Chapter 1: Present Times
By N00813
--
The inn stank of sweat, alcohol and desperation. Dimly lit by flickering torches, and with the setting sun outside pouring orange-red beams through the grease-stained windows, the inn’s wooden panelling tried to shroud itself in shadow, as if ashamed. Unfortunate souls of all kinds and races had gathered in droves, for a chance to drink the night away on the dirty wooden planks that passed for furniture. There was no barmaid, or anyone of the sort; a lone bartender stood behind a long, worn wooden counter the colour of stale piss. The lavender unicorn at the weathered entranceway scrunched up her snout, a reflex to a stimulus she no longer was any stranger to.
Twilight Sparkle tightened the dark brown cloak around her neck and shoulders, and gave the tip of the hood covering her head and shrouding her face a subconscious tug with her magic. She slunk quietly towards the bar counter. There was no need to start any sort of commotion. That would just waste time, and time was something she didn’t have. Not since Spike had been taken from her in that violent rush of inky blackness. Not now, when she was this close to recovering him, and bringing his kidnapper to justice.
She growled automatically, receiving a glare from the black griffon sitting on the barstool next to her. It was odd, really. She didn’t have the recollection of actually propping herself up on the chair she was currently sitting on. It was as if she had simply teleported from the bar floor to the top of her barstool. She knew she hadn’t, of course. That would have drawn attention. And judging by the cacophony of clinking tankards, drunken laughs and… boisterous singing in the background, everything was normal. As normal as could be, with her target not a few miles from here.
Not for her, though. This was her last box on the checklist. Her final stretch. The final step of the thousandth mile of her journey.
Twilight waited patiently for the bartender to come over. Drawing attention to herself, at this point in her journey, wouldn’t be the smartest of ideas. She was a smart unicorn. After all, she used to study at the School for Gifted Unicorns. Used to. That was a past life, one that she could return to after this last hurdle.
The onset of memories, some blurred and others rendered with vicious detail, could wait until she was in the privacy of her own room. Right now, she needed to focus on her surroundings, and prepare for tomorrow’s confrontation. It was a stroke of luck that she was born a unicorn, she thought. Her horn was a weapon, in both physical and magical terms. Weapons were almost a necessity in this region of the world, and many tended to underestimate an opponent who appeared to be unarmed – an opponent such as herself.
The griffon next to her turned back to his own brooding, staring into the flickering flames reflected in the empty glass in front of him. Twilight glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, the cloak’s rough fabric hiding half of her face.
A long-barrelled rifle, ibex-manufacture by the looks of it, hung off his back on tight leather straps. A small machete waited in its sheath, the latter strapped to the griffon’s feathery chest. The handles of both weapons looked well-worn, seemingly as old as the griffon himself. A dangerous opponent, Twilight concluded, despite his relatively small size and wiry frame.
How long had she been travelling, to be able to roughly evaluate someone’s combat experience at a glance? Twilight honestly couldn’t tell. The reflection of her face in the griffon’s glass didn’t reveal much. Her striped mane was still there, her coat was still purple and she was still a she. It felt like only yesterday when the dragon took Spike –
Twilight shook her head. That injustice would be resolved very, very soon. The memories could wait.
The griffon whirled around silently, disappearing behind Twilight’s field of view. To compensate, she turned as quickly as she dared. She belonged, and she was simply looking around. A glance to the stairs at the back of the inn saw his tail disappear up into the floor above. If this inn was built like all the others, then that floor was where the inn’s rooms for hire would be. He wasn’t gunning for her, then.
“Hullo!”
The voice sounded behind her, and she whipped around. Twilight made sure to keep looking down, letting the hood obscure her mane and eyes. From beneath the rough, worn fabric, she could see the orange chest of the male barkeep.
“I’d like a room,” she said, keeping her voice deliberately rough and hoarse. That would make it even harder for him to identify her. Harder for him to alert the rest of the inn to her presence. She had prepared, of course, but there was no such thing as being too safe. “One night.”
“Payment upfront, a hundred bits, fifty riyal, or same in goods,” the barkeep replied, his legs swaying beneath his shifting torso.
Twilight smiled, despite herself. This guy was a worse liar than Applejack. “Seventy five bits.” She wasn’t going to get ripped off.
“Eighty.”
Eighty was still steep, but nothing she couldn’t handle. Best to play his little game, and get him out of her hair so that more important things could fill her mind.
She tilted her head upwards, letting herself see the barkeep’s chin bob up and down, before magicking an appropriate amount of coin from underneath her cloak. The barkeep swept the money away from her with a hoof, before tossing an old, battered key onto the stained countertop in front of her, and sweeping off to the side. A glance that way told her that he was now busy with another order, this time from some big earth pony. She smirked.
Twilight slipped off the stool languidly, before trotting across the inn floor and towards the staircase. Luckily, no one was drunk or stupid enough to attempt to remove her cloak. The results would have been spectacular, to say the least.
The room she’d rented wasn’t spacious or comfortable, or even clean. The window was simply a small hole, cut into the wall, covered by an iron grate that was thinner than the stems of her quills. The floor beneath the window had a similar grate over a hole that she suspected was some sort of drainpipe. Dust and spiderwebs papered the walls, as much a part of them as the light wooden panelling beneath. More insect residue covered the floor and hung off the ceiling like miniature stalactites. The overall look screamed of decay and neglect, the theme highlighted by the application of brown, dark brown and khaki splotches on every piece of furniture and panelling. Under the weak, silver moonlight, it looked more like a dungeon cell than a paid room.
A sharp pang rushed through her as a memory of the past burst through the walls, forcing her to scrunch up her nose to ward off the stinging behind her eyes; Rarity would have a fit, had she come along.
Twilight exhaled slowly, before she began to sweep dust and grime off the bed and magick it out of the window. Then, she turned to the door and locked it shut. It took three attempts, but finally the latch struck home, and Twilight threw herself into bed. She didn’t bother to take off her cloak – there was simply no need, and furthermore, it would stop any attempts to disturb her. Whilst she was relatively vulnerable during sleep, she had enchanted the cloak herself, and any attempt to move her would end in a grand light show. Then she’d wake up, and if the assailant was still alive, she’d be able to do whatever she pleased to him or her or it.
She grimaced. When had she started thinking like this? It seemed like only yesterday that everything was normal in Ponyville. That the most important things in her mind were her friends and her studies, and not whether she was going to live through the night.
Twilight pushed the front of her torso up with her forelegs. The hard mattress barely flexed beneath her shifting weight. On the bedside cabinet sat an old, dirty mirror with a crack running down its surface, whilst an enclosed flame danced inside a small, purely utilitarian lamp on the left of the mirror.
She stared at the mirror’s reflection. There was nothing of note on it; like the griffon’s glass, it depicted a blurred, rough image of a purple unicorn with a deep violet mane, striped with magenta. A cloak draped over her form like a funeral dress, and two intense purple eyes glared out from the darkness under the cloth hood, seemingly alone with nothing to hold them up. The crack split her face in half.
Twilight blinked once, and then looked away, frowning. She pulled back her hood and ran a hoof through her mussed mane once, twice, before deepening her scowl. What was the point? It wasn’t like she was going to perform tomorrow in front of thousands. Why did her appearance matter anymore? What was she really looking for?
Why did anything matter anymore? Next to Spike, next to her friends, her Princess, herself, they were all insignificant.
Spike.
Twilight’s eyes misted up. No, no, no! She threw a glance over to the locked door, and the window. There was no one outside. Taking several deep breaths, she layered a spell over herself.
Then the dam broke, and she felt drops of hot liquid fall down her cheeks as she held her head in her hooves. The spell kept the sound in, letting her release her own feelings with abandon. This was it. Tomorrow was the day that she was going to get Spike back, and go back to her friends and her mentor and everything was going to be just like the old times…
Yeah, right, her mind scoffed. Twilight’s sobs, neither happy nor sad, but relieved, choked away as she unconsciously grimaced. The motion stretched the mithril-based tattoos etched from the corner of her mouth and eyes to the base of her spine, eliciting a cold hiss from the purple pony as dull pain burned at her cheeks. Still, she didn’t regret getting the tattoos. They had saved her life on more than one occasion, and they would save one more soul by the end of tomorrow.
Twilight’s hooves moved towards one another, crushing the air caught in between. Spike. She remembered that day, clear as yesterday.
It was night. Exactly when, she couldn’t remember, but the moon was still rising, about a third of the way through its journey across the sky. She’d told Spike to go clean the library. Stupid, stupid Twilight. That could have been the last time she saw him alive, and her last words, the words he was taking to a potential grave, would have been ‘Spike, re-shelve these books for me’. And he would die, thinking that was all she ever thought of him; as an assistant. A friend, yes, but an assistant first and foremost. She hadn’t even looked at him as she gave the order. The book on magical effects on condensed matter had been more interesting than him.
Stupid, stupid Twilight.
Choked laughter forced itself out of her throat, seemingly mocking the tears still streaming down her face.
Why Spike? Why did he have to be the one? Who would have been sick enough to take a defenceless little dragon? And what for?
A crash had sounded from downstairs, and at first, she’d thought Spike had toppled a bunch of books or plates or whatnot that now, didn’t really matter. Twilight, shamefully, remembered the words that had coalesced in her mind, ready to spear her assistant with: ‘Be careful!’ ‘How many times have I told you?’ Yet it wasn’t just Spike’s face that had stared up at her from the library floor.
Twilight growled, but the torrent of tears leaking out of her eyes didn’t stop.
Spike, her little, loyal assistant, a friend since the earliest days of her life, had been trapped in the vice-grip of another dragon.
She would never forget the dragon’s face. Scales black as ink crested with spikes of dark purple, with chillingly cold amber eyes, the dragon looked at her for one split-second; that fateful moment in time, in which all of Twilight’s thoughts had slowed as if wading through honey. All she could do, and all she did, was gape.
There were not many moments like that in life, Twilight reflected, as she sat with her head in her hooves on the dirty mattress. Looking down at her pillow, she saw a flash of that cruel, jagged snout that was the dragon’s face. An incoherent roar and a blast of purple magic left the stained pillow blackened, a small curl of smoke spinning upwards from the charred fabric.
Of course she had to be so stupid as to do nothing. As the dragon unfurled its wings with a single, sharp flick and propelled itself through the hole in the library and into the night sky, she had blinked, rapidly, repeatedly, screaming that this was all a dream. Once she cut the sole of her hoof on the splintered wood, she knew that it wasn’t. Scanning the shroud of night for any sign of her foster brother had proved fruitless. It was as if the dragon had never existed at all. Every star in the sky looked like a green puff of dragon-fire, flickering in flares of cruel laughter, the aftermath of a nasty cosmic joke. She’d looked back, seeing the hole in the library wall. The building tilted haphazardly, the structure weakened by the dragon’s forceful entry. It had to be some sort of horrid, evil nightmare. Had to.
The blood dripping from her hoof was… was real, though.
Spike was gone. Not in any sort of game, or any rash decision. This was a kidnapping.
Spike was her brother. Foster brother, sure, but blood and ancestry didn’t mean much to her. He was as much of a brother as Shining, perhaps even more so – all the time they spent together, all of the struggles they went through had to mean something. The day he’d grown to monstrous proportions, and managed to get a grip on himself; the week their bond had been tested when the owl came, and come out stronger than ever in the end; the years they’d spent together in Canterlot, before the events that had brought her to this town…
Twilight’s sobs returned in full force, exploding out of her mouth like the tears streaming out of her eyes.