Act III – ‘Mystery’
Synchronicity, Act III – ‘Mystery’
Sunlight glittered through the leaves. Within the inner branches of the tree was a cocoon of shifting green light, with only the occasional random dart of bright white finding its way to Rainbow Dash’s field of vision. She lay sprawled on a bough, a convenient pillow behind her head. She was comfortable. She was warm. Her eyes were heavy and closed off to the world. She was going to get some sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.
In the dream she was back in the Manor with Twilight. Twilight was explaining something that Rainbow already knew, even down to the words Twilight used to explain it, but Rainbow listened anyway. Twilight turned a corner and Rainbow followed her, but then she was rounding another corner at the end of an impossibly long hallway. Rainbow ran to catch up to her, and caught sight of Twilight’s tail disappearing down another turn. She followed left, then right, then… which way? She whipped her head around, but all the hallways in the maze were lined with the same picture of the husk of the gardens. She was about to call for Twilight, had the thought to call for her. She could feel the muscles in her mouth go through the motions, but no sound came out. And that’s when Rainbow Dash realized she wasn’t alone in the Manor.
A great and terrible presence had stirred to life somewhere far away in the Manor. It may have been miles away in the maze, but it knew she was there. She could sense it sweeping through the hallways like night, like smoke, coming for them. For a second she saw through both her eyes and its eyes, saw herself in front of it, and she began to run, but she was impossibly slow. She tried to use her wings, but they stuck in the air as if it were tar. She couldn’t tell how fast the ravenous raving thing behind her was, only that there was no way she would outpace it. She hurled herself at a door and it splintered into a million shards. Twilight was behind the door. Her body had become a tree, dead for years, frozen in place. Rainbow had enough time to understand she had been too late, too late to find her, too late to act, when the nightsmoke engulfed her. She spat a wilted rose out of her mouth. Its petals were black as a starless night.
Rainbow woke with a start, nearly falling out of the tree. Her wings reflexively shot out to right herself, and she took several deep breaths. Then she screwed up her eyes and slammed a hoof into the trunk of the tree.
“I just want to get some sleep!” she moaned, her voice cracking.
It had started after they all got back to the library and everypony was settling down to sleep – everypony except Twilight, who took the first opportunity she got to sneak off into the basement and start running experiments on the blank book. Rainbow had been thinking back to being inside the Manor, how it had been kinda neat to poke around someplace where you weren’t really supposed to be, and how different it was from going on guided (and forced) tours of historical structures around Cloudsdale. She was half-imagining, half-remembering peeking under one of the covered pieces of furniture and Twilight explaining that it was a such-and-such design made from something and something-else-or-other when she fell asleep.
In the first dream she was in the gardens with Twilight. They were trapped in an impossibly tall hedge maze where black roses bloomed from every wall. Twilight insisted they weren’t lost and kept pausing to look at the roses, even though they were all the same. Rainbow kept trying to warn her to stay away from the thorns. Twilight told her the roses didn’t have thorns, and she ate one off the hedge. Then her eyes filled with inky black mist, and she became rooted to the spot. Rainbow tried to get her to move, to respond, but then the world was swallowed in shadow. She was falling and stuck at the same time, with an infinity of nothing surrounding her.
Rainbow had sat bolt upright. She wasn’t floating in nowhere-space, she was on the floor of the library. She tried to pin the bad dream on having one too many of the cupcakes Pinkie had brought with her that had been more frosting than cupcake, and shut her eyes again.
The dreams were different each time, and yet the same. She always dreamed about Twilight, and the Manor, and something terrible that happened. In one they were climbing a staircase that stretched for miles in the sky, the charcoal-black bannisters carved into roses, and at the top stair Twilight slipped and slid backwards out of sight into the black fog that had settled a couple dozen steps behind them. In another she and Twilight had melted through the floor of the hallway and fell through the ground level, through the basement filled with fields of black roses, and beyond, plunging into never-ending darkness. Rainbow tried to shout for Twilight, but her mouth filled up with shadow and she was silenced.
She tried staying awake as long as she could between brief moments of sleep, staring at the clock face standing in a sliver of moonlight, but it didn’t help; the interruptions to her sleep made her more tired, which in turn forced her asleep to have more nightmares. Rainbow Dash was not in the habit of calling her bad dreams nightmares – not the kind everypony has, where they’re going about their business and all of a sudden have no wings and start to fall out of the sky, or they’re back at school for some reason despite being too old – but these were not regular bad dreams that every pony had. When the morning finally came, Rainbow was the first awake, surprising Pinkie who clearly hadn’t been expecting anypony else to be awake with the first rays of the sun. Rainbow played it off as if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep without a proper cloud, which was a kinda lame excuse, but by then all the noise Pinkie was making had woken Applejack, and the whole issue had been forgotten.
When she left, Rainbow had headed straight for her bed, convinced that it would make all the difference to be up in the skies again. Despite everything being safe and comfortable, she dreamed of Twilight Sparkle stirring a cauldron of some nebulous liquid in the entrance of Maresdon Manor with black stains on her hooves and up her forelegs that looked like blood, and when she tried to warn her about the roses growing from the cauldron, the smoke around them turned black and she went blind. Rainbow tried everything, from drinking two full glasses of warm milk to sleeping on her back the wrong way around to pulling Tank into bed with her – none of it was helpful. Now, under the canopy of an apple tree with her eyes screwed up and her face hot, her thoughts started to seem more like Rarity’s or Fluttershy’s than her own. What if this kept happening, forever? What if she never got proper sleep again? What if she couldn’t ever take another nap and slowly went mad? Could that happen? Rainbow was sure that Twilight would know all of the side-effects of not sleeping properly (or ever), and while having that information would bring a certain grim finality, it was almost worse to not know and imagine more and more elaborate ways in which things could get worse.
Twilight would know…
And then Rainbow Dash realized who could help her.
-/-
“Hey, Twilight?” she called. “You around?”
It was clear from glancing around that she wasn’t. The library was neater than it had been when Rainbow had left, but it didn’t seem to be up to Twilight’s usual standards of organization, and it certainly wasn’t like Twilight to half-heartedly organize anything. Spike was away in Canterlot, getting his phoenix registered; his absence had been the reason Twilight invited everypony to her house for a sleepover in the first place. It wasn’t until she spotted a stack of books sorted not by author or subject but the color on the spine that she realized it must have been Rarity who had straightened things up after last night. Rainbow imagined her with one hoof out the door, then turning back to maybe just pick a few things up and put a few things away, and before she knew it she was sorting stuff in ways that were one hundred percent Rarity and zero percent Twilight. This scenario, however, didn’t really allow for Twilight to have emerged from the basement since she went down there last night. Which wasn’t so unusual; Twilight sometimes went unseen for days when she fixated on something especially tricky. There was no reason to worry.
All the same, Rainbow trotted a little quicker to reach the door to the basement.
The stairs that led down from the main area of the library were lit with a pale white light. Rainbow could hear a deep low buzz that got louder with each step down. A crackling sound interrupted the buzzing, and the hallway was lit for a moment in bright green. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Rainbow poked her head around the corner.
All of the machines Twilight kept in the library’s basement nestled among the tree’s roots were alive and running. A squat one in the corner churned a murky liquid inside of it. Another had a series of lit tubes mounted on its front, the tubes shifting lazily through an array of colors. A large metal box hissed out a burst of steam, only to have the steam sucked up into a tube that led up and away into the ceiling. A complex array of lights and lenses were angled to the center of the room, all pointed at the book recovered from the Manor, resting open on a metal table. Twilight was channeling a yellow light from her horn to one of the lenses, temporarily turning the basement a pleasant lemony color. She let the spell lapse and went to check the book, then let out a groan of frustration.
“Nothing?” she asked. “What am I not doing right? What am I missing? Think, Twilight, think!” She began to pace back and forth. It was only after a couple of moments that she looked up from the floor and realized she wasn’t alone. She approached Rainbow with a fervent gleam in her eyes.
“Wha-” Rainbow began, but was loudly shushed. Twilight scanned her with the same lemony-yellow light, then paced around her and subjected her to a spell that was a pale blue. Rainbow was nudged to stand underneath one of the lenses and bathed in emerald green light. It was at this point that Twilight collapsed to the floor and threw her hooves over her face, defeated.
“Uh… Twilight? What, uh, was all that?” Rainbow asked after a moment when she was sure Twilight was either going to start crying or magically setting things on fire.
“I have been up all night,” Twilight said from beneath her hooves, “trying to make sense of the magical signature coming from that book. I have tried every spell I know and every test I could look up, and I have no idea what it is.” She stood up and moved to stand over the book. “I have only learned three hundred and twelve things the magical signature is not. And now I can feel it on you, too!” She strode towards Rainbow and grabbed her around the shoulders. “Did you go back to the Manor?” she asked in a tone that was nearing accusation.
“No!” Rainbow exclaimed.
Twilight’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure!” She shrugged off Twilight’s hooves. “Just chill out for a second, will you?”
The air went out of Twilight like a deflating balloon. Her eyes softened. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I haven’t-”
“Haven’t slept, yeah,” Rainbow finished for her.
“And I was so sure I would find what that magic was quickly – in an hour or two, at most – and I don’t have anyone to help me organize my experiments, since Spike’s away-”
“What about your owl?” Rainbow asked.
“Owloysius went to sleep hours ago,” Twilight sighed, “and he’s not very good at taking dictation.”
Rainbow Dash studied Twilight’s face to see if she was being serious or not. A ghost of a smile appeared on Twilight’s lips, which made Rainbow break into a full grin, which in turn started Twilight laughing. Soon the pair were stuck in a loop of wild laughter where all it took was a look from one to set the other off again. They ended sprawled on the floor, holding each other for support, gasping for air.
After she was calm enough to speak, Twilight said, “I don’t remember what we were laughing about.”
“Me either.”
Twilight took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I needed that, though. With all this researching and testing and that crazy dream I had, I haven’t been able to-”
“Huh, what?” Rainbow said. “Dream? I thought you hadn’t slept at all.”
“Oh, I fell asleep for a moment at the desk down here while I was waiting for my astrological influence analysis to finish.” She indicated one of the less active machines with a headnod. “It takes a while, and it makes this nice humming sound-”
“What was it about?” Rainbow didn’t know how an astrological influence analysis was performed, and she could find out later if she really wanted to. “The dream. Was it about the Manor?”
“It was, actually.” Twilight’s gaze drifted off as she recalled the memory. “You were with me, and we were looking for something important, but I didn’t quite know what it was, so we had to check all of the rooms to find it. But after we had looked everywhere, it turned out the thing we were looking for had been in your mane the whole time.”
“What was it?”
“A rose,” Twilight said. “A black rose.”
“Twilight,” Rainbow said slowly, “I’ve been having that same dream. Since last night, every time I close my eyes I have a dream about the Manor and you and black roses.”
Twilight’s expression became unreadable. “I know I checked for oneiromancy, but maybe…” She glanced back at the book. For a long moment she stared at it, immobile, then she grabbed the book in a magical bubble and turned back to Rainbow, her eyes bright and active.
“Rainbow, come to bed with me.”
The matter-of-fact way Twilight said this made Rainbow question if she had heard her correctly. “What?” she spluttered.
“I want to have another one of these dreams. And I want to compare our dreams, if you have more.” She strode past Rainbow and started up the stairs. “Coming?”
“And you think this will help?”
“There might be a clue that can point me towards the right spell. And I don’t have much practical experience with dream-based magic, so this is actually kind of exciting!”
As Twilight outlined her theoretical education in dream magic, Rainbow silently followed to the loft of the library. Twilight set the book on top of a short stack of books already occupying her nightstand, climbed into her bed, and set a mask over her eyes. She looked at Rainbow as best she could and said, “Well, come on.”
“Listen, Twilight,” Rainbow said, and searched for a long while for the right words.
“Yes?”
“The dreams I was having… they weren’t exactly good dreams. The reason I kept waking up from them…” She trailed off, unable to finish her sentence. She looked up at Twilight to find her smiling.
“It’s okay, Rainbow,” Twilight said. “One of the first things I learned about magically-influenced dreams is that there’s nothing in them that can hurt you. Whatever happens, whatever you see… it’s just a dream. Harmless.”
“Just a dream,” Rainbow said, slightly uncertain. All the same, she got into the bed beside Twilight.
“You can remind yourself that you’re having a dream. It’s supposed to be easier than when you’re having a normal dream, but you’re less likely to wake up. It’s really like reading a story. So said Oneiromancy and You, anyway.”
“Oh-nero-what?”
“Dream magic. That was the title of the primer I studied out of. There might be a copy in the library too, but it’s not a very common subject ponies want to read about.”
Rainbow lay her head on the pillow and watched Twilight talk. “Why not?” she asked.
“Well, for a start, it’s only really relevant to unicorns, and it’s a very outdated form of magic. Dreams are tricky things to influence, and only a handful of unicorns were ever very good at it. It went through a brief revival as a kind of curiosity branch of magic, but nopony found any serious application for it.”
“How come?”
“Ponies tend to interpret dreams incorrectly, for whatever reason. Mostly unicorns used magical dreams to send silly messages to each other.”
“About how long ago was this, exactly?” Rainbow could feel her eyelids growing heavy again.
“Around the time Winthrop Maresdon was conducting her studies.”
“Do you think that’s a coincidence?”
“Not really.”
Rainbow looked at Twilight’s eyemask, wondering how much she could see through it. “So there’s nothing to worry about?” she asked.
“Nothing at all.”
Rainbow closed her eyes. “G’night, Twilight,” she said, and yawned.
“‘Night, Rainbow.”
Falling asleep in the afternoon sun proved very easy. Rainbow had many dreams that shifted seamlessly from one to the next – she was walking beside Twilight in the Manor gardens under a giant upturned glass vase, then she was in Twilight’s library looking at a book full of pictures of the Manor and her mouth was full of rose petals, then she was on the roof of the Manor while Twilight flew above her and she couldn’t follow because her wings had wilted – but she woke from none of them.
-/-
It was a pale white light brought Rainbow Dash out of sleep. For a moment it seemed like another dream, but finding herself in Twilight’s bed and not the Manor convinced her she was awake. She could hear Twilight breathing; she must have turned over and moved closer to Rainbow during the night.
“Twilight,” Rainbow whispered, and nudged her, “wake up.”
Twilight stirred. “Hm?” she murmured, her expression blank beneath her mask.
“The book.” Rainbow kept her voice low. “Look at the book.”
Twilight slid the mask up her face and turned around. Any traces of the fogginess of sleep vanished when she saw the pale white glow coming from the open pages. She sprang out of bed and paced around the book with an expression of intense scrutiny. “Unbelievable,” she breathed.
Rainbow was about to ask what was unbelievable when the light vanished, leaving them in darkness. Twilight’s horn began to glow, revealing the expression on her face. It wasn’t the mundane look of excitement she wore when reading an interesting passage in a book or passing on a new piece of knowledge to somepony: this was the thrill of being the first to see something, to push into uncharted territory, of pure discovery. She looked how Rainbow Dash felt during her first Sonic Rainboom.
“Rainbow,” she said, “take a look at this.”
Rainbow pulled herself out of the bed to stand next to Twilight. The first page of the book was no longer blank, but covered in spidery writing. She leaned in closer to read.
Today marks the day where this grand old house once again has more than a single occupant. The writing of the instructions left for the gardener was a chore unlike any other, given the specific and demanding needs of all the flora. Is it harsh to wonder if one unfamiliar with the needs of Maresdon’s gardens would be up to the task? unbecoming? Perhaps, yet they are crucial to the work being performed here and it is vital their cultivation proceed in a timely manner. One should be permitted to fret for their well-being in such circumstances.
Spied the gardener at work; seems a rustic sort, the kind that comes with competence borne of year of experience and not years of instruction. I was unsure if he was aware of any observation of his efforts, but he had many an opportunity to notice such. There is work to be done in the basement, but the study seems a more compelling locale, with its fine view of all the grounds. Too much time cannot afford to be misspent…
“What is this?” Rainbow asked.
“You were right, Rainbow,” Twilight said, the triumph in her voice unmistakable. She tapped a hoof on one of the pages that had been blank minutes earlier. “This,” she said, “is Winthrop Maresdon’s diary.”
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I do not know where this story is going but I go along
I would be happy with more
753261
ditto
Ghosts? Who you gonna call?
CUTIE MARK CRUSADERS GHOSTBUSTERS, YAY!!!
great story, can't wait for more!
Congrats on the EQD post
I was expecting the other "Synchronicity" by Sev when I clicked this... Guess I'm entitled to try this one now that I commented...
Okay, now this is interesting. For starters I love how you took the extra effort to conduct three different tellings of the same legend to align with cultural differences between the three races, that's well appreciate from someone who's been doing a lot of his own world-building himself lately on other projects. Loved your further reasoning as to why each culture saw things that way. Really good stuff.
And obviously this is well written, I don't think I caught one spelling error the entire time.
As for what you've developed around the plot. Pretty good so far, I'm not sure I can say I'm really invested yet into it. But a few more updates and you'll probably have me in for it.
Thank you.
I approve. Been a while since I've read/watched/played anything good involving the supernatural realm. I am pleased Battle-Brother.
I'm going into this, slightly apprehensive. The last time I read a similar ship fic in which Twilight involved herself with dark magic studies from another pony, Twilight ended up dying... was not a good end. Still, it's really well written, and I can't seem to stop reading.
Feels Lovecraftian when she's talking about folklore. :P Reminds me of a bit of... crap, that story with the aliens washing up in a flood up in Maine.
why is their is no mystery tag option i'll never know, cus this story is delicious so far
I am somehow okay with this. Continue.
I am curious now. Please continue...
Also, it is TwiDash, so I was curious anyway.
Good beginning!
Synchronicity! Synchronicity!
Kinda reminds me of The Police album Synchronicity.
Oh and that song is called Synchronicity I.
My advice: Burn the book then go burn down the manor and all its gardens. Its the only way to be sure.
758742 I'm not the only one who thought of synchronicity I!!!
“Rainbow, come to bed with me.” --> "Alex, I'll take 'Misunderstood Musings' for 500 please!"
It's Derpy, isn't it?
I knew that she could see things nopony else could! That totally explains why her eyes are like that!
Fantastically spooky writing, well done!
"Rainbow Dash. I want you to sleep with me."
THat would have been so much of a better line...
I am deeply concerned.
Kinky UwU