The Golden Oak Library was, more often than not, a peaceful and quiet place. On most mornings, even the resident loudmouth pegasus was content to keep her voice down after she and Twilight got back from their routine runs. Combining that silence with the ever-present fresh, earthy smell that permeated the interior—not to mention the taste of Spike’s always fantastic cooking—and one would have a recipe for a very nice morning.
Twilight Sparkle was enjoying the quiet just then, her eyes glued to an old Daring Do book that floated in the air in front of her, courtesy of her magic. A plate of breakfast sat on the table in front of her, largely consisting of leftovers from the previous night. Spike had wandered out a short while ago to read his comics in the other room, leaving Twilight all on her own.
On most other occasions, Rainbow would already be up so that she and Twilight could go on their run. However, her work with the weather team the previous afternoon had, apparently, left her far more worn-out than usual. When Twilight had woken up, Rainbow was still sound asleep. The sight had been too adorable for Twilight to even think of disturbing it, and so, at the cost of missing a little exercise, she decided to let Rainbow sleep in today.
Thankfully, it was Rainbow’s day off.
“Woah no!”
Suddenly, the peaceful silence that Twilight had been enjoying was dashed against the stones when a loud crashing sound emanated from the living room alongside a loud, indignant squawk from a certain pegasus princess. Twilight paused with her fork halfway to her mouth and lifted her book to see what all the commotion was about.
Rainbow Dash had just crashed down the stairs, coming to a sprawled-out stop at their base. A lampshade had made its home on her head, somehow, and Twilight could just imagine a bunch of baby birds flying in circles around it.
“You okay there, Rainbow?” she called out, her voice a mix of concern and amusement.
“Yeah yeah, I’m fine, just… slipped,” Rainbow grumbled as she forced herself back to her hooves. She pried the lampshade off her head to reveal that her mane was still a mess from all of her tossing and turning, and dark bags were still situated under her eyes. “Guh…”
Twilight chuckled at that, setting her book off to one side. “You need to pay better attention in the mornings.”
Rainbow gave off some unintelligible grumbles as she stumbled into the dining room. Her eyes soon found the plate that had been set aside for her, and her stomach gave off a very loud, audible grumble. “Yeah, whatever. I hate mornings…”
Twilight laughed into her hoof as Rainbow staggered past. “Oh, trust me, I know. I remember how often I had to forcefully roll you out of bed in the first year we lived here,” she said, recalling several such instances, including the morning before Discord began his rampage.
“Ugh, don’t remind me,” Rainbow growled as she took her plate. “Ugh… so, what’s the plan?”
Twilight blinked. She quickly took a bite out of her breakfast as Rainbow sat down before speaking up. “Uh, what do you mean?”
Rainbow gestured vaguely. “Ya know. Today. What are we doing? Is it just a lazy day, do we wanna go on a date, are we gonna go see Pinkie and Maud? What?”
“Go see Maud?” Midnight snarked. “Ah, yes, the biggest waste of time in this entire village.”
“If you could not talk,” Twilight snapped right back. “Ever.”
“I’m sure you’d love that, wouldn’t you?” Midnight asked with an audible sneer.
“It would be better than having to listen to you throwing your bile around every time something unpleasant comes up!”
“Well, then, with that compelling argument, I guess I will just have to say… no.”
Twilight resisted the urge to groan in frustration. She shook her head and focused on Rainbow, who was looking back at her in confusion. “I don’t know. Probably just take it easy. You worked yourself pretty hard yesterday, so it might be better for both of us if we stayed away from anything draining.”
“...Like Pinkie?”
“Like Pinkie.”
Rainbow hummed at that. “Meh. Can’t say I can argue with that,” she said before digging into her breakfast.
Twilight spent the next few hours relaxing. As soon as breakfast was done, she migrated out to the central room to read on the couch. To her surprise, but not to her displeasure, Rainbow Dash joined her to read over her shoulder after she got out of the shower. Every so often, one of them would talk about what was happening in the pages, reminiscing about some part or other of the older books. Spike kept to himself, for the most part, only occasionally making some cheeky remark about how he lived with a couple of nerds.
Alas, their quiet reading time eventually came to a sudden and unwelcome end when a series of sharp knocks was heard at their door. Twilight winced and glanced up at the source of the sudden sound, an irritated frown on her muzzle. “Ugh… who is that?” she asked, not hiding her annoyance at being interrupted.
Rainbow shrugged, hopping down from the couch. “I’ll get it.”
When Rainbow opened the door, Twilight blinked in surprise at the sight of none other than Pinkie Pie standing on the other side with an enormous grin on her face. Maud Pie stood behind her, staring up at the branches overhead with expressionless eyes. Twilight was sure there was an emotion in there somewhere, but she just couldn’t see it.
“Hi, Dashie!” Pinkie chirped enthusiastically, bouncing once in place for emphasis.
Rainbow leaned back, surprised. “Oh! Uh, hey, Pinkie… We weren’t expecting you,” she said awkwardly, her eyes darting over to Maud. “And you brought your sister, too.”
“Of course she did,” Midnight snarled. “She couldn’t just take the hint and leave us be, could she? The oblivious idiot.”
Twilight was unable to keep her coat from bristling at that remark. Barely biting back a snarl, she shoved a bookmark into the novel and set it aside. She looked down to hide her face from the others so she could scowl without incident. “Don’t talk about my friends like that!”
“What are you going to do about it?” Midnight asked with an infuriatingly audible smug smirk. “Yell at me? Cause a scene? Throw some more denials onto that impressive pile you’ve been hoarding?”
“Shut UP!”
Midnight cackled between Twilight’s ears, a sinister sound of sadistic enjoyment. She did not, however, speak up again, allowing that harrowing sound to roll up and down Twilight’s spine like an army of ants.
She took a few deep breaths and looked up, focusing on the new arrivals. Rainbow had just stepped aside, allowing Pinkie and Maud to step inside unobstructed. Pinkie was in the middle of speaking to Rainbow in a long, excited spiel.
“So then I thought—gasp!—it would be really good to have Maud see all of Twilight’s books and stuff! She’s super into poetry and literature and stuff, and so is Twilight, and so I thought that, in the right environment, the two could totally hit it off! And what better place than the place where you keep all of the books?!”
“I mean… I guess?” Rainbow answered, glancing over at Twilight with a hopeless look. “You, uh, ya gonna help me out here?”
Twilight nodded and stood up. “Sure. Good to see you Pinkie, Maud.”
“Hey, Twi!” Pinkie chirped, waving enthusiastically.
“Hello.” Maud deadpanned.
Twilight’s eye twitched once. She cleared her throat and put on a small smile. “Well, Pinkie went through all this effort… might as well humor her. Besides, I didn’t exactly get a good chance to talk to Maud about the things I like last time we met… Maybe she’ll surprise me?”
“Or you’ll just be let down again,” Midnight quipped. “Which seems far more likely to me.”
“Well, that’s my call to make,” Twilight shot back, resisting the urge to snort. “So just shut up and let me do my thing.”
“Tch. Fine.”
With that disgruntled resignation, Midnight withdrew again, allowing Twilight to focus entirely on Maud and Pinkie. “So, Maud… Pinkie Pie keeps saying you’re into poetry and literature? Have you ever read anything by Quill and Ink? Or Flourish Prose?” she asked, trying to keep her hopes tempered.
Maud glanced over at a nearby shelf. “I prefer to read my own poetry,” she said bluntly.
Rainbow raised an eyebrow. “You write poetry?”
“She sure does!” Pinkie declared, bouncing over to where Spike was still sitting. He had lowered his comic and was simply watching the scene unfold. Pinkie leaned down and whispered to him loud enough for the whole room to hear. “You should totally pay attention, Spike! Maud’s poetry is the best!”
Twilight gave Spike a pitying smile before focusing on Maud. It was poetry. How bad could it be? “Well, I’d love to hear some.”
Rainbow looked to Twilight with an uncertain look. “Uh, you sure that’s-”
Too late. Maud had begun.
“Ahem.
Rock. You are a rock.
Grey. You are grey.
Like a rock.
Which you are.
Rock.”
A heavy silence fell over the room, punctuated only by Pinkie’s enthusiastic, if quiet, clapping.
Rainbow raised an eyebrow. “...What was that?” she asked skeptically.
“A poem,” Maud answered.
“You sure?” Spike questioned, scratching the side of his head. “I mean, I’m not an expert or anything, but it just kinda sounded more like a string of factual statements than a poem… does that count?”
“It totally does!” Pinkie answered for Maud.
Maud nodded. “I’ve written thousands.”
Twilight felt her heart skip a beat at that word. Thousands. As in plural. More than a single thousand. More than ten sets of one hundred.
“This next one is about rocks,” Maud said. “They’re all about rocks.”
“Okay, I take it back,” Midnight suddenly piped up. “Watching this train wreck is amazing.”
What felt like an entire geological shift later, Twilight thumped down tiredly at the dining room table, a distant, hollow look on her face. She and Rainbow had both excused themselves from the living room after Maud’s seventh poem recital, much to Midnight’s protests. Somehow, the little inner voice had taken a perverse amount of pleasure in the spectacle.
It was probably because it made Twilight uncomfortable, and that was practically food for Midnight’s soul.
Putting thoughts of her inner demon aside, Twilight quickly downed a glass of water in an effort to refresh her senses. “My brain feels like gravel,” she mumbled when she was done, setting the glass down to one side.
“That’s a type of rock,” Rainbow murmured to her left before downing some of her own.
“It’s a lot of small rocks added together,” Twilight corrected with a snort.
“Oh, good, even better,” Rainbow drawled, thumping her face down onto the kitchen counter. Her next words came through muffled. “Because the last thing we need is more rocks.”
“Rocks, rocks, rocks,” Twilight agreed, laying her head down on its side to stare at the wall. “So many rocks…”
“I dunno, you guys, it—heh—it didn’t seem that bad to me,” Spike commented from the entrance, trying and failing to stifle a series of amused snickers.
Twilight turned her attention to Spike, pouting at him. “Yes, because you were watching our brains melt, not listening to Maud’s poetry recital.”
Spike shrugged his shoulders.
“And for once, the little brat and I are in agreement on something,” Midnight chuckled in a surprisingly light tone.
“Shut up,” came Twilight’s immediate rebuke.
The trio spent a short time in silence after that. Spike came forward and took a seat off to Twilight’s right, his smile fading away in favor of a neutral look. He briefly eyed Twilight, and for a moment, she was worried she had let some of her irritation from Midnight slip through. Luckily, he did not press the matter for now.
Rainbow sighed and sat upright, a bewildered frown on her face. “Honestly, I’m having a hard time believing that those two are related,” she said, gesturing vaguely at the door. “I mean, Pinkie Pie is the most hyper thing I have ever met, but Maud’s, like, the total opposite of that.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” Twilight agreed with a grimace. The sheer gap between Pinkie Pie’s behavior and Maud’s was staggering, to put it mildly. Where one would go springing around the room and squealing her fuzzy pink head off, the other would just… stand there. Maybe she’d even blink, if fate was feeling generous. Perhaps offer a one or two word acknowledgement that, yes, there was in fact something happening, and then go on to either admire the local geology or recite poetry about it. Probably.
To be fair, Twilight reminded herself, they were essentially grasping at straws here. They had known Maud for all of two days, and only spent a collective couple of hours with her. There was a pretty good chance that Maud had a lot more to her, and that Twilight simply hadn’t seen it yet. Pinkie certainly seemed to think that Maud was wonderful in almost every sense…
But at the same time, Pinkie had a penchant for exaggeration…
“Meh,” Rainbow grumbled after a moment, resting her chin in her hoof. “That mare is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an igneous.”
“Enigma,” Twilight corrected automatically.
“No. I mean igneous. It’s a type of rock.”
“Ah, there it is,” Twilight thought with a groan, placing a hoof on her head in a futile bid to quell her rising headache. “Oh, please, no, not more rocks…” she complained.
In response to her complaint, somepony cleared their throat from the doorway.
Startled, Twilight sat bolt upright to find Maud Pie standing in the doorway, staring at them with that ever unreadable expression on her face.
“Holy cow, that mare’s quiet!” Twilight exclaimed internally. How had Maud managed to sneak up on them so quietly?!
Rainbow was similarly startled. She spun in her seat to look at Maud with wide eyes. Her face quickly contorted into a crooked smile when she saw who it was. “Oh, hey, Maud. How, uh… how did you sneak up on us?”
“Please,” Maud dismissed bluntly. Twilight blinked. Did she just...
Before Twilight had a chance to ponder the word choice, Maud stepped up to the chair directly across from her. She glanced down and gestured at it. “May I?”
Twilight blinked a few times, her mind taking a second to catch up. She nodded. “Oh, uh, sure, yeah, make yourself comfortable.”
Maud sat down, her eyes fixing themselves to Twilight. “I was hoping to talk to you. Without Pinkie listening in.”
“Huh?” Spike asked, mirroring Twilight’s thoughts. “Why not? And where is she, anyway? That pony’s practically been glued to your side since you showed up.”
“Because she won’t like what I need to say,” Maud replied, never taking her eyes off of Twilight. “And I asked her to go talk to the rest of your friends. She wants us to all spend some ‘one-on-one’ time together. To help us click.”
“Huh. And you just abused that plan to be alone with us?” Rainbow asked, leaning back in her seat.
“Yes,” Maud answered bluntly.
Twilight swallowed heavily. What could Maud possibly have to talk about with her that Pinkie Pie wouldn’t like? Well, a lot of things, probably. But for her to dislike it enough that her own big sister felt the need to send her away first? Red flags began to go up in her head, and she had a hard time keeping her sudden feeling of unease from showing on her face.
“So, uh… w-what do you want to talk about, then?”
Maud stared at Twilight for several long seconds, her eyes narrowing with a visual emotion. Suspicion.
“I know about what happened in Canterlot.”
Twilight’s heart skipped a beat, a horrible feeling of coldness swelling outward from her core. She swallowed again, her ears lowering. Of course Maud had heard. Hay, Twilight wouldn’t be surprised if all of Equestria knew about her Fall and the disaster that followed in her wake. It hadn’t exactly been a secret event, and all of the memories she had stolen of her abhorrent actions had been returned to their rightful owners… not to mention her victims had numbered in the dozens.
It had been a hair’s breadth away from being so much worse...
Even if word of the event hadn’t spread to every corner of Equestria by now, this was Pinkie Pie’s sister. And unless the secret was a surprise party, there was not a chance in Tartarus that Pinkie could keep anything secret from those she cared about for long. She just didn’t have the fortitude or patience to do it.
Twilight coughed weakly into her hoof, looking away from Maud in shame. “I… r-right, of course you do… W-what did you hear?” she asked, hoping against hope that maybe Maud’s knowledge of the disaster was blown out of proportion.
“What does ‘blown out of proportion’ even mean in this context?” Midnight asked with a surprisingly calm tone. “You stole the memories from dozens of ponies, causing immense psychological pain to all of them in the process, including a princess of Equestria. And, if Luna’s recounting of the aftermath is anything to go by, many of those ponies have been having nightmares about it. I don’t know what proportions that could reasonably be blown up to without entering the realms of unbelievable absurdity.”
“I heard from Pinkie Pie that you turned evil,” Maud explained bluntly. “That you turned into somepony called ‘Midnight Sparkle,’ and went on a rampage through Canterlot, stealing memories from innocent ponies.”
Twilight looked down, the chill in her veins growing worse. “I… y-yeah, that’s about right,” she confessed with a sigh.
“Is this why you’ve been so worried about Pinkie?” Rainbow asked gently, leaning forward slightly. “I mean, I can’t say I’d blame you, if so. It… it wasn’t exactly pretty.”
“That, and more,” Maud confirmed. “I’ve actually been worried about her off and on since she moved to Ponyville. But this was the last straw. I had to come make sure she was really going to be okay around you.”
“You don’t exactly seem worried,” Spike noted. “I mean, you’re always kinda… blunt? Dull? Boring?”
“Spike!” Twilight chastised lightly, though there wasn’t very much energy in her voice.
Maud shook her head. “No. He’s right. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t exactly express my enthusiasm in the same way as my sister. That doesn’t mean that I don’t care, though,” she said before catching Twilight’s gaze again. “And I’m really worried about her being around you. She kept telling me in her letters that you were fine now, and that everything was going back to normal. But that’s not true, is it?”
Twilight opened her mouth to try and assure Maud that yes, everything was in fact fine. However, the words would not come. How could she say them when they would be little more than lies? She licked her lips and looked down, her shame building. “...No, not entirely,” she eventually confessed, bringing a hoof up to rub at her shoulder.
Maud’s gaze intensified considerably.
Before Twilight could speak up about it, though, Rainbow suddenly spoke up, leaning forward. “W-well, she’s been having some anger issues lately. It’s a side effect from what happened. But we’re helping her work through it, bit by bit!”
“Yeah,” Spike added, pumping a fist in the air. “She’s kinda grouchy, but we’re here to keep her calm and down to earth.”
Twilight looked back and forth between the two of them, taken aback by the sudden outbursts of support. A few seconds passed before a tender smile graced her lips. Of course they were standing up for her… why wouldn’t they?
“I noticed the anger issues,” Maud said, nodding at Rainbow. “Back when we were playing camouflage. Pinkie was worried about you after you all left, you know. They all were.”
“Of course she was,” Twilight lamented, a sickening feeling building up in her gut.
“It’s a mess,” Rainbow conceded after a moment, her earlier bravado simmering down to something more somber. “I’m not gonna lie to you, Maud, it’s all kinds of messed up. But I wasn’t kidding when I said we’re doing our best to help her out.”
“And besides, Midnight’s gone now,” Spike pointed out. “So, little outbursts of frustration aside, she’s basically back to her old self! Everything is going to be fine, you’ll see!”
Maud looked between them all for several seconds, her expression softening somewhat. A few seconds later, she focused on Twilight again. “...Is there anything else?” she asked slowly. “Anything else that I should know about?”
Twilight swallowed heavily. A few seconds later, she opened her mouth and spoke. “No. Nothing important, at least.”
Maud studied her for what felt like an eternity. Eventually, she nodded and slowly stood back up. “Okay.”
Rainbow blinked. “Huh? What, is that it?”
“Yes.”
Twilight watched maud rise in abject confusion. She had been expecting some long-winded speech about how Pinkie meant the world to her, and how if Twilight ever hurt her, there would be a reckoning or something; overprotective big sister stuff, but no. Maud was just getting up and walking away.
“Why?” She asked before she had a chance to think better of it.
Maud paused in the doorway. “Because Pinkie Pie trusts her friends,” she said a moment later. She glanced back over her shoulder. “And I trust her.”
She didn’t wait for anypony to reply. Without another word, Maud stepped out of the dining room, vanishing from sight. A few seconds later, the sound of a door opening and closing rang through the library, plunging everything into a heavy silence.