Proofreading props for this chapter go to Garbo802, Scrocket, and anongladje.
Solitary Locust
Chapter 2
A white-hot bolt of pain shot through the root of Twilight’s horn, interrupting the pleasantly disconnected sleep in which she had been relaxing. It was a deep, permeating sort of discomfort that radiated from the very inner core, like a lightning strike being channeled through her body. The unicorn let out a raw gasp and instinctively tried to put her hoof up to her head, but another searing pain erupted in her foreleg when she moved it. Confused and frightened, she bucked her hind legs, trying to beat away whatever was hurting her. Her hooves struck only empty air, and the exertion left her with a burning sensation in her muscles.
She opened her eyes and was immediately confronted with a large, indistinct, gnarled object not two inches away from her face. This was so unexpected it set off her fight-or-flight reaction, causing her to roll her body away from the tree—right onto her injured foreleg. Twilight screeched, turned her head to the side, and retched from the sheer pain. Though her body spasmed several times, the only thing that came out of her mouth was bile.
Still not awake enough to apply sense or rationality to her situation, Twilight propped herself up on her intact left foreleg while her hind legs scuffed the ground, trying to achieve enough balance to hold her body upright. After several failed attempts, her shaking legs managed to lift her into a normal standing position, from which she took off at a run. But she was in no shape to exert herself that way, especially on only three legs, and made it only a very short distance before her lone front hoof caught on a root and tripped her.
As she tried to get up again, bleeding a greenish-yellowish substance from her bad leg, Twilight got a good look at the hoof on which she was leaning. The blind, senseless panic that had consumed her just moments before was rapidly forgotten in favor of feeling her chest and back, and then the wings on her back, and then her strangely-textured, twisted horn. The changeling gasped again as the events that had led her into the forest grove finally came back to her.
A dry, raspy sob left her throat and she let herself slide back down onto the ground, too overwhelmed to get up again. Twilight’s new body wasn’t actually able to cry, as she no longer had tear ducts, but knowing this previously irrelevant fact about changeling anatomy didn’t change what her brain was conditioned to do when she was upset. The result was a grotesque parody of the way real ponies sounded when they cried. She curled up on the ground, unconsciously searching with her good hoof for her tail so she could stroke it and comfort herself—until she remembered she didn’t have one anymore. At that point, her ultimately purposeless sniffling turned into pitiful whimpers.
Everything Twilight hadn’t had time to think about before she passed out was now catching up to her. She didn’t even know where to begin; whether to try getting up and going somewhere, or to just sit there and let the full horror of nearly having her horn ripped off her head sink in while she cried. A sense of helplessness started to creep over her as she lay there. How was she going to get herself out of this when she didn’t even know where to start?
She was alone, traumatized and completely bewildered; badly injured and unable to run if she had to; and worst of all, attempting to use magic was completely out of the question. There was no book Twilight knew of that talked about ponies suddenly transforming into changelings, so there were no reference materials available to help her determine what, exactly, had happened to her up there on the podium. Already, she could feel terror beginning to sink its claws into her.
Inevitably, somepony would find her and she would be powerless to resist capture. They would then take her to the town and cut off her horn. Her friends would interrogate her for the location of the ‘real’ Twilight Sparkle, which she would be unable to give because she was the real Twilight Sparkle.
"Oh, Celestia, please help me..." she whispered, looking pleadingly upward, and then she gasped in horror. It was the first time she had actually, really listened to the way she spoke since the transformation. Twilight's new voice sounded, for lack of something close in nature to compare it to, as if she had gargled broken glass before talking. Speaking Equestrian was also obviously not something changelings were predisposed towards, as she had to work hard to get her tongue around the long fangs at times and her mouth tried replace the s sound with a z every time she said it.
It brought her right back to the dread she had felt the moment before, coupled with a surreal feeling of alienation from herself. An overwhelming need to move took hold of her. She needed to do something, to go somewhere else, to get out of the forest before something bad happened. It didn’t matter where she ended up so long as she wasn’t sitting around waiting to be found (and de-horned!).
Twilight uncurled herself and made an effort to sit up. It took several tries to accomplish this task, as her available limbs were so weak they could barely support her weight. After a bit of very painful trial-and-error practice, she learned to walk—very carefully—without tripping every other step; but her wobbly legs still felt as if they would give out beneath her at any second.
The weakness was yet another problem—she had almost no physical strength to speak of anymore, and she didn’t know why. In fact, her entire body seemed to have been drained of energy, and although her brain told her she should be moving, every other part of her wanted to go back to sleep. She was going to have to be careful about how much energy she expended, lest she collapse from exhaustion in the middle of an open field or on a road. Fortunately, though she still had difficulty getting her unfamiliar limbs to work together with any kind of grace, she could afford to move more slowly and get a feel for it now that she was no longer in immediate danger.
Not actually having any particular destination in mind, Twilight followed a trail of crushed plants and snapped branches in the foliage, which led her to the edge of the treeline. Ponyville was just barely visible in the distant landscape. The lights of Ponyville, anyhow; beyond that, she could barely see anything, as it was nighttime and there was only a sliver of moon hanging in the sky.
She was able to make out enough detail in her surroundings to see that this was the same meadow she had teleported herself into. There was a road somewhere nearby—if she was remembering correctly; it was hard to think through the thick soup of exhaustion, pain, and tension that her brain was currently marinating in.
After staring blankly at the town for some time, Twilight slid down the embankment and set off down the barely-visible dirt road in the direction opposite that of Ponyville proper. She still didn’t know where she wanted to go; was still too disoriented to think about what she was doing.
This time she managed to stay on her hooves in spite of the uneven ground; her balance had improved slightly now that the world wasn’t rolling back and forth in front of her eyes and there wasn’t a carpet of roots, branches, and plants trying to trip her with every step she took. Her three-legged success came at the cost of speed, however. Though Twilight didn’t know exactly how long it was that she spent travelling that little dirt path, it had to be an hour at the least.
The path eventually widened, though the density of the branches overhead increased at about the same rate and covered the moon until it was almost impossible to see at all beyond vague shapes in the dark. Twilight worried at first that she might have been heading into the Everfree Forest, but what she could see of the trees remained gently curved and unintimidating, as opposed to the leering, skeleton-like branches of the Everfree.
As she neared a somewhat acutely angled bend in the road, something alien stirred within her. It took a moment for Twilight to identify—more through the process of elimination than anything else—this strange feeling as being the sixth sense possessed only by changelings: empathy.
The things she was feeling, of course, made little sense to her beyond that basic fact. A pony who had just acquired the ability to see after a lifetime of blindness might have understood her situation, but Twilight had no such experience. She had only a theoretical knowledge of magical empathy until that point, her bizarre experience in the town square notwithstanding.
What she did know, and what did get through to her muddled brain, was that there was something alive and sentient just up the road—and based on how the feeling was steadily growing stronger, whatever or whoever it was was moving toward her.
‘Thinking quickly’ wasn’t a concept that could be applied to Twilight in her current state, but she did think as fast as her distracted, exhausted brain would allow. The first thing she came up with was a question directed at herself: ‘Why did you walk up the middle of the path everypony else walks on like everything was normal? Stupid, stupid, stupid!’.
Immediately thereafter, as her understanding of the situation became more complete, her brain spat out another significant thought. This time it was less of a coherent statement, and more the presence of a simple idea, because of her rising desperation, but it went somewhere along the lines of ‘I can’t take any chances! I need to hide right away!’.
As quietly as she could, she hobbled over to some dark shapes on the side of the road that she assumed were bushes and plunged into them. They scratched at her exoskeleton and, in particular it seemed, at her broken foreleg—but Twilight managed to get far enough in that she was hidden from view before a softly glowing light rounded the corner.
Twilight managed to sneak a look at the newcomers from her hiding place. They were indeed ponies: one, greenish unicorn stallion, was lighting the path with his horn, while the other was a drably colored earth pony—also a stallion—walking on his right, his eyes darting nervously around.
As their hoofsteps drew nearer, she heard them talking quietly to each other. She was too far away to make out what they were actually saying, however, save for a few scattered fragments.
“...up to our ears in... probably run into it...”
“...to think that... don’t know why...”
“...we’d be ten thousand bits richer...”
“...not going to... makes you think...”
“...you never know...”
“...probably long gone, you...”
“...so negative all the...”
“...to fight a changeling anyway... one of the search parties...”
“...can’t be that tough...”
She fought the urge to hyperventilate with every ounce of self-control she had as they passed by. The unicorn actually brushed against the leaves on the front of the bush, and if he had looked to his left at that moment he would surely have seen a pair of terrified blue eyes staring back at him. But he didn’t look, as he was too engrossed in his conversation with the earth pony, and the two continued on down the road, oblivious to the fact that they had just come within half a meter of the changeling they were talking about.
Still holding her breath, Twilight waited for their hoofsteps to fade into the distance. It wasn’t until the sound of their conversation had also vanished that she unfroze and started gulping air in deep breaths that made her chest heave. Even then, she didn’t dare leave the safety of the bush yet; she peered out after them, bending her neck in a position that, while it was very uncomfortable, didn’t cause her horn to jut out into the road when she looked.
Once the unicorn’s light had been completely swallowed up by the dark night, she finally began to untangle herself from the bushes. Her broken foreleg, in particular, caused her a lot of trouble, since she could now use only one hoof to move the bushes aside and she kept getting caught on their branches.
After some struggling, she managed to crawl out onto the road again, where she lay, panting heavily. Getting herself out, combined with her brief moment of terror, had taxed her already exhausted body beyond what it could take. She was still shaking, an aftereffect of having her system infused with the changeling equivalent of adrenaline.
It seemed like those two had been on their way to somewhere in particular—but from what she’d gathered, there were groups of ponies that were actively looking for her. If one of them came across her, she was done for; she had no strength to run or fight, and trying to perform an advanced spell like teleportation again would most likely burn out her horn completely.
A loud, rumbling crack suddenly split the air. Startled, Twilight scrambled to her hooves as fast as she could with her three remaining legs, eyes darting wildly around at the silhouettes of the trees lining the road. When she was unable to identify the source of the noise, she spun around to look in the other direction, and found nothing.
The spaces between the tree branches lit up with a bright flash, scaring the high-strung black creature so badly that she almost jumped out of her hackles. Twilight could still find nothing, which wound the tension inside her even tighter. She heard another boom and started once again, this time so badly that she lost her balance and had to fall back onto her haunches so that she didn’t go crashing face-first into the dirt. For a second time, the sky lit up briefly.
She flinched when she felt something hit her smashed muzzle. But it didn’t hurt; it just felt wet, and harmlessly slid down the side of her face to drip off one of her fangs. Twilight stuck her tongue out and tasted it: it was just water. Not a second later, a faint pattering noise filled her ears, and a sheet of water began to fall both on and around her.
“Just rain,” Twilight murmured to herself, staring distantly at a puddle that was forming in the road as her terror evaporated and left her feeling strangely empty. “Just a thunderstorm...”
How could she have been so afraid of a phenomenon she’d watched Rainbow Dash put together time after time in Ponyville? She knew what thunder and lightning were. Not only was it humiliating, but it drove home the fact that Twilight Sparkle wasn’t cut out for this kind of situation.
She had never actually broken a bone before that day; Rainbow Dash said it was painful, but Twilight hadn’t understood just what that meant until her leg snapped in half in the town square. The worst pain she had ever encountered before that morning was a headache from a spell she’d miscast as a filly. Princess Celestia had had her stay in bed for a day while her magic recharged itself, and by the next day she had felt fine.
It was a recurring theme throughout her life, in fact. There was always somepony Twilight could turn to when she needed help: friends, the Princess, her parents, Shining Armor, Cadence... But she had just been attacked by an entire town, and everypony she cared about thought she was a changeling imposter. Twilight was truly on her own.
Shivering, she sat in the middle of the road, which was quickly transforming into a swamp thanks to all the mud, and hung her head sadly. There were very few times in her life when she could remember feeling as utterly alone and forlorn as she did now. One was when Discord had corrupted all her friends and turned Equestria into a carnival of insanity, when she herself had been corrupted and thought she didn’t need friendship.
And another was the time she had been rejected and banned from attending her own brother’s wedding when she tried to warn the Princess, her brother, and her friends that ‘Princess Cadance’ was actually a...
...was actually an imposter. A fake. A changeling.
Just like she was now.
More cacophonous thunder filled the air as Twilight stood wearily up again. Instead of continuing down the path, she simply walked into the trees on the right-hoof side of the road, not reacting particularly strongly when she bumped into things or got scratched. She blundered through the woods, tripping on roots and getting herself snagged by branches. She didn’t actually have a destination in mind; she was just moving because something in the depths of her mind told her that if she stopped, the panic would catch up to her.
Twilight wondered, very distantly, if she was still in shock over what had happened earlier that day; if the anxiety would hit suddenly and overwhelm her later on. There was no sense of dread or urgency tugging at her mind anymore. Instead she felt strangely numb and detached from her surroundings, as though everything was happening in a dream. Given her sordid record when it came to managing stress, she should have had a panic attack long ago. In fact, by that point she really should have been starting to develop psychotic symptoms, as had happened during some of her most severe experiences in the past.
Her aimless journey through the wild forest eventually led her to another path. It was crude, and it was overgrown, like it hadn’t been used in years, but it was still clear that a course of direction had been delineated there at some point. Lacking anywhere better to go, Twilight lurched down the path. Had she been more lucid, she might have realized that following old roads without knowing where they led was not the best idea, but her brain was too clouded to analyze the situation properly.
Fortunately, it led her not into the claws of a rogue manticore or the gaping maw of a quarray eel, but to a large clearing. On one side, there were more trees, and on the other, a solid wall of black; wherever it went, Twilight couldn’t see where the forest began again. The only thing of note in the clearing itself was a hill which, Twilight noticed, had a tree the size of the oak her library was built into growing on it.
The tree started to gain more and more features with each step she took toward it. Little boxes hanging from the branches became birdhouses; solid lines became a wooden rail; and dark spots in the front of the tree itself proved to be windows and a door. Twilight stopped, trying to process this development. The ‘tree’ was now easily recognizable as Fluttershy’s cottage. The overgrown path she’d walked must have been another, older way to get to the cottage; maybe one Fluttershy herself had used for a while and then abandoned.
For a moment, Twilight felt a surge of terror shoot through her. She was right in front of the house—close enough that Fluttershy would have seen her if she happened to turn on the light and look out the window. But thinking about the lights dredged up an old memory of a conversation she’d had with Fluttershy once; specifically, the part where Fluttershy mentioned she almost never turned off her lights when she was at home, because she was scared of the dark. Unless her power had coincidentally been cut tonight, it was very likely that no lights also meant no Fluttershy.
Of course. It made sense: Fluttershy probably would have been terrified of going home by herself after what had happened in the town square, for fear of being attacked and replaced herself. She had probably stopped by with Rainbow Dash to feed her animals and then gone to spend the night with one of her friends; either Dash or Rarity, most likely.
With a raspy exclamation that sounded more like a hiss than a sigh, Twilight turned around and limped back into the woods, almost zombie-like in her movements because of her lack of energy. Some of the shock was beginning to wear off at last, making her feel anxious and fidgety. The pain in her foreleg was beginning to seep through the protective haze of dissociation she had built up.
Twilight stopped after just a few steps and looked back, an awful idea forming in her head.
Fluttershy was a licensed veterinary clinician. Having been in the yellow pegasus’s home a few times in the past—usually when Spike managed to hurt himself in one of his harebrained schemes to impress Rarity—Twilight knew she kept a store of medical supplies on hoof for treating animals. Surely she would have some antibiotics and something to use as a splint, wouldn’t she?
Slowly, the squeaky wheels of Twilight’s brain started to turn, for the first time since she woke up.
She had gone without medical attention for several hours at the least, as it had been late in the morning when she escaped from the town. After lying in the dirt for most of that time with an open fracture, there was a strong possibility the wound could get infected. Very little was actually known about changelings’ immune systems; it wasn’t a topic that had been extensively studied.
There was no creature in Equestria—not even alicorns—that had complete immunity against every disease that ever existed, however, and she knew she was probably still just as susceptible to illness as a changeling as she had been when she was a unicorn. Even worse, her magic wasn’t working properly. A unicorn’s ability to fight infection was closely tied to how well their magic was functioning, and for all Twilight knew, the same was true of changelings.
Getting her hooves on something to splint her leg with was the most important thing on Twilight’s list as of that moment. There were also a number of drugs she would probably be better off with than without—namely, painkillers and an antiseptic; and if at all possible she also wanted to find some medical-grade horn salve to help soothe and repair the damage done by both her own botched magic and whatever spell had grabbed her in the town square.
She knew there weren’t many places in Equestria where she could find those kinds of medicines that weren’t locked up tight and under guard. Without the ability to use her horn, Twilight had as much chance of successfully breaking into the Ponyville pharmacy as the average earth pony, and trying to get something from the hospital was also a bad idea.
There were medical supplies inside Fluttershy’s cottage, but Fluttershy wasn’t around to give them to her—nor would she be likely to willingly give Twilight anything at all if she were around, save for ‘Take anything you want! Just don’t hurt the animals, please! Or me! Um... that is, if you don’t mind...’
...And besides, it would be wrong for Twilight to break into the cottage and take them herself. Wouldn’t it...? Even when she was hurt and alone and absolutely needed them as soon as possible, it would be wrong.
...Wouldn’t it?
Twilight sat down and reached for her tail so she could stroke it the way her mother used to when she had a breakdown at home, back when she was a filly. She giggled nervously and humorlessly when, for the second time that night, she was reminded that she no longer had her long, silky tail; only a sort of sail-like fin that served as another empathy sensor, just like the one that had replaced her mane. The tension inside her rose rapidly as she argued with herself, coming up with reason after reason both to steal Fluttershy’s things and to not steal them.
What would Fluttershy think of her if she burglarized the pegasus’s house? Even more importantly, what would Princess Celestia think of her? Being late with a friendship report and making a fool of herself in front of an audience weren’t criminal actions, but robbery was! And having screwed up a spell didn’t exempt her from the law! Twilight’s breathing hitched and started to become irregular. How could she have even thought of doing something like—
Another bolt of pain seared through the root of her horn, reminding her exactly why she had even thought about breaking into Fluttershy’s house. Frustrated, Twilight found herself unable to move forward or backward: she couldn’t go into the house because Celestia would banish her to the moon for being such an embarrassment if she did, and she couldn’t leave either because where else could she go that offered anything resembling medical care for her wounds?
Who knew what kind of illnesses she could get if she didn’t do something about the fact that her bones were sticking out of her skin! There was no way Twilight could possibly manage another long journey up the road in her current state, and she would surely end up dying of endomagical cornomacralysis or some other horrible infection if she left her leg the way it was for much longer!
It all came down to whether Twilight would rather lose Fluttershy’s trust or die of an infection; disappoint the Princess or let herself go doing the right thing. And if she died, she would never be able to gain her friend’s trust back at all, and she would never see Princess Celestia again at all! And if she didn’t die...
It was a lose-lose situation.
Twilight imagined that regal white face looking down on her with a look of the utmost sadness, and the Princess’s voice telling her she was a bad student who should have known better than to do what she did.
“I’m disappointed in your choice of actions, Twilight,” said Princess Celestia as she stood over Twilight, who was trapped halfway between unicorn and changeling. “Not only did you break the law, you lost the trust of your friend as you did.”
“I’m sorry!” Twilight pleaded, cowering in the most humble and submissive position she could manage. “Please Princess Celestia, please forgive me—I didn’t want to die!”
Princess Celestia stomped her hoof on the ground, making the mutant freak before her whimper pathetically. “It does not matter, Twilight! The fact that you did something so abhorrible is proof that you don’t deserve to use magic, much less learn its secrets!”
“I’m sorry... I’m sorry... I’m sorry...” she repeated mindlessly. “Princess, I’ll make it right—tell me how to make it right—”
“The time for making right has long passed,” said the Princess coldly. “This is a time for punishment.”
Her horn glowed like the sun peeking over the horizon, momentarily awing Twilight into silence; the pathetic pile of black and lavender forgot everything for that moment to gaze in wonder at the sheer perfection before her. Then Princess Celestia struck, and with one clean swipe she cleaved Twilight’s horn from her head at the base. Blood cascaded down the mutated face as she screamed in agony. A shower of sparks burst from her head—the result of her ability to use magic leaking out of her forever.
A pure white glow surrounded Twilight, and the mutated thing vanished. Next thing she knew, she was on the moon—and the ghosts of other ponies who’d been shot up there were wandering around, telling her she would join them when she was dead, and a hideous face was staring up at her from below, saying you’ve met with a terrible fate, haven’t you?—just like in those End is Neigh horror novels Rainbow Dash liked to read—
“Oh, Celestia! Oh, Celestia...”
Twilight started to cry again, at last, as she tried to extract herself from her own imagination. By then, she was breathing far faster than she usually did, and her attempts to control it only made the hyperventilation worse.
Surely Princess Celestia would banish her to the moon when all was righted; or worse, right into the sun itself! And they would take her horn anyway, and she would never be able to use magic again!
She felt dizzy and confused, and was glad she wasn’t standing up. It was already difficult enough to stay upright without all the new ailments—and she felt like she was going to throw up, too. A moment later she dry-heaved onto the ground beside her. It helped settle her stomach a little, but what it did not help was the crushing tension inside her.
And these were all things that, once she found the mental focus to put them together and make sense of them, told her what was going on. If she could, she would have taken her pulse, but there weren’t any known places on the legs where it could be felt, and her heart was situated behind a thick exoskeleton.
“Okay,” she said to herself, trying to keep her voice steady and calm. “I’m hyperventilating... I feel dizzy and ill... I’m experiencing a sensation of impending doom... I feel as though things are out of my control... and I’m having intrusive thoughts that revolve around being punished by Princess Celestia.”
She took a deep breath and counted to ten, ignoring her body’s demands that she exhale immediately. Then she let it out as slowly and steadily as she could.
“...I’m having a panic attack.”
Twilight took another deep breath, counted to ten, and let it out slowly, letting her body take over and letting her mind go blank on its own. When she finished exhaling, she breathed in again, just as slowly.
“Now that I know I’m having a panic attack, I also know that all of this is an overreaction,” she continued, closing her eyes and willing her body’s tense muscles to relax. “The things I’ve been thinking are not an objective analysis of my situation. They are the result of a disproportionate response to stress by my nervous system, which does not think rationally as I am capable of doing. I am an intelligent, competent unicorn, and I can solve this problem satisfactorily if I regain control over my faculties and organize myself...”
For the next few minutes, Twilight just sat out in the rain, doing the breathing exercises she’d taught herself and diffusing the feelings of helplessness and urgency that had pervaded her mind. When she finally opened her eyes again and looked up, the anxiety had mostly ebbed away and left a much calmer unicorn behind.
To solve the problem at hoof, she needed to look at it logically, rather than emotionally. This was difficult to do with her mind so clouded, but she had time to sort things out now that she had her panic at bay.
The problem was that she had an injury and no way to treat it, unless she broke into her friend’s house and stole things. Twilight tried to force herself not to think about the long-term consequences this time, because they were irrelevant.
Think about now, Twilight. It won’t matter what Princess Celestia does to you if you’re dead...
It really did come down to disappointing Princess Celestia with her behavior or letting her leg get infected. And, her irrational thoughts aside, that was an easy decision. Twilight knew the Princess would be upset if she broke into Fluttershy’s house, but she would be more upset if Twilight died.
Because Princess Celestia loves me and cares about my well-being.
This thought warmed Twilight even under the torrents of cold rain. She suddenly felt energized; as energized as she could be given the circumstances, anyhow. Now she knew what to choose, and she could do it without feeling terrible about it. Or, at least, she could feel just a bit less terrible about it than she had before.
After a few failed tries, she managed to stand up, and limped toward the cottage again. She stumbled into the door when she reached it, as she’d miscalculated her steps, and ended up banging her head against it. Everything was unbalanced and spinning after that, and she didn’t know if it was from exhaustion or anxiety, the relatively mild blow, or all three in combination.
After she’d leaned against the wall for a moment to recover, she took a few steps to the side and turned the doorknob with her good hoof. It turned, but the door itself didn’t budge when she tried to push it in.
By that point, the pain in her horn had died down from the sharp, stabbing pain she'd felt earlier into a dull throbbing. She was reasonably certain her magic had recovered enough to allow for the use of some very minor spells again. It would probably hurt and be very unpleasant, but it would be worth it...
A sickly green glow swirled around the tip of Twilight’s horn as she summoned up a tiny amount of magic and focused it in the direction of the cottage’s front door. It was barely even within her control; rather like a limb that had been almost completely paralyzed and could only make the most basic of motions. Needles jabbed at her horn, making her wince, but it was at least a little less painful than it had been earlier that day when she teleported into the meadow.
The coil of magic crept across the space between her and the door, and then it passed straight through the heavy wood. After a moment of searching, she found the curved bell of the doorknob, and above it the bolt that kept both halves of the door locked shut. It took some effort to manipulate the weak tendril so that it could grasp the lock, but following a long trial-and-error process Twilight was rewarded with a firm grip on it. She slid the bolt back and gave the door a push outward with her magical ‘hoof’. With a soft creak, it swung outward, revealing the darkened sitting room of Fluttershy’s cottage.
Twilight could hardly see inside, even with her improved night vision, and the leakage of green sparks dribbling down from her horn ended before she passed through the doorway. Fortunately, there was a lamp near the door—within reach of her real hoof, in fact; probably so that Fluttershy could turn it on as soon as she stepped inside without having to look around in the scary darkness. Because she was short one foreleg and using the other to support herself, Twilight had to pull the little beaded chain hanging off the side with her mouth instead.
Light flooded the cottage, eliciting loud screeches and flapping from the many birdhouses attached to the walls and ceiling as their occupants awoke. At first, Twilight shied away from the loud noise, but once the shock had drained from her overworked nervous system, she took a couple of tentative steps through the doorway.
She found her empathy sense—Twilight instinctively knew what those strange feelings were, as before—flooded with the crude, primitive emotions of the animals. It was strange to be able to sense the emotions of another pony, as she hazily remembered having done in the town square, and even stranger by far to ‘feel’ those of creatures that weren’t even sentient. In spite of her instinctive understanding of the nature of what she was experiencing, her understanding didn’t extend to cover what, exactly, the emotions were. It wasn’t like feeling her own emotions at all; it was an altogether new sensation that made little sense to her.
After she’d gone about two steps or so, something very suddenly struck her left flank. It wasn’t actually a very powerful blow, but it was unexpected and so it scared her so badly she screamed and tried to backpedal. Because she was still so off-balance, she stumbled a little and ended up sitting on the floor in a bit of a daze. She immediately pushed herself backward, away from her attacker. A second attack made her yelp again and fall on her back, holding her good foreleg out to shield herself.
“Who’s there?” Twilight whimpered, curling up because there was little else she could do to defend herself. “Don’t hurt me! Please, I’m not really a changeling! You have to believe me! I don’t know what went wrong with that spell, but it turned me into this!”
There was no answer.
“Fluttershy? Is that you? Ask me anything! I’ll answer it! Ask me how we met! Ask about when we went up against the manticore! Or the dragon! Anything! I—I—I...”
She trailed off into a stunned silence, having gotten a good look at her assailant. It was Fluttershy’s pet rabbit, Angel. Angel thumped his large foot against the floor a couple of times, then jabbed one paw at it and mimed drop-kicking something out it. It was clear that he wanted her to leave the cottage immediately.
Before that night, Twilight had never really paid much mind to Spike’s horror stories about Angel being the spawn of Discord. Now, however, she felt rather intimidated by the little white rabbit, who was not only unafraid of her but capable of injuring her even further if he happened to kick her broken foreleg.
“Um, Angel? I’m Fluttershy’s friend—Twilight Sparkle...?” she rasped as she rose again, feeling as if she was managing to channel the pegasus’s personality for just a moment. “Can you let me borrow some things from Fluttershy... please...?”
Angel delivered another kick to her flank by way of response and glared at her. Twilight winced and let out a frustrated sigh.
“Of course not. You’re a rabbit. You can’t even understand a word I’m saying.”
Resigning herself to the idea that Angel wasn’t going to stop being a hinderance, she rose slowly to her hooves and started trying to get away from the rabbit. Yet more thumps against her flank told her that Angel was following her, kicking her repeatedly. Twilight was able to put up with this for the most part until he tried to trip her, at which point she began looking around for some way to restrain him.
Her eyes fell upon an empty birdcage hanging from a peg on the wall near the kitchen doorway. The door was halfway open and an unlocked lock dangled from the bars—perhaps Fluttershy used it for particularly uncooperative birds who needed to stay and heal.
Ignoring another kick, Twilight summoned up what little of her magic she had control over. A faint, feeble green light glowed at the tip of her horn, then snaked out and enveloped Angel. The rabbit struggled against it and made obscene gestures at Twilight, but he couldn’t break the hold she had on him, in spite of the fact that Twilight’s magic started to fail after only a few seconds and she nearly dropped him. After placing him in the cage, she telekinetically closed the door and levitated the lock onto it. Angel glared at her with his front paws crossed in anger as it clicked shut.
The exertion left her with the same familiar, stabbing pain shooting through her horn, which ached for a long time even after the throbbing stopped. Twilight had to sit down for a couple of minutes while she recovered from the exertion of using so much magic in such a short time. Once the dizziness, the nausea, and the worst of the fatigue had faded, she stood back up and made her way over to the chest not far from Fluttershy’s front door—which she had ended up quite a ways past in her attempts to get away from Angel—that held the pegasus’s veterinary supplies. She searched around for a set of saddlebags—there was a set leaning against the wall on the other side of the doorway. Twilight put the saddlebags in front of the cabinet, then opened the door.
There was a basic first aid kit in a box on the bottom shelf; two if some of the items elsewhere on the shelf were added up. Some real, hospital-grade bandages and splints were on the second shelf, as well as some rather intimidating tools Fluttershy probably used when she had to perform minor surgeries on animals and some electrical equipment Twilight was certain she’d obtained secondhand from Ponyville General.
The third shelf was taken up entirely by bottles of medications, both over-the-counter and prescription. Twilight couldn’t find any unicorn horn salve—not that she really expected to—but she was surprised to find a salve for dragon horns, which would still help her somewhat since they both contained several similar key ingredients.
In spite of her discomfort over the fact that she was burglarizing her friend’s home and her desire to be done with it as quickly as she could, Twilight took the time to look at each one of the medicine bottles and see if its contents were applicable to her in any way. It was bad enough taking things that weren’t hers; she didn’t want to make herself an even worse friend by stealing medicine she wouldn’t even need.
The unicorn opened the first bottle of painkillers she could find and swallowed several of them dry. Twilight wasn’t sure if pony painkillers would work on changelings, but there was no way she could go a moment longer without at least trying. As well as the painkillers, Fluttershy kept a number of fairly strong antibiotics on hoof, of which Twilight took several bottles, not wanting to stay there while she figured out the dosages. She also swallowed some ibuprofen to help with the swelling in her broken foreleg. Angel continued to glare sullenly at her back the entire time she was going through the cabinet.
She closed the saddlebags and, after some trial-and-error effort, managed to get them over her back. Then she hobbled across the room and opened the door of Fluttershy’s bathroom. Once she’d turned on the light, she shut the door and breathed a sigh of relief, thankful that Angel could no longer stare at her. Twilight took the saddlebags off again and put them on the floor near the sink.
As she moved in front of the sink to run the water, she saw movement. It was something pony-sized, ugly, and pitch-black—and it took her a moment before she realized that she was looking at her own reflection in Fluttershy’s bathroom mirror.
Two large blue eyes stared back at her. The pupils were less that and more like white spaces where the pupils ought to have been in a real pony’s eyes. It gave her a painfully insentient appearance: there was no trace of the intelligence that Twilight was so proud of, or even that she was capable of higher thought at all.
Her muzzle, which in changelings usually came to a sharp, upward-turned end, was twisted grotesquely and had already swelled up significantly. A crust of dried blood clung to her nostrils. Swollen yellow semicircles had formed under and around her eyes, and a part of her the exoskeleton on her cheek had actually chipped or broken somehow, though it didn't hurt very much. The two fangs on either side of her mouth also had yellowish-green stains on them, though it was probably just blood from her nose.
More blood had dried on her horn and formed a circle around the base. Twilight winced when she saw it. She hadn’t even realized she’d been bleeding from her horn until then. The horn itself was so ugly and wrong she could hardly stand to look at it—where she had once had a stubby lavender thing that grew in spirals, she now had a sharply-pointed black horn with a texture like very fine tree bark.
It was also the only part of Twilight that seemed unique at all compared to real changelings: it was as if her horn had tried to resist the change, and the resulting growth twisted repeatedly between being straight and being very slightly curved, in spite of being only slightly longer than her unicorn horn.
Beyond this one anomaly, she was nothing more than an ordinary changeling drone in terms of her appearance. A feeling of depression started to infiltrate Twilight’s previously determined attitude: she had never been very appearance-oriented—not in the way Rarity, and to a lesser degree many of her old classmates, had been—but seeing this monster looking back at her from the mirror made her feel strangely disconnected from herself and her own being.
As much as she hated it, Twilight wished she could use the changelings’ transformation magic. At the very least, there would be a much smaller chance of somepony trying to hurt her if she looked like Twilight Sparkle and not a changeling. But she had never used the transformation spell before. That spell was so innately changeling—it was the source of their name, after all—that no unicorn was powerful enough to cast it; not even Twilight. The Princesses might have been, but as far as she knew neither of them ever tried. Even though Twilight was in the body of a changeling, that didn’t mean she could transform like they could. She didn’t even know if the botched spell’s effects extended to include altering her innate magic.
Research suggested that changelings learned how to mimic the appearances of others over time, rather like unicorns learned to do magic and pegasi learned to fly. That meant even if Twilight could transform, she couldn't just clop her hooves together and change into another pony. And even if she could learn it in the span of a few hours, she didn't even have a working horn with which to do magic. The most useful power possessed by the changeling race was completely unavailable to her, no matter what angle she approached it from.
She turned on the tap, still half-mesmerized by her reflection, and wet one of Fluttershy’s washcloths so she could get the dirt and blood off herself. While she did the calculations for the correct dosages of the antibiotics, she noticed that the painkillers she’d taken earlier were indeed working; if the pleasant haze creeping over her was any indication, anyway. The throbbing pain in her horn ebbed away until it was a comfortably distant ache, and her leg at least hurt less than it had before. It even eased her headache somewhat, allowing her to think more clearly.
Once she’d figured out the dosages of and taken the antibiotic pills, Twilight sat down against the wall. Carefully, she stretched her foreleg out as far as she could and examined it. The wound had, at least, stopped bleeding, and a large mass of greenish clotted blood had formed over the injury. Everything below it felt numb and muted; like the feeling was only being partially received.
It was the yellowish-white objects jutting out about an inch and a half through the skin on either side of the break that held her attention, though. With a wave of horrified nausea, she realized those were the two halves of the bone. Having studied changeling anatomy only the night before, Twilight recognized it as her first —both halves of it, now. A bit lower down, there was a large bruise that was agonizingly painful to the touch. She guessed she had fractured the sesamoid bone as well, either during the jump or one of the times she fell on it earlier. It was a very intimidating injury given her current resources.
Twilight carefully began cleaning her smaller wounds with rubbing alcohol. She knew she was avoiding sterilizing the broken bone, but the idea of putting alcohol on that injury was enough to horrify her. When she ran out of cuts and scrapes, she put it off further by looking for an object to use as a bit. Eventually, she found a mane brush with a wooden handle that was shaped in the perfect dimensions for a bit, and she had nothing left to waste her time on.
The alcohol was every bit as agonizing as she had imagined, and then some. It felt like her leg had caught fire the moment the sterilizing liquid came in contact with it. Twilight swallowed her first scream, but she had no such luck with the rest; even muffled slightly by the bit, she still screamed as loudly as she could. Her foreleg shook so badly she could barely hold the cloth to wipe the alcohol around. It seemed a torturous eternity before she finally put the cloth down again and relax a little.
Taking the bit from her mouth, Twilight removed a roll of bandages from the saddlebags, as well as the splint she’d stuck between the straps. The next step was going to be the worst of all—even after taking the painkillers, Twilight wasn’t going to delude herself into thinking what she was about to do wouldn’t hurt at least as badly as it had when she had broken it. She glanced at the mangled part of her broken foreleg and whimpered softly. Then she sat there, nervously scuffing the floor with her good hoof and staring intently at her bad one. Finally, after an age of inaction, she took the roll of bandages in her mouth and tried to prepare herself for the coming pain.
“Uhkay, Hwihighh,” she murmured to herself. That she wasn’t speaking with her own voice anymore no longer mattered; she was too distracted by her anxiety to really care very much. “Yugh’cahn do ihf...”
She touched her foreleg with her hoof. It didn’t hurt as much as she thought it would, so she pressed on it a little. Immediately, Twilight jerked her hoof back again, letting out a pained cry. Her bottom lip trembled between her fangs. Oh, dear Celestia, this really was going to hurt, wasn’t it...
“Ih’ll huht eeh fhor a heconhdh... d’hen ih’ll eeh okhay.” Twilight took a deep breath. Then she let it out. Then she took another deep breath. And let it out. “Yugh’cahn do idf... howh—”
And then she pressed down on the protruding bone. It was a good thing she had the roll of bandages between her teeth or she would probably have broken them from biting down so hard. As soon as she pushed the bone back into its proper place, the numb feeling vanished—which, although it meant whatever nerves, and possibly blood vessels, had been compressed were now free, it also brought a whole new level of pain as Twilight's hoof started to wake up.
Having done most things with magic all her life meant that Twilight wasn't very well-prepared for bandaging her own leg by mouth, especially while using her other hoof to hold the bones in place and gnashing her teeth together as she screamed. She gave it, perhaps, thirty seconds of effort, and then let the pressure off her leg and spat out the roll of bandages. The changeling then lay on her side for some time, panting and whimpering fearfully because she knew she was going to have to do it again.
This time, she put the makeshift bit in her mouth instead and tried lifting the bandages with magic. Her control faltered a bit when she set the bone again and the pain hit her, but she managed to shakily unwind them and start covering the spot on her leg where the broken bones had stabbed through the skin. The bandages kept the bones together temporarily while she used her good hoof to splint the injury. All she needed to do after that was wrap the wound in some more bandages and she was finished.
Twilight then lay down on the floor, curled up as best she could, and sobbed dryly. For some reason, she wished she could actually cry—it would have allowed her to feel some level of catharsis, perhaps, if she could; and if not that, it would have at least made her feel more like a pony and less like an oversized wasp.
Her thoughts eventually turned to her situation. What was she to do now? She couldn’t stay at Fluttershy’s house; not after having broken into it and stolen Fluttershy’s things like that. Even if Fluttershy wasn’t scared away by her (disgusting, Celestia-hating) actions, she simply didn’t think she could face the pegasus at the moment without feeling terribly guilty about what she’d done. That wasn’t something Twilight wanted to have to sort out in her current state.
She considered the rest of her friends. Which of them, after Fluttershy, was the most likely to listen to her? The opiates she’d taken earlier had done a good job of suppressing the pain, to a point the former unicorn could think more clearly despite the cloudy haze the drugs had brought into her mind.
Rainbow Dash was the embodiment of loyalty, and wouldn’t let anypony hurt Twilight Sparkle if she was in danger. But Rainbow’s loyalty obviously didn’t apply if she didn’t realize it was her friend. She could be hotheaded and stubborn, too; in fact, Twilight was certain she would be the most difficult of her friends to convince.
Pinkie almost always seemed to know what was going on, but she rarely reacted to it with anything approaching maturity. Though it would probably be easy to convince the pink pony, her opinion rarely held any weight with most of the other townsponies, and Twilight wasn’t even sure she would fully grasp how serious the situation was at all.
Rarity was out solely because she was a unicorn and Twilight didn’t want to risk being incapacitated before she could even explain what was going on. And if Fluttershy was staying with Rarity, then there was no chance of going for her, either.
Twilight remembered how Applejack had remained relatively calm when she was being mobbed by the otherwise-hysterical ponies of Ponyville. And as the Element of Honesty, Applejack had an uncanny ability to tell whether somepony was telling the truth or not.
On the other hoof, Applejack wasn’t a living lie detector, and she could be as hotheaded as anypony else sometimes, given the right motivation. And it wasn’t as if Twilight could simply trot up to her bedroom window and throw rocks at it until she came out; Applejack lived with her family, so there was no guarantee she’d even meet the earth pony first.
She racked her brain, trying to think of another pony she could go to. Maybe Lyra Heartstrings would take her in—Lyra was known for sympathizing with odd causes, and also for her interest in alien or long-dead cultures. But humans, as strange-looking as the illustrations in the fantasy books about them often were, had little in common with the frightening visage of a changeling.
Seeing her mutated reflection in the mirror had driven home that she was no longer Twilight Sparkle The Unicorn. To everypony but herself, she was no longer Twilight Sparkle at all. She was a monster to them. A fanged, pitch-black demon that hid under your bed at night. It was naive, in fact, to think that anypony would listen to a word she said in her current form. She couldn't even change herself into a more pony-like form, because she had neither the magic nor the knowledge necessary to do so—something she had never experienced before, and something which frightened her almost beyond reason again.
It was then that Twilight realized what she had to do.
She had to run. Hide. Lay low. Conceal herself. Go to a place ponies wouldn’t find her until she had fixed herself, or at least figured out what to do.
The list of potential hiding places wasn’t very long. Twilight knew she couldn’t keep hiding in the small groves of trees in the surrounding area; there would probably be Royal Guards looking for her by the next morning, and they would almost certainly bring with them a unicorn who knew how to perform scrying spells. She was the only changeling in Ponyville, as she had revealed, and so if one of those spells found a changeling, there would be no doubt as to whether it was the right one.
Worse yet, she actually knew spells that would protect her against scrying—but they all required a significant amount of magic to perform. Since, as she had discovered earlier, even casting a simple telekinesis spell was barely within Twilight’s ability to perform at that moment, there was simply no way she would be able to put an anti-scrying spell on herself at the moment.
Escaping Ponyville wasn’t an option, either. Aside from the fact that Twilight didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as a fugitive hiding in the shadows, all her information on changelings was still at the library, and there was a chance she would need to consult it when she was reverting what the changeling spell had done.
She wasn’t naive enough to think that news of the supposed abduction of Princess Celestia’s protege wouldn’t find its way into other towns, and perhaps even Equestrian newspapers. In fact, there would probably be missing/wanted posters with her face on them—both the unicorn one and the changeling one—plastered all over the place within days.
There was only one other option: she had to hide in the Everfree Forest.
Scrying spells didn’t work there, for reasons still unknown, and most ponies avoided it as much as they could on a normal day. She herself didn’t plan on staying for a long time; just until she either corrected her mistake or recovered enough that she could cast an anti-scrying spell. And one thing of particular significance that the Everfree also had that Twilight couldn’t get anywhere else was a safe place to sleep. It would be something of a long journey to get to the old building, but if she was smart and didn’t do anything foolish, she would probably be safe the whole way.
Now that her broken leg was splinted, Twilight made a crude sling out of some more of the bandages so that it would stay against her chest when she got up. She carefully put everything back in the saddlebags and put them back on again, then stood shakily. One thing the painkillers hadn’t fixed, and had in fact made worse, was her poor balance and coordination. The world spun nauseatingly every time she turned her head and she wanted nothing more than to be able to lie down and go to sleep.
She stopped at the front door, remembering Angel. A small frown crossed her face, but she turned back and unlocked the cage door with her magic before stepping out into the night again. The door shut behind her with a soft clack, and she began to slowly make her way toward the Everfree.
There was little sound in Carousel Boutique beyond the ticking of a clock and some quiet breathing. The clock said it was a quarter after one, but only because the Cutie Mark Crusaders had tried to get their cutie marks in clockmaking several days before and Rarity hadn’t had a chance to fix the damage they had done just yet. In reality, it was around two-thirty in the morning.
A half-finished dress adorned a manequin in Rarity’s workroom on the first floor. She had intended to work on it throughout the day, but events had conspired to push the dress out of her mind entirely. She, like most of the other ponies in Ponyville who hadn’t holed themselves up in their houses, had spent most of that day searching for the rogue changeling that had taken the place of Twilight Sparkle.
Upstairs, Rarity’s sister Sweetie Belle was asleep in her bed, worn out from half a day’s worth of ‘Cutie Mark Crusader Changeling Finders!’, which, naturally, had ended the moment an adult got wind of it. The sofa in the sitting room was occupied by Spike the dragon, who was also fast asleep after Rarity had slipped him some of the sleep aid she occasionally used when she couldn’t get her mind off her work at night. Before that, Spike had been rather out of sorts, which was understandable given what had happened to Twilight.
Rarity herself was sitting at the kitchen table. In front of her there were several books about changelings that Spike had brought from the library, and that she and the others had been looking through earlier. She wasn’t looking at them just then, though; rather, she was staring distantly at the parchment scroll pinned under a glass in the center of the table.
A cup of tea, with steam rising from its surface, was placed by her right hoof. Rarity glanced in that direction with a small ‘hmm’ noise.
“Thank you, darling,” she said to Fluttershy as the latter pony sat down. With a mixture of fondness and slight aggravation, she added, “You’re the only pony I know who would ever make tea for their host, instead of the other way round.”
“Oh, it was no trouble at all,” Fluttershy assured her. “You’ve done so much, and I... feel kind of...”
“Don’t say it,” the unicorn commanded. “You aren’t useless, and we both know it.”
“I guess.” Fluttershy didn’t sound particularly convinced, but didn’t push the matter any. Instead, she said, “I really hope Twilight’s all right, Rarity. I can’t stand to think of her being imprisoned by that... thing.”
“I can assure you, you’re not the only one. Oh, if I ever get my hooves on that monstrosity... But it’s quite unladylike to fantasize about such violent revenge, much less to take it, so I suppose I’ll settle for letting the Princesses deal with it once it’s captured.”
They drank their tea in silence for a while. Eventually, Fluttershy said, “I’m going to ask all my other friends to keep their eyes open for it when I go home tomorrow.”
“That’s an excellent idea, darling. You see? You aren’t useless at all,” replied Rarity with a smile.
“But I talked to her... it... this morning,” murmured the pegasus, staring blankly at her tea. “Why didn’t I...?”
“It had Applejack fooled, too,” said Rarity. “And Pinkie Pie. For all we know, it could have been impersonating her for weeks. You don’t have anything to feel sorry for, Fluttershy. None of us even suspected Twilight wasn’t herself. That one was a good actor.”
Fluttershy nodded to herself. “I still wish I had noticed something.”
“As do I.”
“Do you think she’ll be... mad that we didn’t...”
“No. No, I don’t. Twilight isn’t the type to blame her friends for things they can’t control. She has a very rational mind, when she’s not under a lot of stress. She’ll understand.”
“I hope so...”
There was a sudden, rather loud, banging on the window of Rarity’s sitting room. Rarity hissed in annoyance, knowing exactly what was causing it, and got up. Fortunately, the noise hadn’t woken Spike from his drugged sleep, although the dragon rolled over and mumbled something about rearranging the apple trees in Shining Armor’s apartment.
“Most ponies prefer it when their guests use the door,” Rarity commented once she’d opened the window. “And don’t you dare shake your feathers off in here. You can do it in the bathroom.”
Rainbow Dash said nothing—which, coming from the normally talkative pegasus, was not a good sign. Nor was the fact that she practically stomped after Rarity to the bathroom. Once she’d dried herself, she thumped loudly into the kitchen, and would have slammed the door behind her if Rarity hadn’t foreseen the action and caught the door with magic. She thumped down in front of the table and, without asking, downed the entire remainder of Rarity’s tea.
“Rainbow Dash, I can tolerate your uncouth behavior to a degree, but—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever,” Rainbow cut in, scowling. “I’m goin’ back out when I leave. I need something with caffeine in it.”
“You could have asked me to make you a cup of your own,” insisted Rarity as she sat down herself.
“Whatever.” The blue pegasus stared intently at the wall until Rarity coughed.
“No luck, I take it?” asked Rarity. This earned her an annoyed glance from Rainbow.
“What do you think? I’ve been flyin’ around all bucking day and all bucking night, and I haven’t seen any sign of that stupid little... ugh. It’s probably hiding in somepony’s basement or something. Make me some more tea.”
“I’ll make you tea if you can find it within yourself to ask like a civilized pony.”
Rainbow’s annoyance quickly turned into anger. “How about you go find it within yourself to—go buck a manticore, you—you stuck-up... frou-frou—pile’a ponyfeathers—?”
She sighed, wilting slightly beneath the glare Rarity aimed at her and Fluttershy’s startled look.
“Sorry, okay?” she groaned. “I’m just worried about Twilight...”
Rarity’s glare softened slightly. “We’re all worried about her, Rainbow Dash.”
“But I’m the one that’s actually looking for her, or that stupid changeling, or whatever!” Rainbow complained. She let out a frustrated growl. “The only other pegasus that even bothered staying out late to keep looking was Raindrops! Well, and Derpy, but she’s so useless she practically doesn’t count as a—”
For the second time, Rainbow’s ears flattened back; she was now receiving glares from both Rarity and Fluttershy. Eventually, she hid her face in her hooves.
“Sorry,” the pegasus repeated. “It’s late, okay? Or early. Or whatever the buck time it is right now. I don’t know. It’s night time and I haven’t had a nap since yesterday. I’m sayin’ stuff and not thinkin’ about it first.”
The other two mares continued to send her disapproving looks for a moment, but soon forgave her, since both were aware of Rainbow’s long-running struggle with impulse control.
“Did Celestia send any letters back?” Rainbow asked as Fluttershy went to go make her a cup of tea, as well as a new cup for Rarity, who hadn’t had very much of hers.
“As a matter of fact, she did,” said Rarity. She took the parchment scroll and offered it to Rainbow, who rubbed her eyes and didn’t take it.
“I c’n barely make you guys out right now. My eyesight is worse than...” She waved her hooves around for a moment, searching for an inoffensive way to describe Derpy. “...you-know-who’s... when I’m tired. You’re gonna have to read it to me, cuz it’ll just be a bunch’a fuzzy crap if I look at it.”
Rarity, deciding that questioning Rainbow’s claim wasn’t worth the effort, cleared her throat and read:
‘My little ponies,
I am deeply disturbed by the news of Twilight Sparkle’s abduction. Regrettably, Luna and I are unable to deal with the situation personally, since we are not in or anywhere near Canterlot at the moment. However, I have dispatched a number of Royal Guards, as well as members of the RAW and one of the Inquisitors currently involved in searching Canterlot for remaining changelings, to Ponyville and the neighboring towns to search for both my student and her captor.
I will not lie to you: Twilight is in a situation that could easily prove perilous. That said, do not despair, my little ponies. My faithful student is a clever mare, and as such I expect she will be able to survive much longer than most ordinary ponies in the same situation.
—Princess Celestia’
Predictably, the first thing out of Rainbow’s mouth was “She’s sending the Wonderbolts?”
“It would seem that way, darling.”
“Woah.” The pegasus looked positively giddy for a moment, and then her sullen demeanor slowly returned. “Not gonna matter if Twilight’s dead, though. Ugh... Who’s the inquisitor guy?”
“I’m not sure,” replied Rarity. “I do recall seeing the term in recent news, of course. Apparently, the number of criminals attempting to use the possibility of changeling imposters as a way to have their sentences overturned has been so high that the Princess formed an inquisition to deal with it. I suppose he’ll be some sort of expert when it comes to hunting down changelings.”
“Oh, yeah. Probably.” Rainbow frowned as Fluttershy came back with their tea. “Thanks, Fluttershy.”
Rarity watched disapprovingly, and then with a bit of surprise, face as Rainbow chose to drink all her tea at once, in despite it still being scalding hot when the cup touched her lips. The pegasus’s eyes bugged out a little when she first felt the heat, but it did little to deter her.
“I should get going,” she said once her mouth had cooled enough to allow her to speak normally again. “I shouldn’t even have taken a break, but I gotta check up on everypony. Make sure you’re all okay, y’know? Maybe Pinkie’ll have coffee or something.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” Rarity suggested. “You won’t be able to find anything if you’re too tired to pay attention to your surroundings.”
“That’s what caffeine’s for,” Rainbow told her, grimacing. “Look... I can’t just sit around while one of my friends is in danger. Not if I can do something about it.”
She got up and stretched her wings until the joints popped, then did the same with each leg.
“It kinda pisses me off that you’re not doing more to help,” she added suddenly. “I mean, I don’t get why I’m the only one out there. I mean, I sorta get it, but it just feels wrong.”
“Most ponies can’t keep going full-throttle, day and night, the way you can,” said Rarity, as inoffensively as possible. “We’re not you, Rainbow.”
Rainbow sighed. “I know, I know... It’s just, I’m the Element of Loyalty, y’know? And I kinda expect other ponies to be as loyal to my friends as I am. I guess I forget other ponies aren’t like me. A lot.”
“That was quite introspective,” the unicorn observed.
“Yeah. I’ve been working on it for a while. ‘Putting myself in the horseshoes of others’, and all. Remembering my way isn’t always the best way. Talking about how I feel. That stuff.”
“That’s... actually very mature of you, darling,” said Rarity. “What prompted you to start thinking about it?”
“Dunno, really. Stuff. A buncha stuff,” Rainbow said, shrugging again. “I dunno. Maybe I’ll talk with you girls about it when this is over. Twilight needs help right now. I should be focusing on that. Thanks for the tea.”
“I really think you would do better by Twilight if you had a nap before you start looking again.”
Another tired shrug. “I gotta be out there, or else... I feel like a bad friend. It’s not something you can fix. Comes with being the Element of Loyalty, and stuff.”
“In that case, good luck, I suppose.” Rarity didn’t bother trying to argue further, since another part of her friend’s personality was stubbornness, and she knew it.
“Bye Rarity. See ya, Fluttershy.”
With that, Rainbow clomped out of the kitchen, energized by the caffeine in her tea. The fading hoofsteps stopped abruptly after a second or two and started getting louder again, and then her head poked back in, followed by her body.
“Hey, uh, can I ask you guys something?” she questioned apprehensively.
“Of course, darling.”
“Um, okay,” added Fluttershy.
Rainbow bit her lip and said nothing for a while, until she blurted out, “Do you think Twilight’s still alive?”
There was a short pause following this. Then both of the other ponies spoke at the same time.
“Of course!” Rarity exclaimed, in unison with Fluttershy’s ‘I, um, hope so...’. “What ever possessed you to think she might not be?”
Once again, the beginning of Rainbow’s answer was a shrug. “I don’t know... I just hope she’s okay.”
Fluttershy looked like she half wanted to get up and go hug Rainbow, but settled for giving her a sympathetic look instead since the younger pegasus wasn’t a fan of physical contact. Rarity, meanwhile, looked down into her teacup to hide her troubled face.
“So do the rest of us, darling,” she said.
A pitch-black pony-like creature hobbled down a crude, overgrown path, surrounded by gnarled, skeletal trees that almost completely blocked out the moon. Twilight wasn’t sure how long she had been walking for, but she knew it had been a while. It was at least long enough that she had to stop and take more painkillers, since the initial dose she’d taken in Fluttershy’s bathroom had worn off.
With each step she took, the forest around her became ever denser. It was becoming more and more difficult to see the moon through the branches above, and accordingly Twilight was bumping into more and more obstacles—but Twilight paid little attention to it, or the fact that the bandages on her leg were soaked, either. Her body was on autopilot, only aware enough to avoid straying from the narrow, crude path between the trees. The rest of her was half asleep, as the exhaustion was beginning to catch up with her again.
Eyes peered out of the darkness at her. Eerie noises filled her ears. Once or twice, Twilight knew something had moved nearby, but infuriatingly, everything remained hidden from sight. Her empathy sense was flooded with crude, primitive emotions; most of them malicious ones.
Early on, she had done the only thing she could do to keep predators away with her magic so weakened: she used a very small amount of the magic she could access to generate an extremely offensive vapor that followed her like a cloud. It wasn’t so much offensive-smelling as physically painful—it was actually roughly equal to inhaling mace for everyone but its creator.
One of her hind legs suddenly lost its footing and slipped, leaving her on only two legs for a moment. The natural result of this was that she tumbled over sideways and slid down one of the little streams in the ground that had formed in the rain. Twilight ended up on her side near the bottom of the embankment, half-coated in disgusting muck and bits of plants.
She didn’t get up for a moment; just lay there in the mud, too tired and in too much pain to move. Eventually, the changeling planted her good hoof into the ground and pushed herself up. The muscles gave out halfway, though, and she collapsed again, eyes half closed and very near sleep.
But she couldn’t give up now. She had to be almost there, after walking for so long. Twilight rose up again, and this time managed to stay on her hooves and resume walking, though it was beginning to physically hurt to do so. This was a familiar place—she was so very close to her destination...
Up ahead, the thick trees parted into a small clearing. At the center of this clearing was a decaying stone building whose architecture was identical to that of some of the very oldest Celestian churches in Equestria proper. It wasn’t really a very large building at all, with only two floors and a bell tower. The stones were crumbling in places, and in others they had slipped out altogether.
This building was, in fact, a church at one point—but it was far older than any of the Celestian ones, and had been devoted to the worship of a fabled alicorn called Origin. Origin was the creature who (it was said) created all living things, even the Princesses and Discord. His religion had long since died away, save for a few minor sects among earth ponies that tended to keep to themselves—Pinkie had once mentioned that her family were Originists—but the building itself, which had been erected around the same time as the old castle, had remained in its decaying state for over a thousand years. It was one of the few relics of the old city that was still intact.
Twilight knew all of this because she had taken part in a small equinological expedition into the Everfree about a year after she had first come to Ponyville. She had even slept in the building overnight, as it was one of the few places in the Everfree Forest where it was even remotely safe to close one’s eyes.
A pair of iron-lined doors greeted her when she made her way around to the front side. They were old and rickety, and creaked loudly when she pushed them open, but the wood itself had not decayed at all; one of Twilight’s tasks in the original expedition was to discover what kinds of substances had been put on that wood to preserve it for a thousand years. The same was true of the floors, which creaked and shook when she walked on them but held her weight all the same.
She actually had a bit of trouble getting through the empty space the doors opened up to. It was like trying to walk through a very thick layer of jello in that it gave against her determined but weak pushing, while at the same time attempting to push back. Twilight collapsed onto the floor, panting, as soon as she was inside and the resistance ceased.
That resistance was the reason Twilight didn’t have to worry about running into any animals inside: before leaving, her expedition party had placed spells on the church to prevent non-pony creatures from entering—there had been plans to return there, originally, but a sudden explosion of interest in Discordian-era equinology following his escape turned the funding elsewhere. Apparently changelings had enough pony in them to make the spell relent, eventually.
The inside of the church was filled with rows of dusty benches, leading up to an altar at the other end. All the remotely valuable—scientifically and otherwise—objects had already been removed for study at museums, so everything else was somewhat bare. The overall feeling of the church was a bit cramped, as ponies one thousand years ago were an inch or two smaller than they were now, but it was cramped in an inviting way, like a very old library.
Hobbling past the benches, the worn-out changeling checked behind the altar to see if any of the things they’d left behind were still there. Having so much to bring back with them, and intending to return after a few months, they had left a fair amount of nonessential gear behind. This included a pair of somewhat moth-eaten sleeping bags, which were the only thing Twilight was really interested in.
She spread it out right there, behind the pulpit, and placed her saddlebags at the top as a pillow. Before slipping into the sleeping bag, she remembered to take another dose of painkillers to last through her sleep. The combined power of her physical exhaustion and the drugs’ effects quickly made her eyelids droop down.
The last, very addled, thought Twilight had before she fell asleep was that after everything that had happened to her since that morning, a simple sleeping bag on the floor of an abandoned thousand-year-old church felt absolutely exquisite.
