Twilight Sparkle’s hands tightened around Shining’s sleeve as her heart burst. She watched as Sunset Shimmer slowly lost her balance and toppled, a spear of dark magic lanced through her midsection. Sunset’s hand slipped from the railing as she crumpled to the balcony’s steel mesh floor.
She let out a sigh as her eyes closed.
Twilight looked past her fallen friend to see a dark reflection of herself. The doctor stood in the doorway of her laboratory, her hand outstretched towards Sunset. Purple smoke leaked from the corners of her eyes. Her glowing irises blazed with hatred for the woman.
Immediately, Twilight’s blood boiled.
This woman… no… this monster had the gall to attack her best friend. This thing, this creature that had taken so many lives and hurt so many people, had finally brought her trail of destruction to Twilight Sparkle’s doorstep. In that moment, Twilight found that she had never known true hatred until she saw Dr. Twilight Sparkle face-to-face. She had never before wanted so much to hurt another being. To damage them. To make them feel pain.
Dr. Twilight looked up, and their eyes met. The smoke dissipated as the doctor’s rage faded into confusion, then to a startled realization. She turned away and ran as fast as she could to the west side of the building.
Twilight didn’t take note of Shining Armor screaming Sunset’s name. She didn’t notice as the others raced up the eastern staircase to reach Sunset quicker. She laser-focused on the fleeing doctor. She felt her heart pump a seemingly endless supply of magic through her body, reaching her fingertips and sizzling with sheer power. Equations flashed through her mind as she called up a spell she’d been working on. One that she understood in every way, save for the emotion that powered it.
Rage. Pure, blinding rage. That was the secret to teleportation. That was the only emotion she knew of that could unleash such unrelenting, unrealistic power to throw the laws of physics to their knees and allow her to be in two places at once, just for an instant.
In that moment, she was both in the courtyard looking up at the all-but-slain Sunset, and on the walkway with her hand outstretched towards the doctor. She called her forty-four handgun to her palm and fired seven rounds right at Dr. Twilight’s torso, saving three in the magazine to finish her off.
It was with a scream of pure desperation that Dr. Twilight released a wave of dark crystals at Twilight Sparkle. The black spikes disrupted the trajectory of the slugs—fracturing in the process, but leaving the doctor unscathed. Her next spell gripped the firearm in a bubble of lavender magic. With a twist of her wrist, she disassembled the forty-four to its base components right out of Twilight’s hands.
Twilight opened her fingers and let the useless gun parts tumble to the courtyard below. She ignited her rage into another teleport that placed her right behind the doctor. She put her hands to either side of the doctor’s head, encircled it with magic, and squeezed with all her might.
Dr. Twilight lifted her hands to the sky and released a rain of lightning. A bolt struck Twilight in the shoulder and forced her to relax her grip. She stumbled back as the doctor ran into the computer lab.
Twilight checked her shoulder. A second-degree burn was in the making. It would slow her down. She didn’t care, ultimately. She wasn’t going to stop. Not until the doctor knew her pain. Not until she could bleed the fiend dry.
Twilight Sparkle ran into the computer lab, while a malnourished beagle ran as fast as he could up the stairs.
***
Shining Armor skidded to a halt, scuffing his knees on the steel mesh. He grasped Sunset’s shoulder and turned her over, keeping her back and neck straight. He didn’t know if the crystal spear had damaged the spinal cord. He didn’t want to make it worse. Still, he needed to get her body away from the edge of the balcony immediately. His hands were already stained with his wife’s blood. He stared at the crystals jutting out from her midriff with a sharp pang of hopelessness.
Starlight Glimmer knelt beside him. Her expression mirrored Shining’s desperation. She reached for the crystal and touched a finger to it. She yelped and snatched her hand away from the magical weapon, screaming profanity at the top of her lungs. She spread her fingers and gaped at her palm as black fangs of dark magic grew out from beneath her skin. “Oh God, it’s spreading! Don’t touch it!”
Dulcimer and Big Mac came to a stop a few feet away. The viscount stared after the doctor, stuffing his pistol into its concealed holster. He turned his attention to Sunset and grimaced. “Is there anything we can do? A magic malady should have a magic cure.”
Shining clutched his fists and rested them against his legs. He ripped off a sleeve and bunched it around the wound, careful to keep the crystal away from his skin. He was unable to stanch the wound. “She’s lost a lot of blood. More every second.” Before his eyes, the crystal gained another spire, widening the injury. “Sunset would know what to do.”
“Maybe Twilight, too.” Big Mac took his phone from his pocket and pressed the call button. “The princess, that is.”
The call reached out to Shining Armor’s cell phone, several miles away in Roc. The answer was quick, but still seemed to take ages to come. “Big Mac? Is that you? King Sombra’s dead—”
“Princess, we’ve got a problem.” Big Mac switched on his camera phone and pointed it towards Sunset.
Shining heard the princess gasp. It was not a hopeful gasp. “Please tell us there’s something we can do,” he said. “Anything.”
“No… no, no, no, no…” The princess’ voice trembled. Big Mac knelt beside Shining, holding the phone so that he could see the screen. The princess paced back and forth, running a hand through her hair. “The crystals. Are they getting bigger?”
Shining Armor swallowed hard. “Yeah.”
Princess Twilight bit back a muttered “Horseapples.” She peered into the camera’s screen with her eyes darting back and forth across Sunset’s body. “It’s Sombra’s crystal weapon. It swallows up the magic in your body and solidifies it into those spikes… It’s like a fast-acting cancer.” Her sob was rendered as static by the weak connection. “I don’t think we have enough time to help.”
Starlight Glimmer grasped her wrist with a renewed sense of horror. Her injured hand shook as more tiny spires broke through her fingertips.
“Wait.”
The three of them turned back to Viscount Dulcimer. He looked down at Sunset with a furrowed brow, pursing his lips. “Wait. What if you had time? All the time in the world?”
“Then I could teach somebody the counter-spell.” Princess Twilight narrowed her eyes as Big Mac tilted the phone so she could see the viscount. “Why do you ask?”
Dulcimer’s mouth quirked upward at the corner. He gave Starlight a knowing glance as he spoke. “Well, it just so happens that my personal special talent is the slowing down of time. More precisely, slowing down the perception of time’s passing.”
Princess Twilight’s expression twisted into something bordering on both fury and mystification. “Dulcimer? Hammer Dulcimer?”
Dulcimer’s smirk reached maturation. “So we’ve met, after a fashion.”
Big Mac rested a hand on his rifle. “She said she killed somebody named Dulcimer.”
The smirk vanished without a second’s hesitation. “In that case, I vote to forego the mistakes of my predecessor and save this young woman’s life. Any objections?”
“No,” Starlight said, “but I’ve got a question: Who’s going to cast the counter-spell?”
Dulcimer shook his head. “I’m going to have my magic busy breaking reality, unfortunately.”
Shining pointed at Starlight. “It’s gotta be—”
“Have you seen my hand?” She waved at him, the dark, growing crystals on full display. “It’s going to get even worse if I start casting spells. It’s gotta be you. You’re the only ether mage here.”
Shining Armor threw his hands outward. “I don’t know the first thing about magic! I didn’t even cast spells in the doctor’s world!”
He stood and turned away from Sunset, touching his fingers to his temples. He shook his head as he paced. “Twilight’s the magical one. She’s the one with the talent and the know-how. I’m not like her or Sunset. I can’t grasp magic! I don’t have what it takes!”
“Shining!”
The voice was his sister’s, even if the visual didn’t quite match up. The face of the princess on the phone stared at him through the pixelated touch screen. She bored into his soul, even across the miles. “Listen to yourself. This is Sunset we’re talking about. You promised to stay by her side, sickness and health, right?”
Shining stared straight at his wife. Her skin had grown paler as the minutes dragged on. His puny attempt at first aid had amounted to nothing. “Twilight… I’m a normal man among gods. I don’t have any part in your world.”
“Shut up this instant!” Princess Twilight shook the phone on her end, which only served to make her image blurrier. “Those aren’t the words of Shining Armor; husband, father, and soldier! Those are the words of a bruised ego! Step outside your own lost dreams and look at what you’re really capable of!”
Lost dreams? That stung, as the truth often did. Shining looked down at his reddened hands, which had only ever felt the touch of magic from his wife’s hands.
“Your wife is a master-class wizard, Shining.” Princess Twilight’s voice echoed across the courtyard as her fervor reached a fever pitch. “Your son inherited that power. Your sister learned that power.” She pointed at him with a fingernail sparkling with energy. “And you have that power, too! It lurks deep inside you. It always has. Seeking an outlet. Can you feel it? Can you feel your heart wanting something so much it feels like it will reach out and take it on its own? That magic you feel in Sunset’s presence isn’t just hers, Shining! It’s yours!”
Shining Armor spread his fingers. He knelt beside Sunset and reached a hand out. “I don’t… could it be?”
“It’s a resonance, Shining! Whenever you’re together, you give strength to each other!”
He touched a hand to his wife’s shoulder. Her life ebbed away right before his eyes. He reached out to brush his fingers against her cheek. “I’m not going to say goodbye.”
“Hell yeah, you’re not!” Princess Twilight punched the air. “You feel the love, now let it loose!”
Shining Armor shut his eyes. He focused on his heartbeat, just like Sunset had explained to him. The energy pulsated. His arm shook as he clenched his fist.
“Her magic is yours!”
He opened his hand, and a flash of magenta light glistened in the midst of his fingers. Big Mac clasped a hand to his shoulder. Shining and his friend looked at each other with slacked jaws, which soon morphed into disbelieving laughter.
Shining Armor took the phone from Big Mac. He held his magic-charged hand up to the camera. “Okay. What’s the next step, princess?”
“The next step,” she said with a hint of steel to her voice, “is to rely on Dulcimer.”
***
Twilight practically ripped the door off its hinges as she pushed through to the computer lab. She scanned the rows of old computer monitors for any sign of her counterpart. She felt energy course through her body, pumping from her heart with the ferocity of a waterfall. There! Ducking behind a desk! She pointed her hand and released a furious gout of flame that consumed the doctor completely.
A chair clattered to the other side of her. She turned and saw the doctor leap over a table and hide beneath it. She sent another blast at her second target, striking it dead-center and tearing it to pieces.
But then she saw another doctor. And another. And yet another! There seemed to be dozens of replicas of the woman scrambling around the computer lab, all fleeing from Twilight, all moving of their own accord. One duplicate turned back to Twilight and raised its hands, summoning power to a spell Twilight didn’t recognize. Another readied a different spell, one utilizing fire. A third peered from behind a bookshelf, her eyes leaking trails of purple smoke.
Were they all real? Were none of them real? Could even a fake attack still hurt?
Twilight decided she didn’t care. “Coward!” She released a bolt of electricity and struck the duplicate in front of her. The doctor screeched briefly, then flickered and vanished in a cloud of lavender sparks. They were just illusion spells, far beyond the crayon-drawings Sunset had taught her to do. They were nearly lifelike.
A sizzling-hot strand of energy struck her in the back and wrapped around her right arm. It was like a cord made from an oven’s heating coils. It burned through her coat and made its way to her flesh. She teleported out of the grip and spun to face her attacker. An afterimage was all that remained as the coil sizzled into nothingness on the ground. A block of ice narrowly missed her head—unless it was an illusion meant to distract her? She stepped into the ice’s trajectory just before a computer monitor sailed through where her head had been.
The illusory Dr. Twilight Sparkles spoke as one. “Let us leave, Twilight. We’ll vanish from your life forever.”
“Like you vanished from your Equestria?” Twilight snapped. “Like you vanished from the magic school? Leaving a trail of bodies and broken people behind you? I’ve been to your home, Twilight! I saw King Sombra turn the castle inside out!” She constructed a spell between her hands, piecing it together through what she knew of simple telekinesis. “I’m gonna do the same thing to you!”
She released the spell in a wave, and every table in the room flipped over. Only one of the Twilights was able to react in time, ducking beneath one of the projectiles and cushioning herself with a shield spell. The rest of the duplicates vanished in a cascade of sparks.
Twilight reached out and grasped the real doctor’s body in a bubble. She dragged her foe through the air, taking care to smash her legs against an overturned table on the way. The doctor reached out and released two strands of superheated magic, which anchored her to the floor. Twilight grunted as the battle became a tug-of-war, her magic pulling against the doctor’s cords. The hot spools of energy cut through the floor tiles as she was gradually overpowered by Twilight’s fury.
Dr. Twilight’s eyes narrowed. She released her grip. She shot forward; Twilight’s spell no longer had resistance. She encased herself in a shield and bounced against the floor, landing on her two feet on the rebound.
Twilight ducked beneath a superheated whipcrack. She scrambled back as the doctor swung the spell at her again and again.
“You could have left me alone!”
A strike cut into her leg. She pushed against the doctor, but her magic was redirected with a wave of her hand.
“I could have finally been happy!”
Twilight attempted to cool the air, draw the heat out to extinguish the whip, but the doctor just added more fuel to the fire.
“I could have finally known peace!”
The whip struck Twilight across the face, slicing her glasses in half. Blood trickled from her eyebrow. She fell to the floor, clutching her forehead and screaming. Her anger did not abate; it grew. It burned like a pyre on a hill, visible for all to see. The doctor’s face was blurry without her prescription, but she didn’t need to see clearly to hate.
The sound of claws on metal came from the door. Edgy Spike splayed his paws in front of him. He called out at the top of his lungs. “Twilight, no!”
Dr. Twilight dropped the whip. It vanished into thin air. She scowled at the dog, her breath coming fast and hot as adrenaline wracked her body. “Spike? What—?” She looked down at the collapsed Twilight. “You came here with her to stop me.”
Edgy Spike winced, looking away for a brief second before imploring her with watery eyes. “Don’t do this, Twilight. We can go back together. You and me. You don’t have to fight like this anymore.”
Twilight balled her hand into a fist and drew magic to it. She let the spell build friction until it became the makings of a fireball the size of her head. Without a word, she extended her hand towards the doctor.
But the doctor was one step ahead. She, too, had drawn magic to her hand. Rather than cast a spell, she held it in, let it build pressure. She pressed her thumb against her middle finger and aimed her index finger at Twilight’s torso.
The doctor looked at Edgy Spike and smirked. “You’ve always been a bad liar, Spike.”
She snapped her fingers, and the room exploded with the force of a sonic boom. The magnificent air pressure hit Twilight full in the chest and launched her out of the room, over the railing of the balcony. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Edgy Spike sailing alongside her.
Her body was bruised by the concussive blast, but that was minor in comparison to what the fall would do to her and Edgy Spike. She would break her neck, and that was the best-case scenario. The drop would kill her with utmost certainty.
Unless she made it shorter.
She gripped Edgy Spike with a spell and tucked him against her chest. She surrounded them both with a thin shield—all that Sunset had been able to teach her—and teleported to the floor. They hit hard, bouncing and rolling across the courtyard until they hit the far wall.
Twilight lay still. She wasn’t sure if the pains in her body were bruises, breaks, or sprains. But her mom had always told her that pain meant she was alive. She took that to be a good thing.
Edgy Spike sobbed as he shook against her. He lay curled up, his eyes shut with unspeakable pain. “I just… wanted to see her again…”
Dr. Twilight Sparkle’s footsteps clattered against the stairs as she hurried down, on a fast march towards the exit of the school. She didn’t spare a glance at the carnage she had just wrought. She never looked back at the bloody body of Sunset Shimmer. She never even heard Edgy Spike’s whimpers.
Twilight Sparkle summoned the anger in the depth of her heart. She stood up despite the agony and stepped into the center of the courtyard. She twisted her fingers and encased the doors in a spell that prevented them from opening. The doctor tried the door, then turned to face her counterpart.
The doctor crossed her arms. “You escaping this battle alive is becoming more and more unlikely.”
“You had a mentor who loved you.” Twilight took a step towards the doctor. “You had unbelievable magical power. You had friends who would stand beside you, even now.” She shook her head as her stomach churned. “It may not feel like it, but when you were growing up, you had everything I’ve ever wanted. Everything I never knew until Sunset.”
Dr. Twilight let out a single, derisive laugh. “You had your family. Your pain is nothing—”
“My parents who were always traveling, too deep in their work to spare me a moment? My brother who was too young to take care of me?” Twilight smiled, but it was a flat, plastic smile. Like the kind she plastered to her face in years past. “You had everything I ever wanted, and you treated it like trash. Garbage. You treated people like pawns and friendship like rubbish. The whole world is yours to toy with.”
Her skin glowed from beneath as her fairy strings were overloaded. She felt her vision correct itself with a glistening aura around her eyes. Pain melted away as she focused entirely on the person in front of her. As she plotted how she might repay that person for what she’d done.
“Every last thing I ever wanted.” Twilight Sparkle’s plastic smile shattered into a grimace. “And you squandered it!”
Magic surrounded the doctor. She lit her hands and formed a shield, but Twilight didn’t hit her with anything. She just squeezed. She increased the pressure bit by bit, centimeter by centimeter.
“And now, you’re trying to take away what little I have left.” Twilight all but floated over to the doctor’s side, the magic within her adding a lightness to her steps. “So tell you what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna repay you by taking away the only thing you’ve ever really cared about.”
Dr. Twilight Sparkle furrowed her brow. Her eyes widened when she saw Twilight pull the Memory Stone out of a pocket. “You wouldn’t—!”
Twilight hurled her arm like a baseball pitcher and sent the doctor careening across the courtyard. Dr. Twilight tumbled through a door and crashed against the cots set up for the dormitories. Twilight lit the air with flame and sent a blaze through the door. The blast vaporized several beds and caused the others to catch fire.
Edgy Spike sat up. One of his eyes was swollen shut. “Twilight. Don’t. You have to regain control. Please.”
“Don’t worry, Spike.” Twilight grinned at him and let out a giggle that sounded off, even to her own ears. “I’m more in-control than I’ve ever been in my entire life.”
***
“It isn’t going to be easy.”
“No crap.” It took all of Shining Armor’s focus to keep the magic in his palm from vanishing. He looked over his shoulder at Dulcimer. “You sure this is gonna work?”
“She’ll know the exact moment I activate the spell.” Dulcimer’s fingernails glowed with a light akin to a welder’s torch; bright enough to damage the eyes if you looked right at it. “I have enough trust in one Twilight’s abilities to trust another’s.”
“Considering who your Twilight is,” Princess Twilight said, “that isn’t comforting.”
“We’re wasting time.” Shining gave Big Mac one last look. “If anything happens—”
The building shook with the force of a sonic boom. Shining caught sight of his little sister skidding across the floor, the dog in her arms. The doctor could be seen walking out of the room, retying her hair in the wake of the blast.
Big Mac shouldered his rifle. “I’m gonna help her.”
Starlight Glimmer stood up, but leaned on the railing when she grew woozy. “There’s no way you can face that woman. You saw what she did to Twilight’s gun—”
“I’m gonna help.” Big Mac shouldered his way past Starlight, but not before helping her ease to the ground. He gave Shining a nod. “Save Sunset.” He rushed away, not looking back.
“Alright, Twilight.” Symbols and diagrams surrounded Dulcimer’s hands, looking for all the world like the numbers on a clock. “When the international clock marks the hour.”
Shining’s free hand gripped Sunset’s. It had only been a couple of minutes since she’d been hurt. It felt like months. There was still breath hissing through her nose. There was still blood pumping through her heart. There was still hope.
Dulcimer gritted his teeth. He turned his hands over. “Stop.”
A wave of magic washed over Shining Armor, and the world grew still. A drop of blood hung in midair. Sunset’s breath stopped midway, her lungs not quite fully expanded. Shining released her hand, and it failed to drop.
“For the record,” Dulcimer said, his voice strained. “This is very difficult.”
“Right.” Shining looked at his phone. The image didn’t change. “Princess? Can you hear me?”
There was a brief, yet all-too-long pause. “Yes,” she replied, her voice distorted to a robotic degree. “Communication might be difficult with all this magical interference.”
“We’ll deal.” Shining looked down at his mortal foe: the crystalline shards growing out of Sunset’s torso. “Walk me through this.”
“The spell eats magic.” Princess Twilight’s picture moved a single pixel, then turned unrecognizable. “You need to draw it out with a magic that burns brighter than Sunset’s ambient magic. It doesn’t need to have more power than her, but it needs to be more intense. Even if it’s just at a single point.”
Shining Armor extended a finger. He held it over the tallest spire. Magic congregated on that fingernail. It was slow going, and he didn’t really trust himself to not touch the black crystal. “So I just… hold my hand over it?”
“We’re going to try to get it to spread itself too thin.” Princess Twilight Sparkle muttered to herself, then spoke fully into the phone. “Slowly, as it grows, you’re going to move your hand away from it. Once the crystal is smaller than her wounds, it can come out without hurting anything more than it already has. Then you’ll grab it with your magic and pull it out smoothly.”
Shining Armor jerked his hand away when the crystal grew another tiny spike. Even with time slowed to a crawl, the weaponized crystal was moving too fast for comfort. “It’s still growing.”
“It’s not growing, it’s resizing.” Princess Twilight almost spoke too quickly for Shining to follow. “It hasn’t had enough time to consume more magic. It’ll grow if it feeds, but so long as you’re pulling it away, it’ll never have that chance.”
A game of keep away. Tricking it to lurch greedily towards a higher concentration of magic. Shining had to be up to it. There was no other option. He couldn’t let the doctor’s anger rob Sunset of life.
“You’re my dream, Sunset,” he whispered. “Don’t ever let me forget that. You changed my life the day we met. For the better. Whatever else comes our way, whatever trial or opportunities we face, we’ll face it together.”
His heart beat, and his magic grew brighter. More tendrils of crystal appeared inside of a second, lunging for his fingers. If he looked closer, he could see the central spire thinning out, losing its structure.
“I’m sorry I forgot for so long. I only focused on leaving the military. I thought I had to give up my dream to live for what mattered most in my life. But you’re not the other dream. You’re not the replacement. You’re the missing piece of the puzzle. You showed me the bridge I needed to cross to become the man I could be. I haven’t given anything up; I’ve become more of my best self.”
Like a clawed hand, the crystal reached for him. It reformed and remade itself into a nest of razor-sharp spines that promised to bite into him, rake his skin away, tear into his joints and marrow. Meanwhile, the wound in Sunset’s midriff bled more freely, but the crystal wasn’t causing more damage. The wound was no longer going deeper. The damage was no longer exacerbating.
“It’s the same for you, isn’t it?” Shining blinked back tears. “You didn’t give up magic to come here. To be with me. To have Sunny. It’s just another step on your journey. Your dream was to experience all that magic had to offer, and the realization of that dream… is your life with us.”
The crystal was a collection of loosely-connected spikes that leaned haphazardly against each other. They looked like iron filings on the tip of a magnet. Their connection was so weak, and their structure so off-balance, Shining knew it had to be the time.
“I love you, Sunset,” he said, clutching her hand once more. “I can’t wait to see where our dreams take us next.”
He yanked his hand away, and the crystal chased after it. He caught it in a telekinetic bubble. It began to eat at his magic immediately, but he was ready. He chucked the crystal against a wall, where it shattered to a thousand-thousand-thousand pieces, becoming naught but dust. Capable of harming no one.
He stuffed his rags against the wound and pressed as hard as he could. It immediately soaked through. “She’s still in danger! She needs a hospital!”
Dulcimer breathed out a long, long sigh. “Go.” He fell to his knees, clutching his chest as sweat poured down his brow. “That was… harder than I expected.”
Starlight Glimmer’s eyes popped as time resumed its normal pace. She looked from Sunset to Dulcimer, her jaw slacked. “It worked? It worked!”
Dulcimer pulled a phone from his pocket and dialed. He got an immediate response. “Yes, we have a woman here with a large gut wound. Looks to have been run through. Yes, my current location. Send the helicopter immediately. Be careful—” He peered over the side of the balcony to see the two Twilights having a tense conversation. “We have a violent person on the premises.” He put the phone down and leaned against the railing. “The good news is that we’ll have medical help in a matter of minutes. The bad news…” He gestured at the nearly-colorless Sunset. “I don’t know what they’ll be able to do for her.”
Princess Twilight spoke up from the phone. “Bring her to Equestria.”
Shining Armor brough the phone to his face. “What?”
“Double Diamond says there’s a portal to Equestria right outside the city. Celestia and I can keep her alive until we reach a hospital, and then they’ll take care of her.”
Even if he was exhausted, it didn’t stop Dulcimer’s eyes from lighting up. “I can show the pilot how to get to the portal. Meet us there, and we’ll be able to make quick work of this injury.”
Shining Armor nodded. He squeezed his wife’s hand, stanching her wound as well as he could. “Do you hear that, Sunset? Help is on the way. Don’t give up yet!”
***
Twilight Sparkle glided into the burning female dorm room. The fire had spread to the walls. She smiled. Perhaps she could bring the whole place down on the doctor’s head.
She caught the sound of coughing. Smoke inhalation. A start on the path to asphyxiation. Music to her ears. She raised a hand and ignited her magic to part the smoke. There, lying in the collapsed remains of a cot, was the doctor herself. Blood trickled from the woman’s nose. Her eyes were unfocused, and no longer had their magical glow. She looked up as Twilight approached with pure fear etching itself across her face.
“What’s the matter?” Twilight said, her heart beating at a speed fit to power a motorboat. “Never had to face somebody on equal footing with you? Always picking on people weaker than you? People who’d never do you harm, of course! If King Sombra was smart, he would have banished you to the depths of the ocean!”
She took the Memory Stone in her hand. Fear traced itself through her veins. Afterimages of Sonata Dusk stalked their way throughout the burning room, cackling and screaming while the sound of gunfire echoed in Twilight’s memory. She pushed the panic aside, taking no note of it while still allowing it to feed her magic. “You only care about yourself, so it stands to reason that if I take your sense of self away… nobody else gets hurt. I do that and you’re nothing but a vegetable, rotting away in a cell. Braindead.”
Sonata clawed at her back, sending prickles down her spine. She shook the Memory Stone at the bleeding doctor. “And even that’s better than you deserve!”
Sonata patted Twilight’s cheek. “Come on, Twilight. You know you just wanna shoot her and get it over with. It’s worked out for you so far. Look at me! Pure worm-food. This gal? Why should she be any different? I killed Spike, and this dummy just did the exact same thing to Sunset.”
The glowing aura around Twilight’s eyes intensified. She pushed past the illusory Sonata and thrust the Memory Stone towards her. Magic flowed through the runes and pathways of the artifact. Tendrils of thieving magic reached out for the doctor, ready to rip any sense of “Twilight Sparkle” from her mind.
The tendrils reached the doctor, and found no memories to steal. The illusion spell faded to purple sparks.
A hand, this one as real as Twilight’s own, clasped around her wrist. Magic pulsed through its veins, lending it increased strength. The doctor twisted Twilight’s arm around and grasped her throat with her other hand. The doctor gritted her teeth as she sent electric shocks throughout Twilights body.
“You idiot!” Dr. Twilight Sparkle kicked one of Twilight’s legs out from underneath her. Thrown off-balance, she hung in the doctor’s grasp. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you? Nothing but a child playing with fire!”
She spun and tossed Twilight into a burning bed. She lunged to get ahold of the Memory Stone, straddling Twilight and holding her down. The cot’s weak joints collapsed, sending them both to the floor. Twilight took the opportunity to toss the doctor off of her, but lost her grip on the Stone. It slid across the floor, out of arm’s reach.
Both the doctor and the technician reached for the stone. Both enveloped it in their magic. Both pulled with all their might.
Edgy Spike ran into the room. He stood just behind the Memory Stone and barked at the both of them. “Twilight! You need to stop before one of you gets killed! I couldn’t live with myself if—”
“Shut up!” The doctor blasted him away with a burst of hot air. She got to her feet and glared at Twilight with eyes like a demon, reflecting the heat around her. A feeling like cold steel wrapped around Twilight’s throat, pressing her against the collapsed cot.
With Twilight’s concentration weakened, the doctor called the Stone to her hand. She paused for a critical moment, disoriented by whatever nightmare haunted her dreams. She recovered and took aim at the immobilized Twilight Sparkle, her smile appearing bright and triumphant.
Edgy Spike bit her leg as hard as he could. He jerked his head, tearing at her clothes and the skin beneath. His shout of “Let her go!” was muffled, but the intent was clear.
Dr. Twilight stuck him with a bolt of electricity. She kicked him away. She ignited the Memory Stone and released its tendrils towards him.
He spat blood and closed his eyes. “I love you, Twi—”
The magic hit him, and at once the screaming started. Twilight watched as every memory the poor boy had was drained from his soul. It leaked from his head like film reels from a camera and was absorbed into the Memory Stone. He lay still and quiet, his body barely moving as he breathed.
Dr. Twilight limped on her injured leg, but soon turned to face Twilight. She closed her hand into a fist, and the pain in Twilight’s throat grew tighter. She grasped at her throat and realized that the cot’s metal skeleton had contorted around her.
The doctor shrugged. “Sunset would have made a beautiful alicorn, really. A genius in her own time, backed by the power of the sun and moon. That moon belonged to you too, you know. The two of you, untouchable and omnipotent.”
She pointed the Memory Stone at Twilight’s head and ignited the spell. “But you know me so well, don’t you? Oh, your pain is so much more unbearable than mine. Idiot! If you had lived my life, you would have made the exact same decisions.” She let out a humorless laugh. “I told Sunset the same thing, before I put her out of her misery.”
At that moment, with Edgy Spike lying quietly a few feet away, and herself deprived of oxygen, she remembered something the princess had said:
“There is a difference between self-control and self-suppression. With self-control, one can feel their emotions, acknowledge them, and then refuse to allow them to control their actions. With suppression, you refuse to feel your emotions, tell yourself you shouldn’t have them, and then let them build up pressure in secret.” She held her hands out, palm up, towards Twilight. “When the pressure becomes too much, you burst, and people get hurt.”
Twilight let her lips curl. She pushed her glasses further up her nose. “You know me so well, huh?”
“No. I barely know you.” Princess Twilight allowed her hands to drop to her lap. “But I know myself. I know that I have had the same trouble. I’ve done some really messed-up things because I didn’t accept help for my problems. People have gotten hurt for sure, and it would have been much worse without my friends bailing me out.”
The edges of Twilight’s vision began to fade into whiteness. Still, she pushed magic to her fingertips. It was a spell she had cast before, though then it had been created in the spur of the moment, backed by pure panic. Now, it was backed by determination. She would not allow this person to win. She would not let this be the end. She would not lose herself.
And this time, she would not lose Spike.
“You know me so well.”
“No,” Twilight croaked, “I don’t know you. But I know myself.”
A shimmer of green surrounded the doctor. Her triumphant smirk became a scowl of confusion. She glanced down at the Memory Stone and watched as the tendrils of magic turned back from the shield enveloping her body. Her eyes, their irises shimmering with magic, widened in a sudden panic. “No.” The spell encasing the doctor grew more opaque as the seconds passed, and the tendrils sought their new target. “No! No, wait, please! Stop!”
She dropped the Memory Stone, but Twilight caught it in a strong, soft bubble of magic. She teleported out of the tangled-up cot and stood in front of the doctor, meeting her eye-to-eye.
Tears sprung into the doctor’s eyes. “Help me.”
The tendrils connected with her temples. Dr. Twilight hunched over as horrendous screams burst from the depths of her heart. The memories flashed past, furiously unloading her entire life’s experience in the blink of her eye. Her body shook as if she was vomiting uncontrollably. She clawed at her hair and pulled it out of the tight ponytail she’d kept it in. She didn’t so much collapse as fold to the floor, assuming a fetal position. Drool pooled around her mouth as she wept mindlessly.
Twilight called the Memory Stone to her hand. Sonata stood on the far side of the doctor’s body, smiling like a child with too much candy. “Nice one, Twilie. Braindead and soon to be dead-dead. You handled the situation better than I could’ve hoped for.”
Twilight looked at the Stone in her hands. She turned to the whimpering Edgy Spike, who cried like a confused dog. “If I free Spike’s memories, I free hers.”
“So kill her first. Duh.” Sonata leaned against a cot consumed with flames. “Double-tap to the head oughta do it.”
Twilight sighed as she knelt beside the dog. She petted his side with a trembling hand. “Even after all she’s done, he still loves her. He loves her enough to fight for her. Or against her.”
“And look where it got him.”
“Yeah. But he’s still got me to help him.” Twilight touched a hand to her heart. “Princess Twilight told me if I bottled my feelings up, they’d eventually explode, and people would get hurt. I think… I think I understand.”
She turned the Memory Stone over in her hands. “This rage, this agony, it’s the same thing Dr. Twilight felt when her parents died. When her brother was kidnapped. When her experiments failed again and again. She let it poison her. Soak into the core of her being. Turn her into that thing.” She gestured at the shaking form of the doctor. “If I lose control, I might go down that exact same path. Abandon Shining and Big Mac. Reject my friends because ‘they don’t understand.’” She sighed and glanced at Sonata. “Because that’s all that spite is good for; creating more anger and causing more pain.”
She closed her eyes and focused on her heartbeat. She felt through the corridors and cracks in the Memory Stone, seeking out the stolen memories. “And so it becomes a cycle. That’s all the doctor’s life has been; an uncontrollable cycle. Pain to more pain. It stops now.”
She unspooled the memories and separated them into two halves; Edgy Spike’s and the doctor’s. She let them flow on currents of magic, each seeking out the heart they belonged to. The green light of the Stone’s magic competed with the red light of the room ablaze.
Edgy Spike gasped as light returned to his eyes. He looked up at Twilight and met her gaze. He reached a paw out and touched her forearm.
“Welcome back, Spike.” Twilight gave his side a rub and stood up. She watched as the doctor stirred, shifting her weight as she decided whether or not she could stand.
Sonata Dusk crossed her arms and sneered. “She’s sure as hell not going to break the cycle.”
Twilight shook her head. She charged a spell with a burst of energy, then released it into the depths of the empty Memory Stone. The walls of the artifact cracked as energy blitzed through it on a path as sure as a tidal wave’s. The magical device crackled, then crumbled to stone shards as Twilight split it in half.
Sonata vanished as quickly as she came, nothing more than a misremembered figment of Twilight’s imagination.
Twilight brushed her hand against her jeans, shaking away the stone dust. She approached the doctor with her fingernails glowing with power. “I hear that use of the memory stone can leave you slightly disoriented.”
Dr. Twilight clutched her head and moaned. She toppled over as if she wasn’t quite sure which way was up. She looked at Twilight with the air of someone both drunk and hungover at the same time. “Aren’t you going to kill me?”
“Not unless you give me no choice.” Twilight knelt down and touched a fingertip to the side of the doctor’s head. “Have a good night, doc.”
Dr. Twilight slumped over, passed out from exhaustion and Twilight’s relaxation spell.
Heavy footsteps thundered to the door of the dormitory. Big Mac poked his head in, looking left and right for any sign of the person he loved. “Twilight! Twi, you in here?”
“Over here!” Twilight looked around and finally noticed that the fire had gotten wildly out of control. Even at her full power, she wasn’t going to be able to put it out. “H-hit the fire alarm! There’s sprinklers in here, right?”
He found the lever and alarms rang throughout the building. He rushed into the room and took immediate stock of the situation. “I’ll carry the crazy woman out. You get Spike.”
She scooped the dragon-come-dog into her arms and held him close. She sprinted for the exit with her boyfriend close behind her. She wasn’t sure the sprinklers were going to do much good; the fire was blazing hot, and the smoke was growing thick.
“And Twilight—!”
Twilight looked over her shoulder, only slowing her momentum slightly. Big Mac’s beautiful green eyes radiated comfort down on her, filling her heart to the limit.
“Shining helped Sunset. We’re takin’ her to Equestria right now. She’s got a chance.”
With renewed vigor, they broke out into the indoor courtyard. Through the front doors, Twilight could see a helicopter waiting for them. Shining climbed aboard with Starlight, and the faintest hint of Sunset lying in a stretcher was just behind them. The race for the helicopter was won by all, and they were soon sailing across the skies towards the mainland.
Twilight sat beside Big Mac, some distance away from the paramedics desperately trying to keep Sunset alive. They held each other’s hand, palm to palm, and tried to breathe.