Lucidity

by Indulgence

Set Apart

Deep stillness pervaded every street throughout Ponyville in spite of the falling rain, which had finally blossomed into a downpour having spent the day as mere drizzle. Nopony moved to break this, unmoving as midnight had not long been struck by the town hall’s clock and most already slumbered in the shelters of their beds. Thick clouds and curtains hid all lights beyond those of streetlamps, left without contention to shine like lighthouses, their yellow glows taking on a colourful rainbow splendour as their rays passed through the sea of droplets cascading through the air. All in all the scene was serenely beautiful, its flux of tones in the darkness going beyond chaos to simply seem natural as they painted themselves across every wall, roof and window and throughout every garden.

Only one inhabitant was in a position to take in the town in this near unique form of brilliance, but her eyes were locked elsewhere on sights far less wondrous. Instead Twilight Sparkle sat at her windowsill, her gaze and mind both focused downwards in their entirety, each lost in a past somewhere lower.

Far below her bejewelled tower and set apart from all other buildings (therefore leaving it beyond any streetlamp’s warmth or colour), a patch of darkened earth, far blacker than its surrounding night, captured all of the young alicorn’s attentions. The ground heaved upward as jagged peaks around a central point, creating a cracked bowel like crater, baked instantly solid by searing heat. At the base of this pit a lake of thick grey ooze, an unpleasant mixture of residual ash and rainwater, was now forming. It looked like the insides of a barbed maw, encircled by the fanged splinters of a great tree’s trunk. From the depths of this dirty swirling pool a mass of sharp bony root tendrils reached graspingly outward, seeking desperately anything they could use to re-cover their ancient exhumed selves. The place was a charred gap in the ground, in the Ponyville skyline and in the heart of its current viewer. Her home was gone, burnt up with so many memories and so much she cared about, and the crystalline monstrosity in which she now sat was no substitute.

Alien, empty, cold, the castle was all these things and more, none of which enamoured it in any way to its single resident. The building was an other, distinct from all its kind in the slight settlement in its huge scale and sharpened architecture, sprouting as a towering affront to all other structures. Its difference lost it all its delicacy, making it merely a brutalist expression of its own presence, gaudy like inappropriate jewellery and just as awkward. Within, its vastness diminished little, all vaulted ceilings and great halls, imitating the depersonalised grandeur of a palace. Twilight had absolutely no want of a palace, she had only barely just accepted the idea of being a princess, but the glassy mineral structure was now all she had. She missed her adopted library: its comforting fustiness, its confined cosiness, its lack of shelf space requiring constant rearrangement, the fact that it felt that she actually belonged there. True geographically little, if not nothing, had changed but nonetheless she seemed lost. She missed her home.

Reducing your cognitive capacities to zero through self-imposed insomnia is only going to exacerbate matters, to your further detriment.

Through an extreme degree of effort Twilight forced herself to turn away from the pane, conceding the point of her always analytical inner voice, although the bedroom she now faced was hardly the balm she wanted. She had consciously chosen the smallest of the tower’s rooms to call her own, preferring its almost Spartan refinement in contrast to any of the alternative spacious voids available to her, whilst it had the added bonus of a balcony to match that of her old home. With the future prospect of in finer weather, being able to lounge outside and enjoy Luna’s great tapestry was something a very small part of her was able to almost look forward to, falling just short of being a true solace. Inside it had been simply furnished with a bed, a desk, a couple of chairs, shelves and cupboards, all still far too luxurious in design to feel like they were hers, but at present it was impossible to identify nearly any of these items. A white avalanche of paper had fallen across everything, spreading out in drifts from the desk, its obvious source, leaving only the bed really visible.

It might be a good idea to make use of one of the plethora of larger spaces in this place when you have to rearrange and reorganise all of these in the morning.

Lists had always been her coping mechanism for any and all of life’s problems, allowing any issue to be broken down into its component facets and then be catalogued. Fluttershy and others of a more environmentally concerned perspective would probably take issue with the sheer volume of woodland required to sustain this habit, but Twilight had found few other methods nearly as capable of reigning in her paranoid side. Writing something down was empowering, quantifying it and rendering it down to only its base qualities, whilst making progress against it tangible and approachable. This was of course not to mention the over the top sense of joy she felt on putting a tick against or cross through a list’s contents. Being faced with this snowstorm of fallen sheets however left her frozen; after all how useful was it to have remembered the title of an incinerated book if it was long out of print and near unique? All she had achieved was the heightening of her loss on becoming aware of exactly how much was gone.

This isn’t helping. To reiterate: you need to sleep. All of this can wait for tomorrow and fresh eyes.

Her mind frustratingly remained entirely right as per usual. Acquiescing to its demands she allowed her telekinesis to enwrap the bed’s covers, drawing them back whilst further beams of magic plumped her pillows, meanwhile extending her wings to softly deposit herself within them. Or at least that was the plan, the reality was very different. Instead of the light flap and gentle landing she wanted she found herself catapulted forwards, well overshooting the mattress to crash heavily onto the floor on the other side. ‘Horse apples!’ Hot pain shot up her crumpled wings, shooting through her spine. ‘This is just getting annoying now!’ These occasional power spikes, an unforeseen by-product of absorbing three senior alicorns worth of magic, had had their benefits (not least of which being able to keep up with and beat Rainbow hooves down any race) but their uncontrollability made calling them an annoyance and understatement. She picked herself up, shaking the blurry stars from the edges of her vision. She received screamed protests from her back as she stretched out its bruised muscles, before gingerly stepping into her quilt’s embrace and quickly slipping beneath its surface.

All the power went back to its respective owners, so either yours alone have been put out of kilter or something else has been altered, possibly biological.

‘Now who’s not helping matters!’ Almost immediately however Twilight’s only recently closed eyes sprang back open, descent into sleep denied not by inquisitive thoughts but instead by her still energised wings. Although tender from her fall they flexed and fluttered, refusing to be still. ‘Seriously?’ She rolled onto her other side, huffing in exasperation. For too long now she had been like a stranger in her own body. Ever since she had “ascended” (as everypony insisted on calling the point at which she had sprouted a pair of alien appendages which she had exactly no idea what to do with) this had been the case and when she had finally begun to get the hang of her new self the rug had again been pulled out from under her. Unfair was not nearly the half of it.

A decidedly fed up princess tried again, taking a deep breath and letting the world steadily fade into darkness. She attempted to channel blank, releasing tension with each drawn out exhale, relaxing her frame in each long inhaled breath that followed. Sleep right now was a bare necessity, as she was well aware, but more than that she longed for what accompanied it. In her dreams she knew that Luna would be waiting for her, a fact that brought with it no small amount of delight. Following Tirek’s high profile escape from Tartarus and the succeeding disaster which had followed, the Princess of the Night had been selected to review and reform Equestria’s highest security penal institution, with a new focus on reform over simple containment. This was no small task, necessitating Luna’s prolonged absence and creating something else far more essential for Twilight to lack. She missed her marefriend, feeling sorely without the support and confidence that the dark alicorn gave her. Finally these thoughts of her love did their work, letting her slip from the stresses of her conscious world, drifting into what lay beyond.