//------------------------------//
// Book of Shallows 
// Story: Book 1 - The Behemoth came to Canterlot 
// by Equimorto 
//------------------------------//

Wick Clip stared down at the wooden floor in the corner of her shop, at the spot where once had been the entrance to a lower room that wasn't there anymore. Some mornings she wondered if it hadn't all been a dream, but the memory stuck. Sometimes she wondered if she'd just been delirious, but then why had it stopped? It was probably true. It wasn't even the weirdest thing that had happened in times recent and slightly less so. Sometimes she really wondered how he was doing. She regretted never asking him his soup recipe. She regretted a lot of things, but that one was recent enough to be fresh, mild enough she preferred it over other regrets.
Was that her shop? She didn't own the place. She owned the contents, but she didn't feel them hers for the most part, and those she did weren't the ones putting bits on her table. Fate was cruel, but she'd established that already. But at least it had given her another chance at something different. She would go along with it. Nothing wrong with that.
She wondered what had happened the day before. News didn't travel as quickly from Ponyville to there without a magical projection across the country, and it looked like things were being kept secret on top of that. She'd only heard rumours, and some more concrete stuff about what had happened to Manehattan. It sounded like hyperbole, but there was no being sure of anything anymore at that point. She wondered if her friend was okay. If he was her friend.
That was an ugly and hurtful train of thought, always, and as always she forced her mind off it even as her eyes lingered on the constant missing reminder of what she'd had. And as always her thinking was derailed to darker places, places she was beginning to enjoy despite what her younger self might have thought of it. But there was nothing wrong with it, was there?
No. No more of that. That was a wall, and it was about time she tore it down. Nothing wrong with something when it doesn't hurt anyone, but that didn't apply to her. She could hurt others, she might hurt others, she was already hurting them in a way. But she'd been hurt. For a long while, she'd been hurt. Because life wasn't fair, and she understood that. And she was starting to decide that she wouldn't be fair to it in return.
There was a wrongness to it. She understood that. She didn't care. No, she did care. She was starting to care, yes, but not as she had before. She was in the wrong. And she enjoyed it. She had found her place. Because someone had to play that part and she was damn tired of playing her old one, and such a good fit for her new one. Because maybe history needed villains, after all, and it would give her everything life had denied her.