“You’re finally awake,” Amethyst snickered as I stretched and lazily scanned the room.
“What?” I mumbled as I blinked the sleep from my eyes.
“You’ve been asleep all morning.”
“Oh…” I squinted as I checked the windows to the lab. The bright blue sky was lit a brilliant blue to my unadjusted eyes. “How long have you been up?”
“Several hours, but I haven’t made any headway on the shell. These approximations… they’re useful but I still run into the same issues that I’ve had before”
I had no recollection of the night before, so I simply walked to her side and scrutinized her work. She’d effectively made a shell, but the same issues remained. “It’s so hard to look at it from another perspective,” she said with a huff. “I know that, with the right tools, I can make it sort of work, but I can’t use them. I spend more time avoiding the other solution than I do actually figuring out this problem.”
“Well,” I said as I let out a yawn, “maybe you should try from another angle. Here,” I said as I slid the page aside and pointed toward the graph we had drawn yesterday.
Amethyst looked to me with a frown. “That’s what I’ve been doing.”
“I’m just trying to offer suggestions,” I said as I backed away and stretched.
“I know, I just wish I could get some bout of inspiration like you did that one day.”
My ears perked up. Something deep within my mind was stirring, as though I had only seen something in a dream. “Inspiration?”
“Yeah, you just had an idea, wrote it down, and it was right. I still don’t understand how you did it.”
“Inspiration…” I said as I started toward the fire. “I… feel like I did.”
Amethyst raised an eyebrow. “Come again?”
I closed my eyes and strained to catch that fleeting thought as it raced through my mind. “I remember something last night, in a dream, I got up from my place by the fire…” I rose from my place and, eyes closed, recalled the events as I said them. “Walked over to the table… and wrote down a few words.”
“What were they?”
No matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t recall the specific words. Each time I tried, a new set appeared, and each time they formed less coherent sentences than the last. I shook my head and let my eyes drift open.
“I don’t reme-” Just as I was about to announce my defeat, there before me lay the page. In a moment the entirety of my solution hit me, nearly making me loose my balance. “Amethyst!”
“What?” She asked in eager anticipation.
“It wasn’t a dream! I got up last night and wrote it down!” I took a deep breath and looked at the sloppy lettering on the page. “Answer… not… number.”
“Answer not number?” Amethyst asked as she looked back to her work.
“I don’t know, maybe I’m just cra-”
“That’s it!”
As if to punctuate her revelation, a deep thump shook the room. Before we could react, a haunting moan leaked from the cracks in the door. My heart stopped. I had never heard a sound of such defeated anguish before, and there was something disturbingly familiar to the cry.
“Evenstar!” Amethyst shouted as she bolted toward the door and quickly swung it open. I flinched as Evenstar drew in a sharp breath as he spilled onto the floor.
“I-I,” He painfully whispered as he tried to raise his head. “I tripped.”
“Are you okay?” Amethyst asked. She began to lift him from the ground, however, his painful wince stopped her from continuing.
“My leg…” The room fell silent as we turned our gaze to his right foreleg. It was twisted and pinned beneath his weight in a rather awkward position. “I can’t feel it”
Immediately Amethyst gestured for me to help free his trapped leg, but as we did we realized the gravity of his fall. A small trickle of blood sprung from a tiny white protrusion beneath his grey coat. It was so small I paid little attention to it, but Amethyst’s eyes widened as she noticed the damage. She looked to me and then back to Evenstar, her worry palpable as she tried to keep from staring at the leg.
“We need a splint,” she said, trying to contain the fear that was growing in her eyes. I met her gaze and quickly galloped to the fireplace. I took the poker in my mouth and brought it back to her. “Okay, do we have a rope?”
“There is some fabric atop the second bookshelf,” Evenstar whispered. A moment later, and it descended beside the poker in Amethyst’s purple aura. “I don’t know how it happened…”
“Shhh,” Amethyst whispered as she looked to Evenstar. “Save your breath, we can deal with that later.” She looked around for a moment before nodding in the direction of one of the tables. “We’ll need that. Starswirl, have you ever splinted a leg before?
I shook my head.
“Alright, I’ve done it once, but never on a break this bad…”
“Break?” Evenstar whispered as his ears perked up.
Amethyst looked to me, tears welling up in her eyes.
“I don’t know, Amethyst. It looks like it could be a dislocation,” I said, trying to keep Evenstar’s fear at bay. I don’t think either of us fully understood how devastating this incident was. It’s always easier to brush something off as inconsequential; it keeps the subconscious plans alive.
“Well we need to get him on the table,” Amethyst said with a sigh.
I lifted the bulk of Evenstar’s weight as Amethyst gently stabilized his injured leg as he moved to the table. I let him down as gently as I could, but he still winced when he hit the table. Now, with Evenstar in a more accessible position, we could truly see the extent of the damage. “I… That’s not as bad as I thought,” I said.
A weak smile spread across Amethyst’s lips. “I think you’re right, we’ll have to clean up that cut though,” she said as she nodded toward the small trail of blood.
“Right,” I said before turning toward the bookshelves once more. “Umm… You don’t have bandages down here, do you?”
“Fourth shelf,” Evenstar groaned.
As I trotted off to retrieve the bandages, Amethyst turned to Evenstar. “What happened?”
“I… I can’t remember. The last thing I can recall was walking out of my office.” Evenstar let out a groan and painfully lifted his head from the table. “Everything feels foggy.”
“Did you hit your head?” Amethyst asked as she looked at his head.
“What? Oh no! Not at all!” Evenstar started as he reached up with his good leg and adjusted his hat. “No, no, no, my head is fine,” he said with a sigh as he rested back on the table. “It’s fine.”
Amethyst caught my confused gaze as I trotted back to the table, bandages carried gently in my mouth. She was as bewildered as I at his reaction, but when she saw the bandages she returned to the task at hand.
We stood in silence as Amethyst bandaged the wound. To avoid any awkwardness, I let my eyes wander through the brightly lit tables and shelves. Everything was where it normally was, the clutter filled any surface it could, but something was missing. This wasn't a new realization, mind you, but one that only now dawned on me. The sense of activity was gone, that energy that I fed off when I first entered this lab was now coated in a thin layer of dust on the books that remained untouched on the tables. The experiments we had performed together were the slowly dying embers in the fireplace. And most importantly, the stallion who had taught me in the ways of magic now lay on a table, barely able to lift his head.
Everything I had ever wanted was slowly coming to a standstill, and there was nothing I could do to stop it.