The light begins to fade around Fizzy as she feels a plush, but almost sticky ground beneath her hooves. Her eyes begin to adjust. all around her are almost sickly yellow walls, and a light brown, heavily trodden carpet. She turns around to see just the faintest glimmers of the ciderhouse’s store room dissolve into thin air, leaving her alone in unfamiliar territory.
No, within where the pages wanted her to go.
“Hello?” Fizzy calls out. Her voice echoes continuously back at her, reverberating from wall to wall in the impossibly long hallway.
“Strange,” she mumbles to herself. “There doesn’t seem to be anypony here…”
She begins to trot towards a doorway and pokes her head through. On the other side is a nearly identical empty room with the same brown carpet and the same decaying yellow walls.
“What is this place?” she wonders aloud. “It’s like nothing has happened here in… years.”
She trots to another room. And another. And another. Each room seems nearly identical to the last, except for a change in size. Sometimes a stack of chairs was be heaped into the corner of a room, as if prepared for guests that would never arrive.
“What’s the story here?” She asks to nopony other than herself. “Usually there’s another pony or character or… Something. I don’t think this is even Equestria.”
She pushes open a new door and falls backward in shock. The frame of a door had been expertly crafted into the drywall and finished to look just like every other door, but on the other side was only… more wall.
“Uhhh.”
She rises to her hooves and turns back to retrace her steps, but instead of the open door she walked through waiting for her, there are three other doors with a sign saying “Make your choice.”
“Well that’s not ominous.”
She moves forward and examines each of the three doors.
“Is this some sort of test? If this is a story, why is it boiled down to such… meaningless pieces?”
She blinks and steps back.
“Unless this isn’t a story. Maybe this place… is between the pages of the book. Maybe it’s the absence of stories. As if… the opposite of a book that contains every story, is a library that holds nothing.”
She blinks and examines the three doors.
“Or maybe I’m going CRAZY and just need to wake up.”
Fizzy bites her hoof. It hurts and she loses 2 HP.
“We'll cross that one off, then.”
She scrutinizes the three doors in front of her.
“Well if this is a trick, then that means I need to use… the trick door!”
She turns around and finds that the trick door behind her has vanished.
“Shoot. If there’s a spooky monster behind me now, I’m going to be very angry,” Fizzy says warningly.
Turning around once more, there are only three doors.
“Well, okay. I can open them, but that doesn’t mean I have to go through, right?”
She tosses open the first door, and a dark energy seems to pulse from the other side. A void of pitch black that beacons to her, whispering sweet nothings to her. She can hear the flutter of pages and the gentle coo of a mother’s song. A bedtime story to lull her to rest.
With three steps that seem to have stronger gravity than normal, she throws open the second door, and finds… the storage room of the Ponyville Flower Shop. This is it! She could escape right here and end these tricks. Maybe she could learn more about the Empty Library at a different time. After all, there’s many more pages to find for the Book of All Stories. She can’t spend all of her time here.
Moving seems easier after knowing there seems to be a way out. She tosses open the third door proudly, and shutters as the first thing she sees is two deep crimson eyes glaring back at her.
Fizzy gasps and tries to slam the door shut. But something that seems like a claw reaches forward and pushes, refusing to be locked away again. She pushes as hard as she can, and feels her horn beginning to flare up. This is bad. She can’t hold this thing off forever. She has to do something.
Should she escape home or jump into the void?
*