In the end, Twilight hadn’t had the heart to pull Spike away from what he had been doing with Rarity (something to do with gems, apparently) and so they’d just taken the train. A better idea on the face of it - direct and much less faff. In retrospect probably a mistake.
Some combination of the sunshine filling the carriage with warmth, the gentle rocking of the tracks and the rolling, repetitive, beautiful countryside all swirled together with Anon’s sleepiness to put him out like a light mere minutes after he’d sat down next to Twilight.
And mere minutes after this he’d woken up screaming.
Not a long or prolonged scream. More of a yelp, really, but loud and sudden enough to make Twilight jump a good foot or so out of her seat. That she’d been nodding off as well hadn’t helped.
“What? Who?” She sputtered, on all fours and looking around wildly only to see Anon pressed back into his seat and looked even more confused and scared than she felt, eyes snapping from one side of the carriage to the other but obviously seeing nothing, understanding nothing.
Twilight quickly found herself soothing him again, something that she discovered had got easier. Hopping back up beside him she once again put her hooves around him, squeaking a little in alarm when he clung to her, head pressed to her chest. But she got over it. There seemed to be certain things he responded better to, and these she went for automatically.
“Hey, you’re alright. I’m here, you’re okay, it’s okay,” she said softly.
His eyes stopped rolling around and instead focused on her. Then, a second later, actually seemed to see her.
“T-Twilight?” He murmured, blinking. She smiled.
“Yes Nonny. You’re okay.”
He smiled too - weakly - then noticed that he’d wrapped himself around her perhaps more closely than he would have had he been entirely conscious. Meekly he pulled back, shuffling away from her on his seat up to the very edge.
“Sorry,” he said, quietly.
“It’s okay.”
He then looked around and blinked.
“Why are we - we’re on a train? Why - oh, no, no wait I remember. Yes. Going to see the night princess. Luna, right?” He asked, glancing up to check for confirmation. Still smiling, Twilight nodded and Anon looked away and out the window.
“Good, yeah. Couldn’t take the balloon. I remember now. Alright.”
Then he turned back to her.
“She - she’ll know what to do, right? She does this kind of thing a lot?”
“Luna will know what to do,” Twilight said, with more confidence than she actually felt. Luna was the sensible one to ask, this was beyond doubt, but why hadn’t she said something already? There could have been any number of reasons why, obviously, but which one?
They’d find out soon enough. Probably.
Following this, Anon took to walking up and down the carriage which, much to Twilight’s relief, was empty apart from them. Not a day to be going up to Canterlot, apparently. He swayed alarmingly as he walked and often had to brace himself on the back of seats to keep from falling over, but otherwise seemed as alright as might be expected. For someone in his condition.
Twilight watched him closely, partly out of a concern for his immediate safety - anytime he looked like he might overbalance she had to fight to keep from leaping up and catching him - but mostly due to worrying about his general wellbeing.
Her whole experience of him up to this point had been one of immense and abiding calm. He was somepony - someone, rather - who didn’t seem to get ruffled by anything. Even somehow ending up the sole example of his species in an entirely alien world had only managed to coax a raised eyebrow out of him, and that hadn’t lasted. That was just how he was, it seemed.
Until now, until whatever had started happening had started happening. It made her distinctly uncomfortable to see him like this, muttering to himself, checking over his shoulder, fighting to keep his eyes open. As far as things went it was pretty upsetting to see.
She really hope they fixed him soon.
“You’re staring at me,” he said. He’d wandered all one way up the carriage and now wandered all the way back again without her really noticing. With him standing in front of her she blinked and resettled herself, smiling reassuringly. Or at least attempting to.
“Sorry. Was just thinking. Worried about you,” she said.
He would have blanched, had he not already been about as pale as he could possibly get.
“Why? Should you be worried about me? Do you know what it is? Is it really serious and you just didn’t want to tell me?”
He’d dropped to one knee in front of Twilight while babbling all this out and had grabbed one of her hooves for good measure. She took the opportunity to grab his hands right back and stare him down, realising perhaps that in future she would have to think carefully about her choice of words.
Then again, who knew what was going on in his head by now? What would the right words even be?
“No no no it’s fine, hey? Shh, it’s fine. No, sorry. I’m worried because you haven’t slept. That’s a good reason to be worried about you.”
Anon took a second to process this. Once he did, he looked sheepish.
“Oh. Oh right. Yeah. Sorry. I’m just really tired.”
This much was a given.
His eyes, which had been staring blankly out of the window, wobbled back over towards her, though they didn’t get any less blank.
“You’re real nice to me, Twilight,” he said and she smiled, waving her free hoof at him as though to brush his words aside.
“It’s nothing nopony else wouldn’t have done,” she said. His grip on her other hoof tightened and his look - still blank- somehow got more intense.
“No, no, you’re so nice, Twilight. You put me up when no-one else would, you fed me, looked after me, talked to me. You’re just - you’re so nice to me. You’ve always been so nice to me.”
As grave and serious and slightly intimidating as all this was she couldn’t help but go a little pink at his rather gushing praise. Anything she might have said in response was cut off when he let go and stood up all at once.
“Oh, I’m all emotional!” He giggled before starting back off up the carriage again.
Twilight gave him a very lopsided look of concern.
It was probably just as well they were arriving soon.
-
Canterlot station had been blissfully quiet, it continuing to somehow be a day when no-one wanted to go there or apparently leave, either. The few ponies who were there gave Twilight (and more specifically Anonymous) a wide berth, doing their best to act as though he wasn’t there and they weren’t actually going out of their way to avoid him.
Not that Anonymous noticed, too dazed and too busy letting himself be led by Twilight to the nearest place that coffee could be found. She left him outside while she popped in, popping back out again bare minutes later bearing the extra-large cup into which she had poured several double espressos.
“I don’t know anything about coffee,” she said as she passed the cup to Anon, who took it blearily and slugged back a mouthful without a word. A tremor ran through his whole body from top to bottom and he staggered back.
“Jesus Christ,” he gasped.
“Not good?”
“No, good. Just bracing. It’s like being kicked in the face. It’s amazing.”
He had some more, visibly wincing and Twilight again wondered about the appeal of coffee. Not her sort of thing. Her stimulant of choice? Life. And learning. And possibly books, but that sort of tied into the second one.
“Feel any better?” She asked.
“Not really. But thank you anyway.”
Another sip. More wincing.
“You know, I’m still kind of surprised you ponies have coffee at all,” he said.
That made her genuinely curious.
“Why?” She asked.
Anon blinked. He obviously hadn’t expected any reaction at all, and now that he’d been forced into thinking about what he’d said he was coming up with nothing. After a moment of struggle he just gave up.
“...I don’t know.”
Conversation petered out a little after that, and after clearing her throat Twilight silently led the way onwards. Anon followed, equally silent, through infinitely more sheepish.
Once away from the station and the rather more pedestrian, workaday bit of the city in which it dwelt, the place opened up and became infinitely more gorgeous. This was driven home especially when they turned a corner and caught a magnificent look at a vast slice of the place bathed in blinding sunshine, every polished stone and arch gleaming. A lot of corners in the city had been designed with this sort of effect in mind. The novelty rarely wore off, surprisingly.
“Never not impressive,” Twilight said, unable to keep the smile from her face. Anon, for his part, was mainly just squinting.
“It’s so bright,” he said, slurping.
He wasn’t wrong. Being the home city of a celestial deity did mean the place was perhaps a touch better-lit than most places. Twilight was just used to it.
Still, nothing worth dawdling over. They’d done enough of that already.
“Come on,” she said, setting off again at a brisk trot.
A few more of these stunning, delicious corners later had them on the route to the palace proper, passing guards who appeared to know Twilight on sight as they did not stop to challenge either of them, and all gates were opened.
In his semi-official and poorly defined capacity as ‘guest of the state’ - and also owing to the widely-known circumstances of his mysterious and unexplained arrival - Anon did not draw undue comment. They knew who he was, what he was and if he was with Twilight they didn’t really need to know why he was back in Canterlot, either.
He waved at the guards as he went by anyway. Not that he got a reaction.
Another minute or so of silent walking saw Anon starting to sag and his steps starting to slow. Twilight noticed when he halfway wandered into her, mumbled a semi-verbal apology and then nearly fell into a hedge. Once he was upright again and moving she gave him a bump to the hip to get his attention.
“Hmm? Sorry, sorry,” he said, blinking down at her.
“You’re falling asleep,” she said. “Tell me about something. You have palaces back on Earth?”
Seemed like a dumb question (who didn’t have palaces?) but it wasn’t supposed to spark a deep and involved discussion, it was just to give him something to keep his mind on. Anon screwed his face up as the question sunk through the fog and into his brain proper.
“Palaces? Yeah, a few, I guess. All over the place.”
He thought a little more.
“Big one up in town, too. That one’s famous.”
Doors opened for them and now they entered the castle proper. Stained glass. Fabulously expensive fixtures and fittings. Polished marble tiles. Priceless artworks and artifacts gathered across centuries. Anon noticed none of it, and Twilight had seen them before.
“What’s it like?” She asked, coaxing him into continuing.
“Big. Not as big as this, I don’t think, but still big. Very nice looking. Behind these big gates but otherwise it’s just there. Nice big gardens, too.”
He yawned and rubbed his face.
“One time mum took me up to town - I was a kid - and this was after a princess had died? Accident, it had been. And everyone was so sad! There were the palace gates, right? Big gates. And people had put flowers down in front of them. Hundreds of bunches of flowers. Thousands, maybe. You couldn’t even get close to the gates. They just kept going and going. I’d never seen anything like it,” he said.
Then he shrugged.
“Course, I didn’t really get it at the time. I was only a kid. But I remember what it looked like. Never seen anything like it.”
“Sounds beautiful. Sad, but beautiful,” Twilight said.
“Yeah, I guess it was.”
He sighed.
“I miss home.”
Twilight felt an unexpected stab of guilt at that. She’d got rather used to him being around of late. So used to it, in fact, that she’d almost completely forgotten that he wasn’t meant to be here at all.
It had been some months since all her efforts at working out why he’d arrived had come to nothing, and her additional efforts on working out a method of getting him back hadn’t got much further either. Anon himself had told her not to worry about it, and he talked about his home so little it was easy to forget sometime.
Or maybe she was just a bad friend. Her ears flattened.
“Why you asking me about palaces anyway? I thought this was a castle?” Anon asked, peering around, as though the walls might give him some kind of useful answer. They couldn’t, and so they didn’t.
Twilight did her best to put her bad thoughts behind her, smiling again.
“Just testing you,” she said.
“Oh. Oh right. Cunning.”
-
Anon stood dazedly while Twilight rushed around getting them settled into one of the castle’s guest rooms. He wondered briefly whether he should have packed since it looked like they might be staying overnight, but then he remembered he didn’t actually own anything he could have packed. Bit of a moot point.
“Where - where am I sleeping?” He asked on noticing the room had only one bed. A very big bed, to be fair, in a very plush and luxurious room, but still only one bed. He then seemed to realise what he’d said as he went somehow even paler. “Wait, no, no sleeping. Don’t need a bed. This is fine, this is fine.”
Twilight gave him a look and nudged open a door into an adjoining room. The suite just seemed to keep going on and on.
“I’ll be sleeping through there. Only a door away.”
Something wrinkled Anon’s brain and it took him a second or two to pin down exactly what it was.
“Shouldn’t you have a room here? Somewhere?” He asked.
Twilight had told him about her personal history during the course of their many, many conversations but the exact details of her movements were now a little fuzzy to him. Had she had a house? Lived in the castle? Both? He couldn’t quite remember.
“I felt it best to stay closer to you, keep you company,” Twilight said, smiling pleasantly. The sight gave Anon’s gut enough of a wrench to have him sit down heavily on the bed. It creaked, unused to someone of his dimensions and mass. It held though.
“Oh. Thank you,” he said.
“It’s okay. Now, we’re early. I’ve been informed that neither of the princesses are free yet, but will be before too long. When they are a guard should knock on the door and tell us.”
There was a knock on the door. A guard stuck his head in.
“The Princesses will see you now,” he said before disappearing again. Twilight was blank for a moment.
“That was quick,” she said, shaking it off and settling herself. “Well, guess it’s better than having to wait around.”
“Shhould I come with you?” Anon asked, rising to his feet. She looked him over. Haggard. Unwashed. Shadows under the eyes. Swaying. Slurring. Dozing off every few seconds before snapping back again.
“Uh, you may not be in the best condition to meet them,” she said as delicately as she could.
“Oh thank God,” he said, slumping back onto the bed and cradling his head in his hands. “The big ones scare me…”
Well that solved that.
“That’s good then. Don’t worry about it, Anon, I know what I need to tell them anyway, and this is just to see if they have any ideas. You can stay here and try and get some sleep.”
Somehow, he managed to go even more pale. At this point he was inches away from see-through.
“No. No sleep.”
Twilight would have pressed the point but, looking at him, it seemed pretty clear he’d be nodding off soon or later whether he liked it or not. She’d just have to make sure the guards were warned about the possibility of sudden screaming. That sort of thing tended to rub guards up the wrong way.
“Alright, okay. You going to be okay on your own?”
“I’ll be fine. I’ll find something to do,” he said, adding a moment later while wringing his hands: “Will you be long?”
“I’ll try to be as quick as I can.”
Anon stared at her for a moment.
“What’s-” she about managed to say, but he cut her off.
“You’re so nice to me,” he said, with what sounded almost like a barely-swallowed sob before grabbing her in his arms and hugging her. Twilight squeaked in shock but did hug him back once the surprise had passed, reaching under his arm awkwardly and giving him a pat on the back with her hoof.
“You’re my friend,” she said simply, by way of explanation.
She probably would have appreciated his spontaneous gesture more had he showered recently.
-
“And this came about quite suddenly, you say?”
“Yes. He’s been fine for as long as she’s been here, then just the last couple of days this happened. It’s not like him at all.”
Luna considered this, a hoof tapping against her chin. Twilight’s eyes flicked between the two princesses, a feeling of unaccountable tension building in the pit of her stomach. A childish part of her had, perhaps, been hoping for an instant and painless solution. No such luck.
Celestia didn’t need to be there, nightmares weren’t exactly her wheelhouse, but she had insisted. Partly out of curiosity, partly out a slightly nepotistic desire to help out Twilight’s friend, but mostly out of genuine concern for the apparent suffering of another.
“I have not detected or felt anything...untoward…” Luna said, eventually. “But then I have been giving our guest a degree of privacy when he sleeps, as he is not of this world. But one would imagine - were these nightmares of his as severe as you say - that I would have noticed something…”
She went quiet again, plainly deep in thought.
“A malign force, perhaps? Something interfering with your ability to perceive it?” Celestia ventured. Luna nodded.
“Not beyond the realm of possibility. If it is being actively caused by some foreign entity then it might stand to reason that it would take pains to mask its efforts. I would. But that is conjecture. Without more to go on I couldn’t possibly say.”
“Yes. Yes I think that’s it: speculation will only get us so far. I think we should see this Anon in person. See how best we may help, divine what our move should be.”
“We have some time now, do we not? For a brief meeting, at least?” Luna asked, and Celestia nodded.
Twilight winced. For whatever reason, the thought of others seeing Anon in the state he was in and perhaps thinking worse of him as a result made her oddly uncomfortable. Just didn’t seem fair on him somehow.
“He’s...not his best at the moment,” she said.
“I think we shall survive,” Celestia said, gently. Twilight swallowed.
“R-right. I’ll go get him then,” she said, turning.
“We can ask for a guard?” Celestia called out to her back as she moved towards the doors as quickly as politeness would allow.
“No, no I think it’d be best if I went to go get him,” Twilight said.
The sisters shared a look and came very close to shrugging. Years of experience kept them from doing so, however.
“As you say,” Luna said.
And so Twilight galloped off.
-
A few minutes later, only slightly out of breath, Twilight got back to the rooms and slowed, pleased to see that the brace of guards she’d left outside the door were still there. She wasn’t sure what she might have expected to see, but seeing nothing was a good sign.
She nodded to the guards and the guards nodded to her.
“He hasn’t started...screaming or anything, has he?” She asked, pausing just before the door.
“No. Haven’t heard a peep from him, Miss Sparkle,” said one, the other just shook his head.
Twilight felt that, on balance, this was probably a good sign.
“Thank you,” she said before nosing the door open. The room was dark. When the door clicked shut behind her it got darker still. Unusual but not too crazy. He might even have dozed off if she was lucky.
“Hello? Anon?” She asked, stepping carefully into the room, eyes adjusting. “There’s good news and bad news. Good news! The princesses will help! Bad news. They have no idea what that might involve. But once they’ve seen you they should know better! It shouldn’t take long - if we go now quickly they can talk to you and....”
She trailed off.
The room was silent as well as dark. Twilight squinted.
“Hello?”
No response. A breeze rolled past and she shivered. Now that she was more used to it she could see that the window was open. Wide open, so she saw, and that wasn’t all.
Trotting over - feeling increasing trepidation with each step, for what good ever came of entering a dark, silent room where someone was suppose to be? - she saw that the bed had been stripped down to the mattress and dragged across the floor to the window so much it was now pressed to the wall. The answer to the question of where the sheets had gone was made clear on closer examination, when Twilight saw them tied together and secured to the bed itself.
The knotted bedsheets dangled out the window. There was no way that even with all of them tied together they would have reached all the way down to the ground. Jumping up onto the bed Twilight stuck her head and looked down. There the makeshift rope dangled, maybe reaching three quarters of the way towards the ground. Below that, hedges. And nothing else.
“Anon?” She called out.
No answer at all.
He wasn’t there.