And just like that, the weight was lifted. Twilight could breathe again, and the tears she had not intended to shed were drying on her cheeks. Pulling in one heaving lungful of air after another, Twilight slowly opened her eyes, trying to ready herself for whatever new vision awaited.
The fog had cleared. Traces of it still lingered at the very edges of the room, but that was not the sight that held Twilight’s attention.
Her gaze was fixed on the far wall of the room. A wall that was not a wall at all. At first Twilight thought it was a statue — a huge statue of a pony, an alicorn carved so cunningly from stone that she almost looked alive. A tail flowing in the way that Princess Celestia’s did, the mane curling around to create a floor that undulated up and down in a motion that looked so real Twilight could hardly believe it was carved stone and not real hair.
The alicorn’s eyes were closed, a faint smile dancing at the corner of her mouth, and Twilight crept closer, entranced despite her misgivings. But for the facial features and the difference in manestyle, she could almost have believed it was a statue of Princess Celestia — but this was clearly intended to be a likeness of a different pony.
And wasn’t that a bizarre image? A princess that was not Princess Celestia. Everypony knew she was the only alicorn; had always been the only alicorn.
Twilight paused at the edge of the statue’s mane before steeling herself and scrambling up it. She wanted a closer look at the workmanship on this statue. Something so flawless had to be magical in nature.
She peered closely at the hooves and legs, clad in carven shoes with pointed stars embossed in them. The peytral with the gem embedded in it, so like Celestia’s. The crown, larger and more ornate than that of the Princess, but still reminiscent of it. The material was the same throughout — the same smooth grey-purple stone that the tower itself was made of. But there were no visible lines between the blocks. The alicorn appeared to have been carved from a single piece of stone, and she was so well-made that she almost appeared alive.
Twilight looked up at those long eyelashes brushing the cheek, the half-smile playing across the muzzle. She tried to puzzle out again what the challenge was here —
And then the alicorn opened her eyes.
Twilight tried to bolt and sat down with a thud, too startled to do any more than let out a soft mew of terror.
The alicorn’s eyes were those of a living pony. Sparkling purple irises scattered with drops of brighter colour. Kind eyes. She shook her head once, and then like a river, the life flowed out from her eyes across her face, down her mane, into her chest. Colour flowed with it, and fur, and hair — and in less than a few seconds Twilight was staring a living alicorn in the face.
An alicorn who looked disturbingly similar in colouration to both herself and the not-Twilight of the visions.
The princess — for what else could she be? — looked down at Twilight and her smile slowly spread across her face. “Hello, Twilight Sparkle.”
Twilight remembered the way the key in the room hidden beneath the concierge’s desk had glowed, so bright it had hurt her eyes, and swallowed at the thought of how bright this monstrous princess would burn if she opened up her Sight now.
“How do you know my name?”
A faintly amused glance. “I know…all things. And you knew, too.”
“I…I did?” Twilight’s head was still spinning as she fought to catch up. Was this the clone Sunset claimed to know? Surely not. No clone of Twilight would ever manage to become a princess. It was feasible that this alicorn could create the illusion of a resemblance to Twilight. Twilight wasn’t sure what the motivation for that would be, but she hadn’t understood a single thing that had happened since the Dream deviated from its usual path, so at this point anything was possible.
But regardless of that — of whether this alicorn was one of the clones or not — the existence of another alicorn was a complete impossibility. Princess Celestia was the only princess. Had always been the only princess. Early Equestrian theology was a scantily-sourced and hotly-debated field, but almost every scholar agreed that the Princess had been present at the dawn of the world; had perhaps even brought the world into being herself.
The mysterious Princess before her took no notice of inconvenient facts — like the fact she wasn’t supposed to exist. She continued their conversation as smoothly as if Twilight’s existential dread were of no consequence at all. “Did you enjoy meeting Spike?”
“Uh…” Twilight tried to come back to the present. “The dragon?”
“Yes. My faithful assistant.”
“He said he was my faithful assistant,” answered Twilight doubtfully. “But I didn’t know him.”
“Didn’t you?” The alicorn sounded surprised. “Well, I suppose you will. Or did. I’m no longer sure, myself. I miss Spike, sometimes. Until the wheel turns and I see him again.”
This bewildering statement did little to clear Twilight’s confusion. “Uh…but how can he be my assistant, if he’s yours?”
Even if he was a weird dragon with a habit of folding himself back into an egg, he was still a dragon. They didn’t usually take orders from foals.
The alicorn met her eyes again, and this time her smile was sad. “Oh, how young I was.”
Twilight frowned. What did that have to do with anything? Everypony was young, once. Even an alicorn must have been young once — unless they were an immortal alicorn, like Princess Celestia. Which possibly she was, even though a second alicorn was a complete impossibility. How young I was. It was a rather unanswerable sentiment.
“Tell me,” the alicorn said, her gaze now somehow a little hungry, “Tell me, Twilight Sparkle, of your life.”
This request was met with some perturbation. Twilight was not a social pony, but one slow afternoon when she had run out of other books she had read her grandmother’s copy of Twinkle Belle’s Guide to Etiquette and Sparkling Conversation, and she knew the theory of how to be social. This pony might be a princess, but she clearly did not. She kept saying weird things, and the conversation was only getting stranger.
“Well, I…read a lot,” she replied hesitantly. “I just finished Treatise on the Life and Times of Clover the Clever; Her Spells and Magicks; most ponies find Oulde Equuish too hard to understand, but I can read it okay, even though I’m only seven.”
“Ah,” breathed the princess, “I think I remember what it felt like to learn. I loved that.”
Twilight heard that with wide eyes but chose not to respond; even Twinkle Belle could not help her formulate a polite response to that.
“And I fly kites with my brother on weekends,” she said, slowly.
“Gleam…Shimmer…yes, Shining Armour,” the princess nodded, the words dripping like molasses from her mouth as she searched for the right ones. “…A brother.”
She knows me and my brother. The pieces were falling into place. She’s purple like the tower is purple. She’s a Princess — immeasurably powerful. She’s…she must be the one that brought me here. The Wizard.
I need to get her to let me go.
“And tomorrow I have my entrance exam,” she said pointedly. “I’m going to be doing a test in front of Princess Celestia. I need to be back in time.”
As direct an appeal as she could manage without begging, which she could not resort to unless she was truly desperate. Twinkle Belle focused on conversations with courtiers and aristocracy, but the principles applied just as well to a conversation with the secret Princess of Kidnapping. Keep your cards close to your chest, and act like you have equal power, even if you don’t.
The statement did not have the effect she had hoped for; that of immediate apology and release. Instead the alicorn simply sighed. “Ah, Celestia. I…miss her. It has been a long time…since I moved in the same planes as her. Since she moved on the same planes as me.”
“I understand,” Twilight said, latching onto this concrete fact with some relief. “I want to meet her too.”
“Luna went first.” The alicorn’s voice was a whisper again, and Twilight once more had the feeling that the alicorn was not really speaking to her. “She tired of the mortal world. She wanted to see what lay beyond. And Celestia could not long outlast her sister — not for a second time. And then I was alone. I have been alone a long time, and I will be alone a long time. It circles, little one. It circles, and we circle with it.”
“We do?” Twilight was shifting uncertainly from hoof to hoof again. She missed the solid conversational ground of meeting Princess Celestia.
“You have, and you will.”
Twilight shook her head. She was good at riddles, but she was getting nowhere with this one, and it was growing frustrating. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“No,” the alicorn smiled absently. “I don’t suppose I do, yet. But in time…in time…” Her eyes moved beyond Twilight, to the vast horizon contained within her own mane. “I am here, and you are here. We stand in two places and one. We have a great destiny before us.”
Circles within circles, confusion upon confusion. “But I don’t understand. What am I supposed to do?”
A distant smile in those starry pink eyes. “Great things, little one. Great things.”
Twilight began to feel strongly that she did not like the Princess of Time, or Magic, or weird towers — or whatever this stranger was princess of.
“One last thing I meant to ask you, Twilight Sparkle,” the alicorn said, a smile playing at the edges of her mouth.
Twilight waited mutely.
“What do you think of your friends?”
Twilight thought sourly of the room where the pony with her face had cavorted with five strangers, and how she had felt over and over again the pain of losing them, ponies that meant both nothing and everything to her. “I’m not fond of them.”
The alicorn chuckled. “That’s as it should be. Friends are not for you. Not yet. You’re much better off alone, for now. Remember that.”
Somewhat blankly, Twilight nodded. It was no less than the conclusion she had already arrived at herself, but to hear it confirmed by a princess was a very strange feeling.
The alicorn’s horn glowed, and she bent toward Twilight.
The foal backed away, ears flattening. “What are you doing?” The last thing she needed was more tampering from the Princess who had orchestrated this bizarre half-dream.
“I’m turning the wheel, little one. It all comes and goes, around and around. And everything falls into place.”
“I don’t want—”
“—Don’t panic. And remember, Twilight. You don’t need friends. All you’ll ever need, for a while yet, is your studies.”
The alicorn bent low, and though Twilight instinctively backed away, that great purple spire of a horn kept coming. A gentle touch to her forehead, and Twilight was filled with the same transcendent light that threaded the alicorn’s starry mane. It began in her horn, spiralling down the grooves in the bone, and then it drilled down into her brain with a sudden white-hot fury. It hurt, it burned, and Twilight heard a voice that sounded too high and full of pain to be hers. It kept screaming. Why did it keep screaming?