Chapter 21
That was it. There were no more doors except for the way home, and she had nothing to show for her considerable troubles. “I know I’m bad!” she yelled to the condemning book. “I know everything is my fault! Stupid useless book.” The black emptiness gave no reply, but she was sure it frowned in judgment. “Time to skip out of this shit,” she muttered and galloped for the exit.
Her face waited on the other side of the door. Just before she reached the portal, the other Dusk coughed. Dusk paused and stared confusedly at her image. She didn’t feel the urge to cough, but the Dusk on the other side reeled back, choking on her own lungs. Her chest heaved and she spat blood and ash onto the floor. She collapsed, wheezing, gasping, and expelling more vital fluids. An ember showed on her skin, followed by another, and soon the spots of flame spread across her. Her fur blackened and melted away into smoke. Dusk watched her dry body crack and crumble like a cinder, and at a gust of wind her remains were scattered as ash.
Dusk panicked and jumped back from the door to reality, where she had just watched herself die. Was she still alive? Did she still exist outside this nether dimension? Perhaps this was only another door to a morbid vision that she had mistaken for the way home. But no—a gray ‘x’ by the portal insisted that what she had seen was part of the real world.
She hung in the emptiness, paralyzed by fear and circumstances. There were no more choices. Death waited in all possible realities, and cornered her in the void.
Another white portal appeared to her left. “I don’t want to see any more,” she sobbed. She stared at it with fear, as if it would lunge out and attack her. She was tired from her wild magical transmutations and harrowing experiences that had come so quickly. Every part of her that learned from experience told her to avoid the awful possibilities that opened up here, which had all tried to kill her or succeeded. She was trapped in a book that must be possessed by a hostile and deranged spirit, an evil energy. The warnings had been right.
All resistance was useless. She could run out into the blackness, but the two portals seemed to be the only objects in this eerie plane. To flee from here would be to abdicate dimension, time, and reality.
She picked herself back up one more time and stepped toward the new metaphysical gateway. “You got me,” she conceded mournfully. “I hope it’s the last one,” she said, taking the risk of looking and triggering the dream.
It was a simpler sketch than the last two, with simple outlines of representative shapes. What looked like a ruined city was drawn out in front of her; a moment more and three mountains rose up behind it. Some sort of hole opened up in the side of the center mountain, and came closer until it stretched over the whole paper, leaving it blank again.
“Boxes?” Dusk asked, confused at the two anticlimactic objects that were now showing. Indeed, there were two rectangles, with triangles around them. Just then a small gray figure entered the scene from the left. It left a faint smudge on the paper as it crossed. “That’s me,” she sighed. The stick-figure alicorn hopped over the spikes onto one of the platforms in the middle. “Now does it smash me or something?” Dusk asked despondently.
Another figure approached from the other edge of the paper. It was strange; horse features were drawn out from a pictogram, a character of the Tarpanaic language. She had picked up some of the language a long time ago, and this, she remembered, meant “life”. The stranger, who seemed to bear a good portent, mounted the platform opposite sketch-Dusk. The emblem of the blazing sun moved up from wherever it had been hidden and hung between the two ponies. The character for life jumped out of its bearer into the sun and came down on the tiny alicorn, who grew in stature. The sun ascended high into the sky as Dusk changed from gray to outlined white. Dusk smiled at this happy sign, before looking back to the right. That platform was now empty, as if there was nothing left. “What happened to the other one?” she wondered aloud, as she realized her concern for the stranger. In any case, this door seemed right and offered the only solution she had seen, so she had to take it.
She tried to enter, but it was mere paper, and tore slightly as she pressed onto it.
There was an odd glint of something moving on the other side. She heard the beat of wings that seemed to launch from nearby and power quickly into the distance. The unsupported picture folded on itself and fell down, slipping through the plane she stood on and floating down out of sight. She reached after it, but it was gone.
Now there was nothing left but the home door. She could scarce bring herself to look there again, but when she did she saw that it showed her face again, as if it had reset. She looked into the oversized image of her deep black eyes and blinked. She looked up from the black page and she was in the Vault again.
Spike yelled, “Hey, she’s back!”
“Thank Celestia,” Dr. Sparkle burst out, before reconsidering the old turn of phrase. “I was about to try to separate you from that thing. Are you alright?”
Dusk’s head spun and her legs shook. “I don’t feel so good,” she murmured. The room stopped spinning, but a burning pain coursed from her waist through her chest. Her lungs heaved and sputtered. She tasted soot and spat out red. Twilight and Spike rushed to catch her as she stumbled and collapsed. Dusk cried out as a second sting shot down her hind leg. “I’m going to die, I’m going to burn!” she exclaimed as she was overcome with agony and terror. Doctor Sparkle attempted to render first aid, but it was little use. Fortunately, the bite of the sun left just as it had come. Dusk blinked in shock to be alive; she was certain her fate had found her, just as she had seen from the book.
“Did you find out anything?” Twilight questioned.
“It showed me what to do, I think,” Dusk reported. “It almost killed me, though.”
“There’s a reason it’s here,” Twilight said with confirmed suspicion. “If we have what we need, there’s no sense taking something like that with us.” Her concern was renewed as the ailing alicorn went limp and closed her eyes. “Dusk, are you alright?”
Dusk nodded. She felt her scar and remembered what she had witnessed of herself. “Call me Celestia,” she responded weakly.