Twilight growled. If only she could sense magic while moving without throwing up, this would be so much easier.
“Exploring huh? Still seem like a good idea?”
Strangely enough, she could still comfortably converse while swimming away from the weird blob things at top speed. The pink mist that this place was made of seemed to make actual exhaustion an impossibility.
“Yes,” Rainbow Dash said, shooting ahead of Twilight without even using her wings.
“You led these...things to us!”
“Yeah, well, we needed to get out of here somehow,” Rainbow said defensively, not even looking at the blobs.
“I told you, if we’d stayed in one place I could’ve—”
“Move!” Rainbow Dash dove against Twilight, shoving her away from a blob that had been sneaking up from behind her. For a second, she stared right into it. The moment slowed.
Without movement, the thing’s color was the exact same shade as the mist. If they didn’t move, they blended in completely.
Twilight felt a chill.
There could be hundreds—thousands even, all around her, in wait or just hibernating or something. The mist could be their sleeping state. She needed more information.
Risking nausea, Twilight reached out with her magic. The sense of reality being wrong infused her. Space twisted, presenting her with data that no pony was meant to comprehend. It was like looking at a map that had been crumpled up and combined with another map, then the other map had been extracted and burned, but she could see both at once, superimposed over each other.
That was what it felt like. But she couldn’t describe what it was actually like. She swallowed, forcing back bile as she concentrated on extracting any information she could.
Then she reached an understanding. It was a tiny piece of what reality really was in this place, but it was a glimpse. The blobs and the pink mist were both made out of the same basic stuff. And that stuff was condensed magic, pressed into a form she’d have to break down before she could use it. Magic condensed this far didn’t really have a color. It looked pink when it was still because it was the first thing the mind latched onto, and when it moved her brain was assigning the substance different colors at random, trying to find an analog to her world that made sense.
Twilight rejected the colors her brain was sending her. She looked at the blob’s shapes, saw a superposition of formlessness and sharp definition, rejected it, and looked again.
And nothing made sense. She was surrounded by magic except she was magic, and she wasn’t and everything was different and she could feel her mind twisting and cracking, and the blobs were actually Domains but with real minds instead of just a series of instructions, bundled inside a bunch of magic, and then the world wrenched—
—and once again she was surrounded by pink mist, swimming away from the multicolored blobs.
Flicker.
The world was magic.
Flicker.
The world made sense. Twilight shuddered. No more of that. No more. She could feel the damage in her mind, an area that had been excised. It felt like running her tongue over her teeth and finding a gap where one had been before. She hoped it hadn’t been important.
Still. She had knowledge.
“I’m going to try to set up a shield!” she called to Rainbow. The other mare grunted in assent.
Twilight closed her eyes. She couldn’t directly draw from the magic of this place. She began to summon the magic for a quick but effective shield spell.
Pain.
She heard a distinct cracking sound. Her forehead felt like it was on fire. Her horn was completely numb.
That was probably bad.
“Twilight! Twilight, you okay?”
Rainbow was shaking her, concern in her eyes. The blobs—constructs—blobs were closing in around them.
“Something...wrong. Can’t summon magic.” Twilight croaked. She placed a hoof on her horn and then yelped.
There was a crack. She could feel it. A crack in her horn. The worst possible fate for a unicorn.
She kept her hoof in place, freezing. Not even able to form a tear.
Then she felt the gap closing.
Unicorn horns were sturdy, but every once in a while somepony would get in an accident and lose it. Some nobles even had cracked horns from childhood misadventures. If there was a way—magical or otherwise—to heal a unicorn’s horn, nopony knew of it.
And her horn was healing all on its own. Within moments, every bit of pain had faded away.
Rainbow Dash hauled Twilight over her back and swam away with slow-but-quick motions. “I think this is the place your magic comes from, Twi. Trying to break isn’t going to work. You’re already here.”
“No, the magical signature is completely different,” Twilight said fuzzily. Her body might be fine, but her mind was still recovering. “It’s much more...dense...”
And when she summoned magic, she was breaking something down. She used the process so often that it was normal, but on reflection is was very strange. It was an ability that stuck around even without any thought templates, something that would take hundreds of years of study and building up to it to otherwise. Nopony understood how it worked.
And here Rainbow Dash had just given her the answer on a silver platter.
“How do you know that?!” Twilight shouted.
Rainbow Dash flinched at the volume, throwing Twilight off her back.
“Look. Not important. We need to get away from these things. Any ideas?”
Twilight hesitated. This was important. She wasn’t just going to let Rainbow keep it a secret.
“After we get out of here, I am going to get everything you know out of you, by any means possible,” she promised.
“Oookay psycho. And?”
“...And, I can probably use the magic here, but it will take a while. You’ll have to carry me again while I figure it out.”
“Not going to get sick all over me, are you?” Rainbow eyed her.
“I don’t think so. I have a way to cope, now.”
A way that broke her mind piece by piece, but a way nonetheless.
“Right. Hang on then.”
Rainbow rushed under Twilight, who latched back onto her friend’s back.
This would be a delicate operation. She had to ignore all distractions.
Twilight siphoned in the magic from around her, building herself a stash of useless magic.
Now came the difficult part. She would have to break the magic apart without destabilizing it. She reached in…
“Princess?”
The tone of utter shock drew her out of her concentration. Twilight looked up, and in front of her…
In front of her was the Princess.