unimportant detail.
(Also, tons o' comma splices at the beginning of this. Made me cringe.)
Maybe some of this was due to it being written on a deadline. Maybe some of it was the constraints of whatever prompt the contest used (if any). This just feels... unfinished, and not in a good way like your sky piracy story.
3363505
First off (re: what you said in Skype), never apologize for tearing me a new one in a review. Far too few people do that anyway, and no agent or publisher's ever going to once I get bored with writing about technicolor horses.
I find it interesting that you're the first person to call me on the fic being somewhat of a grab bag of horror tropes, because that's exactly what I've been unconsciously expecting someone to say about it ever since I wrote it. This was my first attempt at ever writing something with a true "horror" vibe to it, so I focused most of my attention on atmosphere and the overall structure of the piece, and less on the gritty details that ended up inflating its word count. My problem has always been that I tend to overstuff my stories with details for fear of leaving them too underdeveloped, so anything I write that doesn't have much of a gap between first draft and final draft tends to ramble. Along the same vein, I've always had trouble remembering to back off inwardly focused character introspection long enough to establish setting, so I'm not surprised to hear that I fell flat in that area too. They're both old habit I try to chip away at a little at a time with each new fic.
The issue I ran into with Twilight's role here is one that's been my eternal gripe whenever I try to write dark things in this fandom: the way the show's environments and the relationships therein are set up, it's really difficult to get any sense of true isolation or primal fear just because of how contrary it runs to everything that FiM's canon establishes. Occasionally with things like Harmony, a detailed enough backstory can give me more leeway in that regard, but here I didn't have the space--logistically or within the confines of the contest rules--to do anything like that. Twilight's logical brain getting in the way of what her friend was claiming to see was the best alternative I could get to work with what I had, which isn't really an excuse as much as it is an explanation of what I was thinking when I set things up the way they were. Without this being a pony fic, I think a lot of components of the story's narrative and underlying construction would've turned out very differently than they did here, and probably would've worked a little better.
As far as the GIF goes, that was a last-minute addition for the FIMFic version of this story that Couch ended up making for me mostly of his own volition. The original version I used for the contest was published in a white-text-on-black Google doc so I could embed the unedited original image without there being visible borders. So in fairness, it was always a gimmick, but initially it was a less blatant one, as well as a more natural escalation from the intentional (if, as your opinion seems to be, too much so) vagueness of the rest of the story. Or at least, that's what I was trying to do.
3363586
Yeah, I'm currently experiencing that lovely "no feedback" black hole that comes with sending stuff to publishers (with one notable exception), so noted.
I agree that the tone of the show and the setting makes it difficult to get a true sense of isolation, but if anything, I think the show's setting can actually be a strength. Instead of slasher horror or cheap jump thrills, I think Equestria suits itself to a slow sort of horror, where something that seemed innocent all along reveals itself to be some cosmic horror. Sorta like Eversion, since I know you play the video games. It's all in how you approach it, and honestly, there's even some horror in canon. Sombra (although portrayed with all the grace and subtlety of Glenn Beck) had his mirror, and when you think about it, Discord can do some pretty horrifying things. Hell, one can even make the incredibly hammy Nightmare Moon scary.
So yeah. Horror can be weird to pull off in pone, but I think it needs to be something more ingrained in the show's setting to really work. I think I did that in my horror fic I linked. Lord knows it has its problems, but feel free to return the favor and tear my fic a new one if you've got an evening free.
It's been almost a year since I first read this story and it still gives me chills
Hi there. I hope you don't mind, but I liked this fic so much I have put together an audio version on YouTube.
3425510
... oh, holy shit, that's awesome. Thanks a bunch.
3425523
Bloody hell, that was quick! I'm used to not getting responses at all. ^_^ I hope you like it.
That was bloody creepy. Just right for kicking off the mood for Halloween!
I love how the story made use of a lot of imagery throughout. To be honest, this made me feel like I was reading a Stephen King short story. Love the gif by the way.
I have to admit, this was indeed good. Not exactly my kind of scary though, honestly.
Then again... I don't know if my own personal preference would exactly fit the definition of horror. I typically like a kind of soap opera-ish scenario where real life, non-paranormal circumstances lead an individual into despair whilst not totally removing their sense of hope until the very end.
At the beginning, for some reason I was thinking that Fluttershy was being made into the unknowing monster. I imagined that she was possessing ponies without meaning to and leading their half-conscious souls to their untimely demise. At the beginning I also assumed that "it" was actually a veiled representation of each ponies true assailant.
When you started getting around to Fluttershy having to recount the experiences, I assumed her memory loss was caused by the forced suppression of the horror's she had committed. Welp, turns out I took that in the wrong direction, didn't I? Don't worry though, I understood what you were aiming for by the end.
I agree with Vimbert.