//------------------------------// // The Wheel of Fortune — Chapter VI // Story: The Twilit Tower // by Fresh Coat //------------------------------// It was hard work, crawling on elbows and knees, frantically scrabbling with all four hooves at once just to propel herself forward. But inch by painful inch, Twilight progressed, and gradually the corridor began to widen. Soon she was able to get to her hooves and walk normally, her horn only just scraping the ceiling. There were no bends in this corridor, no curves. Just smooth purple-grey blocks of stone, each identical and utterly flawless, cut smoother than even a master-mason could ever cut. The only perceptible change was the constant, subtle widening of the corridor. Before long, the ceiling was higher than the roof of Twilight’s home, the polished stone flags of the floor stretching wider than a Canterlot road. Twilight wondered idly how long it would go on getting wider; would she find herself in a corridor larger than a stadium? Taller than a Manehattan skyscraper? Where would it stop? Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was aware that she should be frightened at that prospect. She might be trapped in an infinite corridor — or in an infinite tower, where every room was worse than the one before. Dragons and empty libraries, hotel lobbies and far-off clones. None of this was normal, all of it was horrifying…but somehow it had all taken on a strange sort of distance now. The immediate terror of pursuit from Sunset had passed, and she supposed it was rational enough to find her rest somewhere. At least this corridor was safe enough to be boring. She walked without ceasing for…well, it was hard to say how long. It could have been an hour, or it could have been five. For all Twilight knew, the Wizard could manipulate time as well as space, and she had been trapped in here for a hundred years. Well — hopefully not. The thought of that, of her family being swallowed up by time in the blink of an eye, was enough to make her feel suddenly very queasy. Twilight saw a glimmer of strange light up ahead and quickened her pace, suddenly glad of the distraction from her fears. Without warning, the grey-purple wall dropped away into a huge pane of frosty-blue glass. It was opaque, and strange patterns danced within — almost like ice. She brushed a tentative hoof against it, but it was warm rather than cold. Her lip curled. Could nothing in this place make sense? It wasn’t asking too much for things just to comply with a few of the laws of physics, surely. Other than the fact one of the walls had been replaced by the blue glass, this section of corridor was the same as all the rest. The glass was the feature — perhaps even a new puzzle — and so it was the glass that Twilight kept her eyes fixed on. Apart from the usual imperfections and bubbles in the surface, and the swirling patterns within, the glass was unchanging. Tired as she was, Twilight upped her pace to a trot. The corridor had been a peaceful enough interlude, but she itched to make some tangible progress again — if there was such a thing as progress in this place. If she went far enough, surely she would come to a door sooner or later. “I just don’t understand you!” The voice, ragged with pain and marked with a strong southern burr, rang out of nowhere. Twilight jumped and skidded to a halt. “Who said that?” “I don’t understand what you don’t understand, Fritter,” another voice answered, different to the first. It didn’t seem like either of the speakers had heard her. “What do you want from me?” the first mare asked, a hitch in her voice, and when Twilight pressed her muzzle against the disturbingly warm surface of the glass, she thought she could make out a blurred figure beyond. “I want you…I want you to love me too,” the second mare replied, a sob evident in her words. “I just want you.” No — Twilight hesitated and squinted harder — not one figure. Two. Two ponies, face to face, confronting one another, their shapes distorted and rippled so much by the uneven glass that she could hardly tell whether they were pegasus, unicorn or earth pony. Both were vaguely yellow in colour, one with a green mane, the other red. “I don’t — I can’t—” the first mare stuttered, and Twilight slowly pulled back from the glass. Suddenly this felt too much like eavesdropping. On a private conversation, an adult conversation. Like the arguments she had heard her parents having, once or twice. It wasn’t meant for her ears. For a moment, she considered calling out to them. Banging on the glass perhaps. This was closer to another pony than she had been in hours. Since she had escaped Sunset, she had seen no one. But her last encounter with one of the other strangers wandering this place had been far from helpful, and something in her shied away from interrupting this. Her parents hated it when she walked in on their grown-up conversations. Like the heated debate they’d had on whether or not they could afford the fees for Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, if Twilight somehow managed to pass the entrance exam but did not secure the scholarship. When she had snuck through the door, tears in her eyes, and promised to study three times as hard, they had looked at her with such pain in their eyes. No. Conversations like this one were not meant to be listened to. The two shapes were growing more animated now, gesticulating and shouting, and Twilight hastily pulled her muzzle away from the glass and galloped down the glass-walled corridor, the furious voices of two agonised strangers chasing her as she went. Twilight stood very still, looking up at the newest challenge before her. A door, the same lavender as her own fur, emblazoned with a six-pointed star orbited by five lesser stars. Obscure enough that it could mean anything, denote any number of dreadful things within. One of the void-rooms Sunset had mentioned, perhaps? Dark as the night sky, hence the stars. There was no real way to tell. And her prevarication was just that; a delay of the inevitable. There was no other way to go, unless she wanted to try smashing her way through the glass wall or go back to face Sunset. Twilight let out a heavy sigh and reached out for the door. At the merest brush of her hoof it swung inwards, moving smoothly on silent hinges. Within all was whiteness and mist. Tendrils of fog unrolled out into the corridor, weaving themselves around Twilight’s forelegs and beckoning her on. One more sigh, and Twilight resigned herself to her fate and obeyed the wordless command. There was no way to go but onwards. The mist swallowed her soundlessly, and the clopping of her hooves on the unseen floor was all she heard. She tried her best to keep going in a forward direction, but this room had a lot in common with the form the original Dream had taken. No visual information, only feeling — and this time without even the spectre of the ever-present tower on the horizon. Just blank white, and the slow prickle of moisture over her fur. And then she heard a rustling noise. Twilight froze in place and tried to pinpoint the direction it had come from. She waited ten seconds, twenty, but no further sound came, and she finally concluded she must have imagined it. Deprive the senses long enough and the brain will begin to fill in the blanks. She started to move again, and then she heard it. Clearly this time. A voice, with a lazy southern drawl. “Well, howdy-doo, Miss Twilight!” There was no dismissing that as imagination. “Who’s there?” Twilight shouted into the mist. “Who are you?” “A pleasure makin' your acquaintance,” the voice said, though somehow Twilight felt that it wasn’t speaking to her. “Show yourself,” demanded Twilight, doing her best to sound commanding. “Who are you?” “I'm Applejack,” said the voice, more distantly, and then Twilight caught a glimpse of orange-yellow in the distance. “We here at Sweet Apple Acres sure do like makin' new friends!” Without hesitation, Twilight barrelled after that solitary flash of orange, pursuing the bouncing yellow ponytail long after it had vanished into the mist. Yet another stranger who already knew her name. Twilight was getting heartily sick of them. “Let me guess,” said a new voice, dripping with sarcasm, and Twilight was frozen by the horrifying familiarity of the cadence. Was that…it couldn’t be her voice, could it? “You’re Rainbow Dash,” said the second Twilight Sparkle, the clone Twilight had so dreaded meeting. A gravelly voice answered her. “The one and only. Why, you heard of me?” “Stop it!” Twilight cried, not altogether sure who she was addressing — the clone, or the ghostly occupants of this misty room. “Yeah, yeah, that'll be a snap,” said the gravelly voice, mercilessly. As though it had not heard her at all. “I could clear this sky in ten seconds flat.” A rush of wings, and something blue flashed overhead through the fog, trailing rainbows behind it. Somepony behind Twilight gasped, and she whirled in place to see another shadow in the mist, closer than any of the others had been. A white mare, a unicorn, with a sweeping purple mane. “Oh my stars, darling! Whatever happened to your coiffure?” “Don’t go—!” Twilight stumbled towards her, but the mare dissolved like a mirage on the first touch of her hoof. The soft warble of birdsong. A shivering yellow presence in the fog. “Um... My name is Fluttershy.” Twilight galloped towards the new shape, but though it was sitting, it danced back, constantly just out of reach. A new shape formed just beside the yellow one — a more familiar mix of purple and green. “Oh, I've never seen a baby dragon before,” breathed the ghost named Fluttershy. “He's sooo cute!” “Wait!” protested Twilight, but they did not. “Well…” said the misty ghost of Spike in a voice just barely recognisable as the bass rumble she had heard from his adult form. “I started out as a cute little purple and green egg…” Then they were gone, and there was a new suggestion of a pony, pink and brimming with energy as it bounced around Twilight, never coming within touching distance. “Hi, I'm Pinkie Pie, and I threw this party just for you! Were you surprised? Were ya? Were ya? Huh huh huh?” Twilight stopped fighting — stopped trying to reach the stranger. “Stop it,” she said, glaring with a trembling lip at the pink ghost. “Were ya? Were ya?” It leapt closer, closer, forming into hazy details as it approached. Blue eyes, balloon cutie marks, a fluffy mane as bouncy as her movements. “Huh huh huh?” “Help me or go away,” Twilight spat back at her, and the ghost obediently dissolved into nothingness. Letting out a disappointed huff of air, Twilight dropped onto her haunches. Tried to recover her self-control. This was the strangest room yet. If this was a puzzle, it was not one with an obvious solution. And as she sat there, they came back to her. The creeping, whispering ghosts of ponies long dead, a jumble of voices — “We’re stickin’ to you like caramel on a candy apple…it was under E!…I’d never leave my friends hanging…Laughter, Kindness, Generosity, Loyalty, Honesty…When the five are present, a spark will cause the sixth Element to be revealed.” They swam back out of the fog towards her — the five strangers, the pony that looked too much like her. The voice that was not quite hers. “I felt it the very moment I realized how happy I was to hear you, to see you, how much I cared about you. The spark ignited inside me when I realized that you all... are my friends!” A flicker, and they were older. “Friendship isn’t easy, but there’s no doubt it’s worth fighting for.” Laughter, a picnic. Dreams fulfilled; a crown, a flight captain’s badge, a store, a sanctuary. “Never judge a book by its cover. Real friends don’t care what your cover is. A good friend, like a good book, is something that will last forever.” Six ponies, facing down a vast and incomprehensible threat. A thousand threats, all alike only in that they were each doomed to defeat. Not-Twilight’s voice again. “Whatever it is, I know we need to face it together.” A flicker, and then the ghosts were older still. “Will you be Cheese Pie’s godmother?” “Um, well…Discord and I want you all to be bridesmares — if you don’t mind.” “Apple Bloom’s graduation is this week an’ we’d take if kindly if’n y’all can make it.” “I’ve got a big show on Friday! Can I count on you to come cheer us on?” “My Yakyakistan launch party is coming up; would you like to be the guest of honour, Twilight?” Another flicker, and then one by one, the mares began to fade, until only the lavender one remained, kneeling by a bed. “Will you be alright, Twilight? When we’re gone?” A little laugh. "There is only one thing that’s truly immortal, Pinkie. It’s called true friendship. I’ve had that, with you all. I’ll be alright.” “I know,” the mare in the bed said weakly, before relapsing into another fit of coughing. “I know. But I worry. Who’ll throw you parties when I’m gone?” Not-Twilight smoothed the hair back from her forehead. “Don’t worry about me, Pinkie. You just focus on getting better again.” Her voice was tight. “I’ll try, Twilight.” Another flicker, and then the final friend was gone. The lavender mare — the one who Twilight still refused to recognise as herself — stood alone as the years passed around her. Cities rose and fell at her feet, rivers altering their courses to flow around her vast limbs. Stars burned to life and faded out in the time it took her to blink. Another voice. Tender, kind, and achingly old. “It’s time for me to leave, my faithful student.” “I see.” The answer was emotionless. Flat. “Will you not join me — beyond? It has been a…long time. Are you not tired?” The voice was still monotone. No trace of the laughter that was there when the five mares were present.“There is work to be done. Someone must remain to do it.” “You could…you could do as I did,” suggested a vague sunshine-gold outline. “A student, a protege—” “I would never do as you did.” The rebuke was not sharp, but the sunshine flinched back as though it had been slapped. “You asked too much.” “I am…sorry.” And with those final words that presence too faded, and the mare who once looked like Twilight still remained. Planets orbit her horn. The sun danced upon her forehead. Stars flickered like fireflies around her. And still she stood, alone, pulling the strings and the leylines of the universe, mechanisms vaster than Twilight could comprehend. And all the while the feeling grew, the emotion swelling until it was overwhelming — loneliness, aching, crushing, loneliness — an eternity alone, with only a brief spark of the fleeting thing called friendship to illumine those shadowy eons. The weight of it was enough to bow Twilight’s knees, press her muzzle to the floor. To bring the tears spilling from her eyes though she could barely understand what she was seeing. A pony — a pony far too like herself for comfort — alone after her friends were gone. Just like the two ponies arguing behind the glass wall. Friendship was — it brought pain. Ponies loved ponies who didn’t love them back, who left them, and it hurt. Twilight was…she was better on her own. She understood that now.