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// VI. At Twilight’s Break 
// Story: In Her Mind 
// by SeventhElement 
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Twilight’s hooves click quietly on the ground below her; the smoke around her revealing a familiar, but new room. This room reminds Twilight of her old throne room. A large table and a single chair are carved from a similar white stone that the first room was made from. This table did not contain an ethereal version of Equestria, however it displayed what appeared to be a map. Or was it a tree root structure? Twilight looks down at the marble tiles below, and begins to panic. Her thoughts immediately externalize as she shouts frantically in this large room.
“No! But...I couldn’t have.” Twilight stutters. The realization that she destroyed a part of herself that night takes a considerable toll on her. “This doesn’t make sense! If I destroyed that creature...I mean me...then, what have I done!” Twilight begins shaking. Tears begin to collect in her eyes and her hind legs fold as she falls backwards. The tears feel cold, her shaking turns to shivers.
“I just...didn’t want to be sad anymore.” Twilight muttered. The room around her begins to darken. The once blinding brightness was now dimmed to the point where one could hardly see, not that Twilight cared too much. “I’m not even crying because I’m sad...I’m crying because I’m scared! I don’t miss my friends any more, I don’t even feel bad about it! This feels wrong!”
A bright light on the table on the table flickers into existence with the sound of shattering glass. Twilight gasps and springs to her hooves. Words begin appearing on the table in glowing text, it’s the dead language. Twilight walks to the other end of the table, and hops onto the tall throne to get a better angle on the table. She sees a beautiful display of light as the paths on the map highlight and interconnect like constellations overlaying each other. The words begin to pulsate and and shift. She squints, looking at one of the words and something comes to mind: “Knowing”.
“I don’t understand…” Twilight said to herself as the light crept down the path until reaching its eventual conclusion at the end of the table. The light then jumps from the table and onto the ground, where it radiates outwards and continues the map across the floor and up the walls of the room. It avoids the tall door on the opposite side of the room that Twilight neglected to notice in her distress. The more words that appear on the walls, the the more words enter Twilight’s head: “Decision”, “Empathy”, “Love”, “Beauty” to name a few. Alongside this, a chorus of bells echoes loudly in the room.
“What is happening?!” Twilight shouts over the bells. The words become intensely bright and begin moving to the opposite end of the table. This light converges and forms a pony-like shape that appears to be made of pure light. A ghostly mist erupts from the pony much like Celestia’s mane would, but from random places.
“Time goes by...like a whisper all across the space between me and you.” the creature says in a cacophony of voices.
“What?!” Twilight says. “What even are you?” Suddenly, the bells grow discordant, all the light from the map disperses. With a final glow, the pony of light dissipates into the walls. The room now looks as it did when Twilight first encountered it. She sits stunned in silence. She was conflicted before, but now she’s more confused than anything. A click echoes from across the room, the door begins to open. “Oh what now?” Twilight thinks.