//------------------------------// // Twilight // Story: Heavenly Sphere // by Seer //------------------------------// The observatory was quiet, which wasn’t surprising to Twilight. She checked the console and found the telescope hadn’t even been touched since she’d been in here with Rarity a few days ago.  Fledgling science indeed, but maybe, just maybe, she could change that tonight.  Twilight flicked the lights on, and then, with a twist of telekinesis, she locked the door of the observatory behind her.  She had meant her promise to Luna, she really, really had… at the time.  But when it came down to it, she could sooner stop her heart from beating that stifle that drive in her to know.  Princess Celestia had told Twilight, not so long back, to give up with supposedly pointless research pertaining to the night sky. And because Twilight refused to, because of that need within her to just know, now the princess had her sister back.  Of course, Twilight knew that misdirection and subterfuge was very much Celestia’s angle. Said rescued sister was altogether more blunt. There was no hidden meaning in her warnings, no task to be completed in her explicit plea for Twilight to not do the thing she was planning.  But it wasn’t that easy, was it?  Twilight huffed, before sitting down at the console.  “I’ll take a look,” she said to herself, while simultaneously wondering who exactly this charade was even for, “I’ll just take a look before I decide to do anything.”  She flicked the necessary switches, and the enormous telescope began to whirr into life. The heavy metal lens cover slid away from the glass, freeing up the behemoth's great, staring eye. The roof itself parted to open, allowing a full view of the night sky. And, in the absence of any new input, the gears read the coordinates, and rotated machinery around enough axes to move the telescope into the same position it had been a few nights ago.  The position where it all started.  As the ceiling fully gave way, Twilight caught a glimpse of the moon. The pattern of craters that formed a mare’s face had disappeared now, of course. In her youth, Twilight had often wondered what the mare of the moon was like.  She didn’t have to wonder anymore, all because she’d stuck to her guns.  And Twilight knew precisely what the mare on the moon would think of what she was doing right now.  With a steadying breath, Twilight linked her spell with a fresh quill and parchment, as was becoming habit, and looked into the viewfinder.  She would have liked to have said there was something she could see in the blackness, but it would be nonsense. This was truly a blank area of the night sky, Absolutely nothing in the unbroken, obsidian expanse of the aether. But whatever was hiding there, she was looking at it right now.  She had to be.  Because the quill had started writing.  But Twilight paid more mind to trying to see with her own eyes what was hiding in the blackness. Maybe if she could actually make it out, there wouldn’t be any need to astral project. Maybe she find her answers and could keep her promise to Luna all at the same time…  But she knew it was folly.  She stared and stared and stared. She flicked the lenses to their maximum magnification, milking all the power and focus and strength out of the enormous, clockwork beast. And yet every single time, there was absolutely nothing to see.  Just inky darkness, a totally empty area of the sky.  A void.  Twilight sighed, and moved her head away from the eyepiece. Her quill had written many things, none of which were particularly surprising. ‘Corpse’, ‘Remains’, ‘Infinity’, ‘No escape’, ‘Impossible’, ‘Cadaver’.  While once these had, admittedly, unsettled even Twilight to a degree, she now looked at them with the same feelings she’d get from looking at a particularly hazardous chemical she needed to use in an experiment.  With trepidation, granted, but without serious fear. There was no room for fear in all this. Twilight was a scientist, she was where was in life because of her mind, and it’s insatiable hunger to put to bed the mysteries of this world. There was almost a sadness to the knowledge that was becoming increasingly inescapable.   Because no matter who was right about those words on the page, whether it was as she said, that they were simply an imperfect system attempting to describe exoctic, unfamiliar phenomena with the only words it had. Or whether it was really dangerous, like Luna and Rarity thought. Whatever the truth was, the one truth she knew was that she couldn’t keep her promise to Luna. It was simply beyond her, it just wasn’t in her nature to let it lie without knowing.  She fiddled with some knobs, wrote a few needless lines of text with her quill. Everything to look like she wasn’t going to do the thing she knew she was. As if she could take the universe by surprise somehow.  Twilight looked at her parchment.  Twilight looked at the gears in the walls.  Twilight looked at the control module.  And then, Twilight looked into the eyepiece, at her invisible, dark object in the cosmos. And with barely a thought, without giving herself the time to doubt herself, Twilight’s horn lit, and her body went limp as her mind was thrown out into the heavens.  The first thing Twilight noticed was that she was small.  The jaws of the infinite black of the cosmos encased her and she had never once, not in her entire life, felt as utterly miniscule as she had in that moment.  And though she didn’t want to admit it, as she hung there, suspended like a speck of dust, Twilight felt almost relieved that there truly was nothing to see.  Out here, Luna had been right about one thing. It was absolutely terrifying. Even knowing that there was nothing that could happen to her, even knowing that her body was safe and sound in that observatory building. Even still being able to feel the chair she was sat in, pressing into her flank.  Even with all that, she still had never felt quite as vulnerable as she had, right at this moment.  But, as she had feared, as maybe a part of her had hoped, there was nothing. Just endless black expanses, peppered by endless twinkling stars, with paint strokes of colour from galaxies and nebulae.  The void itself was home to such staggering beauty, she could see why Luna found comfort in it. What horrified Twilight though, was getting a scale of how truly far away everything was. Those galaxies she could see would have taken an eternity to get. She imagined how it would have been had she had tried to teleport her body. Without the effectively infinite range given by the near non-existent mass of her astrally projected essence, she would have had to teleport what… a million times? A billion times? A million trillion billion times?  All were likely gross underestimations. The scale quite simply couldn’t exist in anyone's mind.  Twilight decided to try not to dwell on it. The important thing was that she didn’t have to have any regrets now. She didn’t have to spend her life wondering what she might have missed. The spell was defective, that was all. There was nothing out here, save for the void, and the stars it held.  And then, Twilight turned around.  Were it not for the stars, or lack thereof, Twilight might have missed it. Because without those stars, there would be no way to see something black against the backdrop of infinite obsidian she was dangling in.  But the light from the stars seemed to dance and warp around it, lensing to create a horrifying halo of distorted, unnatural lights. It was like it was ripping a hole in reality itself. It was like reality rejected it. A perfectly unblemished, terrifyingly uniform black circle, or was it a sphere?  Twilight couldn’t tell, it was impossible to tell.  It was a void in the void, an area of pitch blackness that made the void itself seem bright. Twilight felt her body vomit all over herself and the mere sight of it. It wasn’t meant to be seen. It was never ever meant to be seen. It was disgusting and obscene and unnatural.  Luna had been right.  And worse, worse than anything, was that it was moving towards her.  And it was all Twilight could do to try to stop herself panicking. She tried to remind herself that there was nothing sinister here, there was no malice, it was simple the cold, uncaring, unliving nature of the void.  And then Twilight panicked more, because Luna had been right. It wasn’t life. It wasn’t joy or hate or evil or good. It was nothing, it was a cold, unsmiling, unsneering, unfeeling monstrosity. Luna had been right.  And Twilight could hear it. And she knew there was no air for there to be soundwaves in the void, she knew her ears were back with her body.  But Twilight also knew things were different when you astrally projected. You could sense things on another level. Twilight thought the keening, celestia moans of decaying sound was the noise of the cosmos itself being killed by this sickening abomination. Surely nothing could live after seeing this.  And it was still drifting closer, and closer, and closer.  By god, how fast was it?  Twilight tried to make her mind settle so she could cast the spell to bring her back down to her body, but the panic was stopping her from concentrating. All she wanted to do was go home but the more she wanted that the more she panicked and the more her magic would drift away from her and it was still coming.  She kept thinking any moment now it would engulf her, because soon even the lens of light disappeared from view and all she could see was black, and then it still came.  It was the biggest thing she’d ever seen. It was bigger than there could be descriptions for, it was bigger than her mind would allow her to even try to conceptualise. It filled her vision until it filled her vision again, tripling and quadrupling in size every second, growing exponentially. In every instant, the concept of scale was painfully redefined in her terrified, fraying mind.  The black sphere drew closer and Twilight panicked and she couldn’t cast the spell to bring her home and it kept getting closer and Luna was right and it was big so big it was the biggest thing Twilight had ever seen in her life and she could feel its unnatural pull and hear the universe screaming in pain around it as it was moving and always getting closer and ripping and tearing at the fabric of creation and it never stopped growing and Luna was right and it was never meant to be seen and Luna was right and Twilight couldn’t focus or make her magic work and Luna was right.  Luna was right.  In an instant, all feeling from her body disappeared.  She turned around to see that now everything around her was black. The void and all it’s stars was just in a small circle behind her, that was getting smaller and smaller.  Luna was right.  But Twilight could be right too. She was certain if this had happened to her body, whatever the enormous, unnatural monster had done, it would have killed her.  But she was safe, of course.  Because she wasn’t matter.  Twilight was magical energy and light suspended astrally. Nothing could hurt light. Nothing could trap light. All she had to do was concentrate. Forget her panic and… Twilight cast the spell.  She still couldn’t feel her body.  She frantically looked around, and realised to her abject horror that she was still trapped in the blackness, the stars still in a small circle of light, getting smaller and smaller and smaller as her whole world became blackness.  She cast the spell again, and again, and again.  And still, she remained trapped in whatever she had found. Whatever the ‘Corpse’ was. Maybe that’s what it was? Maybe this is what was left when planets died? Maybe even when stars died? But Twilight would never know, nor never have the chance to, because everytime she cast her spell, she found that nothing was changing, all except the circle of light shrinking at an even faster rate.  Twilight watched as her incorporeal body began to lengthen and lengthen, until her bottom half was nothing but a long, thin string. And then this began to happen to the rest of her as well.  The circle of light shrank until it faded from view entirely.  Twilight’s form was pulled thinner and thinner and thinner.  Luna had been right.  If Twilight had been able to, she would have screamed.