Sparks didn’t move for several seconds, expecting at any moment the blow that would end this all for good. When he finally opened his eyes, he had to cover them up with his foreleg almost immediately. Bright, blinding light was streaming down from the fixture overhead, and outside he could hear birds chirping and the bustle of the city as the sun rose over Canterlot. He lowered his hoof to see the sight for himself, and once he did he couldn’t help but laugh. The nightmare was over. He was back in the real world.
Still chuckling to himself, he pushed open the door behind him—unlocked now—and strolled out into the hallway, relishing in the warm glow of the technomagical lights overhead. Stars above, what a psychotic dream! And to think it had made him wander all the way over here into... where in Equestria was he? The walls were painted with smiling flowers and brightly colored balloons, but the pediatrics ward was in the rear of the hospital, not the front side closest to the street. And what’s more, where was everypony else? No matter what ward this was, there should’ve been at least a few ponies milling around in the hallways or visiting with one of the patients.
Sparks stopped walking for a moment just so he could take the time needed to grit his teeth and scold himself. It was natural to be a little edgy after waking up from a strange dream, but this was real life now, and he needed to get back to Surgery before he had to explain to somepony how he’d managed to sleepwalk all the way over to Pediatrics in the middle of the morning. Now wasn’t the time to think about the dream. Now wasn’t the time to let his mind drift back to that stallion, to his screaming, to the last words he’d said before the walls had flashed and he’d woken up here...
…
… why couldn’t he save them? What was that supposed to mean? He’d conducted successful operations with almost every one of his patients. Of course, every surgeon occasionally had a case that just couldn’t be helped, but his were certainly few and far between. In fact, over all of his time as a surgeon, in his own memory of failed operations he could only remember...
Sparks stopped again, and his pulse quickened a bit. He could only remember... why couldn’t he remember them? He tried again, and a hollowing sense of vertigo forced him to give up even quicker than the first time. He knew they’d happened, he was absolutely sure of it, but the details just wouldn’t... stars above, he was messed up right now. Maybe he needed to take the rest of the day off. What time was it right now, anyway?
He trotted ahead a few yards and approached a bulletin board coated with faded flyers to check the time on the clock hanging above it. When he looked up and examined it, though, his stomach started to drop again. The clock was ticking, but the hands stayed perfectly still, stuck at precisely 11:35. He shut his eyes, shook his head, did everything short of blast the clock off the wall with his horn and demand that it work right, but nothing changed. 11:35. A perfectly functional clock, stuck at one single time, hanging over a bulletin board full of get-well cards and crayon drawings and little notices about proper hallway maintenance...
… and a day-by-day calendar, its top half adorned with a picture of a little grey kitten, displaying the date in huge black type.
December 20th, 978 AL.
Sparks stumbled back towards the wall, but his legs gave out before he reached it. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. He was hallucinating, or he was still dreaming, or... it couldn’t be real. It couldn’t be real.
Hoofbeats. Someone was coming. He could hear them walking up to him, reaching him, passing him by, but he never saw them. He got back to his hooves and looked around, but the hall was empty, and the hoofbeats had stopped. Whoever it was had stopped. He took a step forward, froze in place, waited for a response. No one. Nothing.
He was about to turn around again when a droplet of liquid hit him on the nose. He jumped back and dabbed at the spot, and his hoof came away red. Another droplet flashed by his ear and splashed onto the floor. Red. Stained on his hoof. Wouldn’t come off no matter how hard he rubbed.
He looked up.
Wet, glistening hoofprints stretched across the ceiling, curving around from a nearby hallway and traveling right over his head to stop a few feet ahead of him. Red. They were all red. Every print on the ceiling was red.
He heard a noise like a grunt, and the ceiling dimpled overtop the last set of prints. There was a second of silence, and then a loud, thumping impact against the floor twenty feet in front of him, where four new hoofprints splattered into existence without anypony visible to make them. A fifth circle blossomed in front of the four already there, then a sixth, then a seventh and eighth. The hoofbeats he’d heard before broke into a gallop, and the calendar fell to the floor as Sparks jerked away from it and sprinted for the end of the hallway.
There was an exit there, a closed pair of double doors. He could make it there in time. He could hide there. He could stay in there until the loop reset, until he found the other stallion, until he woke up from this dream and was back in his office and he could just think for a second about what the stallion had said. He covered the distance to the door in a few seconds, and slammed into it without bothering to reach for the knob. The door gave, splintered, blew open in front of him as he bashed straight through it.
And the next thing he knew, he was tumbling head over hooves into the wall, tangled up in the legs of a squealing mare and blind in the glare of fluorescent lights.
• • •
“... hear me? Sir, can you hear m... Cheerio, get me a suture kit and call security!”
Sparks opened his eyes and lurched upwards, holding back a swing at the pony hovering above him at the last second. Although their forehooves kept him pinned to the ground and his muscles still ached with the urge to fight them off and run, he had no choice but to stare up at them and force himself to stay put. Even in his state, he could see that the pony’s eyes were green, not blue, and that she was a yellow pegasus mare in clean blue scrubs, not a dark-haired unicorn with much heavier hooves than hers.
“Sir? Sir, if you can hear me, just stay calm. I don’t want to hurt you, I just need you to stay here so we can make sure you’re okay...”
“Di... didn’t...” he struggled to say. His throat was bone-dry, and his wind hadn’t returned from his violent entrance into the hallway. The other pony had squealed. There were other ponies here. Why were there other ponies? Nothing had changed. There had never been… he hadn’t...
“Sir, it’s okay. We’re here, we’ve got you. Whatever happened to you, we can make sure it doesn’t happen aga–”
“Didn’t loop,” he finally managed to say. Before the orderly on top of him could protest, he pushed her away and turned around as he jumped to his hooves. The door he’d busted through hung on one contorted hinge nearby, and behind it lay an ordinary broom closet, its inner contents undisturbed despite the chaos just a few feet outside. “Didn’t loop, he’s still here, he’s still...”
“Sir, just...”
“He’s still coming!”
The orderly swore under her breath and whispered something to a stallion nearby, who nodded and motioned for the ponies gathered in the hallway to clear a path. “Come on,” she told him, taking him by the foreleg and tugging him towards the part in the crowd. “Let’s get you squared away. We’ll go someplace safe, I promise he can’t get you in there.”
Sparks shook his head, unable to resist following her yet unable to explain why he couldn’t bear the thought of it. His mind was moving too fast for his mouth to keep up, jumping back and forth between thoughts and memories and the all-consuming terror that ate away at all of them with every step he took away from that door, every step deeper into whatever fresh hell this was. He’d changed places again, jumped to a different spot in the building, but the walls hadn’t flashed and the floor hadn’t throbbed. So he hadn’t really looped, just... moved. To where? To when? Was it over now? Would it ever be?
Lost inside his mind, Sparks let the orderly lead him into a nearby room and set him on top of the bed. “I’m gonna lock the door when I leave,” she said, squeezing one of his forehooves in both of hers, “and we’re gonna bring in some ponies to check on you and figure out what happened. Nothing’s gonna get in here.”
She turned to leave and Sparks leapt from the bed, grabbing her shoulder and spinning her around. “When is this?” he asked. “What is today, what day is it today?”
The orderly tried to look him in the eyes, and could only manage it for a second. “It’s December 21st,” she said. “Look, I promise I’ll be right back, but we’ve had a hell of a day already. There was a fire in the Lower Quarter last night, a whole orphanage just… we don’t know what’s going on, but we’re gonna find out. I promise.”
She promised.
She didn’t know.
She was turning to leave again.
Through the tiles in the floor, he felt the building begin to pulse.
“Don’t leave,” he begged her. “Don’t leave, it’s happening again.”
The orderly’s eyes widened. She tried to tug her way out of his grip. “Sir, please, I need to go–”
“No no no, please, I’m begging you. It’s happening again, it’s going to happen now.”
She pulled out of his grip, and in desperation he grabbed at her with his magic. His aura caught onto her tail and held fast. The walls were glowing. How could she not see the walls were glowing?
“I don’t know what I did,” he cried. “I don’t know what’s happening to me or why it’s happening or what’s going to happen before I get out, but I can’t do it anymore! I can’t go back in, I have to get out! I have to get out of the loop!”
“Let go of me!” the orderly screamed, but it was too late. The walls flared, the floor and ceiling shook, and when the light exploded all around him it took the orderly with it. He was still holding onto her tail when it happened. He could see her face as it withered in the time it took him to blink, as her flesh rotted away and her eyes imploded and her bones disintegrated into dust. As she was simply wiped away by an instantaneous glitch in time that lasted a second for him and an eternity for anything he dragged along with him.
He let go of her tail, and the single tuft of cherry-red hair he’d held onto dissolved into the air. When the light faded, the hallway outside was quiet, and the air of the room he occupied hung heavy with dust. He had looped. He was alone.
And a brown-coated, blue-eyed stallion was standing in the doorway.