//------------------------------// // The Wheel of Fortune — Chapter II // Story: The Twilit Tower // by Fresh Coat //------------------------------// Little by little, the invisible ground began to slope upwards. Twilight stumbled more than once, but eventually she figured out the angle and worked out the right height to place her hooves. It was basic trigonometry; thirty three degrees. Miss Crabapples would be proud. Twilight had long since surpassed the other foals in her grade — they were still on their times tables and she was moving on to the same math textbooks Shiny was using for high school with only a little help from Miss Crabapples. The building was close now. Only a few steps away. It looked like a tower tonight — impossibly tall and slender, with a single turret rising from the roof. Like something Ra-pone-zel might live in. But the windows were the same as they had always been. Vantablack. Endlessly deep. Utterly impenetrable. Anything could be hiding in darkness that complete. Anything could be watching from those windows. Waiting for her. Twilight swallowed hard. “SohCahToa,” she whispered to herself, seeking comfort in the familiar. “Sine equals opposite over hypotenuse, cos equals adjecant over hypotenuse, tan…tan…” Her voice was horribly quiet in the night. “Tan…equals opposite over adjacent…” The mnemonic recited, she tailed off, and the motion of her hooves faltered and finally stopped. The tower soared into the empty sky, and those black windows watched her, the silence pressing down, as weighty as the dark. Shifting unhappily from hoof to hoof, Twilight hesitated. What was the right course of action? Never before had the Dream followed this course. It had always been exactly the same. The darkness, the endless walking, the brambles and the distant building. Always watching, never waiting. But tonight it had finally changed. Now, of all times, she had finally been permitted to approach. Or rather — she had been approached. Though it had been her legs that seemed to move, Twilight had no doubt of who the true initiator had been. The building had finally deemed her worthy. And…and she had no idea why. Twilight Sparkle was a foal who prided herself on her rationality. Her ability to think calmly and rationally. The Dream had always been a weak point — but she had talked to her parents, had read a psychology article in a magazine Daddy brought her — and she had been fairly confident in classifying the Dream as a run of the mill night terror or recurring dream. But recurring dreams did not change. They just recurred. And now the Dream was changing, and Twilight was suddenly not so sure that she felt calm and logical after all. “SohCahToa,” she finally said, trying to pull herself back to reality. “Sine equals opposite over hypotenus.” The world was rational. The world was sane. She was rational. She was sane. She was a scientist — or she would be when she was grown up, which was practically the same thing — and she could figure this out. The Dream had ceased to be a recurring dream or a formulaic nightmare, that much was clear. But it was still just a dream. She remembered going to sleep, remembered the copper-hot taste of the cocoa that scalded her tongue. The gentle tickle of her Daddy’s fur on her forehead as he kissed her goodnight. And then closing her eyes and just fizzing with excitement about tomorrow. The entrance exam. Princess Celestia! Magic school. Only the knowledge that a good night’s sleep is vital for a healthy brain stopped her from hopping straight back up and heading right back to her textbooks. She had tossed and turned for what felt like hours — and then suddenly, with no shift in consciousness, the Dream. Unpleasantly familiar. But different, tonight. Now she was closer to the building than she had ever managed to get before. Perhaps it was as simple as the stress of the entrance exam wreaking some unheard-of chaos in her subconscious that was causing this strange departure from the norm. Yes, that must be it. And once the entrance exam was over and done with, the very first thing Twilight was going to look up in that glorious new library was the tantalising reference to lucid dreaming she had come across in Trotson’s Dictionary last month. Once she figured that out, the Dream would be dealt with once and for all. She peered up at the tower again, tilting her head back until her neck ached. But the roof was now nowhere in sight — the tower seemed to stretch on forever. If only she had prioritised that research sooner. Maybe then she would be able to wake herself up on command. As she lowered her gaze again, her ears flattened. The building had taken advantage of her distraction to make a change. Where previously purple-grey stone had risen smooth and unmarred, now there was a door. Twilight pressed her lips together as she regarded it. The door was painted a deep purple, and sized only a little larger than she was tall. It was an obvious invitation. She let out a breath and tried to think about her options. She could not wake herself up on demand, and she could not control the dream as a practised lucid dreamer could. Her only choice was to wait and hope she would awaken. She could sit here and wait — or she could go through that door and see what lay beyond. With a slight lowering of her brows, Twilight moved forward and pushed the door lightly. It slid silently open on well-oiled hinges and her eyes widened as she saw what lay beyond. The foal dipped her head and stepped through the door. Unprompted, the door closed behind her. With a slight hiss, the purple stones rippled back into place, as though the door had never been there at all. The tower had swallowed her whole.