Both fillies either grunted or yelped as they were shoved forward into a small, dark room and onto the cold, hard ground. Before they could regain their footing, a thick, heavy sounding metal door was slammed shut and an audible click could be heard.
The blindfolds had been removed only moments before, and Twilight could see that the room was dimly lit by two large crystals jutting out from the walls above them on either side. The dim glow cast an eerie teal glow over the smooth stone walls, and for a moment, Twilight lost herself in that odd glow.
Then she heard something bang against the heavy metal door and reality crashed back down around her.
"We didn't do anything wrong!" Starlight shouted as she slammed her hooves against the door, "how could you just lock two foals in prison when we didn't do anything! We only came to this stupid place by accident, and we were almost eaten!"
After a moment, a face appeared in the small opening in the metal door. lime green predatory eyes peered down at the pale pink filly with annoyance.
"Oh knock it off, would ya?" droned the thestral's slightly raspy masculine voice just outside, "just be thankful the Council hasn't decided to kill you two on the spot."
"But that's not fair!" Starlight continued to whine, "if this is about that stupid manticore, we were only trying to defend ourselves! It's not like we came here looking to kill the thing! It. Was. An. Accident! We didn't even know it was here!"
"Sorry, filly, but rules are rules," the thestral replied dispassionately, "doesn't matter what the situation was, you two violated those rules within our domain, and whatever happens to you now is up to the Council to decide."
"Buck the Council!" Starlight growled, "we're just fillies, for Sun's sake! Let us out!"
The thestral merely shook his head before moving away from the opening and out of sight. The sound of hooves against stone became more distant, meaning the thestral stallion had trotted away, but Starlight continued to call after him regardless.
"Just stop already, Starlight," Twilight sighed as she slumped against the wall in defeat, "they're not gonna let us out. There's nothing we can do... not this time."
"But this is stupid!" Starlight snapped, rounding on the other filly, "none of this is our fault! We don't deserve to be in here!" she clenched her teeth and narrowed her eyes, glaring at the door, "this is all his fault! Firebrand should've said something! He said he was gonna talk to them, and then we're the ones who get thrown in jail... again! Why are we in jail again?!"
"Because we... I broke their rules," Twilight replied, hanging her head, "it's just as much my fault that we're in here as it is Firebrand's. In fact, it's all my fault, Firebrand had nothing to do with it."
"But—"
"You know it's my fault, Starlight," Twilight interjected, shaking her head helplessly, "I was the one that urged you to help Firebrand, and I was the one that... that killed the manticore."
"Well... yeah, but..." Starlight bit her lip, looked back towards the door, and sighed before trotting over to sit next to the miserable lavender filly, "alright fine, so maybe it isn't all Firebrand's fault, but that doesn't mean it's all your fault either.
"Yeah, you were the one that wanted to help, but, it was my choice to go along with it. Sure, you killed the manticore, but like I said, it was self-defense."
When Twilight didn't reply, Starlight frowned and turned to stare at the glowing crystals above.
"Well... at least they're not gonna cut off our horns," she looked back to Twilight with a wan smile, "that's something, right?"
Twilight tried to smile back, but didn't quite make it that far before it slipped back into a grimace. On the way to the town, the female thestral that had been escorting them had gotten sick of Starlight's whining and revealed that de-horning had been a thing of the distant past and had never been practiced in Nightshade.
That did a fair amount to settle Twilight's nearly heart stopping panic attack, though her worry was far from abated. There wasn't much talking to be had after that during the trip to the prison cell the two fillies now resided in.
They weren't sure exactly when they had passed into the town due to the blindfolds, but the growing amount of whispers and mutters of several voices as they walked by were a fairly good indicator that they had reached Nightshade.
There had been a few stops, and words were exchanged between the two thestral guards that had escorted the fillies and other thestrals within the town presumably, but that was only so much noise to Twilight and Starlight.
Starlight herself had tried to pick up anything she could use in the conversations she heard, but little was said in each exchange, and what she did hear seemed to be words and phrases that had no discernible context.
It was as if they were all speaking in some kind of code, and neither Starlight or Twilight could keep up. At some point, another thestral had come along and taken Firebrand away somewhere else for reasons that were never revealed to the captive fillies.
Sometime after that, the fillies had been marched into what the female thestral escorting them called the 'prison hall', in a building somewhere in town. It was there that the blindfolds had finally been removed and the two fillies had almost literally been thrown into prison.
Starlight sighed again and looked around the cell. The room itself seemed to be carved right out of the rock, the walls corners naturally curving slightly into the floor and ceiling. It gave Starlight the impression that they'd been tossed into a small cave with a metal door rather than an actual room.
"Didn't even bother to give us a bucket," Starlight muttered with a frown, "if I could get my hooves on some parchment and something to write with, I could use Runic Magic to get us out of here."
The pale pink filly rose to her hooves and trotted over to one of the walls. Curiously, she raised a hoof and ran it down the smooth dark grey stone surface, humming to herself thoughtfully after a moment.
"You know what?" she mused aloud, "all I'd really need is something to write with, actually. These walls are smooth enough to write on, and I'm pretty sure I could come up with something to break us out."
Twilight watched her with a mix of curiosity and concern. She frowned and turned her attention to the door, an ear flicking as she contemplated their situation. A few seconds later she sighed and turned back to Starlight.
"I don't know if that's a good idea, Starlight," Twilight called out, causing Starlight to give her a questioning look. Twilight simply shrugged, "we don't know what's waiting for us out there, and I don't wanna know what they'll do if they catch us."
Starlight made to protest, but found she couldn't. It certainly would've been foolish to try and sneak out unprepared for what awaited them outside of that cell. The filly also thought about how these creatures were willing to put foals in mortal danger just for some dumb trial.
If they were willing to send foals to their very likely deaths as some kind of rite of passage, who knows what they'd do to a couple of escapees who broke their precious rules? It wasn't a thought Starlight wanted to entertain, so she didn't.
"Alright, fine then," Starlight grumbled, sitting back down next to Twilight, "so what do we do then, just wait for them to hoof out our super unfair sentence?"
"We don't really have a choice," Twilight answered before tapping the metal ring around her own horn, "we can't just magic our way out of this, and making a fuss about it is probably just gonna make things worse."
She cast a quick glance around the cell before speaking again.
"We're probably not gonna be in here for long anyway," Twilight continued, "in fact, I'm pretty sure they only stuck us in here until the Council decides what to do with us. Once that's done, they'll probably let us out, and then... I don't know."
"Well hopefully Firebrand isn't off somewhere screwing us over even more," Starlight groused in response, "he's the one that begged us to come with him after all, so it's still partially his fault."
Twilight eyed her grumbling friend for a moment before shaking her head and staring back down at her hooves. She didn't know how much time had passed since the two of them had accidentally wandered down the corridor that led them both to this point, but she was already getting tired again.
"So... hey, um..."
Twilight looked back up at Starlight, who gave her what was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, but just came off as an awkward sort of half smile instead.
"Did you... wanna talk about it?" at Twilight's bemused expression, Starlight clarified, "the whole 'killing a giant deadly manticore with crazy Dark Magic' thing, I mean."
"Oh," Twilight's frown deepened and she looked back down at her hooves, "right... that. I don't know, Starlight, I just... I don't think I'm broken up about it, not anymore. Now I just kind of... feel... weird about it, y'know?"
"No, not really," Starlight replied, furrowing her brow, "when I... when I killed my parents and Sunburst, I... well, it was bad, Twilight. At first I didn't feel anything, and I mean like, I didn't feel anything. Then everything started to hurt inside, and it got worse... and that's when you found me."
Twilight stared at her for a moment and Starlight groaned before looking away.
"I don't really know how to explain it, okay?" she huffed, "I just felt horrible, but from the way you're explaining how you felt, I don't think it was in any kind of weird way like you're talking about," she turned back to Twilight with a curious frown, "so what do you mean though, when you said you felt weird?"
"Well, I..." Twilight shifted uncomfortably and fell silent for a moment, not wanting to tell Starlight how she truly felt about what happened in that moment, "promise you won't freak out or hate me or anything like that?"
"What? Why would I?" Starlight asked with a bemused frown, "I'm not exactly in a position to judge you, and you technically saved my life, so yeah, I have absolutely no reason to hate you."
"I enjoyed it."
Starlight blinked.
"You... what?" Starlight answered, shaking her head, "you enjoyed it? What are you talking about? Do you mean you..." her eyebrows suddenly rose in understanding, "wait... are you telling me you enjoyed killing that manticore?"
Twilight winced, but nodded nevertheless.
"I don't know why, but when I killed that manticore, something inside me just felt... happy about it," Twilight grimaced at the memory, "it was like, I dunno, it was trying to kill us, and I killed it instead. I put it in its place, and I was happy about that."
Starlight stared at her, mouth hanging slightly open. Aware of her disbelieving gaze, Twilight pointedly kept her own fixed on her hooves as she continued.
"At first I was horrified and confused about it, but now," she worked up the nerved to looked back at Starlight, her expression helpless, "now I'm just... confused. I don't know how to feel about it anymore. I don't feel bad, but I still know it's wrong. Yeah, it was a manticore, and it was trying to eat us... but... but I..."
She trailed off into silence, her eyes shining with unshed tears. A small hiccup escaped her lips and Starlight snapped out of her shocked state.
"Hey, look," Starlight said after a long minute. She put a comforting hoof on Twilight's shoulder and smiled a slightly uneasy smile, "it's Dark Magic, Twilight. It's kind of infamous for doing that kind of stuff to a pony, and it's your affinity."
"That just makes it worse, doesn't it?" Twilight shot back, "every time I think about what I did, I keep seeing that... that mare in the vision. That mare with the scary eyes that looked like mine. The one that was supposed to be me."
"Right, the vision," Starlight muttered, shivering slightly at the memory of her own adult counterpart. She shook her head before looking Twilight in the eye, "look, don't worry about that, okay? It's not gonna go down like that. We have Aeon and all those other teachers. Some of them are... scarier than others, but I'm sure they'll teach us how to control things like your Dark Magic."
Twilight remained completely unconvinced of the fact, but before she could continue to voice her own concerns, they heard a click. The two of them turned to the door in surprise just as it swung open with a loud creak.
A second later, a tall grey thestral mare with hard rosy eyes and a white, mulberry streaked mane stepped inside, followed by two other robed and hooded thestrals who immediately moved off to either side of the room.
The mare wore a pair of black horn rimmed glasses and a set of dark blue robes that nearly dragged across the floor as she trotted in. The two fillies shrank back slightly as she peered down at them, her gaze boring into and right through them both. After a minute she sniffed, raised her head, and spoke, her tone loud, clear, and imperious.
"If you two will follow me, the Council of Elders will see you now."