//------------------------------//
// "No, No, No, No, No!" 
// Story: Sunset Shimmer Goes to Hell 
// by scifipony 
//------------------------------//

I locked eyes with something ahead in the swirling mists.  

By this alone, I could judge its size because all animals have eyes of roughly the same size.  Little else about the titan looked familiar.  The mists shifted and I saw gazelle-like legs and muscular hindquarters that made it more dangerously lithe than elephantine, this despite fan-like flares of webbed skin above its hooves.  I could see bulking forequarters, also, but the monstrosity of its face hid much of that.  

It was a ungulate chimera that was both elephant and octopus.  Writhing tentacles and trunks reached all the way to the ground like a living beard in motion, hiding what I had no doubt was a vicious maul of sharp teeth.  The appendages lead up to a monumental rock dome of a head with a gazelle's black nose writ large, and elephant ears and magenta eyes set forward in its skull.  Its blue-grey furless skin glistened, making me think it was a denizen of the shoreline.  Maybe the tentacles helped it swim, too.

The pegasus! 

The wound around her barrel at her rear legs.  The pulled hair.  

Tentacles.

I swallowed hard.  It had sent the pegasus to slow us down.  Paranoid, maybe.  But Equestria had few non-sentient monsters; Celestia sent none of those to Tartarus.

I wasn't going to ask why the hunter hunted us, either. 

In a whisper, Brandywine said, "On three, we split up and run separate—"

"No," I said flatly.  "It'll go after the weaker one and that's you.  No."

"Then let's at least retreat."

"It can sprint faster than we can," I said, my eyes locked on its eyes.  "For the moment, only us not moving is keeping it from attacking."

"And you're sure of this because...?"

"Instinct.  Because I fought many times before.  Opponents inevitably bigger than me.  It's some sort of ungulate, not too different from a horse.  I'm assuming, ok?"

"Then what are we going to do?"  I could sense in his voice that his ears were down and that he was scared.

Me, too, that is frightened but not ears down—I wasn't foal enough to show it.  "We fight."

"We—We?  What?"

Still whispering, I said, "It won't move until we break.  Maybe it will smile and offer a tea party and conversation.  Prepare Force or Shield just in case, which ever you think would be most effective.  I'm remembering a certain rock I blasted early this morning.  We get just one shot before it overruns us."

Silence.  After many heartbeats, silence; long enough for acid to crawl up my throat as I firmed up the hexagonal rod shape of Force in my mind.  He whispered, "Remember to aim ahead of your target."

I smiled.  "Tell me when you're ready."

"Never going to be, really, but—  I've got Force ready."

I chuckled.  "Break to the left when I move.  Prepare to run away.  And, wait for it..."  

I continued staring unblinking into the magenta eyes fifty pony-lengths away.  This chthonic horror from some dark abyss was scarier than a timberwolf by far, but oddly, I felt calm.  Loquacious had called me her warrior queen enough times that I understood both words and had taken up the title.  Hiding in the forest, looking through a blind of kibble trees across a river, I had then had no purpose other than to be an observer, nor other choice but to become frightened.  

Now I sank into a role I knew well.

I protected ponies.  I would protect Brandywine.  I would put every last iota of my magic into the shot—I'd spare nothing.  I'd ensure the monster would rue the day it thought to challenge a unicorn.

One shot.

And while Brandywine ran, I would charge.  Queens did that.  Mares did that.  Real mares, not the ones in the romance novels.  

I stepped forward.

It lunged at us as if launched from a catapult.  It trumpeted through multiple trunks sounding less like an elephant than a runaway freight train roaring down hill with its polyphonic train whistle shrilling.  The moment its cloven hooves struck the road, the shock thundered through the ground.  Not only was it as big as a house, it weighed as much, too.

My thinking sped up because time, sure as Tartarus was real, didn't slow down.  As the titan's rear legs touched down, I saw Brandywine break left and curve out of its way.  An amber aura lit his horn, visible in the rapidly dimming daylight. 

I leapt towards it, breaking only enough to the right to make me a clear target and the closest, the only one that need be defended against.  As my gait lengthened to a gallop, I knew intuitively that the titan's only vulnerable spot would be its eyes.  If the least I did was hit it with a breath of singeing fire, I'd have at least blinded it.

I should have told Brandywine.  An amber bolt splashed below the titan's nose.  Since the monster waved its mass of tentacles, it minimized damage to any one organ.  Skin charred, it rampaged on…

And veered toward Brandywine.  

Ice instantly clawed up my spine from my tail to my clenched heart.  I lost my rhythm, stepped wrong. 

Stay on target.

It took two crooked lopes to regain my gait.  I turned toward the titan to intercept it, but it presented its shoulder in total disdain of the threat I offered.  I couldn't cut it off!

Stay on target.

As the geometry of my horn and its right eye grew to nearly 45°, and I felt confident I understood its true size, speed, and distance, I began pushing against the spell shape, aiming, ready to squish it like a grape to smash all my magic through it.

Stay on target.

Its eyes weren't even on me!  Adding annoyance to anger and fear, I pushed with all my might, aiming for the center of its left eye.

The spell skittered away.  Nothing happened.  

Not even a sparkle-pony spark.

I screamed my frustration, braking on wet grass, losing the optimal shot.  I pushed, this time harder, aiming for the titan's ear, imagining its head to be the rock I blasted before.  I pushed and shoved my magic.

Nothing!

Shrieking, I barely kept myself from losing traction as my hindquarters shimmied right and left.  As the titan and I passed one another, I got back on the road and spun around, aiming a buck at the monster's back left hock—

—and kicked air.

I stumbled and hopped when my front hoof twisted on a small rock.  I now looked at the titan's rear, protected by a furless deer-like flag tail.  I'd lost the force spell completely.

On neither side of the retreating titan did I see Brandywine.  Which meant—

"No, no, no, no, no!" I cried as I used every bit of what I had learned to recover from a fault during steeplechase.  I got my legs behind me and leapt, kicking stones behind, pushing the fast sprint as far as I could with no thought of endurance.  If I could not distract the titan, or something....  

This would be really bad.

I had wits enough to cast the one spell I could depend on: Levitate.  The spell instantly popped visually across my eyes, whirling with taunting fiery lozenge-shaped outlines.  If I could just get a line of sight on Brandywine, I could whisk him from danger.

Unfortunately, any deviation right or left would further the titan's lead and dilute the effectiveness of the spell.  Were it pony-sized, it would be slow.  But house-sized, it had a gigantic stride-length.  Galloping, one stride took over a second between the thunderous strikes of its front hooves, but the distance it covered was enormous.

As I drew even with its rear legs on the right, I yelled, "Brandywine!"  Maybe if I could get an idea where he was, I'd be able to grab for him by sound alone.

He screamed.

The sound abruptly stopped, cut off.

I yelled, "You hurt him and— and—!"  

It helped my advance that the titan slowed.  I saw clearly from its right side as it whipped Brandywine upward like a foal's doll, wrapped in a loop of an elephant trunk.  It encircled his withers, snugging its nostrils against his lower ear.  Brandywine bucked ineffectively, but also struggled to push to free himself with his forelegs even though the fall could be fatal.

If I didn't catch him.

"Release him!" I yelled, though winded as the titan slowed.  It heard; I chose to think that because its curve to the right also put me between an outcropping of rocks, a dense line of trees, and the monster itself, forming a cul-de-sac trap into which I galloped so hard that my front legs and rear legs crossed completely in an X.  I flew through the air with each lope with no hooves on the ground.  I reached out with my magic and slapped it near the eye to let it know I had power it might have imagined I lacked.  "Release him!"

"No!" It rumbled deeper than thunder like the exhalation of a cavern.  I felt it in my stomach.

Closer now as it slowed, I grabbed for the tip of the trunk that held Brandywine flailing over its head, at least three stories in the air.  I tried ripping the thick, wrinkled hawser-like organ up and over Brandywine's withers.

And succeeded.

"No!" it rumbled, and faster than I could adjust my grip fully and snatch Brandywine more than a half a pony-length upward, tentacles, like the strike of half-a-dozen snakes, shot up and tangled themselves over him with the slapping sound of wet noodles.  Rope-width wet noodles.  The sound even hurt.  As I struggled to pull him, then desperately to pull away the mess, further tentacles wound around his barrel and legs.

It all happened in the span of it rumbling, "He my little pony!"

The titan finished by tightening its grip.  I clearly heard cracks and popping noises.  

Breaking bone noises.

Despite having the breath squeezed from him, Brandywine managed a terrified, "Sunset!"

My heart broke.  My pony body wanted to freeze, but rage burnt through all that.

Shrieking "Brandywine!" I did what street fighter-me would do.  I grabbed the house-sized creature beside me as I would have any normal-sized pony who had ever threatened those I protected and lifted it skyward.

The sheer magnitude of the feedback of its weight sent a shock through my horn.  My broken heart almost seized up.  It sundered me.  I lost my gait and lost my step.  My legs tangled; I stumbled and crashed down, right shoulder leading to slide pony-lengths on the grass.

And I kept sliding.

Connected to the beast through magic, its momentum dragged me roughly along like a disobedient child's red wagon as I doggedly kept it levitated.  I knew absolutely that if I let go, the creature would smash Brandywine as it crashed to earth and rolled forward.

The soaked meadow, however, was not a lawn.  Prickly seed heads slashed at my eyes.  Pulped grass slathered me with a slurry that smelled of Celestia's mowed bowling green and her favorite lemongrass tonic.  Struggling, I nevertheless slid and shimmied toward knobby exposed tree roots, and an iron pyrite outcrop beyond that, and toward the road that would scape my fur off were I dragged down it.  I peddled my legs and bucked for all I was worth.  I flopped twice hard enough to knock the air from my lungs.  

Being dragged by the horn would disorient you, too.

I managed the acrobatics just in time to hop the roots, but landed haunches down and had to buck to get myself airborne over the rocks.  I wobbled as my hooves hit the muddy stone road, but that gave me purchase as it continued dragging me forward, the friction of my gold-plated horseshoes acting as increasingly hot, albeit ineffective, brakes.

Being bruised but upright, and nominally safe, gave me a moment to think about the dynamics of Levitation that essentially worked by pushing up against gravity but otherwise didn't violate physics.  It allowed me to remember my observation about Shield when I instead warped Levitation when pressed by Brandywine to demonstrate I knew a combat spell.

I transformed the burning lozenge of the spell, warping the gravity shear upward as far as it could go without letting the spell shape fragment.  If I could push opposite our direction of travel...

Ten seconds later, we stopped.  

I stood, feeling overloaded as if lead packed my saddlebags and was piled upon my back.  A gravity-like force pulled me with the magnitude of change I'd felt stepping out of a bath having soaked buoyant in hot water for an hour.  My skin buzzed and crackled.  My green magic aura had extended from my horn to envelop my body as I pushed relentlessly to restrain the titan.

It floated before me and swayed a pony-length in the air, as if on an unsteady ocean instead of in a single-sourced magical apparition, its antelope legs reaching and swishing uselessly for the ground it could no longer reach.  It quickly realized it could push its mass against the spell like a foal could pump a playground swing, trying to drift toward the side of a mountain.  

I warped the spell to compensate.

Weighed down by the magic, my heart pumping what felt increasingly like mud through my veins, barely able to get my breath—my head began pounding.  Thump-thump.  Thump-thump.  I could hardly move, let alone trot to face the monster.  I tried.  Then rotated it to face me.

Tentacles wrapped Brandywine the way morning glory vines wrapped an unfortunate bush to strangle it.  The golden-brown colt struggled in the mess of twining gray, only a rear leg free and his head and neck free.  His eyes showed white.  He breathed.  I knew because he said, weakly, "Help me!"

I dimly recalled a teacher prattling on about reserves of magic, and another about sources of magic—enough so that I had concluded that Sparkling had to have stolen magic from Celestia herself.  What I faced was the quandary my competition faced.  Was she a magic stealer?  Or had she found an unlimited depth in her own magic?  Was that even possible?  Like the sap that ran too strongly in the maple trees of Blueblood Park in early spring and dripped from the bark, my magic seeped, neigh steamed, from me.  The spell shape in my mind wriggled and vibrated, wanting to explode to flinders.  But my limits would be the limits of Brandywine's life.  I must not find those limits even if I were destined to be trampled by them.

Panting heavily, I said, "Put.  Him.  Down!"

"My little pony!" rumbled the titan, glaring angrily at me.

I could not let the immediate thought I had in.  I had to block it.  Ugh!  The abyssal creature could not be a child!  Nothing could grow bigger than it already was.  

Or it thought like a child.

Bad either way.

Every muscle in my body tensed up and I clenched my jaw, causing my breath to come out in bull-like snorts of vapor.  I concentrated on Brandywine.  Anger aided my concentration.  The Queen of Cliffside's empathy—unproven conjecture at that—fought my concentration.

I squeezed out an ultimatum in a growl that barely reached audibility though it thundered through my heart.  "If he dies, you die."

With it, came the realization that I could carry out my threat.  

Goodness was ultimately weak.  Sometimes you had to do the wrong thing for the right reason.  

Oddly, with that thought, I felt a surge of power.  The heady sensation lifted much of the crushing weight that smashed down upon me.  The thought that a dead enemy could not come back to hurt you greased it further.  

Stupid Celestia and her Tartarus experiment.  If any creature placed in hibernation escaped her prison, ponies would die!  

Who deserved to die, princess?

My eyes burned with a new magic and I looked back up to lock eyes with the monster, having dropped them during my epiphany.   I hissed, "I can kill you."

My visualization of Levitation flared and flamed with green fire that wept black soot.  The shape lost its round edges and grew crystalline spikes.  

I pushed at the many new sharp levers of the spell until the titan swished higher in the air with a fluidity I'd never experienced before.  I found myself cackling.  A push or pull whirled it or tumbled it.  Magic had never been this powerful nor this easy.  In the euphoria, I had to stifle the impulse to smash the creature down.  

I could fix Celestia's mistake.  

I could fix all her mistakes.  

I could certainly kill the titan.  But that would be counterproductive if I killed Brandywine.

Chills ran up my spine.  They allowed me to hear Brandywine 's pleas.  His voice intruded into my sudden mania.  He said, "Please, Sunset!  You'll kill us all!"  

Not him and the titan, clearly.  

The three of us.

In his pain and fear, he still reached out to me.  Wrapped in that deadly embrace, I would have been screaming for help, yet he saw something I missed.  

I was willing to destroy everything to prevent defeat.

My new found energy drained as if my horn had become a sieve.  The spell reverted to its red fiery rounded shape.

The titan, with a precious treasure wound in its tentacle grip, had floated fifteen pony-lengths up above the canopies of the trees.  

That became untenable.

The pressure I'd felt redoubled.  The Levitation shape shook like a pressure cooker ready to explode.  As the titan fell, the spell smashed me to the ground, folding my legs painfully and bouncing my stomach off the ground.

Pure will, fueled by Brandywine's startled whinny, allowed me to keep the spell together, squeezed like a pillow to bursting.  It was the same reflex that stopped my plummet from the balcony of the Luna tower.

The titan nonetheless walloped the ground, but only bruisingly.  With a sudden sweat washing my face, I popped it back up just enough that it could only touch the tops of the grass but nothing more.

My chin in the wet grass, I glared up at my captive.  Though it felt like in any instant I would be flattened by the boulder that it felt I carried, I levered myself up, eyes locked on those of the beast.

I pushed higher, but the spell petered out at barely half a pony-length.  There was my limit.  The same limit I'd faced enough times.  Like the last time when I wanted to break Pear Brandy's back and could not shove her down hard enough.  My Pollyanna subconscious.  Limits.  I just couldn't hurt ponies... badly. 

Or titans.

But the titan didn't know.  After that crazy I'd just pulled, for sure.

"Put him down!"

It must have been the right amount of authority, or confidence, or just mean growling that did it.  The spider's cocoon of tentacles shifted and lowered gently.  I facilitated the transfer to the ground by lowering the titan to the level of my fetlocks, but no lower.  The tentacles untwined and a limp Brandywine rolled out on his back, legs up and then over on his side.  He moaned and began shivering.

I lifted the titan back up and slid it away as I folded my legs under me beside my colt-friend.  The cannon bone of his right rear leg was broken, offset, and swelling rapidly.  The joints of his front legs were so bloodied, I couldn't tell what state they were in.  Little saucer-sized bruised splotches dotted his hide where the tentacles had wrapped him.  Suckers.  With teeth.  One had left a barb-like tooth behind.  They all bled a tiny rivulet of red.  The hoof tracks on his back wept, too.

I had been wrong about the sudden sweat on my face before.  It was tears—and they streamed down my face hotter than the rain that had just decided to fall just to enhance my misery.  

What kind of friend let her friend be mauled?  I'd known the titan would go for the weakest of us, but I'd chosen the spell that could best aggrandize me, not be most effective.  I had wanted to impress.  

My pride had overruled my common sense.

I didn't know much about friendship, but trying to impress instead of protect was undoubtedly wrong.

I was wrong.  I was no friend.  I really didn't understand the concept of friendship. 

He lifted his head and speared me with his amber eyes.  His charcoal black lips opened to say, barely in a whisper.  "Don't destroy your soul to save me."

The fact of the matter was, I'd have destroyed worlds to save him—had he asked. 

I had to get him to a doctor.  I had to get him to the outpost, station, or whatever the Tartarus it was, at Cerberus' gate.  I tried to lift him in my magic.

The magic aura surrounding the titan sputtered loudly like a firework, sparked, and guttered.  The beast's cloven hooves actually hit the ground before I could even surround Brandywine with my magic.  I gasped and pushed, and—though the creature managed to get traction and clods of grass and dirt arced into the air and he got within two pony-lengths before I stopped him—stop him I did.  I flung him back to the limits of my magic.

A rumbling voice said, "He my little pony!"  It bounced around in my aura, trying to break it, trying to push any which way that could get it to something it could grab.

This did not bode well.

I looked at Brandywine who breathed in pained pants as he got his right shoulder to push his body half-upright so she wasn't flat, his front legs in before him, his rear to the side, his jagged broken leg shockingly visible on top.  

Brandywine wasn't going anywhere if I wasn't carrying him.

I looked toward our tormentor.  "Please.  If I let you go, I promise I won't hurt you if you just run away."

"My pony!" it trumpeted, peddling its legs, lowering its head as if it could charge despite being suspended midair.  Its tentacles and trunks flailed and grasped.  It acted like a child having a tantrum.

Brandywine said, "Not good."

"No kidding."

He whispered.  "You threatened to kill it.  I don't think it believes you."

Again, that empathy thing I didn't have much of.  And me being full of fight.  Three years ago, had I just avoided Celestia, rather than provoking her, I would not have lost to her when she came looking for me.  But that was after her constables had stolen the homeless ponies' possessions and rousted them from their encampments.  Sure, I was full of fight, but not enough to win when I'd bitten off more than I could chew.

I swallowed hard.

I had to lift Brandywine.  I had no choice but to lift the both of them to get to the Cerberus gate!  Somepony had to be able to help me.  Most unicorns could levitate.  I couldn't solve the titan problem myself—that was manifest—but I could put it off if I could just lift the both of them.

Problem was, each time I tried to lift Brandywine, I couldn't keep the titan aloft.  Time and again, the same result.

Though clenched teeth, I hissed, "Maybe I do need to kill it."

Again, the realization bolstered me.  I felt the uncanny strength returning—

"No," Brandywine cried, then clenched his teeth in pain as he shifted a leg to touch my hoof.  I looked into his amber eyes as he forced out his words, "Your eyes—Green.  Purple-black smoke.  Dark magic will crush your soul.  You'll never be allowed to leave Tartarus.  I'm not worth it!"

But he was.  He surely was.  

I moaned, stinging tears flooding my eyesight and emotion working to sunder me.  The weight of unicorn magic saddled me again and I fought to concentrate as desperate anger, fear, and humiliation battled with a love that could kindle the worst hate that could transform a unicorn into—

"What should I do?"

I wiped away sufficient tears to see a wavering smile.  He pressed at his wounds, despite his magic flickering like a candle in the breeze.  He said, "I can help myself for a while.  The gate is less than three miles away.  Send somepony who knows first aid.  Don't give in to the darkness.  For me, please."

"For you," I said, my sight awash with tears again.  I stood, despite the pressure.  Perhaps my father was actually a mule, or a horse.  Perhaps it was simply love that gave me strength.

As I stepped ponderously forward, Brandywine added, "If it is really a simpleton or a child, you may be able to release it when it can no longer see or smell me."

Maybe I could accidentally find a cliff and pass out.  I was already approaching exhaustion.

Brandywine said as I trudged away, back on the road.  "Please.  For me, Sunset."

I gritted my teeth, but the royal bit of my soul spoke up.  I said, "I promise."  Or perhaps I did it because the one thing I did not want to do was disappoint my colt-friend.  I would save him.  I would do what he asked.  And because I was a mare of my word, I promised.  Out loud.  

I was bound by honor.  Every book I'd read said so. 

No more hellish a three-miles could exist in a pony's life than those next miles.  I felt my worry for Brandywine and the magic I expended eat into my vitality.  Beside feeling as if squashed like a bug, and my heart laboring as if I might burst, and suffering a throbbing headache that wanted to crush my skull, I had to slog through rain and mud.  One.  Step.  At a breathless.  Time.  Keeping the spell alive.

I did do as Brandywine suggested.  I let the titan go.

Once.

It screamed about its pony doll and charged explosively past me the way we'd come.  I snatched the titan up just in time in a renewed spell.  That the momentum of it trying to gallop around a bend in the road then caused it instead to fly in a straight line and smash head-first into a rock outcropping—oh well.  I shrugged as it dragged me down the road until it made a thud of a bag of beans hitting pavement, though much louder.  Cindered rock clattered around its forequarters.  I no longer had the strength to stop it from bloodying its many noses.  Unicorn magic apparently had its own limits when it came to preventing its practitioners from doing harm.

I so much would have liked it to have knocked itself unconscious...  but Celestia forbid my magic might really harm the beast!  Oh, my.  My laughter came out as a series of huffs and ended in a sigh.

Thoughts of mean things that-could-have-been gave me a lift, made the slog less arduous.  A sudden gnawing hunger caused by the drain of my magic forced me to stop long enough to graze in a tantalizingly green meadow filled with tender herbs and juicy yellow dandelions.  The greens did have a sulfury taint.  As I chewed, a warm rain matted down my mane and tail, causing it to drip.  

I didn't care. 

Anything to keep me going.

Finally, I clopped across a wooden rope bridge to find a pair of ponies.  The two of them stared downhill in the dusky light away from me.  As the clouds above jostled for position and blew away some of the mists, I could see bits of the sunset beyond, streaming through what seemed very much like the wall of a gigantic glass arboretum.  Really, though, it was the edge of Tartarus' sky where it was situated between time embedded in Equestria's nether dimensions.  The glassy blue-tinted apparition (the edge of local reality) dipped toward the ground.  Cerberus' gate could be only a few minute's walk away.

Perhaps it was the splat-splat of my hooves in the puddles, or some errant rumble or trumpet from the titan of whom I'd basically become obvious to in my misery, but the pair suddenly turned.  Despite shadows, I recognized one of them.  

Though it looked like somepony had splattered him with a bucket of blue-black ink, it was definitely the hefty half-Clydesdale workhorse pony deputy of Lavender Lather's.  The one who'd gone missing.  His khaki uniform shirt was soaked with rain and ink that ran all the way to his flank.  The rest of his coat was brown, except for muddied white socks, hooves, and a white horn.  I blinked—he'd had something on his horn before, but it was gone.  Like Brandywine, his eyes were amber, though somewhat more of a reddish brown.

Beside him stood what I'd at first thought was a pony.  My mind kept insisting he was a pony, but his outline was all wrong.  He wore a concealing gray hooded cassock, but it made his neck look entirely too long.  I got the hint of something in the shadows of the cowl that looked awfully like the nose of a goat.  Oddly, his mane seemed to move of its own accord between his head and his shoulders.  He had a very long neck.

No.  He wasn't a pony.  He was an inmate of Tartarus.

Nevertheless, I said, "Please."  White Stockings.  That was his name.  I saw the outline under the ink stain of some sort of glassware cutie mark.  "I need help."

The pair stared in awe.  Not everyday do you see somepony toting a house-sized flailing angry monster behind them.  White Stockings took a couple steps backwards.  His companion did not and shouldered the deputy to break an impending panic.  

Wait.  Did the goat inmate have an extra set of limbs—?

Monsters abounded here.  It didn't matter!  "My friend needs help.  I need to pacify this monster.   I have to get back to him.  Can you do something?"

As I got closer, White Stockings looked at his companion, who nodded.  "Sure," said the deputy.

"Thank Celestia!" I cried as best I could, huffing and puffing.

His horn lit.  I anticipated some assistance with the heavy lifting as his aura reached out as if some ethereal foreleg.  Everypony had their own way of doing spells, especially Levitation, which all unicorns pretty much could do, but this was unusual.  I was a half-dozen pony-lengths away as he touched me magically.

He said, "I can surely help you, Sunset Shimmer.  All you need to do is follow me down this road—"

Something inside went click.

Wow.  That felt—strange.  Good…  

But strange.   Was he helping lift the titan?

I glanced.  No, the titan had its magenta eyes on the deputy; it waved its tentacles and trunks, peddling its black cloven-hoofed gazelle-like legs and reaching for traction on the muddy stone road so it could run back to get its Brandywine pony toy.  It was still only me levitating the chthonic monster.  I looked into the amber eyes of the pony.  I kept the spell going strong, but my gut told me to trust his guidance implicitly.  I had asked for help and he was helping.  I blinked, feeling...  Disoriented?  What was that feeling?

I gasped as joy overwhelmed me.  It felt sooo good.  I felt myself relieved of my burdens—of thinking about them in any case.  I had had too many decisions to make!  I'd made them all wrong.    

Except now.  

Now, I had made the right decision.

Trust.  

That's it.  I'd found trust.  

It was like falling asleep.  

Like falling into a dream.  

 A lucid dream...

White Stockings murmured in my ear as we walked and I knew everything was going to be okay.