After a terrible accident, Twilight's life hangs in the balance, but for Celestia, this is the perfect opportunity to carry out her plans to vanquish a growing evil . . .
After a terrible accident in Ponyville Library, Twilight's life hangs in the balance, but for Celestia, this is the perfect opportunity to carry out her plans to vanquish a growing evil . . .
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Thank you for whoever drew the cover art; I found it on Google and don't know who did it. Sorry!!!!! :( Whoever you are, again, thank you!
Twilight Sparkle reshelved the last book and sighed in relief. She'd been shelving books for hours, because Spike, who usually reshelved them, was currently cooking dinner. Usually Twilight just went out to eat, but they were running a little low on funding, and Spike insisted that he couldn't dent his pride by asking a magical white princess for some funding because he'd spent it all on gems. So Twilight had eventually complied, if only to appease him. She was planning on asking Celestia after the baby dragon fell asleep.
Twilight let out another great sigh of relief, crumpling down to the ground in exhaustion. Pinkie had held another one of her signature 'Pinkie Parties' at the library the night before, so the entire place was a mess. The girls had helped clean up of course, but it had been late and so they'd all gone home, leaving the majority of the work for Twilight and Spike the next morning. Spike had helped, and so had Owlawiscious, but they'd all left eventually; Spike to make dinner, Owlawiscious to catch up on lost sleep. Of course, Twilight couldn't blame Owlawiscious. She had practically threw her poor owl out of the library because the exhausted avian was dead on her talons.
Twilight Sparkle groaned, heaving her tired and sore body up,then down the stairs that led to the basement. There was an experiment that Princess Celestia needed finished immediately. So she was determined to finish it today. Stifling a yawn, Twilight staggered down the stairs and into the basement. She immediately got to work on the experiment.
Twilight was so tired, she didn't even notice when smoke began filtering out from underneath the door, and the air began getting a little too hot and stuffy. Twilight did notice when there was a dramatic spike in her temperature reader that she was using as her Constant for the experiment. The temperature went from a calm seventy-four degrees, to a burning one-hundred. Inhaling sharply, Twilight came abruptly to her senses. The air was practically sizzling, and Twilight noticed with a shock that her coat was slick with sweat. Stumbling back and suddenly panting heavily, Twilight stumbled over the delicate machinery that she'd forgotten was behind her. The expensive equipment fell to the ground with a resounding crash, a fire immediately springing up where the potions and metal gears had fallen.
Reaching for the magic embedded in her horn's base, Twilight cast it out of her horn as water. She showered it on the flames, and they sputtered out. Heaving a sigh of relief, Twilight began to turn around, but she had barely moved a hoof before the fire sprang up again full force, this time beginning to spread out and catching on the walls and floor around her.
Twilight immediately turned tail and ran up the stairs after it became obvious that the fire wasn't going out by normal nor magical means. She reached the door and wrenched it open so hard it flung completely off its hinges and slammed into the far wall where it was quickly consumed by the flames.
The entire library was a blazing inferno. The books she had so carefully shelved mere hours before were already being devoured by the mass of orange, and the flames were licking their way towards her. She inhaled sharply, and was immediately sent into a coughing fit as smoke filtered into her lungs. She turned towards where the door was, but found only a massive wall of flames. The door was blocked.
She could feel the heat on her face. She stood, mesmerized by the dancing flames in front of her. Some long forgotten instinct surfaced. It was fight or flight now, and her instincts were urging her to fly. Fly away, away from the fire, the fire that hurt and burned and attacked without mercy.
Whipping away from the door so fast she was just a lavender blur, Twilight ran up the stairs that were so far were fire-free. There was a balcony in her bedroom; she could fly out and to safety from there. Taking great gulps of air, she rested her legs for a moment. Some kind of sixth sense was urging her onward, telling her to quickly escape. Her brain rebelled.
Just a minute . . .
Just one moment, the she'd hurry out to safety. It would all be okay, she knew for a fact that fire didn't travel that fast, so it was safe to say she was fine for the moment.
It was a lapse in judgement she would regret for the rest of her life.
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Too late she realized her mistake; the fire was upon her, burning her fur and stinging her eyes. Something was wrong with the fire, it was moving forward at an unnatural rate. Spreading her sooty wings, Twilight rose into the smoky air. Ignoring the pain, Twilight flapped her wings as fast as they would go. A hazy black archway was ahead; she recognized it as the doorway to her bedroom. She began drifting downward, but flapped her wings frantically as the fire seared her hooves. Ducking down and blinking rapidly in an effort to get the smoke out of her eyes, Twilight swooped swiftly through the doorway.
Her room was on fire; the raging inferno had already spread. And the balcony-! It was on fire too, though the flames were small. She could still make it through. Twilight closed her eyes briefly, and then her instincts came to life.
Some strange, long forgotten power was taking over her brain, shoving the part of her that was sane, the part of her that was Twilight Sparkle, to the back, into a mental cell where she could only watch as her body acted without her consent.
Smoke was quickly filling the tiny space. She couldn't see the door to the outside, the ceiling, or the walls. She let out a mighty roar - the likes of which hadn't been seen in centuries - and flared her wings, flattening her ears to the sides of her head, and baring her teeth. A fire of her own had alighted in her usually calm violet eyes.
Then she flapped her wings once, propelling her to where she sensed her balcony was, flapped her wings once more, then flared them out beside her.
The world exploded in a cacophony of pain.
Her back and hind legs were burning and seared horribly, her forelegs had glass embedded in them from where her front hooves had burst through the glass screen, and blood was dripping down the left side of her face. Unconsciously, she flatted her wings to her sides, but couldn't fold them up all the way for the pain.
She felt the wind through her fur - and realized with a jolt that she was in midair.
Twilight Sparkle fell like a rock. Fire was streaming behind her like a comet; her tail was streaming yellow orange flames, as was her back legs. Black was crawling in at the edge of her vision. She weakly tried to raise her wings to slow her fall, but only her left wing responded, her right hung motionless at her side. She flared her left wing, then began spinning out of control. She briefly recognized the ground below her, and weakly brought her wing up to shield her face, before she heard a horrible crunching sound and blood sprayed from her broken wing onto her face. She skidded along the ground, then lay still.
Her wing was trapped beneath her head, she could feel it folded practically in half under her body's weight. Her head was tilted at an odd angle, her broken wing covering the already bloody left side of her face and soaking her whole face completely with blood.
Her one good eye fluttered open.
Rainbow Dash's pale, slack jawed face swam before her eyes. Twilight let out a muffled moan of pain.
"Twilight!"
Ponies were calling her name, shouting it out, telling others to get back. She vaguely heard her friends calling her name, and saw them leaning over her, eyes wide, faces pale and scared. Then her good right eye rolled up into her head and she knew no more.
Shining Armor smiled. His day - heck his year! - was going better than he could've hoped. He was married to a beautiful alicorn, leader of a country full of crystal ponies, and his little sister was now an alicorn Princess as well as his wife. Except for the brief bout with the Changelings they'd had at the wedding, and that spat with King Sombra, his life so far was wonderful. Nothing could ruin this.
And that one thought is what jinxed it.
A young royal Pegasus guard was flapping across the lawn towards himself and Cadence. Shining looked closer, trying to see what rank the pony was. The midday sun was glaring off of his gold plated armor, making the sun on the breastplate look almost like the real thing.
"Wait . . . That's one of Princess Celestia's guards! " he exclaimed in surprise.
"Hmmm?" Cadence asked from beside him. Her eyes were closed, head tilted up toward the sun.
"One of Celestia's guards is running up the field towards us!" He said, getting back up to his hooves to meet him. Cadence immediately opened her eyes and followed her husband's gaze.
"That's odd," she commented. "I wonder if there's some kind of emergency." She got to her hooves as well.
The guard finally reached them, chest heaving and panting heavily like he'd flown the entire way there nonstop. He saluted his old captain.
"Shining Armor, sir," he panted, than straitened up. "Urgent notification from Canterlot Hospital."
"Canterlot Hospital?" Cadence asked in bewilderment.
"The Golden Oaks Library was caught in a terrible fire last night. Twilight Sparkle was still inside."
"What?!" Shining shouted. "Is she hurt?! Is she okay?! She didn't get injured, did she?!"
"She's going to be alright, right?!" Cadence asked slightly hysterically, cutting off her husband.
"I was getting to that, sir. She was injured extensively, losing a lot of blood. She had to be taken to Canterlot Hospital and rushed into emergency surgery." He said quickly. Then added, "Sir!"
"WHAT?!" He very nearly screamed.
"It's okay Shining," Cadence soothed, resting a hoof on his shoulder. "Just take deep breaths."
He closed his eyes and breathed deeply for a moment, then snapped open his eyes open. "Anything else?"
"No, sir!"
"We're both going to Canterlot." He turned to the guard. "Go find a pony called Light Blade. Tell him he's in charge until we return."
The guard saluted, then sank to the ground in exhaustion as soon as they turned away.
Shining Armor and Princess Cadence took off for the train station.
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The train arrived at Canterlot within the next couple of hours, and Shining and Cadence were the first to get off. They ran up towards the whitewashed building in the distance that was the Hospital.
"I hope she's okay," worried Cadence as they ran.
Shining didn't respond; he just continued running, his eyes fixed on the doors to the hospital. There were too many ponies! He wouldn't get there in time; he had a terrible feeling in his gut that he'd gotten only once before, when his little sister had had a near death experience with the flu when she was younger.
It was a roiling knot that twisted his heart and made him want to throw up, lay on the ground and sob like a little filly, and go out and kill a thousand ponies so that his Little Twily could live.
And he knew.
His little sister was in danger. Mortal danger.
His horn flared to life, glowing with such a terrifying intensity it was almost red. He disappeared a millisecond after with a slight pop. His wife followed soon after.
Rainbow Dash hated waiting rooms. And that was on a normal day, when one of her best friends hadn't just been wheeled into the emergency room of Canterlot Hospital covered in blood and with both wings bent at unnatural angles. Today, she just felt like punching something. Or, someone.
Preferably the horrible white monstrosity that was sitting at the front desk and called herself a nurse. How could she sleep at night knowing she was putting her through something as horrible as this?!?!
When they'd first arrived, Rainbow had immediately rushed up to the front desk and demanded the nurse tell her where Twilight was. Said nurse had refused, rambling on about how they were all in shock and that Twilight was going to be just fine, and to please take a seat and a million other things that the rainbow maned Pegasus didn't care about.
So Rainbow had pounded her hoof on the desk, and again demanded she tell her where Twilight was.
The nurse again refused, and repeated the same old stupid spiel, albeit in a slightly more hostile tone.
Then, before her friends could restrain her, she'd leaned in real close to the poor mare, looked her dead in the eyes, and demanded she tell her where her best friend was, or it was going to be her on that hospital bed instead of Twilight.
After Rainbow had finally been dragged back to a chair and now sat, giving the nurse at the front desk the stink eye, more ponies had slowly started arriving over the next few hours. At first Rainbow thought they were here all for another patient, then they all sat down in the plastic chairs and asked how Twilight was doing.
It seemed every pony from Ponyville had come to see how their local Princess was doing.
Taking a brief break from glaring at the nurse, Rainbow glanced around the room in slight surprise. She'd known Twilight was pretty well known, but didn't know she was this well known. She spotted a few famous figures in the quickly gathering crowd, including Prince Blueblood sitting in a seat in the corner and wiping his nose delicately with a hoof-kerchief, Spitfire and a couple of old retired Wonderbolts, Sweet Song, a well known singer, and even Princess Celestia and Princess Luna surrounded by a small army of Royal Guards.
There was a crack like thunder, and Twilight's older brother, Shining Armor, and his wife Princess Cadence both appeared in the center of the room looking slightly frazzled and as if they'd been running through the streets of Canterlot with no care about how messy they got in the process.
Which, Rainbow reminded herself, they probably had been.
Seeing Shining marching toward the good-for-nothing-nurse with a murderous look in his eyes, Rainbow leapt out of her seat and flew quickly over to him.
If Shining murdered that nurse, Rainbow would gladly burn the body where no one would ever find it and blame it on the butler. It was always the butler, wasn't it? Or maybe it was General Ketchup, or what ever his name was . . . Her thoughts briefly wandered, but she snapped them back with a quick Snap out of it, Rainbow! Best friend currently in surgery! There are more important things than General Ketchup!
She arrived at the desk a millisecond after Shining and Cadence did.
"I'm sorry, but you'll have to-" the nurse started, but, surprisingly, Cadence gave the other mare a gaze so cold that it could have frozen an active volcano.
The nurse, gulping and shrinking slightly under the angry gazes of both Shining Armor and Cadence, stuttered nervously. "Y-you h-have t-to g-go-"
"I don't have to go anywhere!" Shiny said forcefully. "But if you'll just tell us where Twilight Sparkle's room is-"
Rainbow butted in and finished the sentence for him.
"-We might let you live." She finished darkly.
The nurse hurried over to her desk and shuffled through the papers there with faint blue magic. Apparently finding the paper she'd been looking for, she lifted it up to eye level and read aloud.
"Twilight Sparkle. Gender: female. Race: previously unicorn, now alicorn. Is this the mare you're looking for?" The nurse asked, all traces of a stutter gone now that she had something to shield her face with.
"Yes," Cadence answered, slightly kinder than before. "Can you tell us which room she's in?"
"I don't think she out of surgery yet." the white mare answered. "She looked really bad when she came in-"
She was once again interrupted, this time by a medium sized plain gray stallion with a white doctor's coat on. His eyes showed a brief flicker of surprise at the mass of ponies all crammed into the waiting room, but then he schooled his face into a bland and bored expression.
"Immediate family of Twilight Sparkle-?" He asked. Shining Armor, Cadence, Twilight's sobbing parents, all of the Element Bearers, and both Royal Pony Sisters all stood up and immediately made their way over to the doctor.
He glanced down at a clipboard he held in his bland gray magic. "Only immediate blood relatives please." He said.
"We are blood relatives!" Rainbow and AJ both protested loudly, while Fluttershy tried to convince the doctor in kind tones to let her and the others in, while Pinkie Pie stood off to the side looking unusually somber and Rarity began trying to bribe the Doctor into letting them in. Twilight's parents wails of how they were her parents was lost in the general hubbub of the mob.
More ponies had come up, protesting loudly and trying to get them to let them in.
They all fell silent as Princess Celestia, Immortal Ruler of the Sun, strode gracefully through, her sister quickly following suit behind her.
She bent down to whisper in the doctor's ear for a moment, to which he nodded.
"Right this way," he said in a low voice. Everyone immediately everyone started shouting all at once. Shining Armor pushed his way to the front.
"Princess," he panted. "Please. I need to see my sister!"
"I understand you need your sister." She said, eyes flickering over to Luna. "But I just need to check with the doctors and see if Twilight is okay. I'm sure you will find out the nature of your sister in but a few short minutes."
He gazed up at her for a moment, before bowing his head. "I trust you, your highness." He looked up. "Please make sure she's okay, though." He pleaded.
Celestia stared down at Shining. "I will," she vowed.
Then, with one last hard warning stare from Luna, Celestia walked out the door and disappeared from view.
And, in the silence that followed, Rainbow vowed that if she never saw Twilight again, she would never forgive herself.
Somehow, she knew, it was all her fault. She should've done something. She should've figured it out sooner.
Then, after longer than Rainbow expected the Princess to be gone, the Empress of the Sun was back. She walked in, her mane no longer waving in the solar breeze, but lying flat and gray against her neck. She walked slowly, head bowed down, and didn't even seem to notice that she'd just entered the waiting room again.
Rainbow stomach contracted. No . . . Please, Oh, Faust no! Please, let her be alive . . .
She looked up when Luna cleared her throat.
Celestia gulped. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. I - she didn't - I mean -" Princess Celestia closed her eyes.
"I'm sorry, Shining. She didn't make it."
No! It's not true! She's lying, it's not true, she's lying . . . It can't be true!
But in her heart, she felt a horrible sense of foreboding, and knew, that she, Rainbow Dash, wouldn't see Twilight Sparkle for a long long time to come.
No . . .
Rainbow flew over to the door that led to the hallway, the door that led to Twilight . . . Tears blurred her vision, and she was hardly even aware that Applejack had her tail in her teeth and was trying to pull her back. Her friends were gathered around her, all crying, all with tears running down their cheeks. Rainbow didn't think she'd ever seen Pinkie cry, not really anyway. Now the pink mare was full on sobbing, curled around her friends as if they were a lifeline in a raging storm.
Rainbow pounded on the door, shouting, crying, calling out to Twilight as if she could hear her, and for a moment she thought she could.
Rainbow Dash, Greatest Flier in all of Equestria and Element of Loyalty, for the first time since she could remember, collapsed onto the ground with her friends and sobbed.
"Please, Twilight, no . . ."
She had her head rested against the door, as the tears traced salty tracks down the soft fur on her cheeks, and for a moment, she thought she could hear Twilight calling to her . . . Crying . . . Asking them to come back . . . Telling them she wasn't really dead . . .
