The halls seemed to grow colder as I approached the library. The air got thick around me and made it harder and harder to walk. My hooves started to drag on the floor, and all the while all I could hear was the incessant rain.
The noise pounded its way into my head. The low, hollow pops of raindrops hitting the windows, plus the sharper smacks as they landed against the crystal walls, and every so often the cannon-boom of thunder. They joined together in chorus, held together by the howling wind, and set a siege upon my psyche.
What did I hope to do? I’d lost. None of us were safe. I clearly wasn’t capable of stopping whoever was doing this. It was only a matter of time until all the elements were gone, and then what?
What was their endgame?
This wasn’t the world of fear I came from. This was concentrated. Were they trying to get us out of their way? Or was there some other motivation at play? Had everything last time just been unfortunate casualties? That didn’t make sense to me.
My thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices as I neared the library.
“—don’t understand”
“If there was any other way—”
“This isn’t like you.”
The voices started getting clearer.
“I told you talking would just make this harder.” That was Applejack.
“I have to go.” Pinkie Pie, then. “I can’t—”
A chair was pushed, hooves started to hurry away.
I turned a corner and could see the open door of the library. Pinkie came into view and caught my eye as she fled my way.
Then another chair was shoved away, and next thing I knew Pinkie was on the ground, pinned by Applejack. She had a knee pressed hard into Pinkie’s side to keep her from moving.
I started to run. Applejack saw me and frowned. “Twilight’s here,” she said, “you’re out of time.”
“No, wait, I can—” Papers rustled. I would’ve stopped dead in my tracks from shock if I wasn’t trying to reach Pinkie.
I recognized the voice.
Just as I made it to the door there was a flash of unruly magic, and time froze.
I was too late.
I slid to a stop as the magic slammed into Pinkie.
This magic would have been dangerous even for experienced magic users, and that wasn’t who was using it. The magic was unrefined, more a blunt tool than one of precision. No doubt she had no control over how powerful the spell was. Maybe if she had time to prepare she could’ve fine-tuned it a bit, made it softer, but with me barreling down on them and the stress of the situation, it went out of control.
And when it hit, it hurt.
Pinkie seized up as her heart was ripped in two, torn apart by the magic. She clenched her eyes tight, and still, tears forced their way out. Her mane and tail deflated as she lost her bouncy happiness.
Applejack staggered backward. Pinkie didn’t get up, instead curling up into a ball and shaking as sobs started to wrack her body.
“W-What happened?” Applejack looked mortified. She turned away, looked at somepony else. “What happened?”
I took the final steps into the library.
There she was. Sitting at a table, rifling through loose pages in a panicked frenzy as tears streamed down her cheeks. She looked awful. Her hooves were muddy, and that mud was streaked all through her frizzled mane. She had dark bags under her eyes. There were scrapes and scratches speckled across her, probably from that plunge out the window.
More than any of that, through, Fluttershy looked terrified.
“I-I-I don’t know!” She was stuttering horribly, hardly getting any words out. “I was scared, and I panicked, and it just blew up, and, and—”
She didn’t look up as I walked in. She was too lost in her fervor.
I took the opportunity to walk over to Pinkie Pie. I put a hoof on her shoulder, as gently as I could, and cast a spell to put her to sleep. It wasn’t much, and she’d still hurt when she woke up, but it was all I could do. She at least stopped shaking as she drifted off.
Then I turned my attention to the cause of all of this.
The pony who was hurting my friends.
The pony who, all this time, I thought had been so terribly hurt.
The pony who had to be stopped.
I didn’t bother with words. I couldn’t risk another panicked blast of magic. I shot a spark at the table, and when it hit it scattered the pages into the air.
“No!” Fluttershy leapt from her seat, meaning to fly after them, but I grabbed her with my magic and sat her back down.
“It’s over,” I told her.
She struggled against my grasp. “A-Applejack,” she choked out, “please, help me!”
Applejack looked conflicted. She looked at Fluttershy, then me, then Pinkie, then back to Fluttershy. “I…” She shook her head. “I can’t. Not after that.”
Fluttershy grunted in frustration as she fought my magic. “I didn’t know!” Her voice cracked. “It didn’t hurt anypony else like that! Do you think I wanted to do that to Pinkie? You saw what happened in Starlight’s village!”
Applejack ignored her and walked towards Pinkie. “I’m gonna… Find her a bed.” She scooped Pinkie up onto her back and made for the door. I decided to let her go; Even after all this, I still trusted her.
“Please, Applejack!” Fluttershy screeched as Applejack walked out the door. “We’re so close!”
It was too late, though. She was gone.
I walked over and sat across from Fluttershy. She coughed, either from a sob getting caught in her throat or from everything she’d been though. A few pages had landed on the table between us, but most littered the floor. By now she’d stopped struggling, and I let her go, content that I could stop her again if I needed to.
I looked hard into her eyes. She looked down and buried her head in her hooves. I watched her there, a broken mare sobbing from… Fear? Guilt? Frustration? I didn’t know. I’m not sure I even cared.
I just wanted to know one thing.
“Why?”
I waited, but she gave no answer.
“Why?”
Again, no answer. I frowned deeply.
“Fluttershy, why did you do this?” My voice rose more than I’d intended it to, and she shrank back a bit. “Don’t you see what you’ve done? Starlight and Twilight are gone, you’ve ruined Pinkie’s life, you—”
“I know!” She burst out, finally talking. “I know. I’ll take whatever punishment you see fit, I just… I had to do something.”
“I was right here,” I told her. “Heck, so was your Twilight!”
“I didn’t know what you’d do! What if you’d hurt yourself? What if giving you the book was what started this whole thing? The me from your time must’ve had a reason not to tell you about it. I… It was too risky. It would’ve been better if I could just take care of it myself.”
“By attacking your friends?” I leaned hard on the table. “Fluttershy, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“I didn’t want to hurt any of you!” She choked up as the tears welled back up to full strength. “I wanted…” She looked away from me, and her voice got quiet. “I wanted to use all the magic on myself.”
I stared at her. That was insane. We’d never have let that happen.
She must’ve noticed my silence because she went on. “I-I tried to do it that first time,” she said. “I knew it probably wouldn’t spread from any of us, so I used it on myself, but… It backfired.”
Of course it did. Magic like that only worked because it had pre-set parameters. Changing the target to herself… It just wasn’t possible for a pegasus to do.
Again, she went on. “I panicked. I know I messed up, Twilight, I know. That’s why I had to fix things! But then Applejack found me, and I got scared and…” She buried her face in her hooves. “It all went so wrong.”
“I just don’t get why you thought you had to do it all alone.”
“Because it was too late! If I went to you, you’d assume I was behind it all and send me off to Tartarus and hide the book, and then whoever did all that awful stuff you told us about would find it and do it all over again! I… The only thing I could think of was to use up all the magic before I turned myself in.”
“Fluttershy…” I sighed and shook my head. I didn’t know what else I could say to her. And now I had to work on fixing things.
First, though, that book. I grabbed one of the pages on the table and slid it over to myself. When I looked for it, magic pulsed off of it in waves, powerful energy that coursed through my body. It wasn’t any kind of magic I recognized, but it was… Frightening.
I held the page down, concentrated, and fired a blast of magic at it.
Nothing. The page sat there, completely intact despite the smoldering crater I’d dug into the table around it.
So, destroying it wasn’t an option.
Hiding it? But, I still didn’t know who was behind it all in my time. What if they found it?
There was Fluttershy’s idea, but… Doing that to another pony wasn’t something I was willing to do.
I made up my mind and shoved the paper away. “Fluttershy. Where was the book?”
She sniffed and looked up at me. “W-What?”
“The book,” I repeated. “Before all this, where was it?”
“It was just on my bookshelf… Why?”
I stood up. “Because you might have been right.” I took a deep breath and prepared my magic. “I’m sorry, Fluttershy. I’ll do better this time.”
“What?” Her eyes went wide as she realized what was happening. “Wait, no!”
I let go, and a wave of energy drew itself out of my horn. It enveloped me in light, and I could feel myself being tugged, pulled away from the time I was in, and I let it take me. Back to the beginning, back to before everything, back to—
Something slammed into my side.
I lost control of the spell. It exploded and shot from my horn. Waves of roiling magic made a bubble around me, and as I landed on my side, having been knocked off my hooves by the blow, it kicked me backward in time.
Both of the blows combined knocked the wind out of me and sent my head spinning. My ears rang, and for a moment my vision tunneled too drastically to see.
I fought to stay conscious. I still had a job to do.
Eventually, my vision started to come back and the dizziness quelled itself. The noise in my head softened, I started to breathe again, and slowly the world came into focus around me.
I was still in the library, of course.
And something was on my side.
I stirred and tried to push myself free. “Let me go,” I groaned out in between heavy breaths.
“Twilight, please,” Fluttershy muttered, “don’t do anything drastic.”
I pushed harder, and Fluttershy started to lose her grasp on me.
“What do you want me to do? Nothing? I couldn’t let things stay like that!”
“I know, I know, I just…” She shut her eyes tight. “Please, Twilight, let me fix things! Let me make up for what I did!”
“I’m not letting you anywhere near that book.”
“I know! That’s not what I’m saying, I—”
The door to the library opened with a heavy creak. We both shot our gazes towards it and watched as Pinkie Pie wheeled in a cart laden with party supplies, whistling a jaunty tune as she skipped along.
When she saw us, Pinkie froze and frowned at Fluttershy. “Hey. Come on,” she said, “you know better.”
We both just stared at her.
She huffed and trotted over to us, pulled me up off the floor, then started pushing us towards the door. “Look,” she said, “I don’t care how you distract Twilight, but you know I gotta decorate the library! You could’ve ruined everything!” She gave us a shove as she pushed us into the hallway. “Happy birthday, Twilight,” she said sternly. Then she slammed the door shut.
It took us both a moment to remember what was going on. We glanced at each other after a few seconds, and it all crashed back down on me. My face fell in a sullen frown.
“Fluttershy, we’ll talk more once the book is dealt with.”
“Wait, don’t—”
I didn’t let her finish. With a sharp crack of magic, I vanished from the castle.
An instant later, I was in Fluttershy’s cottage.
Fluttershy’s living room was warm, inviting, and a little cluttered. A pile of mail sat unopened on one end of her sofa, animal toys were scattered about on the floor, and there was a blanket draped over one arm of the deep armchair. It wasn’t enough mess to be uncomfortable; it just made the cottage feel more like a home.
Her bookshelf was nestled under the staircase, built in as part of that wall. The books were loose, and a lot of the space was taken up by little figures and knick-knacks she’d gathered up over the years. She didn’t have much of a personal collection—she knew she could just come to me for most books—and for once I was incredibly thankful of that.
I rushed over to the bookshelf and started to pick it apart. Biology textbooks, no. Cookbooks, no. Journals, yearbooks, no, no, no. I rifled through the books quickly, shoved them aside as I crossed them off. I accidentally knocked a couple to the floor at once point, but I just let them drop. This was too important to worry about how I was treating the books.
Finally, I found it. An old, well-read book with a pony on both covers, smiling on one and frowning on the other. No title. An otherwise unassuming book. You couldn’t even feel the magic unless you were looking for it.
I flipped the book open and ran a hoof down a page. I could feel how the magic coursed through it, how it directed itself, how it was activated. I could gather a vague idea of what it would do, but nothing concrete. I would find that out in due time, though. Once I—
The door shot open, and Fluttershy flew in. I snapped the book shut and just barely caught her with my magic before she slammed into me again.
“Fluttershy, enough!” I set her on the ground and let go of her. “You’re not getting this book.”
“I don’t want it!” She clasped her hooves together in a pleading gesture. “I just want to make things right. Please.”
“How? It’s too late to undo everything you did.”
“I know that,” she said, “but the magic still has to be used up! It’s too dangerous to let it exist, and it has to be used on somepony.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Fluttershy…”
“Please, Twilight,” she said. “I deserve it! I’m the only pony it would be right to use it on. You can’t use it on anypony else!”
“Well, you’re right about that,” I said. “I could never use this on anypony else.”
“Then please Twilight, let me—”
“But I could never use it on you, either,” I told her. “Which only leaves one pony.”
“Wait, what do you—” She watched in horror as I floated the book out in front of myself and flipped it open. Her eyes grew wide when she realized what I was doing, and she tried to snatch the book away, but I grabbed her with my magic and kept her in place. She wouldn’t interfere with this.
I decided to start with Kindness, hoping it would make the others hurt less.
It didn’t.
The second the beam of magic connected my horn to the book, I felt it dig into me. I coughed and sputtered as I felt the magic drive a stake through my heart, and then the kindness started to slip away. I felt it disappear, listened as the voices in the back of my head went quiet. I stopped caring that my friends would be upset by this. I stopped feeling bad that Fluttershy was being forced to watch as I did this to myself. It all just drained away.
All the while, the stake kept drilling away at me, tearing away at my very being. Once it was done, when the stake was gone, that part of me didn’t heal. It left a hole, a gaping wound in my soul.
Then the second stake stabbed into me.
I dropped to my knees at the shock of it. Somehow it had gotten worse. More painful. Not one stake, but a thousand, flying through me like needles and tugging out the Honesty like a loose thread. It was harder to feel this one disappearing, but somewhere in my mind I could tell.
No sooner had that onslaught ended than the third one began. And the fourth. Generosity and Loyalty went at once, tearing me apart like a blade through paper. It started to become a struggle to keep control over the magic. Here and there I’d slip, lose the slim hold I had over the mayhem, and they’d gouge deeper into me, tear away with less precision and take more than they were meant to. I had no idea what I was losing in those moments, but its absence left me sickened.
The fifth assault came for Laughter. I had almost no control at this point, and it was crude, brutal. It was no precision instrument. The spell just tore away at me, devoured chunks at a time as it took aim at what it wanted. By the time it was finished, I wasn’t sure if there was anything left for the sixth to take.
Of course, I was wrong.
At the very least, the final strike was quick. Merciful, in a way. No digging, no tearing, no ripping me to pieces. It came hard and fast, and it slammed into me like a freight train. Maybe there wasn’t enough left for it to take its time; it just hit me and took everything that was left.
I shut off. I couldn’t keep going after that blow. My vision went dark, the world vanished, and I slumped forward as I lost consciousness.