Day 2
Fluttershy yawns and stretches as she wakes up. It’s a nice summer morning, warm and cozy. She keeps her eyes closed, the blanket close up against her. Maybe I’ll sleep in a little longer, she thinks as she rolls over to the other side of the bed.
Then the world falls out from under her and she plummets to the floor. She lands with a dull thud, jarring but not painful. Groaning, she picks herself up and pries her eyes open. Right. I'm not home. She takes in her surroundings, her makeshift barriers to either side, the bed which she's just discovered is much smaller than her own. Soft sunlight glows behind the cover over the window. Twilight’s room has taken on a bizarrely alien look.
Especially since Twilight is nowhere to be seen.
Fluttershy sits on the floor, leaning against Twilight’s bed as she takes in her friend’s room. It’s all so familiar to her. The little shelves, packed with all of Twilight’s favorite books. Twilight’s desk, covered in half-written letters and lists and lessons. A table in the corner, holding all sorts of old baubles and toys, tiny pieces of Twilight’s life collected together. She knows it all, and yet…
It just doesn’t feel like Twilight’s room. Those aren’t Twilight’s books, they’re just books. The desk will never again feel the scratch of Twilight’s pen. The memories on the table are shrouded by a coat of dust. How can this be Twilight’s room, when there is no Twilight?
No, Fluttershy tells herself. I can’t think like that. There is a Twilight. She’s not here right now, but she isn’t gone forever. She can’t be. I… She looks down and grabs the bedsheet, clutches it, tries to squeeze some drops of Twilight out of it. I can’t let her be gone.
She sits there a while, clinging to the sheet, until her stomach starts to put up a fuss. With a sigh, Fluttershy gathers herself and sets about her day. She pulls the sheet back up over Twilight’s bed, taking extra care to smooth out any wrinkles. She borrows a brush to fix her mane, carefully picking the loose hair out of it afterwards. She takes down her curtains, painstakingly disconnecting them and placing them, neatly folded, back where she had found them. She floats down to the kitchen, scrounges up a makeshift breakfast and scarfs it down. She stops short of borrowing Twilight’s toothbrush, instead just using some mouthwash, but she manages to have some semblance of her morning routine.
Then she plops down at a reading table, a deep frown etched on her face. Now what? Do I leave Ponyville? Go to Canterlot? No, I… I can’t just run away. I can’t ignore what’s happening, or else I’ll just… be alone, forever.
She takes a look around to weigh her options. There’s the sturdy, imposing door sealing off Twilight’s basement. All those gizmos and gadgets, any number of them might be able to bring everypony back. Or, there’s the library, a vast compendium of all the knowledge in the world. Fluttershy can’t do magic, but who knows what Twilight has locked away in there? Find the right tome, and maybe you could change the world.
The basement is dark, though, and the library vast. Both options are difficult prospects for her to commit to. The deep darkness of Twilight’s laboratory is a simple terror, one Fluttershy faces every night, but it is a powerful one. Her fear of the library is more complex, but she’s learned through experience that she and it simply do not mix.
Fluttershy taps a hoof on the table, thinking hard. She looks towards the inner library, then the basement, then the door outside, then the library, then outside, then the library. Okay. She nods to herself. I can handle the library. I have to.
She pushes herself up and marches over to the doorway. There’s nothing special about it, really just the lack of a wall giving way to a hallway, but it looms over her nonetheless. It’s the place where, for Fluttershy at least, Twilight’s home ends and the library begins. The walls are the same, there’s no seam in the carpet, but to cross that line is to step into another world.
Nope. She shakes her head and walks the other way. I can’t do it. I can’t just walk in there and get lost again. I have to find something else, I have to… Oh, but there’s nothing else. Frustrated, she shakes her head more, trying to force herself into a decision. Which she does, her eyes lighting up as it hits her. Snatching up her saddlebag, she dashes outside.
She wastes no time wandering the streets, watching the empty state of things. She allows herself no room to dwell on the world around her, choosing instead to focus on what she can do. Right now, what she can do is go to Rarity’s house, and that’s exactly what she does.
No knocking this time. If Rarity is home, seeing her friend that much sooner is worth the stress of barging in on her. Not that it matters, because Fluttershy walks into another empty building. Rarity’s home, no Rarity.
She makes her way straight to the storeroom and rummages around. Sewing threads are in no short supply, so it takes her little time to fill a pouch in her bag. She considers looking around for more supplies, but can think of nothing she would find, so instead she opts to leave lest she get caught up thinking about the situation she’s in.
On the way out, she borrows some tea from Rarity and leaves her a note explaining what she took.
Back at the library, Fluttershy moves with purpose. Food, water, first aid, she loads up with all the things she’d take on a day in the wilderness. Thread tied down, double checked, triple checked. Maybe a fourth, just to be sure. Just so she can feel safe.
Confident that nothing can go wrong, at least as confident as her mind allows her to be, she steels herself and sets off into the depths.
To say that this place is labyrinthine would be an understatement. Twilight has an eye for a lot of things, but she has absolutely no grasp on architecture, a trait that becomes disastrous in a pony with access to magic allowing her to fit any amount of space she wants in her humble tree house. In some places hallways stretch for ages with seemingly no purpose, while other areas are completely devoid of hallways, just strings of room after room of books. There are stairs everywhere, no rhyme or reason to their placement. Narrow, rickety steps at the end of a hallway, wide spiral staircases serving as centerpieces in larger wings. In more than a few places there are hatches in the floor, ominous portals leading to ladders stretching into infinity. All of this, covered floor to ceiling with books.
It doesn’t take long for it to dawn on Fluttershy what exactly this journey entails. Walking down a featureless hallway, she scans the bare walls and finds very little. There are no maps, no directions, no arrows pointing her along. Just walls and doors. The only things to give any indication of where she is are the plaques telling wayward souls what room they’re about to enter. A room full of cookbooks, another with almanacs. As far as she can tell, there’s no rhyme or reason to how the rooms are set out.
She squints her eyes to read a particularly worn plaque. Does that say… Abbles?
So, with no clear path forward, she just walks. Following this hallway into the next and the one after that, glancing at nameplates in search of anything useful. Walking through rooms when she runs out of hallways, then through hallways when she runs out of rooms. Stopping every so often to tie a new thread onto her lifeline. On and on through the endless maze.
She turns a corner and flinches. Have I… been here before? No, there’s no string. But… She inches her way to the first door, marked “Candy.” No, I’ve definitely seen that room before. I… Fretting, she doubles back around the corner and turns into the first room she sees. I’ll just have to go another way.
Subconsciously, she starts moving faster. Not running, not even jogging, just walking faster. Her method gets muddled as she starts to move erratically, moving randomly through the rooms. No more straight lines, now she’s turning as much as she isn’t. She misses a plaque and has to double back to read it, then just keeps going backwards, walking over her own line for several rooms.
Turning a corner too fast, she runs into a table and yelps, shooting backwards. She stares at it, fear-stricken, for several long moments before she finally processes what happened. She feels her heart pounding, the adrenaline coursing through her body, anxiety buzzing in her head. Realizing the state she’s in, she forces herself to take a seat and breathe. Slow, deep breaths bring the world back into focus. Eventually, she manages to get her body to settle down.
Or, she would, if not for her empty stomach taking the opportunity to make itself known.
Sighing, she collects herself and gets comfortable on the floor to eat. As she does, she looks around the room she’s in. A rather small collection, it seems like all the books have to do with methods for trapping animals. Fluttershy chuckles to herself. They’re exactly the sort of books she was looking for the first, and only, time she had been here alone before.
Normally, Twilight would have gotten anything Fluttershy needed for her. Twilight relished the chance to explore her library, and Fluttershy dreaded it. Even on the few times they had gone in together, Fluttershy hated it. She just couldn’t keep track of where she was, and that terrified her.
Twilight wasn’t there that time, though. Maybe Fluttershy could have found her, or even found somepony else, but panic doesn’t lead to the most rational decisions. An animal needed her help, and she needed to help them. In her racing mind, there was nothing else to consider.
It was only a few hours later that Twilight found her, curled up and shaking under some table in some room, but it felt like an eternity. Lost, frightened, alone, this place had devoured her. It had pulled her in and threatened to never let go.
Strangely, despite the terror she had felt at the time, remembering those times brings a smile to Fluttershy’s face. That had led to a strange week. Twilight, wholly repentant, trying to apologize while Fluttershy insisted that she was okay. Eventually Twilight got so caught up in it that she snuck into Fluttershy’s house at night to get proof that she was having nightmares about it. Which she was, of course, she just didn’t want Twilight to worry. Twilight doesn’t let Fluttershy hide her emotions like that anymore.
Or at least, she didn’t.
Fluttershy pushes the memories away and refocuses, packing her things and setting back off. Back to the endless walking, the aimless wandering. Further in, further down. She tries not to think about how many floors she’s gone down. The last thing she needs at this point is another source of anxiety.
After a couple more hours, Fluttershy reaches to replace a spool that’s run out and realizes she’s used the last of her thread. She stares down into her empty bag. That’s it? That can’t be it, I haven’t found anything. She digs around, under apples and bandages, searching for more. She spots the corner of a spool and snatches it up, but it turns out to be empty, so she tosses it away down the hallway.
No, no, no. She upturns her bag, dumping the contents on the floor. Apples roll away from her, a canteen thunks as it lands. She pushes things around, checking under every little thing, examining every spool. She starts chucking things down the hall as they get in her way, first spools, then bandages, then apples. There has to be something, she pleads as her pile of supplies dwindles.
She picks up the last apple and falls back, sitting against the wall and turning the fruit around in her hooves as she stares at it. No, she thinks. All these books, there has to be something. There has to be a way to bring them back. There has to…
The apple gives a dull thunk when Fluttershy throws it against the wall. She collapses in on herself, falling to the floor and pressing her head into her hooves. Tense, trembling, trying to smother all the emotions raging through her.
Eventually something has to give out. It’s exhausting, the anger and fear and frustration. Soon the shaking stops and her muscles relax, and Fluttershy gets up and starts to walk. She leaves it all, the food, the water, and starts to follow the string back out.
She drags her body along, her limp hooves scraping against the carpet. Tears mark the ground behind her for some way, but they dry up. A pony only has so many tears. She keeps her dull, blank eyes trained on the thread as she walks, no energy left to lift her neck and look around. She runs into the walls as she turns corners, stumbles and loses her balance from time to time, but walks on.
Staring at the thread so long, every detail starts to become more pronounced. The texture under her hooves, the material, the color. Especially the color. Purple first, room after room of purple. Then pink. Orange, blue, red, the colors sear themselves into her mind.
Then she runs out of thread.
Fluttershy stares down at the frayed string as anxiety creeps in. There’s no sign of any more further along, no convenient breaking point to continue from. When did it break? How? There’s no telling how far she may have pulled it away from the entrance. She whips her head around, looking for any reference point, anything recognizable, but finds nothing. Sure, she recognizes the names of the rooms, but she saw so many today. How could she remember where any of them were? She could be anywhere, for all she knows it could still be hours of walking to the exit.
She panics. The thread flies away in the wind as she sprints down the hallway, her breathing shallow and ineffective. She runs blindly through rooms and halls, unable to process the world around her. Her vision blurs, marred by new tears. Soon she closes her eyes and moves purely on instinct, hoping beyond hope that her hooves can take her where her mind can’t.
The wind is knocked out of her as she slams into a bookshelf, crumpling to the floor. Books fall around her, scattering across the floor. When her breath finally does come back, it does so in short, frantic bursts, not enough to get any real air. She tries to look around, but her vision starts to fade, which only serves to panic her further. More fear means less air as breathing gets harder. She curls up as her mind goes blank and the world vanishes from around her, leaving only darkness.