Twilight thinks that we’re not really ponies. We’re all just a mist.
In the morning, Twilight and I do friendship classes. Fun arts and crafts, joint venting. That’s what they do at the friendship school, anyway—how those things are supposed to teach ya friendship, beats me. And the students pay a ridiculous amount of Bits to go there.
If Twilight just wants a friend to shoot the breeze with, she should say so. She doesn’t have to cover it up with “friendship magic” bull.
I don’t think I realize how tired I’ve gotten. I guess I had been so pumped on adrenaline. But these past months, I’ve just been in the castle. Since I’ve started staying at the castle, I’ve heard the voices a lot less. The air’s fresher up here than in the bayou. I look out my window in the morning, and the streets are sparkling clean. All the leaves neatly swept up to the side. Mud and still water quickly mopped up. Sometimes I think there’s some sort of “good magic aura” in the air in Canterlot that just calms any evil spirits. I think that’s why it's chosen as Equestria's capital.
I sleep a lot more. Maybe cause the mattresses here in the castle are made of pegasus clouds and the sheets are like 1 million thread count or somethin’. And it’s pretty calm sleep. I can still feel the demon spirit in me, but there’s not as much words.
oll
si
egasu
lly go
ath
de
Fragments of words.
I must sleep like 13 hours total every day. Y’see, after lunch, Twilight and I take a nap. Cozy used to hate naps, did I ever tell ya? ‘Cause it was the one time of day that Ma kept her in her room against her will. “Mandated disruption of the diurnal circadian rhythm,” she used to call it.
So when I’m sleepy in the afternoon and I take a nap, I smile.
After we wake up from our naps, whenever that is, Twilight starts working on a new curing spell. There’s nothing like it in the books, so she says that she’s gotta make a whole new spell from scratch. And even though she’s failed so many times, her finding me has “emboldened” her to try again.
So like, she sits me down. And I just watch as she tries to crack the magical curse that’s overcome us. She writes on the blackboard. Sticks tabs in her reference books. If she’s got questions, she’ll ask me. I figure she thinks just cause she’s a princess, she’s the leader of my “reformation” so to speak, but really, she and I are both in the same boat.
I a’int mad at her, though. It’s her way of coping. The papers have been told that Twilight’s taken a “professional leave of absence.” She’s left Spike and Shining Armor in charge of all her royal duties. They’re the only ones she trusts with her secret. Spike checks on us in our secure wing of the castle twice a day to make sure we’re okay. If one of us goes so crazy that someone could get killed, or worse, Spike is supposed to touch us with this magical amulet.
Twilight told me it’s really an injector filled with an instant-acting sedative, but made to look like an amulet. Spike just thinks it’s magic.
Nopony else knows about Twilight’s voices. Not even her five best friends. “I don’t want them to know. First they’ll feel so bad for me, and then they’ll also feel so bad that all their efforts to conquer the Legion of Doom are now just…wasted.”
“Aw c’mon Twilight,” I said. “I mean, I don’t know ‘em, but if they’re really yer best friends…I sure as hell don’t think they’re gonna react that way.”
Twilight nodded. “I know. I know. But if I know I would make them feel bad if I told them, and that that would make me feel bad, that means I still feel compassion for somepony else. I still have empathy. And Cozy hasn’t eaten away all the good in my brain yet.” She had tears in her eyes.
“You just don’t wanna tell ‘em your secret, do ya?” I said.
“No.”
She told me her secret, though.
Maybe she’s my best friend, then?
Or maybe she just doesn’t have that much compassion for me.
I think Twilight likes to teach me lessons ‘cause she wants to remind herself that she’s still the same smart pony she once was. Just like I speak a lot. In the bathtub, I’ll just speak into the empty bathroom. It’s weird, I know, but I think that my accent is going away. Maybe it’s ‘cause I’ve been away from home for so long.
My sister never had a country accent.
“Page 85…right.” Twilight asked me as she read from her book. “You said you see…an orange fire in these dreams slash hallucinations?”
“Yeah orange.”
“Strange, I usually see more of a crimson or violet. I remember reading somewhere that the color spectra observed correlates with the stage of progression of the possession magic.” If this is how smart Twilight is when she’s sick, I can’t imagine how smart she used to be.
She started flipping through another book. “Let’s see…index, index, oh where the fuck is that entry…ah, page 852. Correlation between flame color observed in somnolescent hallucinations and magical mist possession. Aha. Abstract…aha, aHA. BINGO. This is cutting edge, I tell you, Spur. Cutting edge. This wasn’t even here in last year’s edition. This is fresh off the presses!”
Then again, I can’t tell the difference between a “Four-E-Hay” Transform and gibberish comin’ outta a madpony.
Twilight still scribbles notes, but this time it’s all neatly contained in a big spiral bound notebook. Her diagrams are still real messy. And when she hallucinates, she twitches sometimes, and it messes up her arrows on the chalkboard.
They go in zigzags instead of from point A to B.
It don’t matter that we’re still hearing voices now, though. There’s gonna be a big day. A cure day, she calls it. Twilight’s gonna put the perfect curing spell in a little amulet, and point it at ourselves. We may have a few failed cure days if the spell doesn’t work out. But eventually there’ll be a real Cure Day. Where everything will be okay forever.
Twilight’s studyin’ something she calls Mist Theory to try to reason with our plight. Everypony’s just a mist, basically. And most of the time, the same mist stays in the same body. When you die, the mist leaves you, and dissolves back into the air. It might stay the same, or it might mix into a new mist, and it flows into a new little foal. But sometimes, another mist can go into you while you’re still alive. And when that happens, the new mist infects you, until it overpowers or covers up the old mist completely.
It could be a good mist that infects you. Or a bad mist. It’s whatever is floating in the wind, or it could be more targeted. Twilight said the books aren’t too clear on that part.
I’m trying to remember. When Cozy was a yearling, there wasn’t any wind. It was summer in the bayou. The bugs were loud, the air was humid, and there was…
…frozen mist over the water.
I think Biscuit’s mist went into the air. And someday he’ll come back to me, in a different body. Maybe he’ll go into Feather Bangs’s body or somethin’. Heh. Or maybe his mist will break apart into a few pieces. And there’ll be somepony to kayak with me. And there’ll be somepony else to kiss and cuddle with me. And maybe then I’ll be all better and I won’t try to kill him, or him, this time.
Cozy the spirit is like an evil mist that infected me and Twilight. Just like it infected my kid sister at some point. Some event made our mist fragile, so says Twilight, which caused it to infect us. And the infection’s just gettin’ worse and worse. Like a brain disease when you’re old and you slowly forget things.
It’s not my fault that I’m violent and angry. It’s the magic’s fault. And Twilight believes me. I confessed to a violent crime but all I got was mandated treatment an’ a comfy bedroom that’s bigger than my whole house in bayou. There’s a cure day comin’ up. There’s gonna be a big spell that’ll zap this evil mist outta me, and everything will be okay forever.
I should be happy.
Why am I not happy?
Twilight still hasn’t told me when the cure day will be. “In a month, at the latest,” and that was two months ago. Her spiral bound notebook is only half-filled up, out of the 500 pages.
Notebooks don’t make me happy.
Y’know what does make me happy? Sometimes these days, when I wake up in my room in Twilight’s castle, and the sun’s shinin’ through my window, I forget that I killed Biscuit, and I think that he’s alive somewhere, and that right now I’m just on a little vacation, and then I’ll come back to the bayou and see him again.
Maybe that’s not a real cure, like Twilight wants.
But I’m fine with that.
Sometimes the moment after I wake up, I don’t even know what all the damn fuss is about.
Cozy the spirit gave Twilight a real bad dream the other night. In the dream, Twilight’s manuscript bled so much, it flooded her whole castle in dark black ink, and drowned her in thick fluid. She was screaming and choking when I came into her room. Her horn was smoking. Blankets, bedsheets, they were flyin’ all over the place. Luckily she had moved all the breakable china into a big metal safe where she couldn’t knock it over during her hysteria.
“Talk to her, Twilight, talk to Cozy!” I grabbed her cheeks and I shook her head. Her eyes flopped around in the sockets.
“NO! GET AWAY FROM ME!”
It was late, and I guess she didn’t have the energy to deal with the spirit. So I took the plastic chamber pot and I filled it with cold water, and I poured it over her head. It was dark, and I was kinda in a hurry, so I didn’t stop to check if there was anything in it. I couldn’t tell. Maybe there was a trace of scat in there? Or some piss? I’m not sure. But I filled it up with cold water.
And after about three or four pours, that seemed to calm her down. There were big, floppy bags under her eyes. After she stopped screaming, her head just kinda fell like a soaked bowling ball onto the pillow.
She had no more to give. She couldn’t fight no more. The evil mist sucked every last drop outta her.
“You okay, Twilight?”
And she smiled at me, with a mix of piss and water and scat dripping from her mane, and she said, “Yes, Spur, I’m okay. Calm. Peaceful.” She sighed. “Finally. Finally, no more.” She was almost giggling.
She squinted her eyes, and I swear some of the piss could’ve gotten in her eye.
She grabbed my hooves and pulled me close to her wet chest. It was damp and cold. “I understand now, Spur. The spell…that’s taken us…I understand it. I’ve had a breakthrough at the very least. I must write this down.” She ran off to her dresser to look for her 500-page notebook.
She smelled awful.
If that’s how Twilight looks and smells when she does understand…
I think she looked prettier when she didn’t understand.
I remember one day, after our nap, I asked Twilight what she thinks my sister felt. When she got turned into stone.
“What…what did it look like?” I asked. “You were there. Yer friends were there. Celestia and Luna and Discord were there. I wasn’t.”
Twilight blinked. And sighed. “Your sister looked…scared. As she got petrified. More scared than I’d even seen her. It was…strange.”
My sister had two mists in her, just like us.
You see, Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, and Discord didn’t really kill Cozy. They just petrified the body it was in. My sister’s body. And the mists boiled off.
First, the evil mist boiled off. “Cozy”, the spirit. It boiled off first. And for a few seconds, there was just one life mist in the body.
My real sister. Maybe that was the only seconds that anypony ever got to see my real sister.
And then the last gaps in the stone sealed shut.
“Why d’you think she looked scared?” I asked Twilight.
“Who wouldn’t be scared?”
“She went in pain?”
“I…I don’t know.”
She hurt me, sis.
She hurt me.
Do what is right.
Make her feel my pain!
Stop.
Stop talkin’.
eel
pai
ake h
urt me s
She stopped talkin'.
Was she lyin’ or tellin’ the truth? Was Twilight lyin’ to me? How would I know? How would I know the truth?
This was gonna be my decision.
I swallowed a lump. “Do it. To me.”
“Do what?”
“Petrify me. Then maybe the mist of Cozy will boil off from me. And then unpetrify me.”
Twilight paced around, looking into space. “Spur, this is incredibly risky. I’m not sure if I'm able to reverse the petrification. It's really supposed to be a permanent spell, so it's intentionally designed to be extremely difficult to reverse. It's a very complex spell, and I haven't done it in so long. I don't have the Elements of Harmony with me.”
“If it a’int reversible, it a’int. Just try it. On me.”
“If I can't reverse it, you'll be trapped for a thousand years. Unless we get Fluttershy to bring a cockatrice, but I'll only do that as an absolute last resort..." she stopped pacing. "Do you understand that, Spur? Spur…if you don’t come back…”
“We’ve been doin’ this fer two whole months. Therapy. Lessons. Friendship. Friendship lessons. Math and logic equations. Writing notes. Way too much writing notes. An’ nothing’s happening. We gotta take a chance. We gotta do somethin’. We gotta act.”
“You must persevere, Spur. I’m going to figure out the cure spell soon, I know it. You just have to believe.”
“What if the cure day never comes? Not fer a thousand years or more?”
Twilight paused. I know she’s secretly scared of that. If that day never comes. And unlike me, she's gonna have to actually live those thousand years, never seein' that day.
Did I tell ya that Twilight has another fake amulet? An injector filled with cyanide, but disguised to look like an amulet.
She tried to cover her fear. “I-I know it’s hard f-for you, S-Spur, it’s hard for me too. I-I hear the voices too, I know what you’re going through—”
“No.”
The Princess stopped pacing.
I just told. A Princess. That she’s wrong. The Princess. Of Equestria.
And I wasn’t scared one bit.
Maybe it’s the “Cozy” inside me. That makes me fearless to authority.
I was proud of myself. Actually I was.
“No, Twilight. Y’ don’t know what I’m goin’ through. Maybe y’know some of it, but you sure as hell don’t know all of it. Havin’ the whole world turn their back on you, just cause of yer sister? Before you came along, I didn’t have anypony who’d help me, other than the pony I fuckin' killed 'cause of this stupid demon in me!
“Meanwhile, you got all these ponies who’ll bend over backwards to support ya—Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, Rarity, Ms. Glimmer, Trixie, Sunset, Cadence, Celestia, Luna…ALL of ‘em? And you won’t tell any of ‘em? Just ‘cause of yer damned pride, ya wanna keep it a secret!? Just ‘cause yer afraid!?
“Well, I’m not afraid, Twilight. I’m not afraid of dying. If I wanna get better, it’s gotta matter. I gotta be willing to lose it all. That’s the difference between you an’ me.”
I wanna tell the whole world the truth. I wanna stand up on the roof an’ tell the whole world that I killed him.
Twilight sat low till the tip of her horn was lower than my head. She let her legs collapse to the floor. She let her hoof touch mine.
She’s my friend. As much as I hate her. I think I care about her so much, that’s why I hate her fer bein’ this way.
“Spur…if you don’t come back…I’ll lose a friend.”
“I jus’ wanna know how my sister went. That’s all.”
If I don’t come back…
Bloofy won’t miss me. And Ma and Pa’ll take care of him.
Biscuit won’t miss me. He’s dead.
Ma and Pa…
I spoke again. “And if I come out of it alive, then you can put the spell in an amulet, and I can do it to you too.”
Twilight held her breath.
“You should know the secret too, Twilight. You should know what happened to yer worst enemy.”
Twilight sighed, her heavy crownless head hung low. Then she growled. She shook her head violently, trying to get it outta her head. Another relapse was comin’ along.
“Let me get a glass of water,” was the last thing she said.
She left me alone in the library for a few minutes. She came back in with...not water, but a cup of cold tea and a little plate of peach jelly biscuits from the castle kitchen. She pushed the plate to me and motioned like she wanted me to eat one.
I pushed the plate back. “Just get on with it.”
So she did it. She pushed the peach biscuits out of frying range, and pointed her horn at me.
The beam of light travels pretty slow, y’know. I know light travels pretty damn fast, but it must’ve been a full second before the end of the beam traveled across the library and reached me.
Enough time for me to swallow the lump in my throat.