Solitary Locust

by nodamnbrakes

VII. Psalm of Locusts

Just to clarify, there will not be any romance involving Spike in this story. o_o

Twilight knew to some vague degree what she was looking at, but there was a disconnect between the part of her mind that was acknowledging it and the part that was supposed to figure out what to do next. One moment, the unicorn-shaped smudge was something she recognized, and then suddenly the unassembled pieces of her thoughts were running into a wall on either side, unable to connect and form solid ideas. The end result was rather like seeing a pony out of the corner of one’s eye or through a cloud of fog; in that the details were blurred and indistinct, and didn’t add up to anything recognizable despite the feeling of familiarity they evoked.

Everything began to slow down around her as she focused on that one spot, and her ears filled up with a noxious buzzing sound that drowned out all the noise of the gathered ponies. It drowned out even the words coming from that mare’s mouth, which was opening and closing at a crawling rate.

Her eyes fell upon the stars that adorned the mulberry mare’s visible flank. Like her own cutie mark—her real one—it showed a six-pointed star with five smaller stars orbiting around it. When she looked at where her own mark should be, she only saw a badly inflamed patch of bare skin with the remains of a solitary star.

She watched its mouth move as it spoke, and although she also heard the words it was saying, the way her senses had suddenly been sectioned from each other did not allow them to connect into a whole. The voice was certainly familiar, but it sounded higher and more nasal than Twilight’s own—much like it did on the water recordings she’d experimented with in her basement laboratory several years ago. There was a barely noticeable hint of a New Canterlot dialect in her speech, just like there had been in Twilight’s for her entire life.

Then the reality finally began to truly sink in, and with it came an accompanying sense of a sort of existential horror that few had ever felt. Like an old friend coming home after a long time apart, all the pieces of her briefly shattered mind slid back into their proper places. She was now able to understand what she had been trying with the utmost desperation not to: that somepony had stolen her very identity from her; that the last thing she had left to hold onto with the tips of her hooves as uniquely and exclusively hers had been ripped away from her and was now being worn like a second coat by a creature she’d never met in her life.

Beyond feeling like she’d had nails driven into her heart and her blood frozen until it burst from her veins, there was no real feeling to accompany that horror. Twilight was simply past the point where she was able to react to such developments anymore; where the fragments of emotions and sensations could coalesce into anything substantial. Even with the icy grip of reality holding her tightly, she felt oddly disconnected from the whole situation, like she was merely observing a series of events from outside her body. Everything—from the star cutie marks to the words coming from Not-Twilight’s mouth—seemed more appropriate for a surreal dream than anything.

It was Trixie who finally brought her out of her stupor. The showmare, having exhausted whatever well of impulsive vitriol she’d initially been spewing at Not-Twilight, seized her captive with magic and roughly dragged her to her hooves.

“Tell them again!” she urged the real Twilight, who was swaying on her hooves. “Tell them how—Tell them it’s a fake! It’s one of your kind! Say you killed the real one!”

A long tendril of red magic burst from Trixie’s horn, coiling on the ground before slithering up Twilight's leg and wrapping itself around her neck/throat. Once again, she found herself struggling to keep her mouth from opening and the words from pouring out of it. It was a completely futile battle that she could hardly begin to fight, much less hope to turn the tide of: “I killed the real Twilight Sparkle! That one is an imposter! I know my own kind! It escaped when The Great and Powerful Trixie mercifully spared—”

“Stop that!” Not-Twilight exclaimed; not at Twilight, but at Trixie. Her expression was one of genuine disgust. “Stop making it do that!”

Trixie’s smirk was full of narcissistic self-satisfaction and triumph as she said, “Are you afraid now because they know the truth?”

“Cut it out, you lying bully!” A familiar rainbow mane poked out of the crowd of ponies, which was beginning to be infused with Royal Guards on all sides. “D’you seriously think we’re gonna believe that thing? You’re using it like a... a... what’s that thing? Not a puppet. The one with strings.”

“Marionette...” Twilight croaked without thinking, at almost exactly the same time that Not-Twilight supplied the same thing.

“Marionette! That’s it. And, uh, it’s not gonna work. ‘Cause we’re not gonna take that.”

“And it’s against the law,” added Not-Twilight, rather self-righteously.

“Against the law?” Trixie repeated furiously. “Against the law? What law does The Great and Powerful Trixie have to follow? What law is it that she must bow to? What higher power is there in the land than The Great and Powerful Trixie? Tell her now!”

The magic around Twilight’s neck and hooves disappeared, allowing her to fall back over again while the imposter—looking rather startled by Trixie’s vehement and incredibly arrogant response—stammered a bit before blurting out an explanation. She squeezed her eyes shut in concentration for a moment, then recited in a stilted, nervous voice:

“That... that spell is illegal... when used... on sapient beings. Section four of the Regulation of Dangerous Magical Spells act prohibits the use of magic to mentally, physically, or emotionally take control of a sentient creature—one determined to possess both self-awareness, higher intelligence, and free will as per the Neighfilly test—without their explicit consent being given befor—”

“Shut up!” shouted Trixie, stamping her hoof on the ground. “You sound like an encyclopedia!”

“You still used an illegal spell, Tr... Trixie. That was the point I wanted to ma—”

“Trixie does as she pleases!”

“Not when she breaks Equestrian law, she doesn’t,” said one of the stallions wearing Inquisitor’s cloaks.

“Miss Sparkle is correct: that is in fact against the law for any reason other than self-defense,” a Royal Guard, whom Twilight guessed was the captain of the group stationed in Ponyville, added, “and attempting to incite mob violence doesn’t qualify as self-defense.”

“Yes,” Not-Twilight agreed rather timidly.

“All of you are completely insane to believe you can order The Great and Powerful Trixie to do anything! Trixie has more magical ability in her hoof than any of you will ever have in your entire bodies! Sparkle, you’ve humiliated Trixie enough to last her a lifetime! She demands that you answer for this grievous crime here and now!”

“Me?” squeaked the fake unicorn.

Doubling her aggression in the face of Not-Twilight’s apparent capitulation, Trixie spat, “Yes, you! Trixie challenges you to a magic duel, Sparkle!”

“Trixie, a magic duel isn’t... it’s not the proper way to solve this!”

The real Twilight watched the scene before her unfold with a sense that she was witnessing a dramatization of something from a book she’d read. It wasn’t everyday that one confronted an insane, vindictive showpony with a flair for the dramatic, and even less often that one was able to see oneself do it in third pony. She almost couldn’t remember which body she was supposed to be in: was she the unicorn who looked like Twilight Sparkle, or the maimed changeling with unicorn parts and memories that lay on the ground in front of the fountain?

“Are you scared, Sparkle?” sneered Trixie at Not-Twilight. “Afraid because you know Trixie is the superior unicorn?”

“I-I just don’t want to fight with you, that’s all. I’m n-not that kind of pony... mostly.”

“Is that a yes?”

“If you want to have a contest with me, we can do it in a lot of other ways. Having a potentially deadly showdown in a public place where a lot of ponies can get hurt is a terrible way to—”

“You arrogant little brat!” Trixie slammed her front hoof down on the ground. “Stop acting as if you care what happens! Trixie knows what ponies like you are really like! Ponies like you don’t give two horseapples about anypony but themselves! You had everything given to you as soon as you asked, just because you were lucky enough to have Celestia there to see you show off when you got your cutie mark! Trixie had to work for everything she has, and you took it away from her anyway! Twilight Sparkle, protégé of Princess Celestia! Why Celestia chose you is beyond Trixie; she must be going senile after so many years of raising the sun every morning.”

“Trixie,” said the fake Twilight sharply. “I understand that you’re angry at me, and I d-do understand why—somewhat—but please be respectful and leave Princess Celestia out of this.”

Trixie just laughed at her. “Trixie’s rival is one of those unicorns, is she?”

Reddish-green magic collected around the tip of Trixie’s horn, creating a bizarre kind of light that looked like a glowing ball of mud. Before Twilight could even comprehend what was about to happen to her, the insane unicorn struck her in the chest with the spell. A confusing mess of pain, fire, and numbness crashed down upon Twilight as her magic went haywire. Stripes of agony erupted up and down her body, and she let out a hoarse screech as her bones all began to morph and change shape. A vortex of emerald fire erupted out of her horn’s tip and surrounded the writhing changeling for a split second.

As if in slow motion, Twilight watched her black legs turn the purest white she’d ever seen, leaving behind a feeling like she’d just been skinned alive. Traveling down her thighs, the white coat became gold, eventually revealing an image of a beaming sun. On her back she could feel her wings bulging and then bursting as feathers pushed through, and they became large and white and swan-like, full of nerves that fired random bursts of pain into her body.

And then it was over. Dizzier than ever, Twilight remained where she had fallen, panting sharply. Twilight’s eyes flicked wildly back and forth, and she saw cascading down from either side of her head a mane like a wild, flowing rainbow. It was still sizzling with electricity, and each shock made her body jerk and twitch spastically. Somehow, she had the presence of mind to avert her eyes from looking at her her lower body and reposition her legs in more modest pose, still determined to respect the Princess no matter what the circumstances. It made her uncomfortable, being in the Princess’s body—Twilight was not worthy of such a thing, and she knew it. Princess Celestia was a goddess, the queen of the day, the guardian of the light; and she, Twilight Sparkle, was a mere mortal unicorn, or changeling, or whatever she was now. Wearing such a divine form felt so painfully wrong.

Through all the confusion, Twilight came to a crude understanding of what had happened to her: she had just transformed into Princess Celestia. Or, rather, a miniaturized version of the Princess—like a tiny, changeling-sized alicorn. Otherwise, as far as she could tell, she was a perfect replica of her mentor; right up to the elongated horn on top of her head.

“Look! Look, Sparkle! It’s Celestia!” Trixie shouted, pointing a the emaciated parody of the goddess her spell had generated and clapping her hooves together obnoxiously. It must have been Trixie’s demented idea of a joke—like a revealing spell cast in reverse. “Are you angry? Are you offended? Does it sicken you to see your goddess brought so low?”

“Stop it!” cried Not-Twilight. Her face was a portrait of horror and disgust, like Trixie was actually tearing apart the real Princess Celestia in front of her. “Change it back! Can’t you see you’re hurting it! How can you be so cruel?”

Many of the ponies watching them were voicing similar sentiments of outrage, though whether at Trixie’s words or the fact that she’d turned a changeling into Princess Celestia was unknown to Twilight. Either way, Trixie seemed to have passed the point where they were affecting her, and she was only getting more and more arrogant with each word that came out of her mouth.

“The Magnificent and All-Powerful Trixie can do whatever she pleases! She is Trixie! She doesn’t have to answer to your pitiful little Celestia!” she proclaimed. Once again, she pointed gleefully at Twilight, who’d sat back on her haunches, unable to remain standing but unwilling to lie down, either. “Celestia is pathetic! Celestia is weak! Celestia can’t stop Trixie from doing what she wants! Trixie is more of a creator than Celestia will ever be!”

She cast the same spell on Twilight again. From far away, Twilight experienced a horrifically familiar sensation: that of her body having its skin peeled off all over again. The transformation was quicker and less painful this time, but she could still feel her bones shifting under her skin, distorting again to take on their previous shapes. Though wasn’t anywhere near as terrible as it had been the first time around, even a shadow of that experience was positively hellish in its own right.

Even as the irregular circular holes in her legs opened up and widened, Twilight noticed patches of mulberry opening up, all of them in exactly the same places as before. Trixie had not simply turned her back into a changeling; she had deliberately turned her back into the demented hybrid between a changeling and herself that she had become in the bubble. Green blood seeped out from the reopened wounds, which had briefly faded into reddish marks on Celestia’s body.

“Stop that! You’re torturing it! How dare you do such a cruel thing!”

The familiar voice belonged to an equally familiar yellow pegasus who pushed past everypony else and stormed right up to Trixie to glare at her. Fluttershy had that very rare expression of anger on her face; the one that tended to accompany her use of The Stare.

“What’s it to you?” Trixie spat. “It’s just a cockroach.”

“It has feelings! It’s obviously in pain! It doesn’t want to be here! You’re torturing an innocent creature—”

There was no malice in the word creature, but Twilight cringed inside anyway, knowing that even Fluttershy thought of her as subequine now.

“—and there’s absolutely no excuse for doing that! You turn right around and go back to your rock farm, and you sit and think about how you would feel if you were the one being treated like this!”

Apparently, the magic turning Trixie’s eyes red offered her some protection from whatever arcane force was behind The Stare, because she initially failed to react to it beyond taking a few steps backward and looking bewildered. Then she started nodding slowly, a completely terrified expression crossing her face as The Stare began to affect her.

Fluttershy was abruptly bumped out of the way by Not-Twilight, who looked quite panicked indeed. As soon as her eye contact with Trixie was broken, the blue unicorn began to snap out of her trance, shaking her head and looking increasingly angry about what had just happened to her.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” said the fake to Fluttershy, waving her hooves around and gesticulating anxiously as she spoke. “I think you should stay back for now—No, all of you should stay back. Really! I don’t want any of you to get hurt!”

“Twi?” That voice belonged to Applejack, who had started out of the crowd of ponies toward Not-Twilight as well.

The other mare continued, now becoming somewhat out of breath in her frenzy, “Because, because, you’re my friends, s-so you getting hurt would be very upsetting to me, so I think, I think you should all—”

She let out a panicked scream when Trixie cast a spell in her direction that tore up the ground and left a sizzling black line in its wake where it touched. Fortunately for Not-Twilight, Trixie was still disoriented from the aftereffects of The Stare, so her spell went quite wide and ended up doing nothing more than harmlessly burning an empty stretch of dirt; even if she had been focused enough to aim properly, she would have missed anyway because the imposter skittered out of the spell’s path.

Trixie spun around and struck at the Royal Guards who were moving to neutralize her, throwing up a wall of fire between them and herself that extended from one side of the town square to the other. A third spell shattered half the stone fountain, causing water to gush out all over the real Twilight, and a fourth blew up a spot on the ground and showered dirt everywhere. Trixie had very little actual finesse with her spells and clearly hadn’t cast combat magic before, but her apparent determination, anger, and raw power more than made up for it at the moment.

“Trixie can’t believe you were the one to ruin her life!” she sneered at Not-Twilight, who was cowering pitifully on the ground where she’d fallen in shock after the most recent explosion. “She’s happy to take you down to where you belong: whimpering like an animal before h—”

The ground beneath Trixie suddenly erupted into a shower of yet more dirt and filth as the insane showmare was lifted up into the air inside a shimmering golden bubble. Caught off guard, she failed to adjust to the sudden change in footing and landed heavily on the bottom, her mouth open in a silent cry of outrage. She spent a moment flailing about, then climbed back to her hooves and began banging on the wall of the sphere—but it was a futile exercise, and it wasn’t long before she stopped in favor of glaring murderously at everypony. A rather pudgy white mare with a red-and-blue mane and a three-starred cutie mark slipped into the light cast by Trixie’s still active self-contained spell that made the partially destroyed fountain shine. Her horn was glowing with an almost blindingly bright gold aura; the same one given off by the spell holding Trixie captive.

Ever since Trixie’s last spell had blown up the ground, the imposter Twilight had lain flat against the dirt with her forelegs over her head, clearly expecting another burst of magic. She remained cowering like this until Applejack’s hoof gently touched her shoulder, at which point she finally uncurled and peeked out at the farmpony from behind her shaking hooves.

“Ya okay there, sugarcube?” Applejack asked her gently. The other mare nodded after a moment of tense silence, allowing herself to be helped back to her hooves by the other mare.

“I-I’m sorry... I just froze up...” she squeaked. She was still trembling and jumping at every little noise. “J-just didn’t know what to do... It w-was... it was scary...”

From a distance away, Twilight Sparkle watched her friends comfort the pony pretending to be her, and it finally sank in just how painful the situation was. There was an imposter pretending to be her. The realization struck Twilight hard: there was a pony who had taken her place; was living her life. It wasn’t fair. She was Twilight Sparkle, not the ‘unicorn’! That was her body being used! Someone was using her body, living her life, sitting in her library, leafing through her books, alone with her Spike for hours at a time, putting her friends in danger, writing letters to her princess—

Sparks fell from Twilight’s horn as she began to lose what little control of her magic she still had left. A searing pain shot up her hind leg, and she turned to watch a stripe of blue coat bubble up through a ring of sickly green fire that reached up to her thigh. One of her wings snapped open on its own as it twisted and deformed, the chitin first sharpening into long knives and then softening to become feathers. The wing stopped there, with only two functioning primaries and patches that were still completely see-through. Her body itself was changing on its own, perhaps as a final, primitive attempt to keep her alive in the face of so much hostility.

“I don’t think you should be out here right now, though.”

The other Twilight was protesting to the real Elements of Harmony, all of whom were now with her. There was still a nervous quaver to her voice, and her eyes were flicking back and forth between the other five ponies and the imprisoned Trixie as she tugged anxiously at her tail. “Although I distinctly remember Trixie being a mediocre magician the first time we met, she seems to have improved significantly...”

“‘More like ‘terrible’,” muttered Rainbow Dash. “And a bully, to boot.”

“All the more reason for you to s-stay back! I don’t know what she’s capable of, e-especially with her improved magical abilities.”

“Ooh! Ear flick... itchy belly button... tingly that-one-tooth-that-tingles-when-it-tingles...” muttered Pinkie, utterly ignoring the others.

“Nu-uh. You just got back, and I’m not just gonna stand back and let this maniac threaten my friend,” Dash shot back at Not-Twilight.

“But you might get hurt. Please go. I can handle this on my own.”

Pinkie Pie’s tail twitched, then contorted into a strange zigzag that resembled a lightning bolt.

“Twilight, darling, you’ve just had a traumatic experience. You aren’t thinking clearly.”

“Yes, that would make sense. But you should still go! It would be bad if you got hurt, Rari—”

“My Pinkie Sense says we’re about to have a spinning blade of death shot at our heads!” announced Pinkie. “That means we should get down on the ground so we can still talk to each other afterward, ‘cause it’s hard to talk when you don’t have a head!”

She seized Fluttershy, who was nearest, and dragged her down into the dirt. Three of the other four ponies followed her, leaving only a panicked, frazzled, and confused looking mulberry unicorn to put her hoof to her head and glance ever more rapidly back and forth between them.

“Pinkie Sense? Oh, that—Right—”

At that moment, Applejack bit the Twilight-like mare’s tail and jerked her out of the way; just in time to prevent a whirling pinwheel of many colours from decapitating her. The spell spun into the side of a house instead of into Not-Twilight's neck and dissipated, leaving behind only an ominous red glow that flickered like it was a pile of coals stuck to the wall—a sign that it had been powerful dark magic.

Trixie was still inside the bubble, but her horn was glowing red in spite of the golden electricity connected to it—to which she seemed to be immune. The showmare had a look of twisted, triumphant amusement plastered across her face, darkening her features to make her look almost demonic.

Instead of casting her unknown dark spell through the bubble again, which might have afforded her some protection against counter-magic, she chose to begin cutting into the bottom of the bubble with the red tip, quickly cutting out the floor beneath her hooves before anypony could even react to what she was doing. Falling in a heap on the ground, she became tangled in her cloak for a second, but a reddish shield erupted around her to ward off the guards that rushed to subdue her. When she’d finally freed herself and gotten back on her hooves, Trixie looked to Not-Twilight, eyes suddenly burning with intense and passionate hatred, as she tore the cloak from her body altogether and levitated it aside into the mud beside the real Twilight.

“The Great and Powerful Trixie will not be so easily subdued!” she snarled. A three-meter-long whip made of fire burst out of her horn as she shouted and lashed through the air, ending in a terrifying snapping noise as it narrowly missed its star-flanked target. Twilight Not-Sparkle, rather predictably, backed up and fell over in terror, struggling to get as far away from the madmare as she could.

Almost immediately after that, Trixie had to turn and block a spell from the huge white unicorn leading the Inquisitors; a spell so powerful its brilliance left spots in Twilight’s eyes. For the first time, Twilight witnessed real battle magic in use: a blur of devastation exchanged between Trixie and what seemed to be the whole of the Canterlot Inquisition that far outstripped what few things Princess Celestia had ever taught her about magical combat.

The gathered townsponies, who’d only just begun to creep back up after Trixie had first been imprisoned, fled for shelter with the full blessings of the Royal Guard. The latter seemed more interested in preventing anypony from getting hurt than in engaging Trixie, preferring to allow the Inquisition to take care of her. Because so many ponies had gathered there, however, there was an uncontrollable stampede of frightened Ponyvillians all trying to escape the danger zone at the same time. There were so many ponies looking at her as they rushed past in a single moment, their feelings all jumbled up into a wide range of emotions. Many were displaying fear or hostility, just as before—even the most sympathetic of their emotions were tainted by some form of negativity or other.

One leg at a time, Twilight crawled to her hooves, desperate to get away from the barrage of psychic negativity—terror, anger, hurt, pain; too much bad go away leave me alone oh please leave me alone—flowing freely from her surroundings. She fixed her wide eyes on a single, almost random, point in the distant shadowed streets that fed into the town square and moved in whatever ways her ruined body was still capable of to get from the open into the darkness. It called to her; invited her to lie in its comforting arms and hide from the burning lights that wanted to destroy her again and again and again.

Nopony seemed to notice her slow plodding towards the welcoming safety of the dark, as they were all too focused on their own escape to pay her any mind. Even if they had, Twilight could hardly separate one from the many anyway. She was crushed beneath the sheer flood of fear coming from all around; like a little black-and-lavender marble wrapped in a thick shroud of increasingly ugly feelings and no way out...

Even lifting her head a fraction of an inch to make sure she wasn’t going to walk into somepony else cost her a terrible effort. And when she did finally look around with her tired eyes, Twilight was almost startled to find that not only had she almost reached the shadows, but they were already occupied. A couple of earth ponies had taken cover behind a cart at the end of the street, probably hoping to watch the battle going on in the square without getting hurt. Their stupidity would have annoyed Twilight had she not been more concerned with remembering how to back away from them, as she was less than a pony’s length away and staring into their coagulated fear...

...and staring into their love.

It hit her like a moving mountain that there were lovers among the hiding ponies. Young lovers, the kind whose love burned bright and fast and was so utterly physical that Twilight couldn’t help but feel as if she’d had the emotion injected straight into her bloodstream. Their fear of her, and the resulting concern they felt for one another, only amplified it still more.

And at that moment she was racked with something bizarre she’d never felt before. All capacity for higher thought seemed to vanish from the changeling’s mind, leaving her struggling to remember where she was, what was going on, and why all of it was happening. The closest Twilight was able to come to fully identifying it was a sense that she’d just stepped into a horrible nightmare where she no longer had control over any of her body’s functions. Twilight’s good foreleg gave way under her, as for some reason she lacked the ability to make its muscles do anything but twitch uselessly all of a sudden.

There were only a hooffull of very strong, very well-defined thoughts still floating around in her head, and she latched onto them and didn’t let go. The next part of her life passed in a blur of these thoughts and a few overly vivid images.

Twilight is hungry
Twilight sees food
Twilight applies the changeling process for feeding
Twilight’s body alters appropriately to reflect the form her target desires
Twilight is in pain but not really in pain
Twilight casts a spell now
Twilight casts a spell now
Twilight casts a spell now

Her brain seemed to have stopped, repeating the same command over and over without response; like a broken record skipping back to the same words every few seconds. The changeling took a few steps toward her food, horn glowing with a nebulous green energy that might or might not have evolved into a spell to steal their love if she’d been able to complete the order. As it was, she suddenly ran face-first into a hoof belonging to one of the stallions and reeled back, her already broken nose smarting badly from the attack.

Twilight did not actually fall, though she swayed dangerously and sagged back into the dirt, sitting on her haunches, her already limited movement further restricted by the way some of her muscles were contorting by themselves—continuing to take steps forward even after she’d been pushed out of the appropriate posture to utilize such movements. Tears and green blood now streamed down her already filthy face, but she felt no real pain. Instead, Twilight just looked at her attacker with glazed eyes.

“S-sorry,” the stallion who’d hit her stammered when she looked up at him. He was very familiar, but not enough that Twilight was able to place him through the haze before giving up. “I didn’t want to! You w-were just coming real close... and you look like m-my neighbor...”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” Twilight slurred back in a near monotone, shaking her head rhythmically from one side to the other for some reason she’d forgotten long before she started doing it. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I th-think I’m late for something. Might be—”

“What?”

Might be... Spike is eating all the ice cream, and I need’ta go write a friendship report. I’m sorry. Can I get back t’ya in a... back t’ya in a second. I’m sorry. Might be tardy if I don’t—when Spike eats all the—I’m sorry... I don't think I'm okay... Sorry...”

With a sickening lurch, all of Twilight’s muscles relaxed at once, causing her to slump forward slightly. Her thoughts rushed back in a sudden, dizzying blur. Even her blinking eyelids were momentarily paralyzed by the pain of having her stolen skin ripped away yet again. A tingling sensation began to travel up her forelegs. Looking dumbly down, Twilight saw green fire whirling around them, just as each of her other transformations had featured.

This time, though, there was also a strange sense of relief along with her torture: this transformation wasn’t just reverting her back to her previous mutated form. When the fire died away, Twilight was able to look straight through one of the holes in her foreleg again for the first time since getting out of the bubble, the horrid lavender membrane that had covered it now absent. She was a simple changeling again, and for some reason she found this preferable to being a disgusting hybrid of two races.

Better one without pain than two in agony.

Looking up, she discovered that she was alone in the shadows now. Sometime during her rambling attempt to remember how to apologize, she’d been abandoned by her fearful near-hostage audience—and she hadn’t even noticed. Nowhere in her memories did she have any recollection of the ponies she had been talking to leaving her. When she touched the ground in front of where she had been sitting for the last who-knew-how-long, she found it wet—and that was when the acrid stench truly hit her partially smashed nose.

A combination of disgust and fear bubbled up inside Twilight. She stumbled to her hooves and ran—or did the best she could to run—away from that place. It was an absurd thing to be afraid of the logical consequence of losing control of most of her muscles, but her less rational subconscious brain was screaming at her that this place was evil; that it represented the culmination of all the hell she had been through, all the shame and humiliation she’d suffered, and the new life that had been forced upon her to replace what that one moment in time had stolen.

Step by painful step, Twilight Sparkle shambled through the shadows in the street leading away from the town square. Her broken leg was no longer held up at an angle, but dragging along the ground since she had neither the will nor the strength to carry it properly.

The street was completely and eerily deserted. To her relief, the maelstrom of negativity had finally broken while she was disconnected from reality. Whatever had happened between Trixie and the Canterlot Inquisition had likely happened some time ago, and her presence had somehow been overlooked by the ponies who had passed her by. It was a mystery how that had happened—perhaps she had held the transformation well enough to fool passersby into thinking she was just another pony; albeit one staring into space and blankly reciting meaningless strings of words at a cart.

Yet again, she’d narrowly missed having her horn pulled off...

“Hey, it’s still trying to use magic... What if it attacks somepony?”

“Aren’t there things you can put over a unicorn's horn to make it not work?”

“D’you mean a limiter? Don’t the police use—”

“Look at its horn! Do you think you could get a limiter on that thing? We’ll have to break it off if we want to keep it from escaping or hurting somepony!”

Twilight shuddered as the terrible memory invaded her thoughts. It was such a vivid recollection that she felt as if she’d been dragged straight back through time to join her past self in that ocean of evil once again. With a soft sob, she huddled into a ball on the ground, her good hoof still outstretched in protest against a group of silent assailants which had long since parted ways with her.

“Twilight... stop, stop, stop,” she gasped to herself. “It’s a flashback. I had a flashback. Everything’s fine. Everything’s fine... Shh... don’t overreact to this. I’ve been through a severe traumatic experience. It’s a-a natural reaction to stress. N-nothing’s wrong.”

With a soft thump, she rocked forward and planted her forehoof on the ground, then raised herself up to her usual height, looked around, and sat back down again. The motion was accompanied by a heavier thumping sound.

“Okay... List. Lists are good. Need to make a list... Need to organize. I don’t know, I don’t know... I need Princess Celestia! Oh, what am I going to—Stop. Stop, Twilight...” Twilight paused deliberately and took a long, deep breath, putting her forehoof up against her head. “Okay... okay... Shh... Calm down...”

I am h-having a panic attack,” Twilight recited, still breathlessly. “Now that I know I am having a panic attack, I also... also know that all of this is an overreaction. The things I am thinking are n-not an objective analysis of my situation. They are the result of a d-disp-p-proportionate r-response to stress by my nervous system... which does not... th-think rationally... as I am capable of doing...”

She sniffled slightly.

“...I am an intelligent, competent u-unic-c-c... unicorn... and I can solve this problem s-satisfactorily... if I regain control over my faculties... and organize myself...”

Slowly, she continued onward, quietly repeating the last portion of her mantra to herself every so often:

“I am an intelligent, competent unicorn, and I can solve this problem satisfactorily if I regain c-control over my faculties and organize myself... I am an intelligent, competent unicorn, and I can solve this problem satisfactorily if I regain control over my faculties and organize myself... I am an intelligent, competent unicorn, and I can solve this problem satisfactorily if I regain control over my faculties and organize myself...”

After wandering aimlessly for house after house with her head lowered, too tired to keep it up, Twilight literally bumped into the endpoint of her journey: a wooden door set in the trunk of a tree. The door had a little brass slot at about knee height with Book Return engraved in it.

“Oh,” she said to herself in mild surprise.

And when she staggered back, there too was the familiar house it belonged to: the Golden Oaks Library. That her seemingly random steps had subconsciously led her back to her library-in-a-tree felt oddly natural and right to Twilight, as did the sight of her favorite place in Equestria after such an endlessly long time away from it. When one had nowhere left to go, one went home.

On one hoof, she knew there was a good chance her double had already returned there after such a long time had passed, but on the other, she didn’t care very much at that very moment. The library was home, and home offered a chance for her to rest at last; to find relief from the endless abuse she’d been put through for the last few days. After only a moment of consideration, Twilight decided it was more than worth the risk to enter—she had neither time nor energy left to waste debating the matter with herself as it was.

She dug around into the bushes behind the library sign, slowly leaning in until only her hindquarters were still visible outside. After quite a bit of clumsy, almost aimless fumbling with her hooves through the leaves, rocks, and dirt, Twilight finally found an object that was shaped and textured like a stone but quite a bit warmer and lighter in weight. Triumphant, she flipped the fake plastic rock upside down and pried the little plastic cover off the bottom. Her spare housekey clinked out into the dirt, and she gingerly picked it up between her teeth.

Twilight tumbled into the Golden Oaks Library once she got the key into the lock and turned it, having leaned on the door both for support and to push it open because she had so little strength left. Luckily, she managed to catch herself before that happened, and ended up stumbling into the library without falling—though she very nearly swallowed the key still in her mouth, which slipped back into her throat for a second when she parted her jaws in surprise. She coughed and choked on the metal object, frightened for a moment that she would actually swallow it, but it dislodged itself again after that and tumbled out of her mouth onto the floor.

The inside of the library was quiet save for the rhythmic ticking of the large, book-shaped ‘Reading Is Fun!’ clock that hung on the wall on the other side opposite the doorway, and the hardly noticeable hum of the power generator that kept the library supplied with (environment-friendly) electricity even when the rest of Ponyville had power outages. A soothing smell of old books, crisp parchment, and ink permeated the air; something that Twilight almost rushed to huff into her lungs as fast as possible after that first breath she took inside. A distinct lack of magic being cast at her, or indeed any movement at all beyond her own, made it quite clear that Twilight’s double was either asleep or not home at all. Either one was quite good enough for Twilight, who only wanted to be left alone now.

Once she’d replaced the housekey in its hiding spot outside—order and organization meant everything; even, and especially, when her life was being systematically torn apart—Twilight shuffled back in and shut the door. Then she finally allowed herself to sink down onto the floor, gasping. The understanding that she was finally somewhere both familiar and (almost) safe and was nearly overwhelming, quickly bringing tears to her eyes.

Nothing truly mattered just then except for the joy that flooded Twilight as she looked around and realized that she was finally home. Finally back in her favorite place in Equestria, with her books, quills, laboratory, and the general tools ponies used to keep themselves civilized. This was where she belonged; not the rotting ruins of the Everfree church, or some stinking changeling hive deep beneath the earth. This was Twilight Sparkle’s homeland: a room full of books and knowledge.

In the time she’d been away, nothing had really changed around the library—at all. With a conditioned pang of annoyance, Twilight noted that the pile of books Spike was to have reshelved during and following her short presentation in the square remained untouched. She immediately felt very guilty for getting even slightly irritated at Spike’s unproductive behavior: her number one assistant had probably been very upset after what happened; of course he wouldn’t have gotten anything done. Still, a part of Twilight wanted very badly to go and put those books away where they belonged—it was a strong enough want that she probably would have done it if she’d had the energy. But she didn’t have anything approaching the energy or focus to reshelve almost a week’s worth of library books, and it was a completely impractical thing to do at that time anyway, so she averted her eyes from the pile and turned her attention elsewhere.

It was quite dark throughout the room, the only light coming from a candle next to Twilight’s reading desk—which caught her gaze by reminding her that she had been studying a huge collection of very technical information about changelings the night before her ordeal began. The logical outcome of recalling this was that Twilight realized she now had a chance to give herself that one badly needed hint that would allow her to solve the mystery of her transformation.

But, when her eyes fell upon the actual desk, the ex-unicorn discovered that it was  the only part of the library that had changed significantly since she’d last been inside. The work she had been reading over was stacked on the floor beside the desk, but by the time she fully registered it, she was already distracted by what had replaced it in its previous spot. Squinting curiously, Twilight lurched back to her hooves and gravitated toward the desk to look more closely at the small pile of letters that had replaced her changeling research from the night before the presentation.

Upon more minute inspection, the letters were not, in fact, letters, but cards made from construction paper. They were arranged in a way that looked as though they had originally been stacked up, but had then pushed over at some point, so only the top one was fully visible. It had a very crude picture of a purple pony with a horn on its head on the front.

With a hoof that trembled slightly from her combined exhaustion and the emotional impact of seeing such a thing, Twilight nudged the top card off the toppled pile and slid it over to open it. Inside, in foal-like hoofwriting that was equally as scribbly as the picture on the front, was a message:

Dear Miss Twilight Sparkle, my name is Silver Spoon and my teacher’s name is Miss Cheerilee. I hope that you are okay and we are thinking of you and when you get back this card is also a gift card to buy whatever you want at my daddy’s store free of charge it doesn’t matter what it is you can have it for free.

Twilight closed the card over again, breathing somewhat raggedly, and opened the next one without sliding it off the pile. It was from Applejack’s sister, Applebloom, and had an invitation to take as many apples as she wanted from Sweet Apple Acres the next time she came around, as well as a similar statement that everypony was thinking of her and hoped she was alright.

Each of the cards she opened shared that basic formula: they were gift cards and get-well cards rolled into one. Twilight guessed that Cheerilee must have had her class write cards to soothe their distress over the town librarian’s apparent abduction and make them feel like they were doing something to help—lest one or three of them go off alone into the forest to search for her on their own...

Strangely, she didn’t actually know what she was supposed to feel at that moment. She wasn’t even sure whether the confusing mess that used to be her emotions was currently capable of producing the appropriate response. There were tears rolling down her cheeks, but Twilight couldn’t understand why seeing the cards was making her cry—it made no sense; nothing made sense. Unsettled and unnerved by her own disjointed reaction to them, she slowly backed away from the desk, though it took her until she bumped against the wall to actually tear her eyes away from it. She looked to her right, and found herself looking up the stairs that led to her small apartment above the library.

The noxious smell of her urine and accumulated days without a proper shower was especially overpowering just then, as Twilight thought of the bathroom upstairs—in particular, the bathtub. Even the dull, gnawing emptiness of her hunger couldn’t steal her attention away from the sense of filthiness anymore. What she needed wasn’t about hiding anymore, or getting back to her friends, or even eating love to keep herself alive. It was far more simple: Twilight wanted to go take a bath and clean the physical and metaphorical filth from herself. Perhaps, if she scrubbed hard enough, she would uncover a genuine spot of mulberry beneath all the ugly chitin. And if not, maybe she could clean herself so thoroughly her nerves wouldn’t feel anything anymore.

Most of all, she was reminded as a spike of pain stabbed through her horn, there was something upstairs she needed badly.

It took her some time and effort to get up the steps, but she was rewarded with a sense of relief and safety when she finally limped past the Please do not enter—Private property! sign on the ‘front door’ of the second floor. It was quiet upstairs; devoid of life as it had been downstairs save for Twilight herself. The former unicorn caught a faint hint of jasmine through her smashed nose when she shuffled past the kitchen—she guessed her double had probably had some recently.

On the right side of the end of the short hallway, there was a door leading to Twilight’s bedroom and study. A few steps past this was another door; one that opened into the bathroom. The natural wooden floor ended at the doorframe here. On the other side it abruptly transitioned into the cheap ceramic tiles Twilight had bought a year ago and installed with the help of Applejack and Fluttershy, both of whom had far more experience with home installation than she did. Twilight’s three-hooved walk went from muffled wooden thumps to grinding clicks that, for some reason, irritated her more sensitive ears greatly. She tried to cross the bathroom without making any more of the unbearable sounds, but it didn’t work very well since she could still pick up the clicking as though it were happening right next to her ears no matter how softly she tread across the tiles.

At last, she finished her walk of agony and sat down beside the bathtub to try and clear her buzzing mind. This, too, wasn’t a particularly successful endeavor, because every little thing—from the little spot on the bottom of the tub to the way the light reflected off one of the tiles near her—seemed to drag her attention away from what she was trying to consider before she even realized it was being tugged on.

“List,” Twilight mumbled after a while. “Need to make a list. Lists’re good. Need to check over... get clean... relax...”

She glanced dumbly around the bathroom and did her best to size up what she had available to her, deliberately avoiding looking at her own reflection in the mirror above her sink. The relatively short periods of productive thinking were repeatedly interrupted by longer stretches of confusedly staring at the wall.

Then, quite suddenly, she lurched over to the toilet and tried to bump the seat up as a particularly strong wave of nausea hit her. Luckily, though she just banged her leg, chin, and chest on it instead of getting it open, Twilight’s stomach had nothing to vomit up during the series of spasms that followed except for a vile-tasting belch of air. She spent the next minute or two breathing heavily over the open toilet, unsure if her body was going to try and eject something from her stomach again. It turned out that it apparently didn’t plan on doing so, if only after a lot of awful churning.

Somehow, the episode of dry-heaving had actually made her feel a bit more focused, having relieved a feeling of general malaise she hadn’t even been aware she’d been under the influence of. Now Twilight was able to look up and glance around, just a bit more collected and just a bit more coherent, and put two thoughts together to form an intention; a plan to do something that wasn’t just reactionary.

“Right... right... the list. The list... The list?”

There was no list to consult, Twilight realized, because there was simply nothing left to do.

To think that she would get lucky again and manage to escape was preposterous to Twilight—a mare whose life and thoughts revolved around logic and measurement. The chances of another fortunate escape were already lower than dirt when Trixie brought her back to Ponyville on a leash, and after what had taken place that evening, she knew her luck wasn’t going to hold for another encounter. It was simply absurd to think anypony could keep getting random lucky breaks forever.

So instead of making some futile, halfhearted attempt to run or hide, Twilight Sparkle decided that she was going to live it up as best she could for what remained of her freedom. And of all the things she could have wanted to do with her time at that very moment, Twilight yearned to do that which was truly symbolic of civilized life, more than anything else.

She wanted to have a proper bath.

Almost as soon as she turned on the tap and touched the warming water coming out of the faucet, Twilight sighed. Simply being able to wash herself like a real pony was a luxury she had taken for granted all her life—but now, after she’d spent days in the filth and mud, covered with her own gore and bodily fluids, she truly appreciated how amazing it was. Right there, Twilight decided that every bath she took from that point on, whether she had only this final one or a hundred thousand, would be treated as something unequivocally priceless and special.

Sitting on the edge of the tub as steam from the hot water began to fill up the bathroom (and, oddly, mist up the shinier parts of her chitin armor a little), she held up her broken foreleg and examined it to see just how dirty the bandages had gotten.

To her surprise and slight bewilderment, the bandaged part of her leg was one of the few places not caked with mud and filth from her trek through the forest. Twilight distinctly remembered being concerned about infection after slogging twice through the Everfree’s swampy lowerlands, and yet there were only a few smears of dirt on the otherwise pristine white bandages from lying in the town square. Still, she decided to change the bandages if she had time after her bath now that she had access to her laboratory downstairs (which stocked a small hospital’s worth of medical supplies).

A particularly vicious jolt ran through Twilight’s horn, reminding her that she also had something else of great importance to take care of. It was something that wasn’t necessarily going to wait for her to finish her relaxing bath before it became an even more serious issue. Twilight glanced at the half-filled bathtub and decided she had enough time to get the supplies she needed before she had to shuffle over and turn off the water.

She went to her medicine cabinet and got herself some soap and horn salve, and then went to her cramped towel cabinet. The important item in question resided in an innocuous-looking wooden box on top of the cabinet. Twilight had a bit of trouble sliding the box down with only one workable foreleg, but with great care she eventually succeeded in balancing it on the upturned pad of her hoof and quickly brought it down to rest on the floor. After retrieving the key from an empty soap bottle in her cabinet, she sat down and opened it.

The box's contents were the sort of thing that deserved to be locked away in boxes; far away from impressionable young dragons and the occasional filly or colt Twilight let in to use the bathroom during Cheerilee’s class field trips to the library. At the moment, Twilight had eyes for none of them save for a little black cloth bag partially buried under everything else. She opened it and shook the single item it contained onto the floor: a heavy silver ring made from two smaller rings stuck together. One of them was smooth all over, and the other was ridged on the outside. Both had gold runes inscribed on them. It was a rather frightening device for any unicorn; one Twilight had only ever found the courage to experiment with a couple of times, but was immeasurably thankful that she owned.

Carefully placing it on the edge of the tub with her soaps and horn salve, Twilight packed the box back up and returned it to its proper spot on top of the cabinet.

A moment later, she sat back so she could reach out and test the water with her uninjured hoof. It was a bit too hot, so she swirled her hoof around in it a little bit before dumping a large amount of lavender bubble soap into the bath. Twilight dipped her foreleg in all the way up to the shoulder; slowly, almost lazily, stirring the water around and around and watching the mass of bubbles rise up with glazed eyes. Even though she no longer had a pony’s hoof, the warm water still felt just as exquisite against Twilight’s new chitin-riddled changeling one.

The process of actually getting into the tub amounted to a difficult and unsteady series of contortions, as Twilight had to navigate around the soap bottles she’d unconsciously lined up on the edge on only three legs without getting the bandage-wrapped fourth wet. Her patience in seeing the tedious acrobatics exercise to its completion, however, was well-rewarded when she was finally able to slip into the heavenly warm water. A soft sigh of combined relief, approval, and outright ecstasy hummed in the back of her throat as she sat, then half-laid down in the water with her broken foreleg resting lightly on a pile of folded towels beside her.

In all her life, Twilight had never felt so utterly rewarded as she did now. She was the personal student of the mare who raised the sun to illuminate all the world. She had defeated gods and demons. She was the Element of Magic. She had the five best friends and the best little dragon assistant she could ever ask for. She had gone from living in a castle to living in her own personal library... and yet being able to lie back in warm, bubbly, lavender-scented bathwater up to her chest after a few days away from home instantly outmatched them all.

Turning gingerly onto her side, she lifted some of the lavender bubbles up on her hoof and blew at them, watching them float around before popping. For the first time that day, a genuine smile turned Twilight’s fanged mouth upwards, fueled by a sense of fillyish delight as she played with the bubbles. Even the aches and pains of a body that had been mercilessly abused for days began to fade into a relaxed soreness, save for the constant stabs that assaulted her horn’s root.

Twilight flopped her good foreleg over her chest and felt around on the side of the tub until it came in contact with the bottle of horn salve. It was about half full until she uncapped it, reached up—her foreleg felt stiff and cramped, but she managed it—and squirted some of it onto her ruined horn. A wonderfully cool feeling spread from everywhere the salve touched, finally snuffing out the unnatural heat that had been radiating from it since she woke up in the grove.

When she touched her horn to rub the salve in, she winced slightly, startled by how sensitive it had become. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant to massage her horn at any time, but she had little interest in physical pleasure of that sort at the moment; and more importantly, each stroke she made to spread the salve around made it ache deeply. Still, Twilight continued to smear the soothing lotion around, and after some time, her horn finally stopped hurting.

Green streaked her hoof, along with the cloudy white horn salve, after she took it away—but Twilight was too relaxed to care. Whatever the green substance was—her horn was probably discharging horn oil in protest against the irritation—could wait until she was done with her bath.

All that was left was the silver ring. Twilight scooped it up in her hoof—after she’d wiped the horn oil and salve off—and carefully slipped it onto the tip of her gnarled changeling horn. To her relief, the now ill-fitting limiter ring still slid more than halfway onto her horn before it was unable to go any further. All she had to do now was push on the ridged side of the top ring to tighten it.

Having her magic shut off and forcibly contained within her body wasn’t entirely alien to Twilight, as she’d had to wear a limiter for several weeks after she got her cutie mark, until Celestia had given her a satisfactory education on how to control her newfound power. However, Twilight didn’t have a military-grade prison limiter like that one lying around the house. What she had available was little more than a toy: unlike the big, heavy black iron ring she’d had to wear day and night, the silver limiter wouldn’t suppress Twilight’s magic completely. While it was powerful enough to eliminate a normal unicorn’s abilities, Twilight had enough magic that she could simply break through it if she needed to. She’d made sure of that.

Regardless of its origin and purpose, the magic limiter would do what Twilight needed it to: it would cut her off from her magic and reduce the pain in her horn to a dull ache, and—more importantly still—it would ensure that no more of her energy would burst through the tip of her horn and risk taking the very power to carry out her special talent with it. If (and it was an if so big Twilight didn’t want to think about it) she ever turned her world back to normal, there was a chance she could have the internal horn damage repaired by a particularly skilled unicorn surgeon in Canterlot. In fact, as far as Twilight could tell, she had gotten a lucky break in that she likely wouldn’t suffer much permanent damage to her magic from the ordeal.

Most importantly, it would ensure that Twilight would still have a horn when it was all over, no matter what awful outcome would eventually befall her. The changeling, however menacing she might still have been to ponies who feared the theft of their love and friendship, was utterly powerless now, already stripped of any ability to do magic. Removing her horn would be a waste of time, energy, and ponypower on the part of anyone who came across her; it was an illogical, irrational act that would gain nothing and cause only pain. And ponies, Twilight firmly believed, were inherently logical, rational creatures, in spite of all their many flaws.

Thus disarmed, the ex-unicorn leaned back and shut her eyes, resting her head lazily against the back of the bathtub. A rippling feeling passed through her body—the very beginnings of the transition from awake and alert to genuine relaxation. She sighed in the closest thing to ecstasy she could manage.

“All earth ponies have no wings and no horn,” she hummed to herself, sinking even further down into the bubbles. “A pony is an earth pony if and only if they have no wings and no horn. Princess Celestia has two wings and a horn. Therefore, Princess Celestia is not an earth pony...”

It was a silly little thing Twilight recited sometimes when she was a little filly, not understanding why she enjoyed it so much. She still didn’t get it, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was that it was logic. And more than anything, logic made Twilight feel comfortable, safe, and calm.

“All pegasi have two wings and no horn. A pony is a pegasus if and only if they have two wings and no horn. There are no ponies with two wings and no horn who are not pegasi. Princess Celestia has two wings and a horn. Therefore, Princess Celestia is not a pegasus.”

Though she already felt much better after getting in the bath, she was still nauseous and was beginning to feel oddly cold. Twilight wondered if she was getting sick. It wouldn’t have been much of a surprise to her if she was—she’d been walking around in the forest with a severely injured leg for days, in an unfamiliar, magically altered body which might or might not have a weakened immune system, and had recently rolled around in a swamp several times over. But it didn’t matter, Twilight decided, because she didn’t want to deal with anything else. She had reached her limit in coping with the bad things that had happened to her and couldn’t take anything further.

Twilight was actually one hundred percent fine.

“All unicorns have no wings and a horn... A pony is a unicorn if and only if they have no wings and a horn... Hmm... mmm...”

She was completely fine—she was fine even when the bottom of the bathtub dropped out from under her and she fell through into the darkness. And she kept falling, until she landed in a pit of ponies without faces and was drowned in their anonymity. Like Twilight, they had lost themselves; were forever doomed to carry a burden of not knowing who they were.

“Princess Celestia has two wings and a horn... Therefore... Princcccessss Celesssstia’s... not a unicorn...”

There were hands on her. Cold hands, fingers like razors, crushing her neck and putting out what light still remained within her, while she sat and smiled in the boiling hot water.

“All alicornssss... have two wingssss... and a horn... A pony... isssss... an alicorn... if... and only if... they have two wingssss and a horn...”

Something fearful was coming closer and closer to her. The emotion registered evoked no fear from Twilight; she was safe in her little hellhole of writhing legs and fields of faceless. It penetrated further and further, and then it was there, and yet Twilight still didn’t care. The sound of hooves—or claws, rather—scraping on the floor gave her only indifference in the depths of darkness.

“There are... no poniessss... with two wingsssss... and a horn... who are not alicornssss.... Princessss Celestia has two wings and a horn... Therefore, Princess Celestia is an alicorn... All earth ponies have no wings and no horn... A pony is an earth pony if and only if they have no wings and no horn. Princess Celestia has two wings and a horn. Therefore, Princess Celestia is not an earth pony...”

Twilight’s eyes cracked open, while her mouth continued to recite the syllogism she’d been repeating over and over and over to herself. The very short amount of time she’d spent asleep before being disturbed wasn’t nearly enough that she’d regained any significant cognitive ability, and so it was like waking up straight into a dream.

“All pegasi have two wings and no horn. A pony is a pegasus if and only if they have two wings and no horn. There are noh, no—”

Quite abruptly, the soothing haze surrounding her was replaced by a whirlwind of disorientation as her brain truly registered at last that she was no longer alone in the bathroom: that there was another pair of eyes looking right at her own. Twilight made a strangled, terrified screeching sound, all her muscles contracting in one violent jolt, and then gasped in pain when her injured leg banged on the outside of the tub. The sudden burst of movement caused her to slip down further into the water. By the time she’d even regained enough control over her body to object, she was already inhaling a mouthful of something that certainly wasn’t air.

She kicked at the other end of the bathtub with her hind hooves to push herself back up, which produced a muffled thump and splashed a lot of water onto the tile floor. Finally able to scoot up onto her plot and spitting out the liquid in her mouth, Twilight continued to flail for a while anyway, simply too frazzled to realize that there was little chance of her drowning in about a foot or so of water. Her temporary inability to analyze anything negated her concern for an intruder at her doorway.

And then, at last, she was in the moment again, taking in a such a flood of sensory input her overtaxed brain froze over while she tried to process it all. The water she was currently sitting in was no longer pleasantly hot but lukewarm; and quite a bit of the bubbly froth on top of it had already vanished except for a thin foam still clinging to the highest parts of the inside of the tub. Twilight was shivering when she sat up. Her stomach roiled about in such severe turbulence that she actually let out a pitiful little sob as she put her hoof on it.

At that point,Twilight’s wildly unfocused attention returned to that which had originally jarred her out of her delirious fever sleep in the first place: the two wide green eyes peering around the doorframe. Their pupils were slitted, like all dragon eyes were—though this didn’t do much in the way of giving their small, chubby owner a malevolent appearance, as his expression was one of mingled childlike curiosity, surprise, and a bit of fear.

“Spike!” Twilight uttered in an unnaturally high voice. The way she choked on her words almost made her sound like a pony; albeit one who’d been bucked in the throat recently. “Spike, don’t hurt—Spike—No, no, I’m not one of... Please... Oh... Oh, Spike... no... Oh, no...”

Seeing how he cowered even further behind the doorframe when she spoke—it was quite a lot like the way she herself was now cowering in a ball at the far end of the bathtub, except without the shivering and the whimpering and the general defeatedness of her demeanor—broke Twilight’s ability to speak coherent words for a moment. The nihilism that had pervaded her world after her second escape from the square returned with all the force of a rampaging hydra. Even Spike, who had been her only friend for more than a decade of her life, was afraid of her in this form—Her adopted brother was afraid of her.

Again and again, Twilight had fought for her own survival and health in the hope that she would come out victorious; that, perhaps, Princess Celestia would come out of the sun and rescue her after getting her notes, or some other equally absurd idea. But the world didn’t work like that, and it had done a very, very good job of pounding the fact into Twilight’s head each time she expended effort and energy working to save herself. Nothing she had done had even amounted to anything. She was still trapped in an oversized insect’s body and had no idea why; she was still being hunted like a monster; she was still hungry and tired; in fact, all she’d done was run into the woods and get dragged out again.

So, after days of struggling and giving everything she had to give, she finally chose to simply give up. She deflated somewhat from her insistent pose, upraised forehoof lowering down into the water and face transforming from a look of desperation into a hollow mockery of indifference, even as her eyes tingled with a tiny hint of changeling magic and tears began to form in them.

“Go on,” she mumbled around her fangs. Her tone was one of bitter hopelessness. “Go find a real pony and tell them I’m right here. I’m not going to go anywhere.”

“Y-you’re the ch-ch-changeling,”stammered Spike. Then he added, with a little bit of uncertainty that further betrayed how nervous he was, “Right?”

“If that’s what you want to think, I can’t stop you. It took me awhile to figure that out, or I would have just... oh... never mind...”

“Well, you stay right there,” Spike said, puffing himself up slightly. “I’m not gonna let you get away.”

“I already said I’m not going anywhere.” Twilight sank back down into the water and looked away from Spike. “I want to relax. Please leave me alone. Tell them I’ve put a limiter on my horn and I’ll go quietly if they don’t hurt me...”

“You’re not gonna fool me,” the dragon informed her.

“I’m not trying to, Spike.”

“You’re not gonna get away with this—Whatever it is. Whatever it is you’re up to.”

“I’m not up to anything, Spike,” Twilight murmured. “I don’t care anymore.”

“I’m not falling for that,” Spike told her haughtily. “Twilight taught me to think critically, y’know... you’re gonna wait until I leave, and then you’re gonna get up and magic yourself away.”

“I did teach you that... didn’t I... I did. You’re a very smart dragon for your age, Spike. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m too tired. Please let me relax.”

Spike snorted a little, probably frustrated that Twilight wasn’t adhering to the typical hero/villain interaction. “Why’re you taking a bath anyway? And why are you doing it here? Aren’t you supposed to be back at your changeling cave thingy? And why were you saying that thing Twilight used to say a lot? And why do you have on that magic limiter thing Twilight keeps with her dildos? And wh—”

“Spike!” Years of being on the lookout to keep Spike from being exposed to anything unsavory steamrolled Twilight’s indifference for a moment. “We do not use that kind of language in this library, no matter what’s going—”

She choked on her words and fell silent as the context of what they were talking about caught up to her. It was only after seeing Spike’s bewildered expression that Twilight opened her mouth again, and an ending to the chastisement tumbled out.

“...no matter what’s going on.”

Though Twilight wasn’t actually looking at Spike, she felt the emotion he was giving off grow slightly stronger and heard his claws click against the floor, and from this she knew that he must have moved out from behind the doorframe. She could feel him looking her over, but refused to turn and meet his eyes.

“Y-yeah, I guess you’re not really gonna go anywhere...” said Spike at last, a slight quiver in his voice.

Twilight said nothing in response. Had she possessed the energy to do so she would have nodded, but that would have entailed moving, and at the moment moving was not something she was capable of without sufficient motivation. More deafening silence passed, and still the emotion coming from the doorway stayed put.

Until the ability to experience others’ feelings in a tangible form had been forced on her, she had never truly comprehended just how much power could be found in the raw emotions of her friends. Even the two stallions who had passed her by on the way to Fluttershy’s cottage without noticing her had filled Twilight’s empathy sense with a range of complicated affects. Spike, who Twilight had always thought of as relatively simple and easy to understand emotionally, was feeling things she could hardly even guess at the significance of. Though for the most part she knew instinctively how to comprehend many of those metaphorical colours, that comprehension covered only the most solid and uncomplicated of them; certainly not the less concrete little veins of other things that were contained within fear, anger, sadness, happiness. Either Twilight’s sense had been packaged with an incomplete instruction manual, so to speak, or else interpreting those nuances was a skill changelings learned through experience.

“Hey, quit ignoring me.”

Wrapped up in her thoughts, Twilight hadn’t even noticed that Spike was talking to her. She turned her head a little, uncurling from her near-fetal position, but still didn’t actually look at him. “I told you to go. Please do what I’m asking of you, Spike. J-just let me relax, or... I don’t know. Just... please... please leave me alone and stop making me wait for everything to fall apart again and... and... just—”

“Yeah. Uh-huh. Got it.” Of all the times for Spike to take that infuriating attitude of flippant opposition, it had to be when she truly needed him to listen to her. “But you’re that one changeling that went up in front of the town a couple of days ago, right?”

“Yes,” Twilight almost growled, squeezing her eyes shut in aggravation. “You could say that, yes. Now go away.”

“So, you’d know where Twilight is, right?" he asked, a tendril of optimism worming its way into his voice. "So where is she? ‘Cause if you don’t tell me, I’m gonna be mad. And you won’t like me when I’m—”

He was cut off by a dark, bitter laugh. “Stop it, Spike. I’m not going to... I’ve wasted enough time hoping. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel. Don’t make me... don’t make me... hallucinate... delusionate... delusionalize... that you’d... believe me. Stop it. Just stop it. Don’t even...”

“Okay... um... whatever...” Another thirty seconds or so of blissful silence went by before Spike spoke again. “But... I know that pony that showed up today isn’t Twilight, okay? I know it’s a changeling disguised as her.”

“That’s completely illogical. If anyone was going to believe you, you would already ha--" Twilight blinked. "Wait. You... you don't think she's Twilight?"

“She took, like, eighteen million years to recognize me when I visited her in the hospital!” the dragon complained in a voice that Twilight was certain had to be accompanied by him throwing his claws up in the air in exasperation. “So—so if you don’t tell me where the real Twilight is, I’ll tell on both of you! And then you’ll both go to jail. How’s that sound?”

Against all her attempts to quash it, a small, but very real, glimmer of light ignited within Twilight’s chest. It was something she did not want at all—she knew letting it flourish would only lead to her getting hurt even more terribly than before—but it lived on nonetheless, feeding off of her inborn tendency to want to think the best of everything and everypony whenever she could. Within moments, there was a blaze burning inside her; a firestorm of hope in the center of a torrential downpour.

“Spike...” she said, almost in a whisper. Her voice cracked slightly when she said his name, so she cleared her throat and repeated it. “I’m the real Twilight, Spike...”

There was no reply; only the clicking of claws as Spike shifted around in the doorway, and the addition of still more confusion to his emotions. To Twilight’s relief, her words didn’t provoke any hostility from him. Perhaps it was because he was simply too young and naive to get angry over something like that the way an adult would, or maybe just because that part of his reaction hadn’t come to pass yet.

“I don’t believe you,” Spike said. Twilight heard him scratch the side of his head. “Cuz it’s kinda obvious you’re a changeling... B-but if you really are her, why didn’t you just say s—”

“I did!” interrupted Twilight, almost hysterical. “Hardly anypony will listen to me, and the ones that did just told me to go... I gave them notes on my—I don’t know how it happened, Spike! I don’t! I just... and then... and then I was like this... a-and everypony wanted to rip off my h-h-horn—”

With a loud splash, she scrabbled back onto her hooves and turned to look at him, leaning her foreleg against the side of the tub while she peeked over it. Spike was about a foot inside the bathroom, with one of his clawed hands resting upon the door handle behind him as though prepared to back up and slam it shut if she attacked.

“Please... Changelings can’t steal memories, Spike! I remember the time... Do you remember when I told Mom and Dad to adopt you so we could be brother and sister? I’ve never told anypony else about that! Spike, please.. please remember... please believe me... I’m not a changeling. I’m a unicorn. M-my name is Twilight Sparkle and I’m a unicorn, not a changeling! I’m your... your sister..."

She paused, straightening up. “Spike, ask me something only the real Twilight Sparkle would know!”

As he stared at her, she sensed a surge of suspicion and confusion in his feelings. “Why d’you want me to do that?”

“Please, Spike. Anything! I’m begging you!”

“Why?” repeated Spike, sounding utterly bewildered. “Fine... Um, right after the sixth year graduation party... like, a couple of days; whatever... you, um, wrote somepony a letter—”

“Yes,” Twilight blurted out, now shaking not only from her shivers but from growing excitement and a little bit of embarrassment over the memory as well. “Yes, yes, yes... I wrote a letter to Princess Celestia and told her that I... I cheated... on a question on my homework by asking for the answer from an upperclasspony. I wrote it because I was too afraid to tell her in person. And you read it before you sent it and I yelled at you for that and hid in my room until Princess Celestia came and told me it was okay...”

“How did you know that?” demanded the little dragon.

A quiet, partially stifled sob left Twilight’s mouth, piercing the silence at last.

“Please believe me...” she concluded desperately—almost in a whisper—before sinking back down, resting her chin on the side of the tub, breathing heavily. Though she wanted to keep looking at him now, Twilight just didn’t have the energy to even stay upright. The world was spinning around in a haze of combined adrenaline exhaustion and near somnia.

The next few minutes passed in torturous silence. The ex-unicorn dared not say anything, and at times found herself literally holding her breath without even realizing it. A faint rippling sound came every time her shaking body forced her to find a more comfortable position.

Never in her life had she felt more nerve-racked. It was very lucky indeed that she had no energy to spare having yet another panic attack, or she would surely have pitched forward into the the bathwater and drowned, too dizzy to stay upright. The last of Twilight’s battered faith was now on the line. If she found herself defeated yet again, she concluded, she would never recover and would spend the rest of her life insane.

Her anxiety was so overpowering that she almost didn’t hear his response:

“But then why are you a changeling?”

“I don’t know!” Twilight wailed. “One second, I was casting the revealing spell on everypony, and then I lost control of my magic and I started turning into a changeling! I don't know what happened. But Spike... please... don't leave me too. They’re going to come for me eventually and I’m afraid... I’m so afraid!”

“Um...” was all Spike said at first, nervously rubbing his claws together. Then he added, “O-okay... so... you’re Twilight?”

Twilight nodded frantically. “Yes, yes, I’m Twilight.”

“You’re Twilight?”

“Yes!”

And then Spike relaxed just a little. Twilight could see his acceptance both in his emotions and his posture, and warmth flooded her chest as she realized that her little brother had listened to her; that he believed in her. Slowly, one clicking step at a time, Spike moved across the tiles to peer into the bathtub.

“Promise?” he asked in a quiet voice.

“I promise. I swear I’m Twilight! Twilight Sparkle, sister of Spike Sparkle, personal student of Princess Celestia, Element of Magic, Ponyville librarian. I’ll swear on anything you want,” the former unicorn declared in an equally quiet, but far more quavering, voice; nodding fervently as she spoke. She started when Spike’s claw touched her hoof, which was resting on the edge of the bathtub.

“Okay.”

Twilight stared at him, not fully willing to consciously believe what she was hearing for fear that it might be a nonentity. A tiny voice in the back of her head was buzzing incessantly about how there had to be some catch, and how she would only get hurt if she put her faith in Spike now.

“S-so you believe me?” Twilight whispered.

Spike nodded.

“I know Twilight,” he told her, “and there’s no way you’re not her.”

She hardly felt the tears streaming down her cheeks, although she did feel her mouth turning up into a watery, wavery smile. Then she rocked forward and nuzzled Spike—even though it hurt her mutilated nose to do so—who did not recoil from her embrace but instead returned it with enthusiasm. The knowledge that her assistant and brother not only believed in her but was willing to touch her disgusting new body was simply more than Twilight could handle, and she subsequently began to cry loudly to accompany her already present tears.

“Oh, Spike... Oh, thank you... thank you...” Twilight choked out. “You don’t know how much this means to me...”

“Nopony could mistake you, could they?” said Spike, also beginning to tear up a little. “Oh, heh. Think I got something in my eye.”

“Me too...”

Twilight hooked her broken leg around him and sniffled into his shoulder while Spike awkwardly patted her on the back. For the first time in her life, Spike was the one comforting her, rather than the other way around. It was a bizarre and slightly humiliating experience, in some ways, but Twilight couldn’t have cared less. The only thing that mattered to her was that she was back home and had somepony there who cared about what happened to her.

She could smell the love Spike felt for her, and before she even knew what she was doing, she had broken past the limiter’s block on her magic and begun to consume it eagerly. This time, she felt no shame at all for what she was doing: it was love that was meant for her. Twilight was not stealing love; she was being given it freely by her very first friend.

That love, Spike’s love, was yet another thing entirely compared to the romantic feelings she’d smelled and fed on. These were brotherly feelings, probably the same as what Shining had for her, except that Spike also depended on her to keep him safe and give him a home. Just like there were so very many complex emotions, Twilight realized, there were also so very many kinds of love, and each one of them had a different, unique flavor.

And all of them tasted so good...

“Twilight, why is your horn glowing?” asked Spike suddenly.

“I c-can’t help it,” Twilight squeaked, only now realizing she might have alienated Spike by feeding on him. “My body doesn’t run on normal f-food, so I have to eat love like a changeling, and I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to—but I was so hungry because I haven’t eaten anything since I was a pony, and I’m s-s-sorry, Spike...”

Though she expected Spike to argue with her, the dragon simply butted in with, “It’s okay, Twilight. I get it. It’s like when I got really greedy and started taking whatever I wanted from ponies, right?”

Nodding frantically, Twilight said, “Yes, yes, that’s exactly it... that’s exactly it...”

“So, um, what now? I’m cool with the changeling stuff, I guess, but it’s kinda hard to hold you up like this,” he said. Indeed, Spike’s knees were beginning to buckle from Twilight leaning such a large portion of her weight on him for so long.

“I’unno. Just wanna relax, please...”

“But how are you gonna get everypony to listen to you? ‘Cause I dunno if you met that changeling that’s pretending to be you, but it did a good enough job that everypony else believed it.”

Staring at the tiles behind her assistant and sighing slightly, Twilight said, “I don’t know anymore, Spike... I'll work on it in the morning. I just want to sleep.”

“But Twilight, you have to... Well, if you’re too tired, I’ll send a letter to the Princess... I'll protect you when the guar—”

“No, Spike,” said Twilight wearily. “No more. Please. I’ve spent days running and hiding and trying to convince ponies, and—and—I just c-can’t anymore. I’m too tired. I just want to let what’s going to happen happen, and I’ll figure it out from there. Please don’t force me to keep going. And don’t put yourself in danger for no reason. Please. I’m asking you as your family, please...”

Again, a part of her expected Spike to continue arguing with her, but to her surprise, he didn’t. “Okay... Then what do you want to do?”

“Sleep,” she repeated. For some reason, she was shivering worse than ever. “I think I might have picked up a virus in the forest. I need to sleep... I’d like to get out of the bathtub, too...”

It took some work, but Spike was able to help her climb out of the tub, and she stood dripping onto the floor until he got her a towel from the cabinet. Twilight began gingerly toweling the remaining water off her chitin, being careful not to further irritate her injuries as she did.

“I can make some tea if you want,” said Spike, tapping his claws together idly.

“That would be nice...”

 “I made some before, but that other Twilight—the changeling—didn’t want it. It was jasmine tea, too; your favorite. I mean, you’d probably like it, but it’s cold now. We have some more, though. ‘Cause you had me get some more tea from the store last week, ‘member?”

“Did you throw it out?” Twilight asked, knowing Spike had a habit of leaving things where they were instead of disposing of them. Even under the current circumstances, she was determined to keep things orderly if possible.

“Nuh-uh... I’ll make some new tea for you.”

“Well, don’t forget... to throw the old tea out,” mumbled Twilight. “And that would be lovely, Spike... Thank you.”

Once Twilight had finished drying herself, Spike helped her limp out of the bathroom and up the staircase adjacent to it. Her bedroom was just as she’d left it: completely neat and orderly, save for Spike’s bed-basket, which she would have told him to make if she hadn’t been so utterly thankful for his believing in her. Instead, she simply avoided looking at it on the way up to her own perfectly made bed.

Spike went downstairs to make the tea he’d promised, leaving her by herself. Twilight barely had the presence of mind to turn on her window fan and put her folded towel in the laundry basket before she simply fell into bed and dragged the sheets up to her chin. Eventually, her assistant returned, carrying a steaming hot cup of jasmine tea. It was just a little too hot for her to drink, so she just leaned over it and inhaled the relaxing scent, then leaned back.

“Spike,” she said, looking at him with a small smile.

“Yeah, Twilight?”

“I love you. Even if Mom and Dad wouldn’t adopt you, you’re still the best little brother I could ever ask for, and I love you... Thank you for believing in me.”

“Hey, what kind of brother would I be if I couldn’t even recognize my own sister?” Spike replied. He leaned over and allowed Twilight to nuzzle him.

The ex-unicorn had never felt so loved in her entire life. Though she was exhausted and wanted to go to sleep, absorbing Spike’s brotherly affection had energized her emotions all over again, altogether reigniting her hope for a positive outcome. There would probably be Royal Guards looming over her when she woke up, and she knew it. Whatever was going to happen, though, it could happen after she’d had tea and a very well-earned nap in her own bed for a little while.

She gave a contented smile, her heart bursting with affection, and allowed Spike to help her have a drink from the teacup, since she had no means of picking it up anymore.

It was delicious.