Never had Belvedere felt so small and insignificant. His utter exhaustion after their hours-long climb up the mountainside was completely forgotten. A dizzyingly tall stone building capped with a slanted roof stood less than twenty paces from him. Some past conflict had carved huge sections out of it, but still it stood, defying time and decay. “Ponies really built this?”
“Huh?” Twilight had walked right past it. She looked back at him from fifty paces down the cobblestone street, partially obscured by the innocent shadows of neighboring buildings. Getting lost seemed to be the worst danger here, thankfully; there hadn’t been a single patch of deep dark since they entered the city.
“This,” he said, gesturing to the tower and then to the rest of the crumbling cityscape stretching out before him, “ponies built this?”
Twilight smiled. “Yep. It’s pretty amazing what a determined pony’s special talent can do, isn’t it?”
He gave a snorting laugh. “Talent… I don’t have any talent, not compared to whoever built this place… Look at that!”
Her head whipped around and she stepped closer to him. “What is it? Where?”
He pointed over the nearest caved-in rooftops, toward the city center. “Look at that huge arch! Look at how the stones are cut so…”
The heat of Twilight’s glare silenced him. He gave a sheepish grin and continued walking. “I-I mean, lead the way. Lead the way. Nothing to see here… aside from utterly amazing architecture that puts everything I ever did to shame…”
Twilight sighed. “Don’t forget your plants. The ponies who originally built Canterlot would’ve been amazed to see your sunlight concentrator.”
His stomach rumbled, and he looked to Twilight’s saddlebags. “But without one, the plants are just going to wither and die. Maybe we should pluck out the seeds and eat the rest.”
“I wouldn’t mind; I’m starving… but we’re almost there. Look!”
The most impressive structure of all lay directly ahead of them, down the gently winding street bordered by battered and abandoned buildings of every shape and size. He couldn’t quite take the whole of it in, not even when he mulled over the word Twilight used to describe it: castle. Tower upon multicolored tower stretched to the sky, equal parts majestic and gloomy. Shadows filled jagged holes in the outer wall, and most of the spires and balconies were little more than rubble now. Still he could see beauty there, the work of hundreds of ponies over years if not decades, still standing proud on the side of a mountain. His eyes focused on each detail in turn, and his mind undid the untold centuries of neglect. “Those two balconies face each other, but they’re so pointy and… it was a bridge. There was a little bridge right there! How did the surrounding structure bear the weight? Hmm…”
“Coming?”
He blinked. Twilight had journeyed ahead again while he’d managed a single step. “Y-yes. Sorry.”
She waited for him to trot up to her and then nudged him with her wing. “Stay close, please? I know there isn’t any deep dark nearby but…”
“Of course! Sorry, I don’t want to worry you… Where are we going, anyway?”
She stared at the castle, her head slowly tilting back until only one structure could possibly be in her view: the castle’s tallest tower, the top of which was leaking faint rays of white light, as if a miniature sun was trapped inside. “Up there.”
He couldn’t help laughing at his luck. They were headed for the castle’s centerpiece, the tallest structure of all, albeit the one with the most damage to its exterior. “Wow… I can’t wait to see the view of the city from there. What’s making that light? Is it a mirror setup like mine?”
Twilight didn’t speak for seconds on end. “I don’t know… It’s actually got me kind of worried.”
“Worried? Why? Didn’t you mumble something before about how light might be the source of all magic?”
“Sunlight, yes. But that light in the tower…”
She stopped walking, her eyes still fixed on their ultimate goal. “I don’t know why Canterlot is here at all… I used to walk down this street every day with my parents. How can there be an exact duplicate of the whole city in some other dimension… What are the chances of there being another dimension with an Equestria populated by ponies, even?”
“Don’t look at me for answers, Twilight. I’ll count myself lucky if I can figure out how this street was made.”
“I just have this bad feeling that… that…”
“What?”
She blinked a few times and forced a smile. “Let’s just keep going. We’ll climb the tower, and then we’ll eat. Sound good?”
He nodded quickly, the thought of food and a magnificent view lifting his spirits even higher. “Sounds great!”
They walked on in silence, save for his irrepressible marveling at their surroundings. Each abandoned building taught him a new trick, a new architectural flourish to stack stones higher or to have them bridge a wider gap. Twilight led him through the castle gates, past sentry towers, and over small bridges without comment. Even as they stepped through a partially caved-in hole and began climbing the tower’s steps, she remained silent.
“Do you think that light… do you think it’s your way home?” The question slipped out before he could consider whether or not he wanted an answer.
Her lips parted long before words passed through them. “I… don’t know. The closer we get, the less I think I understand. I felt so sure of myself when I set up the experiment, right in the heart of Canterlot with two of my fellow princesses to help me. Somepony even wrote about it in the newspaper, about how ‘Princess Twilight was going to solve another magical mystery using the moon,’ or something… But what do those ponies think now? Did I just disappear? Does everypony I’ve ever known… everypony I love think I’m lost, or that I’m…”
“They’re probably looking for you. If I… I-I mean, I’d look for you. I’m sure your friends are searching all over Equestria.”
“I’m sure you’re right. I just wish I knew what happened, what went wrong.”
“Well… What do you know? Just start there and maybe it’ll make sense. That’s what I always do.”
She glanced at him, her eyes searching for answers he didn’t have. “I don’t know where to start.”
“At the beginning. Just start at the beginning.”
“Okay… It was an experiment to figure out how teleportation works, where ponies go in the tiny fraction of a second between them disappearing and reappearing. There are plenty of theories, but nopony has ever been able to conduct an experiment to really prove anything. Personally, I was hoping Star Swirl’s theorem of magical superpositions turned out to be the correct one, but… anyway, I knew I needed help; this kind of experiment needed huge amounts of magic. After some convincing, Princess Celestia and Luna agreed to help; they’re magically connected to the sun and the moon, so I knew they’d have the power requirements covered. We set up the safety enchantments in the astral tower where the sun and moon are traditionally moved, I counted down from ten and teleported six inches forward while they powered the time dilation spells, and then… Then I was here.”
“Sounds like you know plenty.”
She shook her head. “But nothing important! I don’t know where my mistake was, if it just affected me, or if I ended up hurting…”
They’d reached the top of the staircase. In front of them stood a pair of arched wooden doors that might’ve once been ornate. Now they sagged on their broken hinges, rotten and crumbling. Brilliant light, akin to Belvedere’s garden, shone through the cracks in the panels. Somehow this light didn’t burn like that of the sun, despite its intensity. Twilight’s saddlebags dropped to the floor, but there was no use in pretending they were just going to sit down and eat, no matter how hungry they were.
He stepped forward and gave the nearest door the slightest of nudges. Half of it fell away, blasting them with light that their dilated eyes welcomed in without a hint of discomfort.
Twilight screamed all the same. Her wings flapped wildly, and the whole tower seemed to shudder under their hooves.
Belvedere didn’t know what to think, or even what he was looking at. Before him stood a circular room populated by mouldering furniture and the caved-in roof, and lit by two oversized statues that glowed with ethereal light. He looked from one statue to the other, two unicorns with wings like Twilight, but about one and half times the size of the largest pony he’d ever seen. How could statues glow?
Twilight crept forward on shaking legs, her tears dotting the ancient carpet. She reached out a hoof to the right statue, stopping inches short of touching it. “P-Princess Celestia… Princess Luna… I-I’m so sorry!”
“Huh?”
Twilight buried her head in her hooves, weeping onto the statue’s gilded hooves. “How can you be here… What have I done…”
Belvedere raced forward, hoof reaching for Twilight and wide eyes fixed on the imposing visages standing over her. They looked so lifelike up close. “What are they?”
“This is… was… These are the Royal Sisters, Celestia and Luna… I-I don’t how how I did it, but…”
“But you said you teleported from another dimension or something. How can other ponies from your world be here?”
Twilight shuddered. “Because… I think it means this is my world, my Equestria… somehow.”
“How can it—?”
“I don’t know!” She shot him a savage look worthy of a hungry timber. “But if I can figure it out, then maybe I can fix it!”
Belvedere felt something shift beneath his hooves, a movement so slight that he nearly missed it. Hadn’t he felt something like that before, when Twilight first screamed? A horrible thought crossed his mind, worse even than the deathly uncertainty of the deep dark: they were standing atop an ancient, crumbling tower, hundreds upon hundreds of feet in the air. They were standing atop a tower that, while perfectly capable of supporting itself, hadn’t had to contend with two ponies moving around inside it for eons; sometimes seemly well stacked rocks could be toppled by the tiniest of nudges.
“Twilight, I-I think the tower…”
Twilight stood, her wings flared and her gaze on the two giant ponies. “Frozen in time… except the second and fifth enchantments ensured that we couldn’t accidentally move through time by more than a few seconds. So…”
He felt it again, the unmistakable sensation of movement accompanied by a distant rumble. “We can’t stay here!”
She ignored him. “So assuming those enchantments were cast correctly, this isn’t a future Equestria. But everything is still a ruin, and there are semi-traversable dimensional pockets forming everywhere, so that means….”
“Twilight!”
“We… well I… I broke something with the sun and the moon… the moon must be positioned in front of the sun, blocking some of its light. So that’s why it’s just a ring, and Celestia and Luna aren’t here to move either one of them. But what about the apparent time shift…”
He could hear it now, a distinct crack of freed stones breaking against the cobblestone streets so far below. What could he do? Was he supposed to grab her, to drag her down the stairs before they plummeted to their deaths? Would her wings support them both when her magic was so weak?
She held up a hoof as if she’d heard his thoughts. “Just give me a minute, I can get this! I can fix this!”
Despite his fear, he couldn’t help sympathizing with that attitude. He’d solved plenty of seemingly impossible problems, but surviving a fall like the one awaiting them wasn’t on that list. “Hurry, Twilight. Please, please hurry.”
“So if we accept that the protective enchantments worked as intended, but that the magical power given to them approached the theoretical limit described in the… well of course it did, this is Celestia and Luna we’re talking about! So as the spell’s energy level approaches infinity… Ooh!”
She turned back him with her teary eyes sparkling. “I didn’t travel in time, but this is still my Equestria. It’s our Equestria!”
Belvedere retreated to her side, judging the steadiness of the floor with each step. “Hurry, hurry, hurry…”
“I didn’t travel in time, but I still caused a chronological disturbance because… I’ll show you!”
To his horror, she jabbed the floor with her hoof and scraped it through the dust to draw a line. “Here’s the normal flow of time. I performed the experiment right here—” she pointed to the end of the line “—but when I teleported with the Royal Sister’s combined power, the protective enchantments echoed through time itself and caused the sun and moon to get stuck way back here—” she pointed to the middle of the line “—so time for all celestial bodies basically stopped! The sun and the moon were frozen in place hundreds of years ago, and because Celestia and Luna are connected to them, they’re frozen too! Without full sunlight, pony magic is weaker, and without friendship or any other pony magic, dark magic is overrunning everything. I stopped time… but in the past.”
The wall behind Celestia and Luna crumbled away. Falling stones were cracking against the distant ground in rapid succession. Belvedere ran back to the door, hoping Twilight would follow. “We’ve got to go!”
Her ears folded back. “This is it… I’m going home.”
Her horn lit before he could respond, and her cry of agony soon followed. A jagged purple arc bridged the two Royal Sisters with Twilight’s horn, and a crackling sound echoed through the sky. “I… just need to restart the whole process… give it a nudge… so the enchantments get unstuck… and time starts up again!”
Belvedere stood in the doorway, his attention torn between the staircase to safety and the pony framed in the door’s archway, the pony he’d grown so fond of so quickly. Her being stuck in his terrible world was a problem he had to solve, whether he wanted to or not. “You’re really… you’re really leaving? I-I’d hoped… I mean…”
She grimaced, her legs buckling as if a heavy load had fallen on her back. “C-can’t… do it… h-hurts… hurts so much!”
For once he knew what was happening. No. Not now. Not now! “You don’t have enough magic left; the pain’s just going to get worse if you don’t stop, and if you pass out I don’t know if I can carry you out of here. Just stop and we can… we’ll try something else! We’ll find another way!”
Even he didn’t believe it. His words were nothing more than vain hope, the selfish desire that she’d remain in his life. He couldn’t do that. She deserved better than this world, better than him.
She let out a fresh scream. “I have to restart time! I have to!”
Belvedere’s horn lit. “If the sisters powered your spell, and you just need to nudge it, then maybe if I—”
Her head whipped from side to side. “No, don’t! If you’re connected to the spell when I get pulled back… I-I don’t know what’ll happen. It might destroy you!”
He stepped forward, his horn surging with every drop of magic he had left. “Good. I… I don’t want to be here if you’re not.”
“Belvedere—”
As their magical auras met, a pain beyond anything he’d ever experienced shot through him, rolling through horn, head, and spine. A scream filled his mind but couldn’t reach his lips; every muscle in him burned with a paralyzing fire that seemed to get stronger and more distant at the same time, as if his soul was retreating from his dying body along with his magic. At last he’d solved the ultimate problem, the question of what to do with his life: he’d give all of it to her. “G-good…bye… Twilight.”
Light overwhelmed him. Suddenly he was sailing back through door, and then out into the open air beyond the tower’s crumbling walls, the shockwave that had propelled him still ringing in his ears. He’d hit the ground inside of a minute, and that would be a mercy. All that mattered was the brilliant beacon of purple light hanging in the sky, and the image burned into his mind of Twilight standing inside the arched doorway. Go home, Twilight. Go home.
---
“So… that’s it.”
There was an air of finality in Belvedere’s voice. Early afternoon sunlight shone through the windows, causing the shadows to retreat to the office’s corners. The papers covering the wall shone brilliantly, each one perfectly aligned with its neighbor, together creating a weathered stone wall and a tall archway that stretched over the closed office door.
“This is what I’ve been so excited about… so obsessed over. It’s just a wall… Just a big, empty archway.”
If only Cornice could hear him. Would she offer him a fresh cup of coffee and tell him about how the civic center project was going? Those were the things he paid her for, after all: keeping him alert and focused on whatever task the company required of its president and chief architect. “But what if… what if that’s not what I want anymore?”
The whispered words rang in his ears.
He returned to his desk and pulled out a fresh sheet of drafting paper, perfectly sized for a sketch, but rather awkward for a letter. His needle-sharp drafting pencil made a thin, crisp capital D on the upper right corner, and he proceeded to write.
Dear Cornice,
Thanks for being such an amazing executive secretary. I wouldn’t be half the success I am without a pony like you keeping me sane. I hope you know that. I hope all the other ponies in your life know how special you are. Don’t ever let them forget.
He stopped there for a moment. Was he really ready for this? Whispering it was one thing, but committing it to paper? Did he dare leave the comfort and security of the empire he’d built with his own hooves and horn? One glance at the currently obscured photographs hanging on the wall, the photographs peppered with business smiles as devoid of true happiness as he’d felt for well over a day, if not for years, got him writing again.
It’s time for me to do something different. I don’t know what, exactly. All I know for sure is I’m ready for a new challenge, a new direction. Most of all, I’m ready to have some more ponies like you in my life, ponies that care if I’m falling asleep on my desk or not eating three meals a day. Don’t worry, this doodle isn’t my Formal Letter of Resignation. I’ll write out something simple and lawyer-friendly on regular letter-sized paper in time for the next board meeting. I just thought you deserved to know fir
The intercom buzzed, and his pencil point tore through the paper. “I’m a little busy pouring out my soul here, Cornice.”
The intercom buzzed twice more, Cornice’s code for “drop everything because there’s somepony important coming up in the elevator.”
Belvedere sighed and pressed the button. “I need another minute, Cornice.”
“No can do, Mr. B, sorry.”
Belvedere stared at the intercom, mildly unsure of who was on the other end of it. “Excuse me, Cornice, but I’m going to have to insist.”
“Me too, Mr. B. There’s some ponies that you just can’t say no to.”
He glared at the intercom, half wondering if he needed to scratch out the gushing declaration of friendship he’d just penned, or skip recommending to the board that she get a raise and promotion. “Like your boss, for example?”
The doors swung open on their silent hinges, and Belvedere threw the pencil aside. “Cornice! I—”
Princess Twilight was standing in his doorway. More importantly, she was standing inside the stone arch, completing it. She was what had been missing all along.
She gave a nervous smile. “Ahem. I-I’m sorry to intrude, Mr. Belvedere. My name is Twilight Sparkle, and I’m looking for a… a lost friend of mine. You might’ve seen in the paper that I conducted a teleportation experiment the other day and—” she looked away and ground her hoof into the plush carpet, “—nopony even knows what happened… where I went and for how long… or why I’ve been scouring Equestria for your name ever since I got back. To everypony else I was gone for a split second, but for me… and maybe for you? Does any of this make sense?”
He was overcome by a million thoughts, all of them so wildly strange they felt like they belonged to another stallion from another world. And yet all of them felt so real, so charged with pain, joy, and every emotion in between, that a lifetime seemed to pass by between his next two breaths. He stared at her, the most important pony in the world, and nodded. “Yes. Yes. I… I think we have a lot to talk about. Have you had lunch yet? I’m up for just about anything.”
She smiled her brightest. “I’m sure we’ll figure something out.”