When the room was dark again, the mare under the shower was gone and the tiles where she had sat were dry as bone. Sparks would’ve expected the stallion who had led him in here to have vanished as well, but somehow he was still there, patiently waiting for Sparks to notice him before he took hold of his candle again and trotted out of the shower room. Once he’d followed his guide past a row of toilets and through another tiled archway, Sparks found himself back out in the hallway again, trailing a few feet behind the stallion as he whistled his way down the corridor. A few dozen yards later, he hung a sharp left through an open door and entered a patient’s room that seemed to be, like every other one on the hall, deserted.
“Well, that was weird,” the stallion said once Sparks had followed him in. As he spoke, he kicked the door shut with his foreleg, which he left hanging out in midair as he turned his expressionless gaze towards the wide-eyed pony next to him.
“What... what is going on here?” Sparks managed to spit out after a few initial attempts at speaking Equestrian failed him. “Th-those flashes, those... those things I keep running into, what...”
“You ever gone jogging, Doctor Sparks?”
Sparks kept talking over the first few words of the stallion’s question, and fell silent just in time for the stallion to scoff and take over again. “No, you’ve gone jogging, Doctor Sparks, of course you’ve gone jogging, Doctor Sparks, how would you not remember that you’ve gone jogging once in your life? It’s weird, though, isn’t it? All those ponies exercising, sweating, running-running-running-running and for what? No matter how fast they run, it’s still the same damn track!”
“I-I don’t...” Sparks began to say, but the stallion just cut him off again.
“It’s a loop, Doctor Sparks, it’s all a loop just a loop everyone loops everything’s loops,” he said, pacing in an aimless circle around Sparks. “Loops-loops-loops. Then, now, always, forever.”
Sparks raised his hoof to interject, but once again it took him a moment before he could cobble his thoughts together into words. “You’re saying this... this is a loop? This hospital is a loop?”
Strands of the stallion's mane stood up off his scalp as he whipped his head back and forth. “No no no, not this hospital, not this place, this... thing, this everything.”
Now he was shaking Sparks himself, grabbing his shoulders and twitching in front of them. “It’s a loop,” he whispered once he’d suddenly gone deathly still. “You are, I are, life death space time, time-time-time-time it’s all a loop.”
Finally, a single detail in the stallion’s ravings clicked in Sparks’s mind. A loop in time... he’d heard of those before. Something like this had happened at Canterlot General a long time ago. Patchy details sprang into his mind: horrible magical accident, disappearances, mayhem. A pony trapped inside a cursed building, flashing uncontrollably through time and space to wherever the volatile spell inhabiting it took him. He was that pony now. He was the one stuck looping through the past, present, and future of this awful place.
But ghosts?
He'd heard stories about Canterlot General, about how it was supposed to be haunted. In retrospect, he probably should’ve listened.
“We’re in a time loop?” he asked the stallion, who had since let go of him and wandered over to the window again. Caught up in his own mutterings again, he didn’t seem to notice Sparks had spoken.
“We stop and we go and we’re here and we’re there, but we’re still going around, aren’t we?” he murmured. “You’re still in the loop, we... we still are the loop. And all those things out there, all those ghosts you don’t believe in...”
The stallion chuckled, and flashed Sparks a cheeky grin. “They’re coming along with us.”
Now it was Sparks stubbornly shaking his head. Even now, he still couldn’t buy into everything the stallion claimed. “No, you keep calling them ghosts. They’re not ghosts,” he said. “They’re... I can see them. I’ve felt them, they... they have physical substance. They’re not ghosts. So what are they?”
Once again, the stallion ignored him, this time choosing to rock back and forth on his hooves and stare up at the ceiling. “Twelve-twenty, nine-seven-eight AL,” he said. “You were eight years old. You remember.”
“I don’t know what you’re talk–”
The stallion screwed up his eyes, and the side table next to the bed exploded as his magical aura smashed it against the wall. “You remember!” he screamed, sawdust showering down on him as his chest heaved and his hooves twitched beneath him. He stood there seething for a few terrifying moments, during which Sparks was sure he’d be the next thing that got broken in half, but eventually he calmed himself down and dropped his tone back into a murmur.
“You never forgot,” he said softly. “And that’s why you’re here. That’s why we’re here.”
“Why am I here?” Sparks shouted, adrenaline knocking his voice up a couple octaves. “Why am I the one stuck in this moondamn loop? Why me?”
The stallion looked at Sparks and tilted his head, and in that moment Sparks was overcome with a depth of terror even the monsters that had chased him before hadn’t reached. The stallion was shocked, gobsmacked, completely and utterly blown away by Sparks’ response... and so gut-wrenchingly familiar all the same. December 20th of the year 978. He knew that date. What had happened then? Why couldn’t he remember now?
“Why you?” the stallion asked, in a voice so frail and pitiful Sparks wondered whether he was about to cry. “Why not you? Why couldn’t it be you, why wasn’t it you, why shouldn’t it have been you, why isn’t it you?”
Sparks took a step backwards. He couldn’t remember what had happened on that date. He couldn’t remember if the stallion had locked the door.
“Why a shy young mare with a sickness that wouldn’t heal?” the stallion said, his voice rising and growing more agitated with each word. “Why a starving factory worker with a beard he forgot to shave, why a headstrong pegasus who hit a bad crosswind, why a father of four with a preexisting condition? Why an entire orphanage the week before Hearth's Warming, dead because the alarm never went off, alive because they went to the bathroom and smelled the smoke?”
The stallion was rounding on him now, slowly stomping forward as Sparks helplessly tugged at the knob on the dead-bolted door. The ceiling was glowing again. The floor was pulsing again. “Why you, why them, why us, why we? Why didn’t you do something, why couldn’t you do something, why can’t you do anything, why didn’t you help them why didn’t you fix them why don’t you remember them...”
The stallion was nose-to-nose with him. He raised his hoof. Sparks shut his eyes, and the walls flashed.
“Why couldn’t you save them, Doctor?!”