//------------------------------//
// Chapter III 
// Story: My Little Redemption 
// by F-ShyAustin 
//------------------------------//

Chapter 3


Twilight stayed at the farm with AJ, but both of them eventually made their way to the house, when they parted. Apple Jack began sobbing again when she told Grannie what had happened. After so many years, she had finally found what neither Grannie herself, nor any other pony could seek for her. She now understood Silver Light in a way that Twilight was incapable of. At least, not yet.

As sweet as it seemed, this was a moment reserved for those two, and besides, Twilight HAD to get to Canterlot as soon as possible. Someone resided there whose advice she desperately needed. 

The train station was located on the outskirts of Ponyville, in between Fluttershy’s house and the edge of Sweet Apple Acres. It was mostly a silent walk, but as she neared the train station, she began thinking out loud.

"Why is she like this now? So different from yesterday…”

Twilight looked around cautiously, making sure nopony else was around to hear what she was about to say.

“Her parents are still dead, Grannie hasn’t changed at all, and physically speaking, Apple Jack is till the same, too! She understands this whole Him thing, and I don’t. Why don’t I understand?!?”

A few ponies were staring at her; she must have been closer to the station than she thought. She walked to the counter and waited for a clerk to come. It took a while, but eventually one did show up.
“One ticket, Canterlot, round trip,” Twilight said.

“Sixty-two bits,” the clerk returned.

Twilight dug through her bag with her magic to get the coins that the answers to her questions ultimately demanded, while at the same time realizing that prices had gone up. It was fifty-five last time. 

Oh, well.

She handed the money to the clerk, who hurriedly cashed it and gave Twilight her ticket.

“Gate 2B.”

Of course. She had made this trip before, many times. She didn’t need anypony telling her which gate she needed to go to. She was about to lash out at him for that, but then realized, by way of his nametag, that he was new here. “Silver Lining,” his tag read, and below it, “Proudly Serving the Ponyville Community for __ months.” He hadn’t even finished his first month. They must have had a high turnover rate if they measured other ponies’ employment there in months, not years.

Twilight made her way to the station, and got on the train. It unexpectedly occurred to her that she could have flown to Canterlot, but she pushed the thought out of her mind. It was simply too far. That was a job reserved for royal guards, and even then, that was a situation where two Pegasi pulled a Princess’s chariot, not just one. Flying was too foreign a thought to her right now, anyway.

As Twilight found her seat that her ticket had defined for her, she looked around. She didn’t normally pay this much attention to other ponies, but this time, she couldn’t help it. There were doctors, lawyers, merchants, and other prestigious members in society. Virtually each and every one’s career was recognizable by his attire. They were all on their way to fulfill their quest in the common city of Canterlot. Twilight couldn’t help staring at each pony for a least a little while. Today, instead of telling herself her normal excuse of “their business is none of mine”, she began pondering how many other ponies in Equestria were feeling as empty as she had been. Maybe… everypony needed the experience that Apple Jack had been subject to – no, not subject to, rescued from.

Maybe even she did.

For such an intricate thought process, she only spent thirty seconds or so thinking before she found her seat, which next to a prominent-looking doctor. She sat down on it and tried to make herself comfortable, which was nearly impossible. Thought STILL drained her brain of all energy that was expendable, which, granted, hadn’t been these past few days.

Sleep didn’t come easily, but Canterlot was quite a ways away, and it eventually came, if for no other reason, then that it was tired of taunting Twilight’s inability to take advantage of it.



*          *          *



A couple of hours into the trip, Twilight shot awake. She had either dreamed or subconsciously heard a loud noise. She awoke, frantically trying to remember what she and her friends had done to fight off the Changelings before, but quickly realized that there were no Changelings. They were instead passing over a dangerous-looking overpass that looked like it had held train tracks for hundreds of years. As it creaked, she remembered that she had wings, as did a little over half of the rest of the population of the train, so in the event that things turned sour, there was plenty of wing power to prevent any deaths, providing that each Pegasus saved a life. Twilight felt calmer and lay back in her seat. Suddenly, panic hit her all over again. She didn’t feel her seat. Come to think of it, she couldn’t feel any of her hoofs. Her entire body was completely numb. She looked around desperately. She noticed all the other ponies around her. They didn’t even look solid anymore. They all floated around, their shapes loose and waving around, like seaweed, driven and tossed by the water. She wondered how she didn’t notice it before.

The same panic that hit her when all her friends turned against her in the battle against Discord hit her at that moment. She stood up abruptly and began heading toward the back of the train car.

Then it struck her.

Hard.

As she stood up, she left her body, in its entirety, behind. Every degree of terror that had ever struck her affected her at that moment. She still possessed the sensation of breathing, and her soul/spirit – or whatever she was – was hyperventilating. The closest she could come to accurately describing what was happening was something she had read about in one of her books. It was called an “out-of-body experience”. The book said that spells like that were only reserved to powerful unicorns like Starswirl the Bearded, though. The only other time she had ever heard of that spell was in the rare mention of some obscure legend from time long past, even before the Princesses had ruled. Despite the fact that Twilight had “fulfilled her destiny”, like Celestia said, she still didn’t know how to do that spell; which could only mean one thing: someone else must have done it. She didn’t know who, and she anxiously analyzed her situation, trying to find out what may have caused such a surge in arcane energy. She looked around, scanning her surroundings hurriedly, when she found her answer. She saw a unicorn-like creature whose horn was surrounded with smoky-red energy. It penetrated all areas of its environment, transforming the entire landscape, once green and growing, into a barren wasteland, filled with dead, black trees, and complete with spurting flames and an evilly black sky.

She looked back at the unicorn – or whatever it was – and stared into its eyes. It smiled cruelly, and made its way to Twilight. She kept staring at it, half-refusing to believe what her mind told her she was seeing.

Ten seconds later, the creature came to a stop in front of her, and she found herself staring into the distorted face of unmistakable evil.

Twilight was so in shock that her heart skipped a beat – or two. She quit breathing. Somehow, the creature’s smile grew, slowly becoming more and more evil and twisted.

All of a sudden, Twilight remember what Apple Jack had said that Silver Light told her. “I will be with you, Apple Jack.’”

Twilight called out in panic. “Silver Li – ”

“Don’t Bother,” were the creature’s first words. Its voice sounded like 2 voices at once, much like Twilight remembered the changeling queen Chrysalis’s voice. This… creature… was not she, though. Aside from its leathery wings, it held no resemblance.

“Wh – what do you… mean?” Twilight asked.

“I killed Silver Light long ago.”

“But… you COULDN’T have! Apple Jack told me – ”

“All an illusion, my dear.”

“Who are you?” Twilight worriedly asked.

The creature laughed a deep guttural laugh before responding. “Your world once called me Deceiver. Few know of me now, but I still work hard to bring your world to their knees. You, though, were no effort at all.”

Twilight’s face questioned the creature called Deceiver. “What are you talking about?”

He grinned maliciously. “I deceived you into thinking that knowledge was more important that relationships, that you needed this world more than you needed friends.”

Deceiver kept talking and Twilight kept panicking. It was incessant. Everything Deceiver said seemed so true, and the more he spoke, the more depressed she became and the more she began to hate herself for falling for such a seemingly common tactic. The creature must have noticed, because he stopped speaking and began smiling a toothy grin.

Twilight ignored the creature. The events of the day were blurry in Twilight’s mind. The only thing she could really remember clearly was the conversation she had had with Apple Jack. 

Wait. Apple Jack. She told me that Silver Light appeared right after that thing was about to kill her. Maybe… will he come for me, too?

Deceiver spoke once more. 

“You think you are a strong, valiant mare,” the creature further explained. “You are so sure of yourself, of your logic, that when something comes along that you can’t explain you push it off without a second thought, like the feeling of the future that your pink friend possesses. Now, you are in the midst of death, and you must die. He unsheathed a large obsidian blade that Twilight had not seen before, and rose up to strike her down.

"Now is my moment. Now is when my savior will come." 

She watched in exciting expectancy as the blade slowly came down, Deceiver’s face filled with malice. Time slowed. The blade finished its swipe. 

It went through Twilight’s heart, and the violet mare’s blood began flowing freely. In the last few seconds of her consciousness, she began seeing a vision: a dull grey thread being held between two pairs of pincers. The thread had a plaque in front of it, which displayed the string’s label: Twilight’s cutie mark. A dark-colored unicorn took up a pair of scissors and brought them to the thread. Twilight now understood. Her life was about to be ended. But as the scissors dramatically began to close over the thread, another pony entered the scene: a large stallion. He used his own hooves to reopen the scissors from the other end; by the blades. But as he did so, the blades pierced through his hooves and his face contorted in pain. 

Throwing the scissors aside, he used the blood from his own body to coat the string’s two pieces, almost ritually. Then something miraculous happened. After the pieces floated up into the air and once again became one piece, they began turning from their blood-stained grey to a bright, shining silver. Silver… The stallion looked exactly how Apple Jack had described Silver Light. He slowly turned to Twilight, and mouthed the words “I AM He.” He then disappeared and Twilight went unconscious. 



*          *          *



As Twilight went unconscious in that world, she became conscious in the world where she first laid eyes on Deceiver. She was still in her seat, clicking over the same railroad pass. Nothing had changed. With the exception of her. The lack of change Twilight saw in her environment was made up for the drastic change that had taken place inside of her. She looked around herself, trying to see if anything had truly not changed. But something else had. The doctor who was originally sitting in the seat next to her no longer was. Instead, another stallion pony was. He was slightly rugged-looking, and his cutie mark was a rough-hewn wooden cross in front of both Princess Luna’s and Princess Celestia’s cutie marks, almost as if to say that the cross, or whatever it represented, completely superseded the princesses’ rulership. The pony’s presence indicated to Twilight that she still wasn’t quite in the real world. She looked into the stallion’s eyes. She knew those eyes. Silver Light. She nearly fell off her seat from shock and fear, but the rough stallion caught her. She gazed into his eyes once more, and was greeted by a warm, kind voice that covered all fear, all frustrations. She heard three familiar words escape His mouth:

“I AM He,” he said.

“Who are – Who is He?” Twilight asked in wonder.

“He is I. I am not from here. I hail from another land: the land of hope, dreams-come-true, and forgiveness; the land of eternal life. But long ago, I was born, flesh and blood, into your world. I came to live the same kind of life that the sinful live, but I lived it sinlessly. They hated me. They beat me. They spit upon me.”

He looked down at his cutie mark. “They nailed me to a cross.”

Everything he had been saying would have brought forth a great measure of anger, had it been said by any other. But He said all that He did about them – about what they had done to Him – with pity, with a tone of forgiveness in his voice. 

“I came,” he stopped short to regain his composure, and to wipe a single tear. “I came that they – you – might have life, and have it to the full.”

Twilight was moved by Him. “You came to earth and died. For…me? Why? I’m nothing.”

“You are everything. And I love you. I love your world. I want to know you like you know yourself, but deeper.”

Twilight now was driven to the verge of tears. 

"To think that somepony would leave the world of perfection – dreams, hopes, eternal life – to live a life as any other pony? Because he loves me? My world? That’s… unheard of! But he did…”

“You came to save me, and my world. How... can you save me?”
Silver Light firmly responded. “I already have saved you. My saving you is my free gift to you, because I love you. Now, all you must do is accept my gift, and spread the joy you experience because of it. In this way, your sharing will bring others to me.

“I want to accept it. But how can I? I don’t deserve it.”

“I have redeemed you. Confess with your mouth that I am Lord in your life, and believe in your heart that my father, The Master, raised me from death. If you believe that in your heart, you will be justified. If you confess it with your mouth, you will be saved. That is how you accept my gift.”

Silver Light’s voice started to fade, and Twilight started to dissolve out of His world.

“Take this. It will help you along your way. Read it, and let Me, through it, be your guide.”

Twilight took a book out of His hoof. On the front, in bold scripted letters read “The Timeless Words of The Master”.

She finally disappeared from that world. A she slowly drifted back into realit, she noticed that she was inside of her body. Her out-of-body-experience had ended, but she was still clutching the book. Time must have not have been concrete in her vision. The train had just finished crossing the rail-bridge over which she had first seen Deceiver, who she now presumed to be one and the same with Apollyon from Apple Jack’s dream.

With nothing to do, time to burn, and book in hoof, Twilight opened up the book and started reading.

In the beginning…