Night Zero

It was night and I was asleep when Twilight burst into the tree house library.

“Where is it!” Panicked Twilight. Her mane was tattered with effort and exertion. She had stress lines circling under her eyes like crescent moons. Though her eyes were half closed she still jumped around the library both literally and figuratively. Pops of magic like otherworldly popcorn colored the house white as she warped from shelf to shelf.

“Ugh… I need more TIME! Spike! I need your help looking for something!” The desperation in her voice was enough to bring me to my feet. I could hear her roaring from all the way upstairs and behind the thick door separating the main section of the library from the bedroom in which I had just been sleeping. I approached cautiously, yawning after being woken up at such a crazy hour. I opened the separating door and recoiled as bright white candlelight flooded around me.

“Slow down Twilight, what are we looking for?” I asked her, already shuffling through some books next to her in a half-hearted attempt to look busy.

At the words slow down she offered me a quick look. I swear I could feel her eyes cutting a hole into my head as she said, “Slow down?! Are you CRAZY?! We don’t have time for slowing down.” Then as quickly as the look came, it went. “We… are… looking… for…” she spat out in rather fast heaves of breath as she made an attempt to jump for the top shelf this time, her magic already focused on another shelf altogether.

It was one question that she did not line up the books like she normally did when searching for information. She was trying so hard to look fast that she was actually being less efficient. Looking at her face and mane, I wondered how she was still conscious.

“For…” I said, hanging my word out like a wet towel. Then my own concern started to set itself in my stomach as I wondered the vast number of things she could be up in legs about. Maybe, I thought, Discord was up to his old shenanigans, or maybe Sombra was back. Then I breathed a sigh as I considered that it could also be something trivial she was worked up about. For all I knew, Twilight was looking for a book she had forgotten to return to the library… I immediately shook that thought when I remembered that this WAS the library, but the idea was still there. What ever this was it could be her blowing something small out of proportion.

“Time… travel… book… from Canter… lot” She said still jumping for more top shelf books. She had all her books collected in a pile. All she needed was a quick glance over the cover before she tossed them aside into a growing pile. “Ohhhh Spike. I may have made a mistake…”

And I had thought she learnt her lesson the last time she messed with time travel. I tugged at her mane, which was a feat easier said then done, what with her moving across the shelves so quickly. She paused for just long enough for me to point her to the table in the other room, half in view through the archway. I had remembered her reading through a particularly small book days ago and she told me not to shelve it for her. She specifically asked me to leave it there so she could find it later. “Is that it?” I asked her incredulously.

I watched her expression perform a mental face hoof as she remembered the location of the very important book. Next second, she was in the other room, calling my name again. I dragged my self half-heartedly into the room.

She flipped through the pages, eyes twitching left and right. At one point she jolted her head to look through the window to the outside world. Then she put her nose right back in the book. I looked out the same window and saw that it was just another night. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, other than Twilight’s sudden panic of course.

“Aha!” she said, so sharply that I jumped. I rushed closer to her side and looked into the pages she was studying.

As far as I could tell, she was looking at some kind of spell, and guessing from the type of book it was in, I was pretty sure that it had something to do with time travel. But all the characters on the page were unrecognizable to me, as were most spells, so I looked to Twilight and asked, “What does this do?”

For a moment she didn’t answer, instead reading down the pages of glyphs and over what looked like small sketches of ponies performing spells in different stances. Then she said without looking at me, “I will explain when we get there.”

“Get where?” I asked, now forced to take more interest now that I was apparently going somewhere. “I thought you were done messing with time travel…”

She ignored this and walked back to the library part of the house presumably to have a larger space to cast her magic. I tapped my claws together in a way that said, “of course she’d ignore me” then followed.

For some reason, the only thoughts passing through my head were whether or not I should pack for a long trip. Here Twilight was, acting like the end was nigh and I felt like we were just going on some vacation. I mean how bad could whatever this is possibly be. Certainly no worse than what we’ve seen before, right?

“No…” I said to myself, “whatever this is, it will blow over eventually, it always does.”

By this point I didn’t have much to say about Twi’s magic. Yeah it was impressive, yeah pops of black auras and green and purple electric tendrils sparked curiously out of her horn like a gopher peeking above his ground hole and then scampering across an open field. But when the line of black-green-purple magic hit the ground she pointed at, something strange happened. A sound reminiscent of a train screeching to a halt and something like paper tearing ripped through the floor. It was as if someone had stapled my eyes open, I couldn’t close them no matter how hard I tried. This proved painful when the black-green-purple ball of magic, now stuck to the floor with a sucking smack, like jelly being squished between hooves, exploded into violet light which quickly turned blue then green then yellow then orange then red. A moment later… and a few pained tears shed from the light’s intensity… and the light receded to a point where only a glowing red orb hovered above the ground where Twi had cast the spell.

I coughed the words, “Wha-wha-aaaat is that thing?” I for some reason said this with less fear and more intrigue, like I was asking Twilight about a new book and what it was like.

Twilight stared at the pulsing red ball for a moment before she realized the magnitude of her own spell. She seemed a bit taken aback by how easy it had been. I guessed she must have thought it would have taken much longer or would have been far harder, but here she was with her horn still humming softly with the purple afterglow of magic and a red monstrosity to boot.

“It’s a kind of time rift, Spike.” She answered back to me with equal parts curiosity and urgency. Her trance lifted as she said this and then she made a gesture with her neck that I assumed meant, “Touch the glowing red orb.” Then she actually said to me in the most sincere and urgent voice I had heard her use in some time, “You need to go first, just touch it.”

I didn’t want to go near the thing. For all I knew, it would turn me inside out. I guess I could trust Twilight, but I had a strange feeling that this would hurt, like a lot. I didn’t much relish the thought of having my innards turn into a buffet for hungry horse flies so I approached with the kind of caution one takes when poking a worrying hornets’ nest with a stick to see if the pests still enjoy living in it. Then I cautiously set one single nailed talon on the giant boil. It was strangely cold. It was like touching a solid cloud of fog, or so I thought, like sticking your claw into the thickest fog nature could manage and then landing on something softer than the softest, squishiest fabric I had ever felt.

“It’s cold.” I said aloud to no one in particular, I gave a chuckle to ease my own tension. It wasn’t really working. “Kinda, hah, feels good actually…. I, um, think it’s all safe, um, Twiiiii…..” My words were sounding less and less enthusiastic, and that wasn’t saying a lot since they hadn’t begun with much excitement to begin with.

It pulsed after a few seconds of my touch and I felt something grab my arm. I snapped. “AHHHH TWILIGHT WHAT IS THIS THING DOING TO MEEEEEEEEEE!!!” Instinctively I retracted my arm, or at least that is what I tried to do but the magic red ball wasn’t going to see things my way. It yanked me towards it as if the thing had grown an appendage of its own, gripping my claw and pulling me arm first into the glowing red mass. I looked over my shoulder to where Twilight had been, noticed she wasn’t there than let my mind fill with mean thoughts, cursing Twilight for reasons I had yet to comprehend. A second later I noticed her on the other end of the orb. I hadn’t realized it, but she had quickly followed me, circled to the other side of the orb and she too had touched it with a hoof. Then I was pulled the rest of the way in. Up to that point I had been shoulder deep into the red light, feeling the soft fabric feel tightened around my wrist and arm like I was being tied up by bed sheets, then quickly my head, along with the rest of me, was yanked in as if I had been an unsightly nose hair on the face of the world. I hastily screwed my eyes shut.

I tried to scream, but the sound was drowned out by a buzzing sound that shook me to the core of my skeleton, threatening to vibrate my very bones out of my skin. I could see the light burn through my eyelids like glorious fire from the aether and persisted in a flying / falling / tumbling motion for what seemed like mere seconds before I landed hard on my feet on what felt like a wood floor. The light immediately dimmed to the point to where I risked opening an eye. My eyes took little time adjusting to the light, the dim red glow of the room I was now in, and I let my mind trip over itself as I realized where I had just been transported.

It was the library. In fact, I was standing in the exact same place I had been the moment I touched Twilight’s spell ball. Then my brain picked up on the next big thing.

“Red…” I said out loud, “Everything is red.”

Everything was red, the same hellish crimson that the spell had become before I touched it. I felt like I was in an oven. The color seemed to trick my brain into making me think that I was hot which was in direct conflict with my skin, which told me that it was actually rather chilly in here. The light that seemed to exist as some sort of ambient background with no visible source bathed the room. The windows, which I noticed second, were black washed with a radiating darkness that shown into the house with a radiance that I didn’t know black, the absence of light, to be capable of producing. The whole effect was as mind-blowing as one of those visual illusions that you stare at for minutes until your head hurts and your eyes start seeing the world spin around you.

It was with my ever-growing surprise that I found Twilight pop up in front of me, also in the exact spot in which she first made contact with her spell. I was again surprised, in that weird illusioned-mind-blow way to see that the red did not affect her purple colors at all. She was purple, not purple with red colored light, just purple. “But that’s not possible,” went my brain “the color of something you perceive must be altered based on the light that shines on it.” But either reality had forgotten some of its guidelines, or there was something seriously different about the world now. Not reddish purple, just purple… Just lavender purple. The strange illusion was so intense I felt bile rising in my throat.

I soon realized that I too was like this. All colors of my body that I could see had remained the same, unchanged by the ambient lighting. Or rather, all our colors were the same they had been before the spell. I felt like a simple image superimposed poorly upon an elaborate painting, making me (and Twilight) stick sorely out like an unsightly blemish on reality.

Twilight, who ignored me for the moment, walked around the room as if to test her work. “Is it working?” Which seemed like a dumb question considering the looming, glooming redness. For a moment I considered that I was just seeing things and that the red around me was a lasting stain on my eyes.

I rubbed my eyes and asked, “I’d think so, doesn’t the world being red kinda qualify the spell as “working”?”

She gave me a confused, almost bewildered, look like I had just missed an obvious joke. Apparently, she had asked the question rhetorically, but when I didn’t say anything else, she was happy to take the initiative in explaining. “Yes it does, Spike.” She didn’t so much as roll her eyes or purse her lips, but I could sense that she was fighting an urge to be bitingly sarcastic.

“So what just happe-”

“Time stop.” She interjected. “Hopefully I did everything right… this should give us five days.”

I kinda was guessing that time had somehow been changed or distorted or whatever. I think the real question on my mind was why she had done this, so I asked her.

“Five days to do what?”

In the few seconds it had taken me to ask the question Twilight had made her way to the front door of the library. I was actually curious to see what it would look like, with all the sickly voidish black outside creeping through the windows like black tar, so when she opened the door and nothing happened, I breathed a sigh. I followed her outside, hoping she would answer my question. I shuffled next to her, just outside the frame of the door and looked at her as she stood, ramrod stiff, staring blankly ahead of her like something she saw was amiss. She didn’t do any of that jaw dropping stuff or widened eyes but her brow was furrowed and her body was tensed up like she was about to be a bystander of a tragic train wreck.

“What is it we are doing?” I so dared to ask again. Then I looked forward to see what she was looking at and saw something that, unlike Twilight, made my jaw drop and eyes bug out so hard that they threatened to pop out of their sockets and rocket across the yard.

The sky was black, no surprises there, and everything was true to the eerie glowing redness that painted colors across the whole of everything. What caught me a bit off guard was the fact that there were two moons hanging in the sky. One was a regular small semicircle of red shining with red and black light, the one I assumed was the real moon in all of its half moon, lunar glory. It hung at about the height a moon would hang at say two in the morning, which is to say halfway between midnight and the horizon. Then the second moon, the one that was massive, taking up most of the entire horizon loomed like a passive aggressive middle talon to the world. It looked more like a large flash of light than a celestial sphere. It bled into the flat of the world line like a sun, but was far too big. On top of that, lines of light that looked like party streamers surrounded the exposed like a halo made of dotted-dashed lines. It looked like… a giant pop of magic… I was starting to wonder how many times in one night I could be left dumbfounded.

Twilight gave me her best doomsayers look and said “I thought we had more time” with the kind of tone a child uses after they’ve excepted the fact that they are going to receive a beating no matter what.

“Twilight, what are you talking about?!” I started, finally feeling the true gravity of the situation. I rose a claw and gestured to the surrounding environment “What is all this?”

“It’s all my fault, that’s what!” she said, not helpfully and continued to stare fatalistically.

Irritation found its way into my voice, “Just tell me what it is Twilight!”

“Fine!” She yelled at me, causing me to jump. “It’s all my fault. There! I said it twice now. Are you happy?! It is a spell gone wrong, what more do you want to know?!” She began to run toward the light, which I thought was exactly the opposite thing you were supposed to do in a situation like this. “What have I done, what have I done, what have I done?” She said over and over as she took off.

Being on two stumpy little legs, I couldn’t keep up and before long, she was out of earshot. I could still hear the mad ramblings she continued to spout but couldn’t understand them. After a bit, I had to catch my breath. I sat down on the ground, somewhere near the middle of the marketplace in Ponyville and coughed my lungs up in exasperation. She was gone.

“Well,” I said to myself. “Now what?” After my breath was back, I kicked the red dirt in frustration. Strangely, the dirt I kicked up in the air, stayed in the air as if someone hit the eternal pause button. It seemed pointless… that she’d bring me here, just to tell me that something was her fault and then run off, especially after that show she gave me.

I very, very slowly began to walk towards the light in hopes of eventually catching up with Twilight.

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