//------------------------------//
// Mirror 
// Story: The Mirror 
// by SoloBrony 
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I couldn't cry forever, even if it felt like I should. I was numb and exhausted by the time I was done, pressed against the caretaker, who practically radiated sincere concern. I hadn't expected that, but I didn't have the heart to really care or press into it right then.

Eventually, he carried me to bed and tucked me in. He sat on the edge and stayed with me until I fell asleep.

Part of me wanted to tell him to go away, but I liked having him there, and I figured that was okay as long as I didn't have to admit it. If he left, I might stop feeling so humiliated by my outburst.

And then it might start again.

Instead, he just sat with me, rubbing my head occasionally, until I passed into sleep.

When I woke up, I could still feel the pain, even through the numb layer of sensation going through me. One thought kept recurring to me, that nothing had changed, but I kept trying to push it down.

There was still nothing for me in this world, but I was trying to hold it together for just a little while. The worst of it had passed for now, so I just looked forward and kept moving, wondering when it would catch up again. Couldn't be long.

I made my way to the dining room. The caretaker was there, of course, and we ate together in silence. I kept wanting to speak, but then I just went back to eating, each time. What could I say at this point? I'd already said it all.

The caretaker cleared his throat when we were done, looking at me intently.

"Cozy, I need to speak with you about something important."

I shrugged the same way he always did. That's when I understood what that was; it was something to fill the space when you were too dead to come up with a real answer. "Sure."

"Let me show you something."

He led me back to the study. I followed him, vaguely curious, but still plagued by the thought that it wouldn't matter, whatever it was. He opened a closet and pulled out something with a brown tarp over it; when he dragged it off, I could see it was an ornate, room-height mirror with an elaborate purple frame. I shrugged again and bit back a mean-spirited reply.

"Fancy mirror."

He cleared his throat, and I realized he was uncomfortable.

Wait, is he coming clean about something...? Oh well. I guess it doesn't matter if somepony else did something wrong at this point.

"This isn't just a mirror, Cozy. It's a mirror-portal. It leads to another world."

My eyes widened slightly. I remembered Twilight had something like that.

Wait, could it be...?

"You took that from Twilight's castle before it was destroyed?"

He hesitated, and then nodded. "Well, yes. It leads to—"

"The 'human' world, is that right? Some kind of school?"

He cleared his throat again. "Well, it used to, but it's been modified. This leads to... well, it leads home, Cozy. The home you knew."

I stared at him. I saw him wince slightly, probably expecting some kind of outburst, but...

I just shrugged. "Okay...? So you're saying that leads back in time, or something?"

"Well... more like sideways in time, but yes."

Sideways...?

"Wait, I'm in the wrong timeline? How did that happen?"

"I brought you here. It... took a lot of effort to find this timeline, this specific possibility out of thousands, but I did. A world where Equestria is intact, but never recovered."

I felt a flicker of suspicion and anger, but I stomped down on it. I couldn't feel that without... well, without the rest of it.

"Okay."

He recoiled slightly in surprise. "Okay...?"

"Yeah, like... go on, if you had more to say. Seems like you've got more to say."

He sputtered slightly, but collected himself. I snickered at that; he wasn't used to dealing with deadpan, I guess.

"W-well... In this world, Cozy Glow succeeded. She had a backup plan in case she, Tirek, and Chrysalis were defeated; she wiped out all magic from Equestria, except for a scepter she had hidden away, and she used it to take over."

I laughed at that, shaking my head and staring down at the floor. "I guess 'she' got pretty depressed with the result, huh?"

"Well... yes. After a few years. She stopped caring, started keeping to the palace, and eventually..."

"Angry ponies stormed in, took the scepter, and this place has been terrible ever since. I can figure out the rest."

The caretaker scraped a hoof against the ground, frowning and looking away.

Clearly not going the way you had planned, is it? Oh well.

"... I thought you would be mad."

"I'm too tired to be mad right now. And I'm more mad at myself, honestly, for... well, everything. If you're saying this was some kind of weird punishment, fine, whatever; not the first time I've been punished for misbehaving. At least it wasn't Tartarus."

Tartarus was so much easier to deal with than this...

He sighed, leaning his head against the mirror frame. "Cozy, I didn't mean to punish you. I just wanted to help you."

I watched magic flicker over him. His cloak billowed off, and I spotted a tornado cutie mark on his flank before he slowly began to change form, growing longer, changing color, each of his hooves taking a different form, his horn splitting in two...

I groaned and facehoofed.

"Discord?! Seriously?! You fooled me again?"

Discord had the good grace to look sheepish. And his eyes were more tired-looking than I'd ever seen him.

"I'm... sorry, Cozy—"

I held up a hoof. "No. No, whatever, I get it. It's what I'd have done. It was the only way to manipulate me to get what you wanted. Fine. So... what do you want? If this wasn't a punishment, what was it?"

Discord studied the floor, contemplative. "It was a... second chance. I wanted you to have a... a space, an environment, where you could just slow down, stop, and think."

I sat down on the floor and sighed miserably. "Well, congratulations. I did."

He slithered up to me – probably so he wouldn't seem too imposing by walking over at his full height, I realized – and laid his paw on me. "I know. I didn't realize what it would put you through."

I snorted. "Nopony did, not even me. That was the whole point. So... now what? You think I can just go back to the real Equestria, and be all happy? I told you... even if the world was fine, I'm just not. I don't even know what I want any more. No, I do; I don't want anything, except to just stop hurting. I can't..."

My breath hitched and I growled, trying to force the feelings back down.

"... I can't do this anymore. I can't look back on all of that and just handle it all."

Discord scratched my head slightly, and I leaned into it. I may have been furious with him, on several levels, but right now I just didn't care about any of that.

Any source of warmth was better than what I felt coming from inside of me.

"What if I told you... you don't have to? Here, come look at this."

He waved at the mirror with his talons, and it slid closer to us. I looked up at it, and I saw myself – but not quite. The filly I saw had brushed her mane straight, her coat color was different, but she had my cutie mark. She still had her horn, I saw, and the bigger wings I had when I'd taken Grogar's magic.

She was soaring through the sky, practicing some kind of magic. Most of all, though, what stood out to me was that she was smiling. Not the horrible I-have-a-devious-scheme-and-it's-working smile – I do love that one – but just a simple, genuine smile of enjoyment.

"Who, or what, am I looking at?"

Discord hummed. "It's another future we came across in our search. You thought everypony forgot about you, but we didn't. Twilight, Starlight, Fluttershy... everypony still wanted to find some way to help you, or at least give you a chance. It was agonizing, watching them beat themselves up over it all. Tirek they could accept, I think. Chrysalis was hard; Starlight still wanted to save her so, so badly. But you, you were their friend, their student; they couldn't accept giving up on you, despite everything. They refused, but they couldn't find a way... so I volunteered."

I was stunned by the idea of it. Everypony still cared about me? They'd all seen what I really was! I didn't make any sense – I didn't care about real me, how could they? Discord cleared his throat and continued.

"I didn't tell them the specifics of my plan. But I needed help; my magic is ideal for making change, for causing chaos and tearing down barriers... but this required precision. Twilight, Starlight and Starswirl worked for months to make it possible, and as we did so, we stumbled across the future you see in the mirror while looking for this one."

I gently laid a hoof on the mirror frame. "So... then why did you pick this future to send me to, instead of the good one?"

Discord frowned. "I'm afraid that one required... different circumstances, different choices, to have already been made. It isn't... real. It was just a lost possibility, like this future was – is – and if I'd sent you there, you wouldn't have made the choices that made this future a possibility."

I looked at the happy filly in the mirror. "Because I already made the choices that got me turned to stone."

Discord grimaced and nodded. "Yeah... that's basically right. But I think you're ready, and... I don't see another way. Twilight will be furious, of course, but she always is when I do something reckless. But this filly... she doesn't remember. You won't remember, not at first. Not anything."

I looked up to him, and I felt pathetic for how whiny I sounded. "Nothing? You promise?"

He crossed his heart and a stick with a cupcake on it appeared. I held up a hoof in alarm. "Okay, okay, I believe you!"

I really didn't need to see him 'stick' a cupcake in his eye right now.

The stick vanished with a wave of his paw. "I promise you. It... won't last forever. You'll have to go back to reality eventually; that timeline is lost to us, so we only have a few months of it 'captured', so to speak. But..."

"I'll take it. What have I got to lose...?"

I hitched and looked back up to him. "What about the queen? When we leave... you said this timeline was lost, does that mean it will disappear when we go?"

Discord grimaced and glanced away. "I... maaay have left out a little detail. While this timeline will disappear when we leave, the queen isn't exactly... well, it's complicated."

My mind raced with possibilities, and I realized what those meddling ponies must have fixated on. It actually made me laugh.

"Are you trying to say the queen is Chrysalis, somehow?"

"... More or less. She has her own timeline, where you're just as much of an outlier as she was, here."

He waved a paw at the mirror, and I saw Queen Chrysalis shaping some kind of changeling armor with a nymph. It took me a second...

"Is that supposed to be me?"

"More or less. These timelines are connected; mirrors of one another. What happens in one world impacts the other."

I sighed, and... smiled, just a little.

"I get it, I think. So I was a friend to her, and she was a friend to me, and neither of us even realized it. I... will I be able to visit her? After?"

He nodded. "I can take you into her timeline whenever you want. At least, until she's... well, until she's ready to face Equestria again."

I scoffed, rolling my eyes. "I can't believe you're trying to reform us. And you sure go about it a weird way."

Discord stared at Chrysalis in the mirror, thinking for a time. All of the spontaneity I associated with him had been missing ever since we arrived, I realized; then again, he sure did an awfully good impression of Grogar when the time came, too...

" 'Reforming', as you put it, was the greatest gift I ever could have asked for, Cozy. I might have had fun before, but real happiness... it's like a warmth that radiates from your bones. When you open your door to others in that blizzard, you can embrace them and chase away the cold. It connects you to the world around you just as much as depression and hatred pull you away from it; things that never made sense start to come clear to you, like you're just waking up for the first time. Without it, you look on the antics others get up to, and they seem..."

"... Stupid," I finished for him, realization dawning. Real happiness, a sense of purpose and belonging... that was the warmth I needed, but how...?

I looked at the mirror, and Discord waved it back over to the image of that smiling filly, probably anticipating my next question. I watched her for a time, and I realized I was crying again.

"She's... really happy, isn't she?"

"She's had her hardships, but yes. Frankly, I couldn't have imagined a more absurd way for you to turn things around, but this was a possibility, deep down. And sure, we may have missed our chance on living in that better timeline this time around, but..." He chuckled. "I'm Discord, who says I have to play by the rules?"

I had practically tuned him out, focusing on the image.

"Can I really feel that? Can I really have that, even for just a little while?"

He leaned down, setting his paw on my head. "Yes, Cozy. For a little while. And we'll keep trying to help you, even after."

I sniffed and bit my lip for a moment before responding. "Why?"

He just chuckled, which I glared daggers at him for, and he held up his talon placatingly. "Cozy... you know why. That's the whole reason I brought you here, to show you."

I felt my eyes go wide, letting tears fall freely as I put it together.

"This isn't what a world without magic looks like, it's what a world without friendship, without love looks like... isn't it?"

He nodded. "And that has to start somewhere. That's why you reached out to the queen, isn't it? To ignite that spark that could fix this world."

I looked back at the mirror, and I managed to screw up a smile as I started to think, just maybe, there might be something worth running towards.

"... Thank you."