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The indistinct structure had resolved into three towers, one of them shorter than the other two, and connected by... something. At least that was what she thought it might be.
Rainbow Dash had been traveling for nearly two hours, yet the towers still seemed distant, casting a long shadow over the city.
At this point, she was seriously wondering if she was gonna make it back to their meeting point in time, or if she'd have to turn around before even reaching her goal.
Noticing an obstacle coming up ahead, she squinted her eyes trying to make out details. The dim light provided by the glowing crystal structures all around made it hard for even the pegasus' keen eyes to see, but coming closer, she recognized the obstacle as an... enormous tree that had fallen over on its side, blocking off the path.
The toppled tree's trunk was positively massive – nearly as thick as a one-story building was high!
Her first instinct was to take flight, eliciting the familiar unpleasant sensation of pain as her bandaged wing failed to stretch out. The grounded pegasus once again sighed frustratedly, as she realized that, no, she could not fly over the obstacle.
“Aww, come on! This has got to be some kind of sick joke!” Rainbow Dash groaned unhappily.
Just yesterday, she hadn't been able to fly back up after she'd fallen through a hole in the ground, then she'd nearly fallen off a waterfall-staircase, now this. Geez, was this an obstacle course?
Trying to scale the tree trunk quickly proved an equally invalid option, as the bark of the dead tree gave way, depositing a flailing rainbow-maned mare on her flank. Rubbing her back, Dash stood up and examined her surroundings for anything that might help in overcoming the obstacle. There didn't seem to be anything that came into question for constructing a makeshift ladder.
However, she noticed something else.
The house to her left had a balcony on the second floor going out to the side where the tree had crashed, hanging just high enough that it would allow her to jump down onto the tree-trunk, and possibly find her way down to the other side from there.
It took her a few seconds to spot the building's entrance, as the otherwise omnipresent light-sources were mostly obstructed by the tree, casting the entire street in deep shadow.
There was barely just enough light that she could see a symbol on the door. A waving sheet of paper, or perhaps a flag. Dash could vaguely recall having seen it before somewhere in the city, but didn't pay it any mind otherwise.
The athletic pegasus tried to pull, then to push open the door, but to no avail.
It appeared to be either locked, or simply stuck. A brief glance to her sides confirmed the lack of windows or other potential points of entry.
Dash put her weight against the unyielding door with full force, her free wing flapping instinctively in an attempt to increase her thrust.
“Open up, you stupid door...” Dash grunted in frustration. Rearing up on her hind legs, she slammed the full brunt of her body into the obstacle.
It was at this exact moment the door gave way.
Rainbow Dash stumbled forwards into a pitch-dark room at high speed, and subsequently crashed into some unseen part of the furniture, which then proceeded to fall over with an ear-piercing creak. It was followed by a cacophony of noise as the rest of the room's interior decided to follow its example, and everything fell into chaos.
It took Dash a few seconds to recover. Coughing, she sat up, waving away the almost tangible clouds of dust, certain that at least half of which had settled into her lungs.
The door had fallen shut right behind her, cutting off what little light the outside had to offer. She couldn't even see her own hooves in front of her.
To top it off, her right hind leg had gotten stuck on something. For nearly a minute, the hapless pegasus flailed around in complete and total darkness before getting herself unstuck.
Once free, Dash used the opportunity to rub a hoof across her face with a groan. Standing up on all fours, she winced, shaking an uncomfortable cramp from her legs, briefly turning to massage a particularly sore spot.
Around her, the smell of paper filled the air. Several dozen wooden shelves lay toppled on the floor, and strewn about all over the ground lay a number of tattered objects that, at one point, had been books.
All that remained now were the shredded husks of empty front- and back-hardcovers.
The question as to what may have happened to the rest of their contents was answered, when she took a step forward, instantly rewarded with the “crunch” of dry scraps of paper being crushed to dust under-hoof.
Trying to pick up the remains, they, too, crumbled right in her hooves.
Rainbow Dash winced reflexively, reminded of her repeated crash-landings in “Golden Oak Library”.
“Good thing Twilight isn't here,” she thought. She almost expected the unicorn-librarian to burst into the room horn blazing in fury to avenge the destruction of the library –
Library.
This was a library.
Well, it had been one, anyway – now it was just one huge mess of wooden splinters and small papery bits lying all over the floor.
Great. Daring Do had told her to be on the lookout for important stuff, and here she up and went wrecking an entire library that would no doubt have proven useful in their quest. Just great.
Grumbling, the grounded pegasus tip-hoofed through the mess, careful to avoid sharp pieces of wood and shards of broken glass. She was about halfway through to the other side of the room, when, sticking out amidst the debris, a single, seemingly intact book caught her attention.
Dash picked up the thick tome, intent on examining the faded cover-art for any indication of the book's contents.
Said contents promptly fell to the floor as a papery cloud of scraps.
Groaning, Dash dropped the remains and threw her hooves up in the air in defeat.
Great. Those books were so fragile, everything had been utterly destroyed. Fantastic.
What Dash wanted to do now would have been to vent, and swiftly stomp towards the stairs, further pulverization of already destroyed books be darned. And she certainly would have done so – had she not also been trying to avoid stepping on scattered shards of glass mostly hidden amongst the rubble.
As it were, Rainbow Dash was instead forced to agitatedly tip-hoof toward the stairs instead.
The stairs themselves were mercifully free of debris, and the door to the upstairs opened easily enough.
Once unlocked, the library's upper floor was revealed as... only marginally less worse off than the lower one.
Wooden shelves rose high on the walls, most either empty or filled with piles of dust that once had been scrolls. An oaken desk lay toppled on the floor with a broken leg. Light poured in through a massive hole in the wall, books and various detritus littered the floor.
Much like the single tome amongst the rubble downstairs, the ancient texts literally fell apart at the seams in her hooves.
“I guess the books downstairs would've been useless either way.” Oddly enough, the thought filled her with a sense of relief.
Slowly, Dash made her way around sharp pieces of shattered wall, ruined books, a few artistic examples of post-shatter pottery, and various other odds and ends.
At least, with light coming in through the hole in the side-wall, she didn't need to rely on her torch anymore.
Rainbow Dash turned her head very, very slowly to look at the flickering orange light. Her eyes came to rest on a brightly burning torch, firmly grasped in her right foreleg.
.
.
“GAAAAAH!”
She didn't strictly speaking drop the torch – rather, she threw it on the ground, startled.
Immediately afterwards, Dash was in a mad scramble to pick up the burning object, somehow still managing to avert the bone-dry parchments from catching fire and burning the entire library to the ground.
Rainbow Dash glared venomously at the offending object that had so violently disrupted her sense of relative normalcy. Sadly, this proved to have little effect on the piece of charcoal wood, burning brightly in defiance of logic.
Just where in the hay had this thing come from?
She distinctly didn't remember bringing it with her.
Rainbow Dash turned to look back towards the stairs to the lower level.
Complete and utter darkness. No windows, and the front-door was still shut closed.
How could she have seen anything downstairs, if not for the torch?
Dash's muzzle scrunched in confusion. The last time she remembered even having the torch was way back when she'd just entered the central cave.
She'd stood on the cliff overlooking the city, spotted Daring Do passed out, and jumped into a... lake.
Filled with water.
Water that should've extinguished the fire.
Come to think of it – she had lit up the torch after she'd twisted her wing, back in the tunnels – and that had been yesterday. How was the torch even burning still!?
The torch's very existence seemed to laugh in the face of common sense!
It was just a burning lump of wood! It shouldn't be able to teleport right into her hoof, somehow at the exact moment that she both needed and wasn't thinking about it.
It was just a piece of wood! Daring Do had just grabbed it off a wall somewhere, there was nothing special about it!
“Just pretend it's 'Pinkie being Pinkie' and ignore it.” Dash told herself, taking several steadying breaths.
But a simple wooden torch wasn't “being Pinkie Pie”. It couldn't, it was just a piece of wood, it could not do those things! It simply could not –
Just accept it. Just accept it and move on. If you don't let go, it'll drive you insane.
Dash continued her breathing exercises – had she picked those up from Twilight? – until she'd regained her cool.
Once calm, Rainbow Dash's focus returned to the matter at hoof. Slowly, through piles of rubble, she made her way towards her goal – the balcony-door at the other end of the room.
It really looked like none of the library's books had stood the test of time.
Some of the covers themselves were still legible though, and Dash found herself trying to make sense of what she saw, picking up a few to get a closer look.
Most of them seemed to be either technical, showing depictions of cogwheels and abstract diagrams, or about gemstones and crystals.
As such, one of the books stood out, and Dash examined it closer.
The cover showed a galloping pony-silhouette carrying a spear, with a few trees in the background. The sky was dominated by a comparatively simplistic sun, and some weird, misshapen blobs.
It suddenly hit Dash that those blobs were supposed to be clouds.
Clouds, as drawn by somepony who had never seen them.
It sent a chill down her spine, and the pegasus' wings twitched involuntarily. She'd been stuck below ground for two days, she couldn't conceive of the idea that somepony would willingly spend their entire life underground.
She opened the book. Of course, there was nothing inside. Nothing, but scraps.
Dash stared at the book.
This could've been anything. It could've been somepony's life-story. It could've been their history.
Or... it could've been a work of fiction.
Dash felt the sensation of the book's withered, wrinkled hardback-cover against her hooves, and her nostrils took in the smell of dry parchment. It was a small, fragile thing. Even as she held it, tiny bits flaked off of its back.
To think that a book, not too much unlike the one she was holding in her very hooves right now contained the entire world around her…
The mere thought was... was...
Dash didn't know what it was – she had already exhausted her vocabulary for the absurd.
A book containing an entire world, a world created from the written word. While most definitely completely bonkers, in a way, Rainbow Dash had to admit that the idea also sounded... somewhat poetic.
It probably was symbolic, although Dash wasn't sure what for.
But then again – what about all the other copies of the book that had been published alongside it? That kinda threw a wrench into the symbolism of a single book containing an entire world. Not to mention all the other books in the series.
In the now 15 years of its run, the “Daring Do”-series had grown immensely popular. With thousands of copies sold for each book in the series, it had spawned several dozen localized and Equestria-wide fan-clubs. A few of those organized their own meetups – there were even rumors of an upcoming “Daring Do”- convention – and one of them also made their own quarter-yearly club-magazine with news, speculations on upcoming books and short fan-written stories.
Naturally, Dash had subscribed as soon as Twilight had told her about the magazine.
When Dash made it out of this story, she was gonna have one heck of a fan-story of her own to write. And this time, they'd totally print it, too! “Hah!” The rainbow-maned mare had to chuckle bemusedly at the stray thought. They just couldn't handle her awesomeness, that's why her stuff never showed up.
And Twilight always kept insisting she should ditch the “self-insert”-character. Well, what do ya know – she really was part of the story, after all! It wasn't a “self-insert” if it was “official”, right?
Though at this, Dash's brow furled in confusion.
Hang on. When she had... “read” the story, at least at one point her own name had come up. What did that mean?
From what she had gathered, what was happening now was actually the story from the most recent book in the series. The one Twilight had gotten an early copy of. The one Pinkie had then gone and snatched up before any of them could read it. The one she had dashed over to Sugar Cube Corner for to get it back... The one she was in right now.
But if this was that same story – how could she be in the story? Okay, duh, she was here, and that was still a complete mystery. But the book had obviously been written before she had been transported here.
An interesting question presented itself – what would she find when she got back to Ponyville, and actually read the book for real?
How could the anonymous author of the Daring Do series have written a story that included her – before she even got here? Argh, none of this was making any sense!
Wait – if there really was an... an author, writing about these very same events that were going on right now – including herself being here – then... did that mean that she... played a role in the story?
Dash shook her head, deciding to abandon this train of thought before it reached its destination of giving her a headache.
Suddenly, Dash felt herself violently jerked from her reveries, as nothing happened.
Wait, what. That can't be right.
Dash looked about in confusion, as several internal mental checks, inherent to every living creature and honed over the course of a lifetime, failed to provide the source for the sensory input that had reported the disturbance, or the nature thereof.
What was that just now? Had she... heard something? Seen something?
Her ears flicking about wildly, Dash turned her head this way and that, looking about the immediate area. Rainbow Dash's eyes wandered over the empty streets below, scanning for anything out of the ordinary, her ears swiveling from side to side trying to catch the unheard sound.
Slowly, very slowly, a sensation trickled its way into her conscious thoughts – first a concept, then an inclination, then certainty.
There was that feeling again – the feeling that she wasn't alone anymore.
The last time she’d felt this way, back in the tunnels, she'd simply chalked it up to fatigue.
She wasn’t fatigued now.
There literally couldn't have been anypony back in that seemingly unending tunnel.
And surely, there wasn't anypony other than herself and Daring down here now… Right?
A minor itch caused Dash to raise her left foreleg to scratch – but she stopped halfway, as she noticed some of the papery bits still clinging to it.
She easily scraped them off on the floor, but paused, glancing between the scraps of paper lying on the ground and one of the empty hardback-covers she had just checked.
Unbidden, a thought came to mind, causing the cerulean pegasus to snort and roll her eyes.
“No... that's crazy,” she muttered out loud.
The cerulean pegasus threw a glance between the deteriorated books lying on the floor and the desolate streets below.
Nopony was here. And yet...
Her brow wrinkled, as she gazed back up to the empty streets outside. She had an idea. It was a crazy thought. The mere notion was laughably insane. But... it kinda made a weird sort of sense, all things considered.
She was inside a book. Somepony was watching her.
Somepony was reading the story.
For a few seconds more, Dash simply stood at the edge of the building, at the large hole in the wall, and stared dead-ahead with eyes glazed over.
This... this was so... crazy!
And yet... it simply made too much sense.
“Hello?” Dash asked hesitantly, addressing the empty streets. “Hey, you! Whoever you are!” she shouted. “Help me! It's me, Rainbow Dash! I'm trapped in this story!”
The cave remained silent. No response.
“Go get Twilight Sparkle, she'll know how to fix this!”
Silence.
“Argh! This isn't a joke!” Dash urged. “It's really me, I got sucked into this book, somehow!”
More silence. ...Was she just making a foal of herself?!
“Come on!” Dash threw her forelegs up in frustration. “Say something!”
Nothing. Just the rustle of papers strewn about on the floor behind her.
Rainbow Dash blinked. Then she face-hoofed.
“Yeah...” She snorted in irritation. “How should somepony even respond to a character in a book anyway.”
Of course, as per usual for comical timing, it was right then that the pegasus displaced from reality was knocked out cold by her supposed “audience”.
The diamond dog hefted the unconscious pegasus over his back, chuckling to himself.
“Ahuitzotl-boss will be pleased...“
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End of chapter 11.
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