Hollyleaf didn’t get a chance to reply. Not before Octavia tackled her.
The two rolled across the floor, across and outside of the circle. Octavia’s fur singed wherever it touched the lines of the spell.
They stopped against the back wall. Octavia stood over her, teeth bared, one paw pinning Hollyleaf to the ground. One of her claws pressed its tip against Hollyleaf’s neck.
“A Lycan!?” Hollyleaf exclaimed. “When did you get a lycan!?”
“We’re just full of surprises,” Octavia growled. “Try anything and you’re history.”
“Don’t kill her!” Bon Bon yelled, sprinting after them, Vinyl just ahead of her, Pinkie just behind. “She’ll just transfer again! Get her horn!”
“Not going to happen,” Hollyleaf snarled. Her horn flashed crimson, and Octavia was repelled, sent flying backwards into the roof of the cave.
‘Tavi!
“I’m alright!” she said, dropping back down to the ground on all fours.
Hollyleaf, however, only got a moment’s breathing room, because then Vinyl was upon her.
Lyra dashed towards Winter Bell, hopping over the burning lines of the ritual until she had reached its center. Ditzy flew along beside her.
“Is she okay?” Ditzy asked.
Lyra knelt down and scooped up Winter Bell—only unconscious, thank Celestia—in her forehooves, cradling her.
“She looks okay,” Lyra said. “She’s still breathing.”
Ditzy let out a breath. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get her out of here before anything else happens.”
Lyra nodded. She lifted Winter Bell up in her telekinesis, stood, and set the filly down on her back.
There was a shout. She glanced over at the fight.
Bon Bon had been sent flying, launched to one side by Hollyleaf’s telekinesis. She landed on the ground on her side, skidded a few feet. Hollyleaf remained standing, her horn glowing bright.
“How did you find me!?” she yelled.
“That was me!” Pinkie said, dropping down behind her, seemingly out of nothingness. Her forelegs wrapped around Hollyleaf’s, restraining her. “Vinyl! Piñata time!”
Aw, but I didn’t bring a stick! Vinyl said, running forwards. Guess I’ll just have to use my hooves!
Vinyl leapt forwards, one hoof cocked back, ready to kick—but a field of crimson magic locked around her throat, jerking her back by her own momentum. Vinyl’s hiss caught in her throat as her airpipe was cut off.
“Hrk—”
Octavia rushed in from the side, delivering a clawed right hook straight to Hollyleaf’s head. She screamed, and Vinyl dropped to the floor.
Ditzy was suddenly in Lyra’s face.
“Lyra! Come on! We need to hurry!”
“Right!” Lyra said. She checked to make sure Winter Bell was still secure on her back, then ran for the exit, careful to step over any of the lines of the spell. They were glowing more intensely now—it stung Lyra’s eyes to look at them for longer than an instant, and they left streaks in her vision.
“Lyra! Behind you! Chains!”
At Ditzy’s warning, Lyra glanced back—there was nothing there.
But she knew there would be.
“What do you mean, chains?” she shouted back.
As if in answer, the spell circle flashed brighter still, and from the six points of the hexagon, shapes began to emerge. Links first, then chains, burning just the same as the spell, which rose up and curled towards Lyra.
“Ah! Chains! Got it!”
The ends of the chains shot out, spooling out of nowhere as they darted towards her—no, not towards her, she realized, towards the child on her back. Lyra ran faster, she could hear them clanking behind her, growing closer and closer as she bounded towards the cave’s entrance.
She glanced back, just for a second. The ends of the chains were only feet away.
“Ditzy!” Lyra shouted. “Little help, here?”
Ditzy was flying just overhead, her wings keeping pace with Lyra’s galloping.
“Uh… uh… I don’t know what to do!” she shouted back. "Nothing I do works in the next thirty seconds! I need more time!”
The chains sped closer. Lyra could almost feel the heat coming off of them.
“We don’t have more time!” Lyra yelled. “Just do something!”
“Uh... Okay! Doing something!”
Ditzy swooped down. With her hooves, she scooped Winter Bell off of Lyra’s back and flew ahead of her, angling upwards towards the cave’s ceiling.
The chains arced upwards, too, following her, moving even faster than before. Ditzy didn’t get a chance to get far, before—
“Ditzy!”
Two of the chains arced around Ditzy and sank into Winter Bell’s barrel, the ends disappearing as they phased into her. Ditzy, still holding onto her, was jerked back mid-flight as the chains began to pull.
Ditzy clung desperately to the filly, her wings flapping as hard as they ever had.
“Let go of her!” she shouted. “Let go!”
But she was losing ground. The chains were pulling Winter Bell back, back towards the center of the circle, and they were dragging Ditzy with her.
Lyra lit her horn, grabbing onto Winter Bell with her magic. She grit her teeth as she pulled, but she wasn’t making much of a difference.
“Come on… Come on!”
But it was no use. The other four chains snaked around and joined their brethren, and the weight on their end tripled.
The force became too much for Lyra. She shouted with pain as her magic snapped back. Ditzy didn’t last much longer on her own.
“No!” she shouted as Winter bell was dragged out of her hooves. The filly’s legs dangled limp like a doll’s as the chains of light dragged her back to the center of the circle.
She froze in mid-air, a meter off the ground. The chains arched up, like linked rainbows, and burrowed into her, disappearing link by link into her chest. She began to convulse, her eyes fluttering open and shut, open and shut, as the chains continued to fly into her.
Lyra ran forwards, intent on trying again to free her, but stopped at the edge of the circle. It was too hot to move forwards, like she was standing in front of a bonfire, and she had no choice but to stagger backwards, one foreleg rising to cover her face instinctually.
Abruptly, the chains snapped taught, and Winter Bell fell limp again. They began to withdraw, slowly, then faster, pulling tight as if they’d wrapped around something heavy on the other end.
“Winter Bell!” Lyra screamed. Ditzy, above her, flicked her eyes around, looking at everything, anything.
“No… no… no!” she said. “There’s nothing… there’s nothing!”
Lyra shot a glance towards the others. Hollyleaf had surrounded herself in a shield bubble—one the others were working their way through. The surface of it was covered in cracks, like a shattered mirror—and more formed with each hit.
“Can we break the spell!?” Lyra asked.
“I-I can’t!” Ditzy said. “I don’t even know what I’m looking at! If this was a temporal mechanism, sure, but I have no idea what half of this even—”
Her eyes grew wide, and she dove down towards Lyra. She threw herself over her, forcing her to the ground.
“Get down!” she shouted. “Get—”
And then everything exploded.
First came the sound, a thousand roars of thunder that echoed through the room, drowning out the sounds of the fight.
And then Lyra was flying, flying backwards, thrown off her hooves by a wave of light and force and heat and sent tumbling through the air. She hit the back wall of the cave, hard, the impact knocking the breath from her lungs.
She fell down, into a heap on the cold, rough floor. Her vision was white. Her head was empty. Her hearing was shot. Her thoughts fought through thick, murky bog-water on their way to the surface.
Then her hearing came back, and all she could hear was screaming.
It wasn’t hers; her lungs were empty. She blinked, desperately trying to clear her vision, to see.
She tried to stand. Couldn’t.
Her vision began to clear. So did her head, enough to realize that the sound she was hearing wasn’t a scream.
At least, not an equine one. But a scream is a scream, no matter what manner of creature it originates from.
Lyra squeezed her eyes shut one more time, opened them. She could see again. She cast her eyes across the room.
Ditzy was beside her, lying face-down in the dirt. Her wings—one was bent, the other twisted, but the bent one was twitching. She was alive.
Octavia laid in a heap across the cavern. Her fur smoldered. Lyra couldn’t tell if she was breathing.
Vinyl lay behind her, limbs spread out, several twisted in the wrong direction. Her white coat was marred with red—the blood packs in her satchel must have burst, Lyra realized—but also with black.
Pinkie lay some meters away. She lay on her side, facing away from Lyra—but she could see her legs, oddly-toed as they were, curled up under her. She thought of a spider—no. Not like that.
Lyra couldn’t see Bon Bon. She searched, fruitlessly, but—no, there! There, against the other wall, she could see it, a cream-colored hoof, poking out from underneath a pile of debris. And it was moving! Thank Celestia, it was moving!
Then her eyes turned to the center of the room—and the source of the bright neon glow that overtook the entire chamber.
Winter Bell’s body lay limp on the ground at the center of the circle. Discarded, for its purpose in this ritual had been fulfilled.
Above her, wrapped in chains of burning phosphor, was a being. Lyra had seen it before, briefly. She hadn’t known what to make of it then. She didn’t know what to make of it now.
It wasn’t a being of flesh, bone, or sinew. It was a being of space—or, perhaps, the bending of it. It didn’t seem to exist so much as it cast a shadow, a shadow that hung there in space, suspended by chains, trapped, the air and the light warping and twisting around it the only indication that it was there at all.
And it was screaming.
There was one more in the room—one more, Lyra knew. She tried to turn her head to look. Her movements were sluggish, pained—but there, at last, she saw her, just as the remains of her shield spell dropped at her ankles.
Hollyleaf.
And though one eye was blackened, and blood trailed down her nose, and she was bleeding from half a dozen other places…
She was still standing.
Her lips turned up in a smile as her eyes locked on the being at the center of the room.
“Astonishing,” she whispered. She took a step forwards. The wails of the Winter Bell’s mother doubled.
“Truly astonishing.”
Lyra tried to move, to get up—but her body wasn’t working. Her legs weren’t working. Why weren’t her legs working?
The effort made her choke, cough. Somehow, Hollyleaf must have heard it, because her head snapped to the side.
“Still alive?” she said. “Well, not for much longer, by the looks of things. Still, no more taking chances. Not now.”
She raised her horn, lit it, and launched a burst of magic at Lyra. Lyra could do nothing as it impacted her legs—it was cold, she could feel it, that was a good sign—and crystals began to sprout, first over her legs, then over the rest of her body. Within moments, she was restrained, entombed up to her neck, but the crystals stopped there.
Hollyleaf repeated the same for the others, trapping them within crystalline prisons of their own.
“There,” she said. “No more interruptions.” She turned her attention back to the being.
From a pouch tied around her midsection, she retrieved something. A bottle, Lyra realized, with a cork stopper. Gold inlaid in the glass.
No. Not a bottle. A flask.
Hollyleaf held the flask out, it's neck pointed at Winter Bell’s mother. With a burst of magic, she pulled the stopper out.
The shimmering, swirling, shifting mass of light and air began to twist, bend, and pull, stretching out towards the flask. It collected in the bottom of the glass as it was sucked in, like a genie into its lamp, screaming all the while. The chains holding it dissipated, but it was not free, merely moving from one confinement to another.
It did not last long. Within seconds, it had all collected into Bagatelle’s flask—and, as Hollyleaf replaced the bottle’s stopper, the screams, at last, came to an end.
It grew dark, its source of illumination gone. Dark enough only barely to see.
Silence reigned in the cavern.
And then:
Laughter. Cruel, but hardly cold. Tinged with relief.
Hollyleaf’s.
Lyra opened her mouth, tried to say something, coughed again. Something came up; Lyra didn’t know what it was. She didn’t want to know.
She tried again.
“Clover,” she croaked out.
And then Hollyleaf was before her. Lyra could see her eyes, just her eyes and the outline of her face, illuminated by the faint light given off by the bottle and her horn.
“So,” she said. “You figured it out, did you?”
“Just about,” Lyra said. It was getting easier.
“I must say, I did enjoy you not knowing who I was,” Hollyleaf—no, Clover said. “It was amusing. What gave it away?”
“Starswirl himself,” Lyra said. “And the journal. From the museum.”
“Ah, the journal,” Clover said. “I only took it on a whim. You’d have done the same, I suspect.”
Her eyes narrowed. “But Starswirl—” she spat the name when she spoke it “—what do you mean by that? Surely the old fool can’t still be around, though I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Time travel,” Lyra said. “You were the one who trapped him in that fake time loop.”
Clover’s eyebrows raised. “You know about that?”
“I helped him escape it.”
“That was you?” She laughed. “My son spoke of a mare, but I never—even all those years ago, you were working against me!”
She laughed again, and then her face returned to its normal, cold self. “It was a mistake on my part,” she said. “I’d hoped it would give me more time to work out a solution—but that was dashed the moment I realized time wasn’t actually repeating.”
“A solution to your sickness.” Lyra said. Clover grimaced.
“Indeed. I told you, the last time we met,” she said. “I want what was denied me. I want the life I didn’t have—the one I was promised. The one I deserve.”
“Well, now you have it,” Lyra said. “You’ve been body-hopping all over the place—they’re your own family, aren’t they?”
Clover nodded. “My descendants, as was the way of the spell I’d used—and how far the line has fallen!”
“Then you’re functionally immortal.” Lyra said. “You must have thousands of descendants, tens of thousands. You have your life. Why do any of this?”
Clover snorted. “Life? You’d call this miserable half-existence life? I’d hardly call that a success! Bouncing eternally between the bodies of my own descendants, as each one burns out quicker than the last—”
“Burns out?”
“Their bodies can only hold my soul for so long—we’re so many generations apart, now, I only get a few weeks if I’m lucky before they reject me and die. Hollyleaf was a special case, a particularly strong connection, and even then I could have only had her for a few months. Most I would only have for a moment, and then… nothing. No, this was only ever a temporary solution.”
“Which is why you went after Twilight’s spell.”
“MY spell!” Clover said, her voice suddenly elevated. Lyra would have flinched if she could have. “It was meant for me! If he’d finished it—”
“He did finish it.” Lyra said.
“Lies.”
“Truth.” Lyra said. “He showed it to me. He was going to give it to you on your birthday, once he’d broken the time loop.”
Clover recoiled, her eyes growing wide. “But… but that would mean… then he wasn’t…”
“But the Starswirl I met?” Lyra said. Though it hurt, her lips turned up into a smile.
“He’d never have given that to someone like you.”
“Enough!” Clover yelled. Her shout echoed through the cavern.
“Enough,” she said again, quieter. “These matters are beneath me, now. The past is… the past is so far behind me now.”
From the line of pouches at her side, she withdrew something else. It glittered in the dim light.
“Mage Meadowbrook’s Emerald of Equine Enchantment,” Lyra said.
“She was after my time,” Clover said. “A good friend of the old fool’s, if your history books are to be believed. Ironic, then, that one of her creations is the key to my ascension.”
“About that…” Lyra said. “That’s the one thing I don’t understand. Why Bell?”
“Oh?” Clover said. “Did you not realize what that girl had in her possession?”
“…A song in her heart?”
Clover laughed. “Oh yes, a song in her heart… a song that could bend reality to its whims. Alter matter, bend space, rewrite the very fabric of the universe!Such power, reduced to a child’s plaything!”
“I, however,” Clover said, “will use it to its full potential.”
“So, you are trying to steal her magic,” Lyra said.
“Not just steal,” she said. “Take for my own. With this emerald, I can incorporate that magic, that energy, into my very being. I will rise above mortality… rise above the even the alicorns! I will become a god!”
“I’ve met gods,” Lyra said. “I know several personally. They aren’t that impressive.”
“Then I will rise above even them!” Clover cried. “I will take my rightful place in this wretched world, this world that would strike an infant with a disease that would claim her life forever, this world that would produce a pony whose only desire is to kill, this world filled with monsters and vile creatures of the night, and I will make it right, as only I can!”
“You’re insane,” Lyra said, quite calmly.
“Perhaps I am,” Clover replied. “I spent a long time in that box. But it hardly matters.”
She took a step forwards.
“I had wanted to keep you alive, to witness my ascension… but that was a useless sentiment. The world I will create will be a perfect one. A utopia.”
“But you will have no place in it.”
Clover’s horn brightened. Its crimson glow grew violent, angry.
“I,” she said, “will continue eternal.
“But you?
“This is the end for you.”
Her horn flared.
Someone screamed.
“Lyra!
All was white, and fire, and pain, and then…
Lyra Heartstrings was no more.