//------------------------------//
// Chapter Six - Radical Notion 
// Story: DECEPTION 
// by Christian Harisay 
//------------------------------//

	Twilight groaned as she stirred in her bed sheets. Her twisting opened up slight cracks between the blanket and the bed, allowing some of the warmth from her snug confines to escape and let some of the cool morning air in to waft across her fur. The change in temperature did little to relieve a dull ache in her sides.

She yawned and cracked open her sleepy eyes. The blurry sight of her room greeted her, dimly lit through drawn curtains by the faint light from the sun, still waiting to be summoned from below the horizon.

“Shoot,” Twilight muttered to herself. Her head was still foggy from sleep and her coordination was still in bed as she stumbled across her hooves and outside her bedroom.

I thought I’d gotten used to this by now, she thought to herself as she made her haphazard way down the stairs.

Twilight opened the door and was greeted by the brisk coolness and crisp humidity of the morning air. She trotted outside towards Ponyville and looked to the east. The sun had already begun to illuminate the fringes of the lingering blue night with its golden rays.

Twilight closed her still-groggy eyes and ignited her horn.

Except she couldn’t feel it.

Twilight scrunched up her face in concentration, channeling more of her mana into her horn.

Still nothing.

Come on, I thought I’d already gotten the hang of this; I have done this over a dozen time—

Twilight gasped and snapped her eyes open. The sudden exposure to the light stung her eyes, and she was forced to squint. The majestic sun rose over Equestria, bringing its beloved light to the proud and peaceful country once more, casting long shadows over the sleepy little town.

Twilight stared, with her mouth drawn open in some sort of horror as the scope of what she had just attempted dawned upon her.

I tried to raise the sun... I tried to raise the sun!

At that moment, she realized her horn was still active. Her mood curdled instantly, and she snuffed it out with a scowl.

She stood alone in the quiet streets of Ponyville with her head aimed down, her brow furrowed, her ears folded back, and a glower directed towards herself. Perturbed, she muddled over all the various implications of just how wrong this scene was. She looked back at the sun and realized that for the first time in her life, she wasn’t happy to see it.

Now fuming, she turned around, stomped back inside her library, and slammed the door.


- - - - - -


Month five, day twenty-six, entry four hundred and eighty-five.

No more pussyhoofing around this point anymore; I’m going to revise the functions of the Dreamscape Spell.

Specifically, I’m going to fix the “death glitch:” the phenomenon of “dying” while in a dream resulting in dropping into a contained coma/mental limbo. As of yet, I’m still not sure what the cause of it is. I’m guessing it’s either due to missing functions from the spell, some sort of kink in the interactivity between one or more simultaneous operations, or it has something to do with how the spell affects consciousness.

But there’s no way of knowing for sure without checking each individual segment of the codex first... all twenty-four hundred lines of arcane code.

I’ll be updating this entry periodically with new information or updates as I find them.

This is going to be fun...

Working on the spell was not fun.

Plowing through the written functions of Dreamscape made Twilight feel like she was trying to find a needle in a haystack, using her tongue, while she had shoved the entire haystack into her mouth and was trying to chew it. After nine hours of study, all she had gotten for her troubles was a massive headache.

She put her forehooves to her head and rubbed her temple, letting out a groan as she did.

“Twilight!” Spike blurted from right next to her.

“AH!” Twilight jumped back from him, startled.

“I finished my chores and all my other stuff may I go see Rarity please?” Spike asked in a single breath.

She opened her mouth to answer, but found that the knot had showed up again, and she had to force her way past it. “Didn’t you just go to see Rarity yesterday?”

“Yeah… she said she was too busy to see me, but that’s not a problem, is it?” Spike asked.

“It isn’t with me, but... will Rarity think it’s a problem?”

“Well I won’t know unless I go see Rarity as ask if it’s okay to spend time with her, will I?” Spike said.

Twilight didn’t have anything to say to that. She could see his logic, but she was still hesitant to comply. Why am I hesitating to just let him go?

“I don’t know, Spike...”

“But I’ve already done all my chores!” Spike protested, growing increasingly tense. “I finished early, and did a little extra! Why can’t I just go?” His brow hardened. “Or do you have more stuff that you want to stick me with?”

Twilight was about to answer, when she saw Spike throw a quick look at something behind her before he met her eyes again, almost glaring.

Twilight had the uncanny feeling that something was behind her. “Okay, alright; you may go see Rarity, Spike.”

Spike brightened up instantly. “Thanks! See ya later, Twi!”

He bolted out the door without another word, leaving Twilight with only her numerous tomes of research notes to keep her company. She looked behind her to see what Spike had glanced at, and saw nothing, but an uneasy feeling still stirred fitfully in her gut.

It’s okay... I jumped when he got my attention because I was thoroughly engrossed in my work, and he just startled me is all.

Reason’s snort of derision was so loud inside her head that she almost jumped.

Rather than get into another emotionally uncomfortable debate with herself, she redoubled her efforts to ignore her inner turmoils, and cantered into the main room.

“Pee-Wee!” 

Spike’s pet phoenix chirped in response.

Feeling more relieved, Twilight looked around for something to keep him occupied. She spotted something by Spike’s bed.

Twilight picked up Spike’s favorite fire-colored marble with her magic and shook it for the phoenix to see. “Look what I have...”

Pee-Wee let out an excited peep and scurried after the orb, exhilarated at the prospect of playing with the marble. He made a clumsy ascent up the staircase, half-flying up the steps and half tripping over himself, running on his little legs for the prize.

Twilight gently tossed the marble into her room, letting it roll across the floor. Pee-Wee took off after it and leapt through the air. He pounced the marble and tumbled over himself as he tackled it, squeaking with joy the entire time.

Content with the company, Twilight returned to the codex as Pee-Wee periodically gnawed on the marble with his beak, lost his grip on it, then took off after it again.


- - - - - -


“Ugh, if only I had somepony to help me fix this blasted thing,” Twilight grumbled to herself. Several more hours had passed, and the only thing that had changed was that Pee-Wee had fallen asleep with the marble under a wing.

Twilight flopped down on her bed, lying on her back and closing her eyes. She could still see the multitudes of glyphs and equations etched and glowing on the insides of her eyelids, taunting her like an unsolved riddle.

Twilight groaned. “Maybe I should just get back to this tomorrow.”

She tried to relax and unwind the strained cogs of her exhausted mind. The strain gradually ebbed away, and her headache began to subside. The burning after-images of the ink faded away, leaving nothing to see but darkness.

Hello?

Twilight opened her eyes as felt herself go cold. She turned in her bed, away from the window. Pulling her tail towards herself, she held it with her hooves, stroking it gently. With her thoughts focusing on brushing over her tail with a hoof, her jitters started to subside.

If only the darkness was that easy to abolish...

At that moment, her logic had to step in to shut the door and keep any more of those foreboding notions from lingering in her mind. Her thoughts returned to what Reason had told her when they met in her dream: about how she needed a way to keep track of reality.

So how do I accomplish devising a method to determine whether I’m dreaming or not? I could just attempt a mental link to the spell matrices like I would if I was trying to manipulate something; I’ll be able to tell if I’m not dreaming if I reach out and can’t feel anything...

She remembered reaching out with her mind: casting it out so far that she feared she might lose consciousness, and only finding an infinite nothing.

Her heart rate jumped and her breathing quickened.

No, that won’t work... don’t think about that, Twilight. No, I need some way to independently determine if I’m in a dream, not matter how deep I am in one. But how? And Reason said I need a way of keeping track of reality, so it can’t just be limited to what I can do in a dream. I need something that I could carry back and forth between worlds. But how could that thing help me differentiate whether or not I’m dreaming?

A light went off in her head.

Twilight hopped off her bed, trotted over to her chest of sentimental items and undid the padlock clamped firmly around the latch.

She dug past her acceptance letter into Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, pushed aside her autographed copy of one of Dominus Cob’s books, relocated the golden locket her mother had given her, carefully set aside her first quill and looked behind the little collection of miniature encyclopedia volumes that she had made for her foalhood doll, Smarty Pants, which she realized was still missing. At the bottom of the trunk, she found the little case that housed the object of her search.

Twilight gently opened it to find what she was looking for: her glass gyroscope.

Huh, it was in the exact same place where I found it in... no, no don’t think about that!

More urgent than ever now, Twilight went over to the sleeping phoenix and gently nudged him with her muzzle.

“Hey, Pee-Wee, wake up. Could you help me with something, please?”

Pee-Wee yawned as he came to, rubbing his eyes with a wing before looking up at her.

Twilight rubbed her side. “I need your help for an experiment. Here,” she said as she pulled a little bag from a drawer where Spike kept his personal belongings and held it out to him. “Arm some of these, then meet me downstairs, okay?”

Pee-Wee nodded in excitement, took the bag, and hobbled outside.

After the little bird had left, Twilight suddenly felt terror creep up on her, like she was strapped in and climbing the lift hill of a roller coaster known to have safety issues. She nervously glanced back at the mountains of papers on her desk..

It’ll be fine, she told herself.

Twilight looked back towards the door at trotted out of her room.

I hope…


	- - - - - -


Twilight stood downstairs, alone in her basement laboratory. She took a moment to look around at the scenery before she picked up her little gyroscope with her magic, focusing on it like it was a rope she was holding onto while she was hanging from a cliff.

“Okay... this’ll only take a few minutes...”

Twilight closed her eyes and focused her magic on the gyroscope. Her horn began to glow varying hues of magenta, and the glass trinket followed suit, flashing with brilliant colors.

After a moment of concentration, Twilight finished her spell and set the glass gyroscope upon the nearby counter top. Gently placing a hoof atop the frame, she reached out with her other hoof and spun the contraption.

She let go and returned all four hooves to the ground. She moved to close to the gyroscope, staring at it with insurmountable fixation.

The little glass gyroscope spun in place without a care in the world, singing its gentle, harmonious whirr as the rotor and various gimbals rotated around each other.

The oscillating tone made Twilight’s ears twitch to and fro, dancing along with the spinning rings like a serpent with a snake charmer.

Still, the gyroscope spun.

Twilight licked her lips in nervous anticipation. Her eyes hardly even blinked as they watched the motion device at work.

A minute passed. Then two. Then five. Still, the gyroscope spun.

Twilight was so transfixed with watching it that she paid no mind as the tree above her creaked and moaned like it would during a sustained gust of wind. Even as the tree’s protests started to become more audible and agitated, Twilight’s attention remained focused on the gyroscope.

The closed door groaned in discontent as it bowled out. It held its convex shape for a few seconds, then was torn right off the hinges as a violent flood of water rushed into the basement.

One of Twilight’s ears swiveled to greet the roaring waters. She felt her her muscles involuntarily tense up for the impact, but still she would not look away from the gyroscope. Even over the raging froth of the waves, its resonating chime could still be heard.

The roof caved in, burying her in water. Its weight and force crushed her under its might, making movement impossible and drowning the world in black. 

Twilight woke up, rubbed water out of her eyes, and wiped shreds of rubber off of her face.

She undid the straps around the helmet attached to her head, deactivated the machine it was plugged into, and looked to Pee-Wee. He was laughing hysterically and had tripped over the watch she’d assigned him, falling back onto the pile of water balloons he had stockpiled.

“Thanks, Pee-Wee,” Twilight said indirectly as she relocated her gyroscope.

Twilight levitated the gyroscope over to the counter again and spun it. Once again the delicate whirr of the spinning, glass halos sounded through the air, and Twilight became so fixated upon it that she even stopped hearing Pee-Wee’s wheezing peeps of avian laugher.

Seconds ticked on, seemingly drawn out in exponentially greater lengths as Twilight stared at the gyroscope.

Twenty seconds passed, but they felt as long as the five minutes she’d spent in the dream.

Wait: did I imagine it, or did it just wobble?

Twilight got so close to the gyroscope that her nose almost touched it. Still it spun, then another wobble. Then it swayed back and forth as its momentum deteriorated.

After about forty seconds, the gyroscope fell over on its side, hitting the counter top with a light clink. Twilight sighed in relief.

Another water balloon splattered across the side of her face.

“Hey, I’m up now; you don’t need to do that anymore!” Twilight said to the phoenix, who had collapsed with a new fit of giggles.

Twilight looked over the roll of paper that she had written before.

“Month five, day twenty six, entry four hundred and eighty-six

“Okay, I’ve taken a break from the solving the death glitch for the moment. Yes, it’s still momentarily unsolved and thus Dreamscape is still unsafe for use, but this is just going to be a control test; something that if I had perhaps taken care of before, I could have avoided an awful lot of unbearable heartbreak headaches…”

Twilight levitated another sheet of parchment and a quill over to the nearest desk, and started to write.

“Month five, day twenty six, entry four hundred and eighty-seven

“I’m proud to say that the experiment was a success. I’ve now devised an elegant little solution for keeping track of reality.

“For the sake of categorization, I shall call it a “totem.””

Another water balloon exploded across Twilight’s face, and she whipped around to glare at Pee-Wee. “Oh, you’re going to get it now!”

Pee-Wee squeaked with delight and took off, Twilight chasing after him with several of his own watery weapons.


- - - - - -


Spike trudged through the streets of Ponyville, arms filled with bags of groceries as he made his way back home.

His trip to Carousel Boutique had been severely disappointing. When Rarity had answered the front door, her mood had clearly been the “I'm in the middle of something and can't be bothered” one. Apparently, she'd had a last-minute order to fill for an upcoming parade in Canterlot. He'd sensed an opportunity and asked if he could help, but she had turned him down as politely as she could. Instead of taking the cue, he had insisted that he could assist. Ultimately, after more exchanged words, it had ended with Rarity telling him he had to leave in a stern voice bordering on a demand that he go.

He did leave, out of respect, but he still couldn’t help but feel dejected.

Why now? I thought she knew how much I love to help her...

His gloomy brooding turned to the last time that he had gotten to help. Rarity had been in one her spur-of-the-moment creative sessions when he had showed up, and she'd been more than pleased to have an assistant. The next of couple of hours had been a flurry of activity as he'd fetched rolls of fabric and smaller rolls of ribbons, as well as scissors, pins, and needles. He'd even served as an impromptu mannequin. 

Ultimately, however, the final product had failed to meet her high standards, though she had smiled when he said he liked it. She had even ruffled his crest with a hoof when she thanked him for stopping by and helping out. He'd tried not to blush, but had failed fantastically. She didn't do it very often, but he liked it when she ruffled his crest.

He would have really liked it if she had kissed him again, but she had only ever done that twice; once when he had given her the fire ruby, the other on the bridge, after that one incident he didn’t like to talk about. That felt like ages ago now, though. He brooded more over why she couldn’t have been less preoccupied and more open like she had been just last... he couldn’t remember when now.

As his moody thoughts seeped through his mind like dense fog, his path became obstructed by a cotton-candy blur. 

"HI SPIKE!" Pinkie Pie yelled in his face, a tight grin plastered across her own.

Spike almost jumped out of his scales in surprise as he dropped his grocery bags. To his horror, he thought he heard the sound of breaking eggs.

"GAH! Wha... hu... WHAT THE HAY, PINKIE!" Spike yelled. A purple flicker of movement behind Pinkie Pie made his eye twitch. 

His burst of outrage barely seemed to register with her. Her rigid smile didn't falter at all. Without breaking eye contact, she wordlessly reached into her saddlebags and shoved a piece of paper into his claws.

"I'm having a party tonight; will you come?" she asked with a pleasantly strained voice.

Spike felt suddenly apprehensive being around Pinkie. The paper in his hand was a crumpled white sheet with hastily-written words on it. It was a party invitation.

Spike looked back and forth between Pinkie and the invitation.

Didn't she just throw a party a few days ago? Why is she throwing another one?

"Um… Pinkie, can I ask you something?"

The muscles in her cheek twitched and her eyes opened up even wider, making her inviting gaze all the more scrutinizing.

 "What? Oh... sure!"

"Why didn't you want to see Twilight yesterday?"

More cracks appeared in her smile. "I... er... but she's my friend! Why wouldn't I want to see Starlight?"

"But she said... wait, did you just call her Starlight?"

Pinkie’s ear twitched. "Yeah, silly, it's only her name!"

"No it's not."

Pinkie’s lower jaw ground from one side to the other, and the muscles in her face became so clenched that she appeared to tremble.  "Well, you still haven't answered my question. Are you coming to my party?"

Pinkie's unblinking smile bored into him, making him sweat through his scales."I... um... I don't know... I mean I've got to cook dinner tonight, then I've got to... um..."

"But... we're friends!" she said. "Why wouldn't you come?"

"Pinkie, I didn’t say—"

"BUT WE'RE FRIENDS!" Pinkie screamed, getting right up in his face. “YOU HAVE TO COME!”

Spike to step back in shock. What looked like anger, desperation, and sadness blended horrifically together on her visage for a single moment.

Then her expression changed; her eyes slowly went wide and her mouth opened in horror. Before Spike could say anything, she brushed past him as she broke into a gallop, and he thought he heard a choked sob from her as she passed.

He stood in a stupor as he watched her gallop away. After a prolonged moment, he pinched the bridge of his snout and sighed in exasperation before bending over to clean up the mess of groceries.


- - - - - -


“Ugh...” Twilight grumbled as she lay in bed, reluctant to have regained consciousness. Not that she wasn’t well-rested, but she knew that as soon as she got up that she would inevitably have to start ironing out the kinks in Dreamscape again. The only breaks she’d gotten from the headache of rechecking almost the entire spell over the course of yesterday had been the research tangent into totems, and when an unusually quiet Spike had come home and had made dinner for the both of them.

She couldn’t even remember where she’d left off; she’d gotten so tired that she eventually just said “to hay with it” and called it a night. Her cortex no longer throbbed with a migraine, but it felt like whatever pain had been in her head had just migrated to her sides.

The unpleasant sensations were hard to place; her sides had never ached in the same way that they did now, but she settled on it feeling like she’d been kicked by both Big Mac and Applejack from different sides at the same time, and the pains from the bruises still hadn’t subsided.

For a moment she forgot about the pain as she stared up at the ceiling, then moaned in discontent. Her own train of thought had reminded her that she still hadn’t seen hide or hair of either Applejack or Fluttershy since before those... nine seconds. That, coupled with the realization that she’d spent the entire day yesterday cooped up in the library with little more than Pee-Wee to keep her company, left her feeling very restless.

The sun hadn’t risen yet. Twilight winced slightly from her aching sides as she twisted in bed and peeled the covers off herself. She sat on the edge of her bed for a moment, hooves hovering just above the floor.

Wait... why am I up so early, and where am I going?

She grumbled to herself again. “You don’t need to do that anymore, Twilight.”

She felt it was too late to go back to bed to get some extra rest before she usually woke up; the ache in her sides kind of took that out of the question anyway. Though she didn’t want to start her morning right off the bat with a project that was sure to make her skull feel like it was housing a burning pincushion. She hopped out of bed; if nothing else, she needed to look for something to do.

She made her way past Spike, still curled up and sleeping in his bed. He snored lightly as she passed. Twilight jumped at the noise. She stared at him for a moment, watching each of his slight movements as he stirred.

His face was without expression. His breathing was deep and regular. One of his arms had escaped from under his blanket and hung over the side of his bedded basket. For a single moment his breathing was interrupted as he stirred in his slumber, adjusting the position where he lay. His exposed claws twitched, flexing slightly.

I wonder what he’s dreaming about, Twilight thought to herself.

The fur on the back of her neck stood on end. Could Spike be dreaming about... HIM?!

She slowly backed away from the sleeping dragon. Did it break free again? Is he trying to lock him up again? What if the time comes when he can’t keep those doors closed?

Twilight stopped her backwards advance and put a hoof to her chest. Twilight, be reasonable. There are plenty of things that he could be dreaming about right now, and he isn’t acting nearly as fretful the last time he was having a dream like... that. He could be just be dreaming that he’s helping Rarity dig for gems, or something.

Or he could be dreaming of going on a thieving spree, ergo the grabbing motions with his claw.

Suddenly the chills returned, and she backed further away from Spike.

Is he having Avarice’s dream right now? Their consciences already share the same skull; can they also share dreams? If Spike woke up during a shared dream, could he wake up too?

Twilight’s rear hit her bedroom door. She whipped around in surprise, shot a quick glance back at Spike, then hurriedly opened the door, left the bedroom, and slammed it shut behind her.

She realized that her breathing and heart rate had shot upwards. She leaned against the railing of the stairs and sighed.

Great, Twilight... you’re still terrified of your closest friend.

She looked over the oaken walls all lined with books, wondering what to do. Her mind was made up for her when her stomach voiced some discontent of its own.

Can’t wake Spike up for breakfast... because that would be rude of me. Might as well try my hoof at cooking, because that’s less scary than focusing on my new-found phobias.

Twilight made her way to the kitchen. The room of culinary creations was innocently oblivious to the horrors it was about to be subjugated to.

Forty-five minutes and four extinguished fires later, the sun had fully risen and Twilight was still without breakfast, as her empty stomach so grumpily reminded her.

She heard a knock come from the front door, but she couldn’t hear who it was through the kitchen door. Growling a little in frustration as she tried to pull an egg beater out of her mane, she trotted to the front door to attend to her early guest.

She opened the door, too annoyed to give her customary greeting. She gasped and froze.

“Howdy, Twi! Hey, I ran into RD right when I got back, and she said—”

Applejack never got to finish what she was saying before Twilight tacked her to the ground with a hug.

“APPLEJACK! Oh, I missed you so much!”

The farm pony merely chuckled. “Yep, Rainbow warned me about that, too.” Applejack returned the hug from the ground. “I missed ya too, Twi.”

Applejack sniffed the air, scrunching up her face. “Uh, sugarcube, you haven’t been tryin’ to cook again, have ya?”

“Um... maybe a little?”

Applejack sighed. “Lemme guess,” she started to say, spying the beater still stuck in Twilight’s mane. “You tried to make some Prench toast or somethin’?”

“No: cereal.”

Applejack put a hoof to her face. “No offense, but from what I’ve heard tell, I hope you and Sweetie Belle are never hungry and in a kitchen at the same time. I reckon whatever the two of you would try and make could be used to put down any other villain we might face in the future.”

Twilight snorted in embarrased amusement. “Probably...”

“Tell ya what,” Applejack said as she pulled herself out from under Twilight, “if ya don’t mind, how about ya let me fix up some grub for the two of us?”

Twilight’s stomach answered in its native tongue.

Applejack smiled. “Well, if that ain’t an open invitation if I ever heard one...”

The two mares relocated to the kitchen. She hadn’t even walked through the door before Applejack reeled back in terror at the sight, after which she just stared, dumbfounded.

“Golly, Twi! Were ya tryin’ to make something illegal in here?” Applejack asked.

“What?” Twilight protested as Applejack got to work, grabbing a new pot out of the cupboard: one that hadn’t been damaged beyond repair. “I didn’t do as badly as the last time I attempted to cook.”

Applejack’s head shot up from her rummaging of the pantry in alarm. Her eyes were wide, pupils shrunk in focus and fear. “Yer not talkin’ about...”

“No, not that time...” Twilight interrupted, annoyed. “I’ve actually tried a few times since then, if for nothing else to try and get better in hopes to play down that debacle.”

“Ah,” Applejack noted as she pulled several items from the fridge and took two apples from the fruit basket. “No offense, and do correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t ya forbidden by law to ever try yer hoof at cookin’ after... ya know... that one time?”

“No, I’m just not allowed within fifty yards of the royal Canterlot kitchens.” 

“Oh... well that’s not as bad as some o’ the rumors I’ve heard,” Applejack said while she set the pot of water on the stove to boil and began mashing up the fruit.

“Yeah, it could have been way worse. Celestia later told me that the head chef had looked into seeing if what I did could have been classified as treason. He tried to claim that, unintentional or not, I was using the palace resources to manufacture cruel and unusual weapons of war.”

Applejack froze in the middle of her task. Without turning her head, she shifted her gaze to stare at Twilight for a moment. Then she sighed and went back to her work, wordlessly turning the heat down on the stove and adding a good deal of oats to the boiling water.

“Oh come on, it wasn’t that bad, was it?”

“I wouldn’t go as far to call it a crime against all Equestria, but Twi, you gotta understand that no matter what, it just wasn’t right. Shoot, if it wasn’t for Spike’s eggplant lasagna, that one incident probably would’ve turned me off Itailian food for good.

“Anyway, I’d rather not talk about the spaghetti incident unless it’s Nightmare Night and I need a good horror story to scare the foals,” Applejack said while she dumped the mashed apples into a bowl and mixed in various measurements of other ingredients. “What’ve you been up to, Twi?”

“Oh, just... research and studies into magic, working on new spells, ironing the kinks out of them, the usual.” Twilight waved a hoof. “Really complicated stuff that I’d rather not jump into first thing in the morning unless I want a splitting headache by lunch.”

“Well, I guess it’s good I showed up then, ain’t it? Nothin’ like a little southern comfort to get ya started for a tough day.”.

“Yeah,” Twilight agreed. “On top of everything else, I really missed your cooking for those two weeks.”

Applejack peered at Twilight, quizzical. “Uh, Twilight? I was only gone for a few days.”

Twilight’s eyes widened. Shoot.

Applejack dumped the mashed apples into the pot, stirred them in then, and pulled up a chair next to Twilight. “Speakin’ o’ which, Rainbow said that she’d ran into ya yesterday, and she gave me fair warnin’ that y’all might be a bit, uh, “spirited” with the hugs. And apparently Pinkie’s got somethin’ on her plate that’s made a real shut-in outta her; like even worse than when she thought we didn’t want to be her friends anymore.”

She leaned over on the table, getting closer to Twilight. “Just what in the hay happened while I was gone?”

Twilight breathed in deep and let it out with a prolonged sigh. “Okay, I don’t know exactly what has Pinkie so bothered, but I’m certain it has to with something that happened five days ago.”

“The day of that big water balloon fight?” Applejack asked.

“That’s the one.” 

Applejack grinned. “Yeah, that was great...”

Twilight put on a slight smile of her own. “It was, but right before that happened... well, I suppose I have to share this now, too. For almost the past six months I’ve been working off and on to complete an unfinished spell that can allow ponies to enter into their own dreams. Pinkie learned about it and then roped me into trying it out with her, and she had a really, really bad dream as a result of it. I tried to talk to her about it the next day, but she was still really upset by it.”

Twilight looked off in another direction. “At least she was still talking to me, then. Hardly anypony has been able to take to her since.”

“Well shoot, maybe I should stop by Sugarcube Corner and see if I can’t offer some support, too,” said Applejack. “But what about you? RD said you’ve been a bit off-color, too; somethin’ about you havin’ a bad dream, too.”

Twilight began to fiddle with her hooves. “I was alone...” she mumbled, barely audible.

Applejack tilted her head to the side. “Beg yer’ pardon?”

It took effort for Twilight to look back up to Applejack and continue. “I dreamed that I was completely alone. I didn’t have you, or any of our friends, or anypony to keep me company. I wasn’t even in Equestria; I was stuck in a empty world...” Twilight looked away.

Applejack stared at her for a moment. “Shoot, Twi; that—”

“For two weeks.”

Applejack’s eyes went wide. “Dang... wait; that’s what you meant when you said you hadn’t had Apple family cookin’ for more than weeks? But how’s that even possible?”

“The dream took place so deep in my mind that I perceived time to be passing at a much faster rate, so it felt like much more time passed than it actually did.” Twilight was having the conversation with the linoleum at this point. “The actual amount of time that passed was, well... much shorter than two weeks...”

“Holy moly... and I thought the lonely train ride out to Appaloosa was gonna make me go more nuts than a squirrel in a sealed barrel.”

The words echoed in Twilight’s ears like a broken tuning fork. Lonely train ride...

The chug of steam escaping from pistons and smoke billowing forth from atop the cylindrical stack carried the undertone of parts clicking away in rhythmic harmony, like a galloping clock. She only picked up on the syncopated melody from the empty platform because of the lack of ponies milling about in idle chatter to drown out the subliminal clatter, and likewise was the only reason her view of the polished chrome engine with an onyx-handed clock embroidered across its front was unobstructed. The train pulled up in front of her, and she wrenched open one of the doors, hopping into the passenger car before the train had even come to a stop. She looked around to pick a seat, only to see that each one was as empty as the station dock which she had just left.

“Hey, Twi; ya’ll right?”

Applejack’s query pulled Twilight back to reality.

“Wha... oh, no; I just...” Twilight let her sentence hang.

Applejack put a hoof on Twilight’s and gave her a warm smile. “Hey, you’re awake now and I’m here. That’s what matters, right?”

Twilight repeated the gesture. “Yeah. Thank you, Applejack.”

The farmer tipped her hat. “My pleasure. They don’t call me “the most dependable of ponies” for nothin’.” Her smile faltered slightly. “But sugarcube, ya sure ya want to be messin’ ‘round with somethin’ like that? I mean, sounds like it’s caused ya more harm than good so far.”

“I’m sure. Those were just occurrences in the early stages of testing, and I’ve learned from them. Besides, it... well, it’s just something I have to do.”

The smell of the food on the stove had become tantalizing to the senses by now, making Twilight’s stomach grumble again.

“Tell your guts to hold that thought, I’ll take care of it,” Applejack commented as she got up from the table and returned to the stove.

Twilight spoke up. “So, Rarity had said that you were out of town on business. May I ask where?” 

“Ya sure can,” Applejack said while she ladled the oatmeal from the pot into two separate bowls. “I had to make a quick trip out to Appaloosa to help the settlers with their orchards, make sure all the books were balanced, and catch up with cousin Braeburn o’ course. Even got to meet Lil’ Strongheart again. The townsfolk an’ the tribe are gettin’ along like apples and pie crust, so it’s all good.”

Applejack returned with the bowls and two glasses of apple juice, then slid one pair to Twilight. “Well dig in, sugarcube. Ya look outright famished.”

Twilight didn’t need to be told twice. She used her magic to pick up a spoon and shoveled a heap of oats into her mouth. Her reward was a delicious stampede of oats and apples with the perfect blend of cinnamon and brown sugar, much to the delight of her taste buds.

Applejack chuckled at the heavily lidded Twilight. “Another satisfied customer.”

Twilight let the taste stand on her tongue until her own watering mouth began to dilute the flavor, and she swallowed, eager for more. “It’s great, Applejack; thank you.”

“Just doin’ what Apples do best, from here to the untamed frontier.” Her expression bunched up ever so slightly, looking pensive. “Speakin’ o’ which, that reminds me; the trip out to Appaloosa was long and lonely, but that’s partly ‘cause I found it preferable to move to an empty car after one o’ the other passengers raised enough of a ruckus. Somethin’ o’ her’s had gone missin’, and she was shootin’ claims that it’d been stolen. And right when I moved to a quieter car to hopefully get a lil’ shut-eye, I got to thinking; we never did catch that thief runnin’ ‘round Ponyville, did we?”

Twilight paused in mid-chew, then stuffed the contents of her mouth into a cheek. “No, I guess not.”

Applejack let out a little hum of contemplation. “Well, have ya heard anythin’ new about it? Ya run a library in the middle o’ town, and considering how popular ya seem to be, you’ve got to have heard something, right?”

Something about Applejack’s honest questions made Twilight feel like she was tied to a chair in a dark room while a spotlight was being shined into her face. “I, uh... no... but...”

Applejack was giving her that same look that she usually only saw on the farm pony during poker night. She conceded.

Okay, it’s not lying if I don’t tell her everything.

“Actually, I did learn a little something not too long ago.”

“Oh?” Applejack perked up. “What’s that?”

“Well...”

Deep gouges from cruel claws had carved their vitriol all over the inside of the clockwork doors. Hatred translated into letters as jagged as his razored frill. The cool air of the cave was warm compared to the chills that ran down her spine.


	EVERYTHING


	WILL BE


	MINE


“I know that the thief isn’t Spike.”

“How’d ya come across that?” Applejack inquired.

Twilight paused. “There was another theft about four nights ago. The thief tried to steal my research notes on the Dreamscape spell that I’ve been working on, but they didn’t get out of the library with them. I saw Spike just after it happened, and he was sleeping, so I guess that makes me his alibi.“

Applejack put a hoof to her chin. “Huh... And did ya see any of this happen?”

“No. I was also sleeping when it happened, and Owloysius woke me up after the fact.” Twilight wiped a hoof across her forehead. I’m telling the truth, so why do I feel so uneasy about this?

“And ya just recovered your notes right after that?” AJ asked.

“Yes.”

Applejack crossed her other foreleg and set the elbow of the leg propping her chin up on it. “Now that’s odd... why wouldn’t the thief have stashed the notes away like they had everything else?”

“I don’t know... but then considering the kinds of things this thief has stolen already, I wouldn’t say that there’s much rhyme or reason to their madness.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Applejack said.

Twilight caught herself from letting out a sigh of relief.

“Shoot,” Applejack muttered when she caught a glance at the kitchen clock. “I probably shouldn’t stay much longer. Apple Bloom will want to know her big sister is back so she can go playin’ with her friends. It ain’t fair to her that I had to leave on such short notice and she had to pick up my slack.”

“I’m sure she’ll just be happy to know that you’re back.” 

“Yeah.” Applejack began to smile. “Look at me; I’m already grinnin’ just thinkin’ about how big a smile she’ll have on her lil’ face to see me come trottin’ back home. Speaking o’ which, thanks a ton for havin’ me over.”

“Thanks for stopping by, Applejack,” Twilight bid her farewell. “I really needed your company.”

“The pleasure’s all mine, sugarcube. I’m just glad to know you’re doin’ ok. And I feel even better knowing that Spike ain’t goin’ ‘round on a thevin’ spree.” She leaned back in her chair and took a big gulp from her glass. “I’ll be honest, for a while there, I was actually worried about the lil’ guy.”

“Yeah,” Twilight shifted slightly in her seat. “So was I.”


- - - - - -


Month five, day twenty-seven, entry four hundred and eighty-eight

This thing sucks.

Twenty-four hundred lines of code in the arcane scripts for this spell, and not one of them contains any sort of discrepancy that could feasibly cause the death glitch. And don’t even get me started on checking every possible factorial of any given number of lines interacting with any other number of given lines; that’s such an astronomical number of possibilities that I wouldn’t be able to check the spell that thoroughly unless I could live as long as Celestia.

For once, I’ll admit that I might be overthinking this. I’ve already checked this spell thirteen times over; what is written into the spell already works just fine, and even what little Dominus had written when I found his notes was solid enough for me to eventually finish it. This is probably just an oversight that I hadn’t accounted for... that oversight being that it’s possible to die within the dream. Seriously, how could I have forseen this would even be a problem?

On the bright side, since there doesn’t seem to be an existing line of code that solves the glitch, writing an entirely new segment of code to the spell to rectify the problem is probably the best way to go.

Now I just have to figure out what to do to fix it, how to write that into the codex, and how to do it without upsetting the entire function of the spell in the process. Talk about “out of the frying pan and into the fire.”

…

Maybe it’s best if I avoid cooking metaphors.

Twilight returned the quill to the inkwell that was next to her gyroscope and put a hoof to her throbbing temple. Whatever tension she’d relieved from Applejack’s visit had returned in full force as the hours of study had stretched well into the afternoon. She turned away from her desk to find a comfortable spot to lay down and give her overworked brain a break.

“Twilight!”

“AH!” Twilight nearly jumped out of her own pelt.

Spike had somehow gotten right next to her without Twilight even noticing. He was close even for Twilight’s comfort zone, and he stared up at her with urgent, puppy-dog eyes.

“Can I go see Rarity?” Spike asked.

“Uh...”

“Can I go see Rarity?” he pleaded, gripping her desk and bouncing on his heels.

The cat had gotten her tongue and wasn’t interested in giving it back.

“Can I go see Rarity pleasePleasePLEASE?” Spike was practically on his knees.

Twilight managed to catch the cat, and with a shaky hoof took back what was hers. “D-did you finish your chores?”

“Yes!”

“Did you make sure the books are still in order?”

“Yes!”

“Wait... didn’t you just see Rarity yesterday?”

“I DON’T CARE!”

Spike’s expression went from puppy to rottweiler. He glared at her, boring into her for an answer as his claws left scratches on the desk and his nostrils flared like he might set fire to something. 

Just as Twilight was about to panic, his aggravation subsided, and he sighed, putting a claw to his forehead. “Okay, I’m sorry for yelling. I don’t know what got into me; that was uncalled for, and I shouldn’t have done that.”

He sighed again, stood up straight, and composed himself. “May I please go see Rarity?” he asked politely.

Twilight fought to keep her breath from trembling too violently. “S-s-su-re.” She turned away, fixating her attention on her latest entry. Her ears were plastered to the back of her head, and her body shivered.

Spike studied the quivering mare for a moment, trying to piece her together.

“Okay, thanks,” he said as he turned and left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

Twilight remained fastened to her seat and did not move for several minutes. The silence was so still that she could hear her teeth chattering. She looked up at her gyroscope and caught her own glaring reflection.

“Stop it, Twilight,” Reason scorned.

Twilight yelped in surprise and reeled back, falling out of her chair in the process.

“Oh, quit acting like such a scaredy-pony! It’s just me!” Reason said.

“Oh,” Twilight said as she put a hoof to her chest to slow her heart and ease her breathing. She turned herself over and pulled herself back up into a standing position. “Stop doing what?”

“Don’t try to play ignorant with yourself; you know exactly what!” Reason scolded. “The way you keep acting around Spike; jumping every time you see him, acting like he might set fire to you if you say the wrong thing, it’s unacceptable.”

“But...”

“No, don’t try to “but” us! If you’re afraid of that thing lurking around in his head, then be afraid of Avarice!”

Twilight shuddered at the mention of his name. Reason continued on regardless.

“Instead, you’ve become so paranoid that now you’re afraid of Spike! What kind of friend does that?”

Twilight’s ears fell and she hung her head, unable to face her own shame.

“I’ll take that as your answer.” Reason sighed from her fractured reflection held within the gyroscope and put a hoof to her face. “Look, trying to fix Dreamscape so you can learn more about this new villain on our hooves is a step in the right direction, but you need to do more than just work behind the scenes.”

“But what else can I do?” Twilight asked.

“Well, first thing you need to do is to stop being so scared of Spike, because that won’t help anything, least of all your friendship. Second, there has to be something you can do to take on the problem a little more directly so it’s obvious that you are doing something. Even if it’s just trying to learn more about what you’re going up against. And subtly trying to let Spike know that you are helping him might not be a bad idea, either.”

“Okay,” Twilight said, taking in a deep breath to try and invigorate herself. “I suppose that I could start with trying to learn more about split personality disorders...”

Reason gave an approving nod. “That’s a good place to start.”

“Alright; let’s go do that now.” Twilight’s horn became aglow with her magenta aura, and she picked up the gyroscope with her magic.

“Hey; what are you doing?” Reason protested.

Twilight looked at Reason as she trotted down the stairs. “I don’t like being alone.”

Twilight placed the gyroscope containing Reason upon the center desk in the main room, then turned towards the shelves, looking for any of the books she had on psychology. She acquired a decent hoof full and returned to the desk. She opened up one with a deep green cover and set the rest next to Reason.

“Let’s see, split personality... split personality...” Twilight hummed to herself as she flipped through the index in the back of the book. “Ah, here it is! ‘Split Personality Disorder:’ Another term for ‘Dissociative Identity Disorder.’See ‘Psychological Disorders.’”

Twilight flipped back a few pages into the index. “Alright, p’s.... phantom limb— no, too far. Ah, here we go; Psychological Disorders...” She browsed down the worryingly long list. “Dissociative Identity Disorder. Page 112.”

Twilight turned over a considerable number of pages to her desired topic, then read aloud for the both of them to hear.

“Dissociative identity disorder, also known as split personality disorder or multiple personality disorder, is classified as a mental disorder wherein two or more distinctive personalities occupy the same conscious. It is a rare but not unheard of disorder, most often caused by severe distress, anxiety, discontent, depression, and/or crises of identity when applied to or brought about by varying cases of dementia, schizophrenia, or psychosis.”

Twilight paused and frowned. This didn’t seem just to fit Spike. Why else would she be talking to…

“Look, I know what you’re thinking,” Reason interrupted, jarring Twilight’s train of thought. 

Twilight turned from the book and put her face right up to the glass gyroscope. “I know you know what I’m thinking; you’re part of me! But the fact that I’m talking to you means that I have a very serious problem! Potentially the exact same problem as Spike! How the hay can I help him out if I’m the next candidate for the looney bin? Why should I even talk to you anymore?”

“You need to calm down,” Reason replied. “First thing, I’m not the problem, all right? I’m the result of the problem; your subconscious made me to help you deal with it! Second, have I led you astray at any point thus far?” 

“Well, no…”

“That’s right, I haven’t. I’m part of you, remember? I have just as much stake in this as you do. I’ll freely admit I’m just a split personality, but you have to remember I’m on your side.”

Reason put a hoof to the inside of her glass container, her expression one of pure sympathy. “I’m here to help you, Twilight. Don’t you want help from your own voice of reason?”

Twilight’s expression softened, and she put the tip of her own hoof to Reason’s tiny one in the gyroscope. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay, I know you’re going through a difficult time right now,” Reason replied. “But right now we need to focus on how we can help Spike. So how about we finish reading?”

“Okay.” Twilight turned away from the gyroscope and picked up from where she left off.

 “Symptoms and indications of this disorder can include inexplicable gaps or loss in memory, moderate to severe mood swings, alterations in routines, formalities, and/or behavior, and sometimes radical revisions in personal ethics and morals.”

Twilight felt the fur begin to stand up on the back of her neck.

“These separate identities may or may not be aware of each other, but in the most extreme cases, a separate identity can evolve into its own separate consciousness: a sentient entity capable of intelligent thought, emotional responses, and independent structure or morals. In these cases, behavior can alternate between different identities, and these identities can have conversations with each other, reason on different levels, share memories... ”

The noose was back in her throat again, choking off whatever words were about to come next. 

Share memories...

It was six months ago. A bestial Spike was harassing Scootaloo, trying to rip her scooter right out of her hooves. Twilight pulled a broom from the nearest porch and taunted him with it. He took the bait and turned his attention away from the Cutie Mark Crusaders, roaring a primal bellow and visibility surging in size before taking off after her.

Share memories...

She, Spike, and his projection of Rarity were deep in a cave, huddled up in a defensive circle while an omnipresent voice mocked them from the shadows.

“I know far more than you would dare imagine, Twilight.”

Share memories...

Avarice had her pinned. She fought helplessly to free herself from under the crushing foot that held her down.

“By the way, if my memory serves me right, you still owe me a broom.”

“They have the same memories... they have the exact same memories!”

Twilight had backed away from the desk and into the shelves behind her, like the book had transformed into a writhing mass of black adders.

“Twilight, don’t—”

“NO! No no no no no No NO! You read it too! He knows everything that Spike knows!” Twilight wailed. “If Spike so much as gets the idea that I’m trying to help him, Avarice will take over and kill me!”

Twilight had her back pressed flat against the bookshelf, yet she was still pushing against it with her hind legs, like the whole wall might give way for her to gallop off and away from the horrible passages that she just read. Her breathing came in desperate gasps and the entirety of her trembled uncontrollably in fear.

She felt just as helpless as she did during those very last moments that had she spent in limbo, watching as some dreaded, unstoppable force that she didn’t have a prayer to escape tore across the landscape and devoured her with bone-shattering force. Her legs gave out from underneath her and she collapsed to the floor, where she shut her eyes and wept, prompting horrible visions to force themselves upon her agonized heart and mind.

In her imagination she could see herself talking to Spike:

“Spike, I scheduled an appointment at three o’clock tomorrow for you to see a psychiatrist.”

“What?! But... why?” the little dragon asked, utterly bewildered.

“Because... uh...” Twilight paused. “Just to make sure you’re okay after the wedding, of course!” she lied with a forced grin to Spike. “I just want to make sure that my little number one dragon assistant isn’t suffering from any post-traumatic stress after all of Canterlot was invaded by an army of love-eating, shape-shifting equinsects.”

Spike squinted at her through one eye with his other eye arched upward in uncertainty. “Well... okay, then.”

Spike turned around and went back into the kitchen to finish making dinner.

Twilight wiped the sweat off her forehead with a hoof. “Phew...”

It was much later into the night. All the lights were out save for the gentle glow of the scenic moon, which lended a soothing night light to pour through her window. She slept comfortably and snug in her warm bed, content as could be.

A powerful claw gripped her by the muzzle, covering her mouth and nostrils as it forced her down into her pillow. Her eyes shot open from the sudden suffocation, and her hooves flew to her face the free herself from the obstruction.

Right then she felt the cold edge of a blade against her throat, and then a searing fire of agony as steel sliced open her neck.

She tried to scream, but the only sound she made was of a horrid gurgle bubbling up through the gaping slit in her throat.

“Shhh...” a cruel voice hissed through the enclosing darkness.

A figure moved into the light, and she felt a railroad spike drive into her heart that made the whole of her body seem to assume room temperature right then and there.

Spike wore a wicked smile that drove screws through her spine, and he wielded the serrated knife that they used to carve lanterns out of pumpkins for Nightmare Night. Her blood dripped from the blade like the scornful elation that dripped from the sharp crescents of his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, but the voice that emerged was not that of her friend’s.

“You really should have learned after poker night that you are a terrible liar, Twilight.” The voice of Avarice mocked her.

She struggled desperately to pull his claw off her face, but it might as well have been faceted with padlocks. She tried to ignite her horn in a terrified attempt to heal the mortal wound, but her magic was sputtering and dying along with her. She fought for breath, but only feeble wisps of air seeped into her throat, past the spurting blood that seeped down her throat and stained her bedsheets.

“I hope you know that I didn’t want to kill you like this. I would have prefered to have burned you to death in a battle so epic that it would have been recorded in history books for centuries. And then I’d steal every copy just to read it over and over again, and I would enjoy it. Every. Single. Time.”

Her life was flashing before her eyes now: a whirlwind flip-book of every moment and everypony she’d ever cared for. Each one whisked by too fast for her to properly cherish but lingered for just long enough that its passing broke her heart, for she knew there would be no more moments as dear as those. She would be no more.

Twilight went limp as she drew her last breath. This was her end.

“Goodbye, hmhmm... “friend.””

“TWILIGHT!” Reason’s voice boomed inside of her head with world-shaking volume.

Twilight cracked open her eyes and wiped away the tears blurring her vision. She could see Reason was still in the gyroscope on the table.

Reason spoke again. “Here’s a checklist to calm you down. You like checklists, right?”

“Y-y-yeah...” Twilight blubbered.

“Okay, here goes. You’re hyperventilating, shaking, and crying; your pulse has skyrocketed, your skin is clammy, and you’ve just gone through an explosion of anxiety that’s making you fabricate irrational, worst-possible-case scenarios that are pushing you towards hysteria. That means you are...”

Twilight recounted all the bullet points over in her head. Just having a beloved checklist, even a mental one, was enough to bring a surprising rush of tranquility to her addled thoughts. Through that moment of clarity, she was able to compile all her symptoms together and retrieve the answer.

“H-having a p-panic a-ttack,” Twilight answered.

“Good. See? I told us that we’re a smart pony. So take a moment to calm down, take a few deep breaths, relax, and then let’s think about this rationally.”

Twilight pushed herself up into a sitting position. She wiped the tears and run-off from her muzzle, breathing deeply.

“So,” Reason said, gearing up for lecture mode. “Time to think about this logically; hysteria and fear aren’t going to help save Spike.”

Twilight pointed a shaky hoof back at the book. “B-but what about...”

Reason looked back to the passage. “Well... we just won’t be able to tell Spike about any of this, then. We’ll have to be cautious, but not paranoid about this when dealing with Spike.”

“But isn’t paranoia somewhat justifiable when we know that somebody is out to get us?” 

“Yeah, but Spike isn’t the one out to get us, Avarice is. And this brings me back to my earlier point; if you keep treating Spike with as much terror as you have been, then that’s just going to make things worse between you and Spike and make it even harder to give him whatever help he needs. Remember; he’s your friend, his alter ego is the enemy.”

Twilight looked away and started pacing as she pondered, her mind racing. The more she thought about it, the more it seemed like they were in a lose-lose situation. If she even so much as told Spike that she was trying to help, without even giving any details, then that might make Avarice retaliate, making it that much harder to learn more about his nature and how to ultimately deal with him. But if she didn’t give Spike some sort of concrete reassurance that he wasn’t alone in his desperate struggle to maintain his sanity, then he might end up losing his fight anyway for lack of support.

It really did seem like there was nothing that she could directly do.

Wait...

“Maybe there’s nothing we can do,” Twilight started to say as she looked to Reason; she could tell by the expression worn that Reason had thought of it at the exact same time. “But who said only we can do something about this?”

Reason smiled. “I like the way we think.”


- - - - - -


Spike had run all the way to Carousel Boutique. He was always eager to see Rarity, and even more so if that visit meant a prolonged stay to act in her service, but he was being led there by something more than his desire to help. He couldn’t describe it, but he could feel it nonetheless; whatever motivation he had to go all the way to the dress shop with the intent to stay there for the entire afternoon to help his crush carried the undertow of some sort of desperate urgency.

He bounded up the steps to the front door, then leaned against the threshold for a moment to catch his breath. When he was finally able to stop his panting, he stepped back, straightened his posture and broadened his shoulders a little before knocking on the door.

He stood there for a minute, trying to look as fetching as possible. That minute stretched into two, then three. Feeling that sense of urgency creep back up on him, he knocked on the door again, with a little more clamour this time.

A moment passed, then he heard hoofsteps coming from the other side of the door, and his heart fluttered with, daring to hope. Could it be...

The muffled clatter of locks hastily coming undone met his ears, the door whipped open, and he felt more relieved just at the sight. Even when in disarray from whatever hectic project Rarity was undertaking, the way her mane glistened and her coat shined in the afternoon sunlight almost stole his breath away every time. She was wearing her red, horn-rimmed glasses too, giving her that keen artist’s air of focus and determination that he couldn’t help but find attractive. Whatever she was working on, he wanted in on it.

Oh, how I want to be in on it.

“Good afternoon, Rarity!” Some of his breath was still catching up to him. “Can I help y—”

“No.”

Whatever momentum his mood had been picking up stopped so abruptly that it took him a moment to realize that he’d been thrown through the windshield.

“What?”

Rarity sighed and put a hoof to her forehead, letting some of her flustered impatience flutter to the surface. “This is the third time in three days that you’ve come asking if there was anything you could do around here, and for the third time, my answer is no.”

Three days? Spike thought. “But... why?”

She let out a little huff. “Haven’t you heard the phrase, “too many cooks spoils the recipe?” For the third time, this is one of those projects that’s best left to the hooves of one, and the more I stand here having to remind you of that, the more already sparse time I waste that I should be dedicating to my work.”

“But... no! There’s gotta be something I can do for you!”

“There isn’t.”

“Can I fetch fabric for you?”

“No.”

“Can I dig up more gems?”

“No.”

“Can’t I just sit quietly in the back and watch you work?”

“No, Spike!” Rarity sighed again in exacerbation. “I appreciate that you want to help, really, I do, but my answer is still a resounding, final, let-me-be-absolutely-clear no. I don’t need you, Spike.”

A flash of something amethyst behind Rarity almost tore Spike’s devastated gaze away from her.

“What?”

“I don’t need your assistance at the moment. And I simply cannot allow you to squander the rest of your day merely watching me work. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have an extraordinary amount of work that I must attend to, preferably without interruption.” Rarity turned back around into the boutique. “Good day to you, Spike.”

The door briskly shut in his face.

Spike couldn’t move. His feet seemed to have fused themselves to the floorboards of the porch. He just stared ahead at the closed door in hurt spite. His upended mind spun and reeled from the blow it had just taken, and now matter how he tried, there was only one thing that permeated every thought and every feeling with a deafening resonance that soured him to his soul.

“I don’t need you, Spike.”

He cast his mind out to grab ahold of something else to focus on, but a twister was tearing up every other ground, carrying him away and drowning out every sound save for its terrible din.

“I don’t need you, Spike.”

He balled his hands into fists so tight that the rest of him began to quiver, and he shut his eyes in pain.

She doesn’t need me...

With a wounded scowl plastered across his face like a tragedy mask, and a gaping, all-consuming void tearing at his heart, he turned around, and stomped off the porch, away from Rarity.


- - - - - -


Dear Princess Celestia,

I have a very severe dilemma upon my hooves concerning the well-being of Spike. Unfortunately, due to the precarious nature of this problematic situation, I would feel more comfortable discussing the specifics in person, and I wish to schedule a time to meet in order to discuss this issue.

Please reply to this message as expediently as possible. This is a matter of the utmost importance, and it’s imperative that it be attended to without hesitation.

Your faithful student,
Twilight Sparkle

The letter rested unattended upon the desk, alongside another entry into Twilight’s work on Dreamscape.

Month five, day twenty seven, entry four hundred and eighty-nine.

It took me long enough, but I think I finally managed to get that breakthrough on fixing the death glitch that I’ve been looking for.

I started thinking about what I could do to fix this bug in the system when I decided to take another look at all the sub-magics that deal with containing the conscious within a dream world, and didn’t find anything, which is what I think is precisely wrong. There’s no program or function written to deal with what happens when you die in a dream (again, I never thought I’d see the day where this was a problem). The metaphysical conscious reacts as though it’s actually died, and then drops out of the contained world and into a mental oblivion.

I should note that this is at best a hypothesis and at worst a stipulation. The only way to know for sure is to directly test this conjecture, and I don’t feel like doing that. For obvious reasons.

So as I said in my last entry, the best solution is probably going to be the simplest one, and just write a new line of code. I’m thinking of including a few automated commands into the subscripts that will alter functions of existing algorithms so that any trauma resulting in death will simply “eject” the dreamer from the level of the dream and make them wake into whatever level exists above, whether it be reality or another dream.

To do this, I reasoned that I could probably...

The rest of the entry descended into techno-arcane babble, quoting numerous laws of spellcraft, calculus, neuroscience, and citing adages to the laws the spell itself operated upon. Various rough matrices had been drawn up and made reference to with figures and footnotes.

As the entry carried on, the writing became noticeably less neat and composed at increasingly frequent intervals. Finally, the writing skewed in a jagged line, ending where the quill moved back and forth from the gentle air of a studious unicorn’s deep, subdued breathing.

Twilight lay draped in an unceremonious heap across her desk. Her face lay where it had fallen from exhaustion upon the entry she had been writing. The way in which she had lost consciousness and lay strewn across her desk had put an arch in her back, and occasionally a hoof twitched while she slept.

Twilight stirred, then grimaced as she came to. She yawned, stretched her back, and rubbed a hoof across her aching sides.

“Shoot,” she muttered.

She winced and tried to relieve the tension in her muscles. The spots on her back right behind her shoulder blades both ached like a bad cramp, and whatever efforts she attempted to knead the soreness out of her muscles seemed to cause just as much new pain as they relieved.

Twilight grumbled in discontent as she looked around the room. It was already well into the night, and whatever candles she had lit going into her long session of study had burned out long ago. Her eyes adjusted more to the dark, and she saw the letter that she had written to Celestia still lying on her desk, waiting to be sent.

Twilight picked up the letter, rolled it up, tied it with the traditional band, and looked around her bedroom for her assistant and direct link to Celestia.

She spotted his bed in its usual spot. It was empty.

“Spike?” she instinctively called out. “Spike?”

Silence answered her.

Initially, Twilight had thought the reason he hadn’t come back earlier in the night was because he’d managed to convince Rarity to let him help her with the big project she was busy with. But now it was well past the hours that she would stay up, even when she had a major order to work on. She would have called it a night so she could get her “beauty sleep” and get an early start on it the next morning. So if Spike wasn’t back...

Oh no...

Twilight darted out of her bedroom and into the main room of the library, calling out to the dark again from atop the stairs.

“Spike? SPIKE?!”

A slight sound of a hacking cough from her right caught her attention, and her right ear flicked towards the direction of the noise before the rest of her head did. She found herself looking at the bathroom door. Light seeped from under the crack, and muffled churn of plumbing told her that the shower was running.

She sighed in relief; Spike was just taking a shower. But right on the heels of that calm came newfound worry.

Why is he taking a shower this late at night? Twilight wondered. For that matter, why is he taking a shower? He only ever takes bubble-baths...

Concern crossed her face. She stared at the ominous door for several moments, then collected herself and strode towards the bathroom.

“Spike?” she asked as she gently knocked on the door with a hoof. “Are you in there?”


- - - - - -


Darkness. Warm, foggy darkness. Darkness disrupted only by the distant hiss of water passing through pipes. Save for the noise, the darkness was complete.

Wait, no; there was more than that.

There was an omnipresent patter of water droplets raining down around him, colliding upon some contained surface. Constant streams drummed on the back of his head, some of it forming little pools behind his frills before overflowing and trickling away.

The steam was all encompassing: all surrounding. Heated vapor pressed up against every scale and filled every breath, adding to the alluding sense of lethargically dwelling in a hot spring.

The darkness was still everywhere, coaxing him to stay in its ignorant stasis. His tired, inexplicably sore muscles were all too willing to comply. He could feel his whole form slouched over, hanging loose and limp. His eyelids felt reluctant to comply to any command. They felt so heavy he could practically feel their weight pulling his face down. Even his thoughts carried little interest in moving. Whatever cognition that was passing through his brain did so at a glacial pace.

The warm and relaxing dark carried an incredible placidity. It all felt so very wrong.

He peeled his sluggish eyes open, only to squint them near shut as the searing blaze of bright light met his sights with a hammer. Everything appeared blurry through the crack in his eyelids, but the most predominant color was still that harsh white.

His eyelids fluttered open when his vision finally adjusted to the brightness. The first discernable feature he saw was himself, sitting cross-legged and hunched over with his arms on his knees, slightly propping him up. White surfaces surrounded him. With strained effort, he lifted his head to look around.

He found himself sitting in a porcelain basin surrounded by an azure curtain that had been drawn shut. A cylinder of onyx rose above him and then arched down, spraying jets of hot water onto him. He took note of various obtrusions here and there, like a little shelf to his right that held a small, green block, and in front of him was a faucet with two knobs on either side. The water pouring down all around him flowed freely into a drain a few feet in front of him with a faint babble.

Spike rubbed his eyes with a balled-up fist, trying to clear his vision up a little more. He blinked out whatever buildup had still been lingering in the corners of his eyes when he noticed a bunched-up piece of cloth in front of him.

Spike groaned slightly as he leaned over and picked up the fabric on the other end of the tub. He pulled it back towards him and inspected it with a dull curiosity. It was textured with ruffled tassels, and its color matched that of his scales perfectly... save for a few faint, rusty smears that covered it.

He blinked, uncertain. On a whim, Spike brought the washcloth closer to his face and sniffed it. The heavy fragrance of soap met his nostrils, but there was another aroma under that which he couldn’t exactly identify. The closest that he could place was that it faintly smelled like some sort of metal, like copper or iron.

He turned the washcloth over in his hand, and spotted a bright green “S” in an elegant font that had been sewn into the fabric with fine string.

He peered at it with fixation, gently twiddling the embroidery between a finger and a thumb. There was such care and craft put into the fashion, he couldn’t help but think off...

A lone whisper seeped through his mind, distant and insidious.

“I don’t need you, Spike.”

That one thought became his only thought. It overruled every sensation and every notion until even the atmosphere of steam seemed far away. It festered inside his mind, filling him with despondence, disgust, and indignation until he felt like he was going to be sick.

“Hhhh... Huuuuu... Huuuuuuuhhhhh...” Spike wheezed as his own contained spite reached a fever pitch. He could feel it writhing and raging in some raw, indecipherable hunger for more...

Spike hacked like he was trying to cough up a golf ball. The scornful haze in his mind lifted right as he felt himself regurgitate a large mass of something slimy and putrescent.

He spat out the offender in his mouth without a second thought. The sight immediately disgusted him. A large wad of dark, feathered slime tumbled over itself across the surface of the bathtub, sliding away on the currents of water towards the drain.

The blackened, repulsive mass caught on the edge of the drain. Spike watched it in detached suspicion as the hunk of slime clung to the rim with small tendrils for a few desperate seconds. Then it slipped away, disappearing into the shadowy hole.

Spike exhaled heavily and hung his head back down. The soothing feeling from the warm mist was returning. He felt all too willing to welcome it back, letting his muscles relax again and his awareness drop. With his mind unfocused, a stray thought drifted by that pointed out that this was the first time he’d ever spat in the bathtub.

His eyes opened abruptly and he lifted his head back up again, suddenly more alert. That ominous feeling that the whole scene was wrong came upon him again. He realized that was the first time he’d spat in the shower because he never took showers; he only ever took bubble baths. And that’s when it hit him:

How did I get here?

An abrupt knock on the door made him almost jump out of his scales.

“Spike? Are you in there?”

He eased up slightly after the initial surprise wore off. It was just Twilight.

“Yeah,” Spike replied as he pulled back the curtain to look at the door, surprised at how hoarse his voice sounded.

“Okay...” There was a pause.  “Spike, may I talk with you?”

“Sure... come on in, the door isn’t locked.”

How did I know that?

The handle turned, making a gentle click as the deadlatch pulled back. The door cracked open, slowly revealing Twilight as she gently pushed the door aside with her muzzle. She carefully closed it behind her, then walked towards the tub.

“Hi,” she said. Her voice was tender and tentative. “How are you?”

Spike leaned back against the rear of the tub. “Been better...” he mumbled.

Twilight sat down next to the bathtub, bringing her a little closer to eye level with Spike.

“Hmm... so, what are you doing in here?” 

Spike blinked at her. He looked down at the fabric still clutched in his claws, then looked back at Twilight.

“Bathing, apparently,” Spike answered, holding the washcloth up for her to see.

A small smile pulled at a corner of Twilight’s mouth for a microsecond. “I could have guessed that,” she said, trying to be a little playful. “But that’s not entirely what I’m getting at. What I mean is, why are you here, especially so late at night?”

“Good question,” Spike muttered.

Something in the tone of Twilight’s voice set off another red flag for him. He pulled the shower curtain back a little more, peering through the window at the starry night sky.

“Um, what time is it?” Spike asked. “Ten? Ten-thirty?”

Twilight’s expression fell. “Spike... it’s three in the morning.”

Spike’s mind went blank. He stared off in the distance at Twilight’s direction, trying to piece together what she had just said to explain his scenario to himself. He might as well have tried to keep a train from jumping the rails with nothing more than a lasso.

Twilight interrupted his derailed train of thought. “I had initially thought that you were out so late because you had just gotten caught up in a really big project when you went to go help Rarity...”

Another train crashed into the wreckage.

“I wasn’t with Rarity,” Spike muttered.

“What?” Alarm begin to creep onto Twilight’s face.

Spike exhaled. “When I went to Rarity’s, she was so busy with what she claimed was a one-pony project that she wouldn’t even let me inside. She said that she didn’t need me.”

Spike scowled. Those words felt as disgusting as that thing which he’d just spat out, but that feeling he had before coughing it up was all the same.

Twilight had an expression like she was crossing a minefield. “So... where were you then?”

A sinkhole opened up under the wreckage.

“I don’t know.”

“Then, did you go see somepony else?”

“I don’t know...”

“Spike, you’ve been gone for about twelve hours. What were you doing that whole time?”

“I don’t know! I’m not holding anything back here, Twilight; I really don’t know!”

Twilight had stood up again and taken a step back. Her ears folded down and she looked off in another direction with a very troubled look on her face.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to raise my voice at you.” Spike apologized, looking away. “I’m not mad at you, it’s just... I really don’t know...”

He looked back at Twilight. Her expression still hadn’t changed, but he could practically see the mechanical parts of her mind at work, though to what end, he couldn’t tell. Occasionally, her eyes would flicker in his direction before darting away again. Though every time they did make eye contact for a fraction of a second, even if it was less apparent, she still had a little bit of that look in her eyes.

Some of his frustration returned, and this time it was directed at her. “Why is it suddenly so important to you?”

Twilight turned her attention from the tile and looked straight at Spike. Minute wisps of fright were still evident, but it was buried beneath her sympathy.

“I was worried about you, Spike. I mean, what if something happened to you, and I didn’t learn about it until it was too late to help?” She dry-swallowed. “I’m sorry if it seems like I’ve been cold or distant recently, but... I really do care about you. I wouldn’t be so worried if I didn’t care.”

A little part of him felt more warm than even the steam that filled the bathroom. He gave her a little smile, which Twilight returned.

Twilight turned around for the door, but kept an eye over her shoulder at Spike. “It’s late, so finish up here and get back to bed, okay?”

“Okay. Good night, Twi.” Spike watched her go, and felt compelled to say something else. Despite the humidity, his throat felt dry, and he had to force out a reply. “Love ya.”

Twilight stopped at the threshold, already halfway out the door and staring into the hall. She turned her head in his direction, but did not look completely back. “I love you too, Spike.”

She closed the door behind her.

Spike watched her go and didn’t break eye contact with the last spot that he’d seen her. He stared at the bathroom door for several minutes until weariness caught back up with him. He yawned, stood up, and shut off the water.

By the time he’d dried off and gotten back to their bedroom, Twilight was already under the covers, and still as the grave. He couldn’t tell if she was sleeping, though; she was backlit from the moonlight coming through the window, which covered her face in shadow and made only her silhouette visible.

Spike pulled back the blankets of his own bed, lay down, pulled the sheets back over him, and settled in. He curled up into a little ball, yawned, and sleep swept him away on its astral chariots.


- - - - - -


Twilight watched Spike get into bed. She lay perfectly still, so he paid her no mind.

He must have thought I was already asleep.

She continued to look over the little dragon, even long after he passed out and began to gently snore. Listening to his rhythmic breathing did little to soothe her though, and she was too tired to devote herself to mull over all the possible plans that she had made mental checklists out of that could be used to possibly help Spike. Being too sleepy to think, all she could do was feel... and she felt nothing but angst.

“What am I going to do with you?” Twilight whispered.

The sirens of slumber were calling her now, and she could hold herself from their alluring calls no longer. Twilight closed her eyes and was consumed by darkness.


- - - - - -


The sky overhead was a bright, uniform cerulean. The overhead sun blazed in all its magnificent glory: bright, warm, and loving, like the one who guided it across the heavens. It drifted alone across the vast blue sky, without a single cloud to blot out its light.

Yet something about the serene view seemed off to Twilight. She studied it, trying to discern what seemed so incorrect about the sun being the only feature in the sky. That’s when it hit her.

Clouds. I forgot the clouds and the weather last time.

Wait; last time?

A gentle breeze wafted by, carrying with it a constant, gentle, harmonious whirr. Twilight’s ears twitched at the sound. Bumps rose across her skin, making her fur stand on end and sending a tingling through her feathers. 

Another chill swept through her, but not from the coolness of the wind.

She could hear the wind trying to coax her up into the sky, swirling around her like an atypical windigo foal that thrived upon cheer instead of malice.

Come on, Twilight! Come play!

Twilight’s wings shifted in unease. “No, I need to help Spike...”

Aw, come on, it’s fun! And you liked it so much last time...

Her eyes opened wider. She looked down from the sky in alarm.

Twilight stood upon the balcony of the palace that overlooked the clockwork courtyard. Past the surface of the tower, over the surrounding city and forest, and beyond purple mountains miles away, she could make out the hazy glare reflecting from off the infinite, empty plane.

She turned around and trotted away from the balustrade, with her attentiveness focused upon the stone under her hooves. The oscillating volume of the crystalline tone was still omnipresent.

Don’t you want to go flying with me?

“No! Not right now!” Twilight blurted.

The voice moaned in dissatisfaction, then suddenly became that of one whom always set her on edge.

“Fine,” the disembodied voice of Discord said. “Have it your way.”

Twilight heard a snap of fingers. She lurched forward as the pull of gravity shifted, and her head shot up in the direction that she was being dragged in.

The ebony and bronze doors that opened up to the balcony had been replaced with the clockwork gates that had been been imbedded to the mountain in Spike’s dream. They banged open and the wind rolled into the cave: the maw of a hungry predator that intended to swallow her whole.

Twilight attempted to dig into the smooth surface of the deck to find purchase, and her wings beat as if she could have flown away, but to no avail. She slid across the balcony and into the cave. The directional pull of gravity corrected itself when she tumbled inside. Her momentum carried her forward through the air for some distance until she slammed into the ground and skidded to a halt, kicking up plumes of dust as she did.

The doors slammed shut with a deafening boom that left Twilight with her ears ringing, and the infinite, impenetrable darkness rushed in the instant afterwards.

She spat out dust and got back up on her hooves as quickly as possible. Her horn burst to light, illuminating her surroundings... or rather the lack thereof. All she could see was a flat, barren surface of hard-packed dust, and the ever-present darkness surrounding its prey.

Her eyes adjusted to the light, and she realized that she wasn’t alone. Standing just at the edge of where the light dissipated and was consumed by the endless shadow was the barely discernable figure of a pony standing on its hind legs.

Its first feature that Twilight was able to identify through the dark was its ghostly, hollow eyes.

Twilight’s jaw dropped. “You...”

Something extremely heavy fell unto the back of Twilight’s head, smashing her face into the ground. Her jaw snapped shut and she howled in pain when she felt some of her teeth crack.

She tried to get back up, but talons kept her pinned to the ground.

A voice from above spoke, and her blood went cold. “Will you ever learn to knock?”

He moved his head down next to the side of her face, glaring at her with that stare that made her feel like she was being ripped to pieces by his eyes. Her wings brushed up against him as they flapped in a vain attempt to escape.

His scrutinizing eyes darted to her back. He sneered at her, moved his foot from her head to her back, and grabbed both of her wings. Feathers snapped and bones fractured under the vice-grip of his claws.

Avarice growled in her ear. “You’re not supposed to have these.”

Then he ripped off her wings.

Twilight screamed bloody murder. Adrenaline surged through her body, and she pushed off with her forehooves using all her might, shooting off from where she was being pinned without resistance.

Her vision had gone black, so she ripped her eyes back open. Blurry visions of a wooden ceiling being lit by a sunrise rushed by in a whirl.

Great, Twilight, you’re freaking out again over another bad dre—

Twilight fell out of bed, onto the hard floor on her side, and started screaming bloody murder again.

Agonizing pain ripped across her like whips made of lightning. She scrambled to get back onto her hooves and off of where it hurt, eliciting more cries of pain whenever any and every movement made the muscles in the afflicted area expand or contract.

Twilight tentatively put a hoof to her side, making her cry out in pain again. She felt like daggers had been driven into her and were sticking out from behind her shoulders.

Her eyes darted around the bedroom. Spike stirred in his bed. He let out a loud snore and began to mumble something. Her research notes, new letter to the princess, and gyroscope were still on her desk.

Twilight picked up the gyroscope with her magic and cantered out of her bedroom as quickly as she could without causing herself more pain. She didn’t even bother to shut the door as she left, just made a beeline straight for the bathroom.

She shut the bathroom door behind her, flicked on the lights, and yanked open the mirrored door to the medicine cabinet. Twilight grabbed a bottle of extra strength pain reliever that she kept for the worst of migraines with her magic, yanked the cap off, and dry-swallowed a double dose.

With her horn still lit, she turned on the faucet to the sink and use her magic to let some of the water pool up in a telekinetic bowl, which she lifted to her lips and sipped from.

The spots behind her shoulders still felt like they had been beaten sore. She reared up on her hind legs, balanced herself on the edge of the sink with her forehooves, and started repeatedly splashing herself in the face with water until her face was soaked.

Droplets trickled down her face from her sopping wet mane and muzzle. She closed her eyes and breathed in deep, trying to shut the pain out of her mind. She stood there for a moment, with only the sounds of rushing water and her own heavy breathing to accompany her.

She dismounted, reaching for a towel to dry her face with. The gyroscope on the counter caught her attention. She propped it upright and spun it without a second thought.

The longer she stared at it, the more the gentle ring of the moving pieces drowned out the rushing water from the faucet. Slivers of the orange sunrise coming through the window glinted off its surface like catching glimpses of goldfish in a pond. She couldn’t even hear her own breathing after a certain point.

The gyroscope wobbled a little, twisted in place, and fell. The glass made a gentle clink as it hit the counter.

Twilight exhaled the breath she had been holding, taking some form of consolation in the reliability of her totem. At that moment she realized that the water in the sink was still running, and she shut it off. She picked up her gyroscope and left the bathroom, wondering if she had any pouches lying around the library to keep carry her totem in.

As she passed by the open door to her bedroom, something smacked right into her side. More daggers: she screamed again.

“I’m sorry! I jus—”

“WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!” Twilight snapped.

She regretted her outburst the instant it left her mouth. Spike looked at her, mouth open, and as startled as he was hurt. Slowly, the pain of his wounded feelings melted away to indignation. Then he sneered at her. That terrifying anger boiled just under the surface of his eyes.

“Oh Spike, I’m so sor—”

“Whatever,” Spike shut her up with a curt grumble. He brushed past her, and then stomped down the stairs. “I just thought it would be nice of me the check on my best friend when she wakes up screaming like she got a limb torn off, but I guess not!

“Since I was woken up so early, I’m going to make some breakfast, because Celestia knows you can’t. Maybe if you’re lucky, I’ll have calmed down by the time I’m done, so I won’t have accidently shed a few scales into your porridge!”

Spike trampled into the kitchen and slammed the door behind him so hard that the windows rattled.

Twilight was going to follow Spike and try to get in a proper apology, but she stopped herself. Spike had that tone in his voice. She had learned a long time ago that when Spike had that tone, it meant he was in a bad enough mood that he wouldn’t even want to talk to her for a while, and it was better to give him enough time to calm down before trying to reconcile with him.

All she could do was hang her head in shame and curse herself for her behavior.

Way to undo whatever good you might have done earlier, Twilight...


- - - - - -


Hours later into the afternoon, much to Twilight’s dismay, Spike was still in a bad mood. Ever since their exchange on the stairs, he’d been scowling. He wouldn’t look directly at her, and whenever she asked him to help with something, even as polite and apologetic as she tried to be about it, he didn’t respond with anything more than a grumpy “Mmhm” or a disgruntled “Sure, whatever.” She sure didn’t feel comfortable with just how much fire had erupted from his mouth when she’d asked him to send that letter to Celestia, either.

The good news at least was that Spike hadn’t callously shed into Twilight’s breakfast... the bad news was the he seemed to have opted for an even more cruel option, and laced her oatmeal with ginger: a natural irritant to ponies. She couldn’t actually taste any, but the way she kept wrinkling her nose like she was about to sneeze, and the burning sensation in her throat that had forced her to have drunk about half a gallon of milk by lunch in an attempt to soothe her esophagus was indication enough.

She’d have used a spell to try and remove the spice from the food and present it to Spike to give him a good, stern lecture about his attitude, but the last time she had targeted food with a spell, spaghetti had been involved.

And just to make everything even worse, the pain in her sides was back with a vengeance.

Not that it had ever really left. Even with her pain-killers that could topple even her legendary headaches, her sides had still hurt all day with a persistent soreness. It had at least been manageable then, but the medicine was wearing off, and it seemed like all the discomfort she had staved off had just creeped back up on her.

She had taken another dose, but the previous chemical buzz had yet to fully disperse from her system, so it hadn’t helped as much. She’d even taken a long detour from working on that last line of code from Dreamscape to look through a few medicinal and pharmaceutical books for some answer for why she felt in such pain and how to alleviate it, but to no avail.

A knock came from the front door.

Twilight grimaced. Great: what else does the world want to interrupt me with?

“Spike, could you get the door please?”

His muffled response came from another part of the library. “I’m busy.”

“Please, Spike?”

“I said, I’m busy. Got to put all these books away... the ones that you keep taking out and keep leaving for me to reshelve... because you won’t put them back...”

Twilight’s mouth pulled tight in annoyance. She got up from her seat and crossed the library to open the door herself, shutting out Spike’s grumbling. Each step sent another needle into her side, and she was gritting her teeth in pain and frustration by the time she got there.

She opened the door and momentarily forgot all her discomforts.

“Now Twilight, what did I say about not being a stranger?”

“Rarity!” Twilight gasped. She almost didn’t catch herself from pouncing Rarity with another hug.

“Ah,” Rarity held up a hoof, and motioned to her side. “And company.”

Twilight opened the door wider, and gasped again.

“Oh, um... hi, Twilight. It’s good to see y—”

Fluttershy didn’t get to finish her hellos before Twilight tackled her with a hug.

“Fluttershy! Oh it’s so good to see you again! I’d missed you so much!”

“Twilight!” Rarity scolded. “Show some composure! That’s Fluttershy you just tackled!”

“Oh, it’s alright Rarity; I’m sure she just missed me, like you said she would. Besides,” Fluttershy patted the back of her affectionate attacker’s head, “she’s not nearly as bad with the hugs as the cougars.”

Rarity nodded. “Well then, it’s good to see you too, Twilight. I hope you haven’t forgotten our arranged trip to the spa, no?”

“Huh? Oh, of course not. Just let me get something...” Twilight got off of Fluttershy and turned to go back into the library, but her way was impeded.

“Finished putting the books away.” The edge from Spike’s voice was all but gone. He looked past Twilight to the other unicorn in the group. “Hi, Rarity. So you three were going to the spa? Can I come too?”

“Oh, uh, I’d rather not bring anypony else along...” Rarity said, rubbing her left foreleg.

“But you’ve been working so hard for the last few days; don’t you deserve some extra pampering?” Spike tried to plead his case.

“I appreciate the thought, but... um...”

“Aren’t Aloe and Lotus still upset with you over the mud-wrestling incident with the Cutie Mark Crusaders?” Fluttershy asked.

Spike looked at them, confused. “The what? Oh yeah, that.”

“I’m sorry, but the spa sisters aren’t too keen to hold onto grudges. I’m sure they’ll be glad to have you back... after they’ve finished getting all the mud stains off the ceiling...” Rarity said with a forced smile.

Spike didn’t answer, just looked down and sighed.

“Excuse me,” Twilight said, brushing past Spike. She went back to her bedroom, put her gyroscope back in its case, and put it into a small purse that she slung over her neck and around her shoulder, careful not to touch her sides. Content with her accessory, Twilight went back downstairs to her friends.

“Alright, I’m ready. We’ll be back in, how long? A few hours?”

“Again, I apologize for the inconvenience, Spike. Perhaps some other time?” Rarity bid.

“Can’t wait,” Spike muttered. “If you three are heading off, then I’m going to go take a nap.”

“Actually, since you’ve put all the books back, you need to go over the double-check list to make sure they’re all back in place, don’t you?” Twilight quipped.

Spike leered at her, making Twilight feel a little worse. She’d only intended to use her authority to tease him, not rub salt on the wound.

“Fine.” Spike all but growled as he put his hand back on the door to close it and turned away. “See you—”

Spike’s gaze shot back to Twilight in a double take. For a moment, his eyes were wide open in fear. The instant later his expression had changed, and he started looked behind Twilight, perplexed.

Twilight peered at him. “Spike? Is something wrong?”.

“No, it’s nothing. I just... thought I saw someone. See you later,” Spike said, returning to his despondency, and shut the door.

Twilight hung her head at the door and let out a heavy, remorseful breath. She felt a gentle hoof upon her shoulder. Even such a delicate touch so close to her afflicted areas made her wince, and she tried to hide her pain as she looked up into Fluttershy’s soft eyes.

“Twilight, is everything okay between you and Spike?”

Twilight looked away. “Not really.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Would it make you feel better to talk to somepony about it?”

Twilight breathed out through her nostrils. “Things have been a little... tense between Spike and me for the last few days. We’ve both been a bit on edge, but I haven’t been able to be there for him as much as I should be because I’ve been wrapped up in something very, very important. And to make matters worse, I’ve developed some sort of stabbing pain at my sides.”

Fluttershy’s eyes grew wider at the words. “Pain? Where?” She instinctively looked over Twilight, making her hoof shift.

Twilight gritted her teeth, and had to force herself from screaming out. “On both sides, right where your hoof is touching me.”

Fluttershy withdrew her hoof in an instant. “Oh! I’m sorry! I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Twilight tried to smile, even though it felt like she had porcupines tied to her. “Not too much.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry, Twilight! I didn’t mean to...”

“It’s okay, Fluttershy, I know you didn’t... but I wasn’t so considerate to Spike over the same matter.” Regret came back upon her again. “The pain was far worse this morning. I woke up feeling like I’d been stabbed, and when Spike woke up, he came to check up on me, but he accidentally ran into me, right where it hurt. I lost my temper and snapped at him, and he’s been upset even since.”

Sorrow pulled her gaze downward. “I hurt his feelings, and all he wanted to do was make sure I was okay.”

Fluttershy craned her neck down, trying to re-establish eye contact with her friend. “I’m sure you didn’t mean to get mad at him, Twilight.”

She sniffed. “I didn’t mean to, but I still did. I tried to apologize, but I put him in such a bad mood that he hasn’t even wanted to talk to me since then.”

Rarity stepped forward to Twilight’s other side. “Dear, it sounds like you’re still burdened by an undue amount of stress. If anything, it sounds like you need an afternoon to relax and get things back in order. And if you’ve been stricken with some inexplicable physical ailment, then perhaps some quality time with a masseuse would suite you well.”

“I suppose you’re right. Maybe then I’ll be able to think of something I can do to make up with Spike.”

Rarity smiled. “That’s the spirit, dear. Come then; let us not tarry a moment longer!”

With that, the three mares turned and left for the spa.

Rarity turned her head to look at Twilight. “I do hope you’ll forgive us for our tardiness. On a whim of mine, we stopped by Sugarcube Corner to extend a hoof of invitation to Pinkie Pie.”

Twilight was instantly alert. “You two saw Pinkie?”

“We did, but... um...” Fluttershy let her sentence go unfinished. She and Rarity started shifting glances between each other.

“What happened?” Twilight dared ask.

“She seemed, well... “off color,” I suppose is the most polite way to put it,” Rarity answered. “She was yammering on about things neither of us could make heads or tails of, like “dastardly zebras,” “the paradox of ponies pulling trains,” and something about her Pinkie sense, somepony watching her, and a burning hoof. I might have caught more, but she was talking so fast, most everything else was just indecipherable babble.”

“Have you ever seen songbirds on a sugar high?” Fluttershy added. “Because, well, she was kind of acting like that.”

“Mmhm,” Rarity nodded in agreement, then continued. ”She hardly seemed entirely cognizant of either of us while we were conversing. Only part of her comments seemed in direct correlation to our conversation; otherwise, she kept skewing off on completely unrelated tangents, as if she was talking to somepony else entirely. And she kept yammering on, faster and faster, until suddenly, out of nowhere, she stops right in the middle of what she was saying. Then her eyes droop and she slumps over, and afterwards she’s barely able to slur out a complete sentence.”

Twilight could feel her gut shift. “Really?”

“Oh dear, yes! Now get this; her whole spiel: that entire cascade of capricious conveyance, happened within the space of,” Rarity paused for dramatic effect, “two minutes. And with hardly any provocation from either of us!”

“It was... well, odd,” Fluttershy added. “I mean, I know Pinkie is a bit unpredictable, but... well, it just didn’t seem like Pinkie at all. Oh, and for almost the entire time, she seemed, well, timid around me; almost like she was afraid of me.” Fluttershy nodded. “She hardly ever looked directly at me, and whenever she did, it was with nervous glances, like she was afraid I might explode or set fire to something. And she kept stuttering my name, like she was confusing me with somepony else. She even completely messed up and called me “Havoc” once.”

Fluttershy drew up a pensive expression. “Do we know anypony named Havoc? Who even has a name like that?”

“That’s not even the worst part,” Rarity cut back in. “When we finally got past our rather awkward “hellos” and I got around to inquiring her if she wished to join us, she became, well... infuriated. Outraged, even. I mean... dear Celestia, I haven’t seen her so steeped with animosity since the last and only time that Applejack broke a Pinkie promise!” She shuddered. “She exploded at us, claiming we were attempting to derail some party that she’d been trying to plan by placing a visit to the spa over our friendship. And before I could retort with either indignation or my utmost concern for her, she broke down. Right in the middle of the shop, she started sobbing, choking out numerous apologies and berating herself; slandering herself as a terrible pony for... whatever it was she was going through.”

“We tried to say something to her, but before we could, she galloped back into her room and locked the door,” Fluttershy explained. “So we tried offering her our support through the door, but she wouldn’t even say anything back.”

Twilight had to resist the urge to break away, gallop all the way to Sugarcube Corner, teleport past her bedroom door, and give Pinkie all the compassion and empathy that her heart could pour out.

“I can only imagine how terrible she must feel right now; I mean...” Fluttershy’s ears and eyes folded down, “I was doing almost the exact same thing after Iron Will...” She looked away. “I’m still sorry about that, Rarity.”

“That’s quite alright, darling. I forgave you long ago, and you’ve come far since that belligerent ruffian,” Rarity said. “But what concerns me here is the magnitude of whatever Pinkie is going through, and we don’t even know what exactly she’s going through. Twilight, you said that you saw her about four days ago, yes?”

Twilight nodded. “Yes, but she wasn’t nearly as unstable as you described... of course that was when she was still willing to see me. Two w—the next day, Dash and I couldn’t even get her to see us.”

“That was around the last time you and I met, if I remember correctly,” Rarity noted. “For what it’s worth, your disposition seems to have improved, but what could possibly make Pinkie that flustered that she’d still be so conflicted several days later? I know she’s an emotional pony, more than she’ll admit, but I can hardly think of a time I’ve seen her more distraught.”

“That’s exactly what Rainbow Dash told us,” Fluttershy noted.

“Ah, yes; we ran into her as well. She gave us the same story, except she’d been checking on her periodically for the last few days, and had hardly seen hide nor hair of her for all the effort, let alone gotten to the bottom of this.” Rarity sighed. “Before she sped off to check on her again, I said that if she did manage to coax Pinkie out of her slump, we’d still love to rendezvous at the spa for some time amongst friends. And if Pinkie still declined, Dash was always welcome too, even if it was just her.”

Rarity huffed. “You can imagine how well that offer went over...”

“That might be because you mentioned the words “brush” and “mane” in the same sentence,” Fluttershy said. “I wish Applejack could have come too, but she said she’d be busy with work for the whole day.”

“Pity, really,” Rarity sighed. “I brought more than enough bits for all six of us. I even gave Sweetie Belle and her friends plenty of money so we could have this get-together while they have an afternoon to themselves to go play... so long as they Pinkie promised not to spend it on anything dangerous... or that involves dirt.”

“Well, if they Pinkie promised, everything should be okay. I just hope they have as good time as we will,” Fluttershy said as they reached the spa.

“And not a moment too soon. I think I speak for all of us when I say we need this.” Rarity opened the door to the spa, trotted inside, and held the door open for her friends.

A soothing melody comprised of a continual, bass note held indefinitely, overlaid with the tones of a shamisen being delicately plucked in staccato and a wafting flute met them at the door. The sounds of water gently flowing over structures of smooth rocks and bubbling into serene, crystalline pools bid their guests to enter. They stepped inside into an atmosphere of perfect temperature and humidity that smelled of water lilies, citrus, and light perfumes.

Twilight was almost instantly at ease; she could scarcely remember how long it had been since she’d anticipated feeling this good. Her stress and tension began to melt away, dripping from her weary form and freeing her of its hefty burdens. She breathed in deep, wishing to absorb as much of the placidity as she could and drift away on the still, inviting air. She was almost completely at peace.

She would have, had the nerves at her sides still not been chewing on themselves.

“Ah, Miss Rarity! Such a pleasure to see you and your friends again!” Lotus warmly welcomed them in her musical Swedish accent. “De usual?”

“The pleasure is ours, darling.” Rarity gave a polite little bow. “But no, I think the girls and myself are in need of something a little more rejuvenating. Three deluxe packages, on my tab.”

Lotus nodded. “Excellent choice, Miss Rarity.” She motioned to their group with a tilt of her head. “Dis way.”

“Oh, and it might not be an issue, but some of my other friends might still be coming,” Rarity added to Lotus as they walked. “If Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, or Applejack do decide to attend with us, a deluxe package for each of them as well, if you would.”

“Of course.” Lotus pointed to a wardrobe in the mares’ restrooms. “Your bathrobes, clean and pressed. I shall prepare de sauna for you three. Would you prefer for either me or my sister to attend to steaming de rocks for you, or shall I leave de ladle to your hoof?”

“I think we’ll be alright on our lonesome, thank you.” Rarity said, fitting herself into one of the silken soft robes.

“Very well,” Lotus replied. “I shall attend to de other matters of your treatment. Oh, and Miss Rarity, might I add that your timing is impeccable; my sister and I have finally scrubbed de mud from de ceiling, so de mud baths are once again open.”

“Oh... really, now? Ah, well... wonderful!” Rarity replied with a tight smile.

Lotus opened the door the sauna for them. They entered into the overbearing heat and humidity of a room that smelled of cedar.

“I shall go prepare your rejuvenating masks, then. Farväl for now, but do call if you need any assistance.” With that, Lotus departed, leaving the three to each other’s company.

Twilight moved to a nearby bench, groaning as she settled down. Whatever harmony she was trying to ease into was still being jarred by the dissonance of the pain in her sides.

“Will you be okay?” Fluttershy asked, noting Twilight’s discomfort.

“I’ll be fine... eventually. I just need time to relax.”

“Okay then,” Fluttershy said, settling down herself next to the stack of sizzling rocks. “Though I do feel a little bad for Spike now. We probably could have brought him along since the mud baths have been cleaned.”

From next to Fluttershy, Rarity sighed.

“What?” Fluttershy asked.

Rarity picked up the ladle with her magic and poured water over the rocks, enveloping them in steam. “To be honest, I had hoped just to make this a mares’ day out. Not that I’m intentionally going out of my way to exclude him, but sometimes us ladies need our getaways, right?”

Twilight and Fluttershy nodded in agreement.

After a long while spent in the swirling steam, Twilight asked, “Spike has been asking me if he can visit you an awful lot recently. Has he been bothering you, Rarity?”

“Eh, somewhat. It’s not that I don’t want him around, but I’ve just been awfully busy with something only I can deal with, so I haven’t been able to entertain company or accept his usual offers for assistance. His newfound insistence isn’t helping his cause much, either.”

“Aw, I’m sure he just wants to help you,” Fluttershy said.

“I know, and I do appreciate that his heart is in the right place, but for all his efforts, it just comes across as ‘trying too hard.’ I’m sure you understand,” Rarity said, laying down on her back and closing her eyes.

“Hmm...” Fluttershy laid down on her stomach, crossing her forelegs and resting her head upon them, wearing a ponderous expression as she did. “Rarity, may I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“Well, I mean, if it’s not too personal; I don’t want to feel like I’m intruding... you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, but...”

“Oh, just spit it out, darling.”

“Okay...” Fluttershy composed herself, raising her head up from her perch and looking right at Rarity. “Do you like Spike?”

Rarity put her hooves to her eyes. “Ugh... it’s complicated. I think he’s an adorable little gentlestallion, and I do like him… as a friend.”

An awkward silence hung in the air. After several long seconds, Twilight said the word she and Fluttershy knew that Rarity wasn’t saying. “But…”

“I don’t know… Spike is so young. Not foalish, definitely, but young. Because of that, I don’t know if he genuinely likes me, or if it’s still just a crush.”

“I’m pretty sure he likes you, Rarity,” Twilight interjected. “This has been going on for a while now.”

“Alright then, so I like him and he likes me,” Rarity conceded, “but what then?”

“What do you mean?” Fluttershy asked.

“So we tell each other that we are each other’s very special somepony. We laugh, we hug, and then we kiss.” Rarity stopped and looked off into space. “Then what? What happens next?”

A heavy pause hung in the steamy air. Twilight and Fluttershy looked at each other, unable to collaborate an answer.

“That’s what I thought,” Rarity said dejectedly. “I don’t know what happens next after that. I don’t think Spike knows, either. I don’t think he’s even thought about it. And because of that, I can’t be sure that he’s mature enough to be in a serious relationship.” 

Rarity stopped staring into space to look her friends in the eye. “So yes, since you’re asking, I do like Spike, but not that way. I don’t know if he knows that sometimes it’s better to just stay friends. But neither of us knows where this is going, and from what I’ve experienced, I’ve learned to be a little more cautious and thoughtful when it comes to matters of the heart. And for that matter, I refuse to be a heartbreaker.”

“Fair enough,” Twilight said. Then a thought occurred to her. “Hey, Rarity, you wouldn't have happened to have learned to take a more cautious approach to relationships after Blueblo— ”

Rarity cut off Twilight with a gaze of daggers. “DON’T...”

Twilight shied away. “Sorry...” 

Rarity took on a more reassuring tone. “No need to be sorry, darling. Regardless, I think the three of us came here to relax from our daily stress, no?” She picked up the ladle and poured more water over the sweltering stones.

“Oh, but I had such a lovely time teaching the young birds how to fly,” Fluttershy pouted a little.

Twilight smiled. “Well, I’d love to hear about it.”

Fluttershy returned the smile and shared her story of her week for the remainder of the time that they remained in the sauna.


- - - - - -


From there on out, their time was most relaxing. They all had a bath of mineral water, then they spent some rather enjoyable time in the jacuzzi. After a quick shower to cleanse their fur and pores, the three were given rejuvenating masks, or in Fluttershy’s case, rejuvenating eye shadow, then the three received the finest of hooficures while Rarity and Twilight had their horns gently filed to a smooth texture.

Then came the part Twilight had secretly been dreading since she walked in the door: the massages.

On the far table, Rarity lay on her stomach, still wearing her mask with cucumbers over her eyes while Aloe and Lotus’s older brother, the sandy-coated, blonde-maned Tempo, part-time massage  therapist and drummer for a band called “Thunderhorse,” worked his magic on Rarity’s back.

In between the two on a wider table lay Fluttershy. Aloe sat upon the table with Fluttershy, and was gently kneading her wings. Fluttershy was purring like a kitten, lying there with her eyes closed and the most content of relaxed smiles on her face as Aloe relieved the tension from her wings: still slightly sore from all the flying she’d been doing for the last few days.

And then there was Twilight, who was staring at Lotus’s forehooves as the masseuse approached, and was sweating bullets.

“Are you alright, Miss Twilight?” Lotus asked. “You appear a little tense...”

“I’ll be alright,” she said.

I hope...

“Very well,” said Lotus. She reared back and placed her hooves across the table. “Tell me, is there a massage technique you would prefer?”

“Just... whatever you think is good for aching muscles.”

Lotus nodded, taking note of Twilight’s aversion. “Very well. I think I know just de thing...”

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut tight, dreading what was to come. It’s okay, Twilight. Just relax, let her ease away the pain. Don’t focus on how much it might hurt, and you’ll be just fine...

Lotus stabbed Twilight with a claymore.

Twilight shrieked out in pain, bucking involuntarily as a foreleg rushed back to cover the wound.

Lotus backed away in alarm. Aloe and Fluttershy were staring at her. Rarity had peeled away one of the cucumber slices off of her face to see what was the matter. Even Tempo had stopped drumming on Rarity’s back to look at the commotion.

“Twilight, dear, are you alright?” Rarity inquired.

Fluttershy looked at her with concern. “Do you really hurt that badly?”

“Vät happened, sister?” Aloe asked.

Lotus looked back and forth between Aloe and Twilight, confused. “I merely touched her side with a hoof...”

Now Aloe bore an expression of bewilderment. “Would you excuse me for a moment?” she asked Fluttershy.

“Oh, of course; Twilight needs your attention more than I do.”

Aloe gracefully hopped down from her perch upon the table, and relocated to her sister’s side.

“So, what is de problem?” Aloe asked.

“Well, my sides hurt. A lot. And I don’t know why,” Twilight replied.

“And how long have you been feeling dis pain?” Lotus further inquired.

“A few days now.” Twilight spoke truthfully.

“Hmm...” Lotus put a hoof to her chin. “Miss Sparkle, may I prod de afflicted area once mer?”

Twilight looked at the two for some sympathy.

“I promise, I shall be gentle.”

Twilight scoured their concerned gazes for some respite. Exhaling with slight dread, she moved her hoof away, exposing herself, and laid her head back down upon the table with her eyes shut tight.

“Do it.”

Aloe and Lotus moved in for a better look. Slowly, the latter raised her hoof and moved it to the area behind Twilight’s right shoulder blade. With a tender touch like Fluttershy waking a baby mouse with her muzzle, Lotus gently touched Twilight’s side.

Twilight winced at the attack, sucking in air with a sharp inhale and flinching away from the assault. Lotus’s hoof might as well have been a mace, swung at her with all the tact of a stray kick in a barroom brawl.

The sisters turned their attention to each other and began to rapidly converse in their native tongue.

“Ser du hur hennes muskler rycka?” Lotus asked of Aloe.

“Jag gör...” Aloe replied. She brushed some of her sapphire mane back and stole another glance at Twilight’s still-convulsing muscles. “Det ser nästan ut som om hon har nervskador.”

Aloe looked back to the injured unicorn as well. “Udda, jag har bara sett muskler rycka sånt för vingar...”

“What’s wrong?” Twilight asked, her worry mounting.

“Well, my sister and I both think that de afflicted area appears to have nerve damage.”

Fluttershy gasped.

“Oh my, that sounds awfully serious!” Rarity exclaimed.

“Is there anything you can do?” Twilight asked, hopeful.

“Oh, we can certainly help,” Aloe assured her.

“Ja,” Lotus agreed. “I think first, it would be best to employ our own specialty topical application crafted of wintergreen oil to soothe de affected areas, then use suction therapy to gently loosen and relax de muscles. Afterwords, I think only de most pristine and delicate of massages is in order, and then a quick round of acupuncture to complete de ordeal.”

Lotus gave Twilight a warm and reassuring smile. “It’s very simple...”

“Ja, ja, it’s very simple,” Aloe concurred.

“Alright, do it. But skip the acupuncture; I don’t like needles,” Twilight answered.

The sisters nodded in unison.


- - - - - -


Aloe and Lotus worked on Twilight for the better half of an hour. Their brand of wintergreen rubefacient stung upon first application, both for its chemical composition and that any agitation to her sides still hurt like none other, even with the topical’s numbing effect. The little glass baubles filled with heated air that they’d affixed to her back were none too comfortable either, least of all from having something constantly in contact against where she was feeling pain, but it did have the desired effect of loosening her muscles.

However, the hoof massages she’d gotten were out of this world. Aloe and Lotus gently kneaded out as much of the pain as they could with perfect applications of pressure and care. Twilight had easily thought that if she were capable of it, she would have been purring, too.

The rest of their stay went off without a hitch: seaweed wraps, warm mud baths, another shower with the finest bath soaps and shampoos, and finally, just some time to lay back and relax with some nice drinks and the pleasure of each others company.

But Twilight’s sides still ached.

They didn’t hurt nearly as bad as they had when she first set hoof in the spa, and though Aloe and Lotus had done the best they could to remedy her ailment (and their treatments and the hot water from her shower had helped), discomfort still ebbed through them with a dull ache. And like with her pain killers before, she knew it was only a matter of time until swords and arrows would be sheathed into her flesh again.

She had that concern to greet her outside, for their time to depart and return to their busy lives had come.

“Are you feeling any better, Miss Sparkle?” Aloe asked.

“Yeah,” Twilight returned with a weak smile. “For now, at least.”

“Well, if dis issue persists, may I advise you seek professional medical attention,” Aloe counselled.

“Of course, more frequent visits could be in order as Well,” said Lotus, giving Twilight a little wink. “We do so love to see your friendly face.”

Twilight’s smile brightened up a little. “I’ll see if I can free up some time from my schedule.”

Lotus gave her a little bow. “Very well. Farväl, for now.”

“Adieu, dearest Blossoms!” Rarity waved from the front door.

Aloe bowed her head in kind. “Farväl, friends!”

With that, the three ponies left, walking out into the warm, mid-afternoon sunlight.

Fluttershy sighed in content. “Ah... I do love these visits.” She looked to Twilight with care. “Do you feel any better?”

“For now, but I’m not sure how long it’ll last.” Twilight replied. “Maybe I should see somepony about this.”

“Perhaps, if it gets even more out of hoof,” Rarity said. “Until then, would you like Fluttershy and myself to walk back to the library with you?”

“Actually, I think we should go check and see if Rainbow made any progress with Pinkie,” Fluttershy said.

“Hm, excellent proposition, Fluttershy. Would you like to join us to Sugarcube Corner, then?” Rarity asked of Twilight.

Her initial thought was to say yes. Maybe, just maybe, Pinkie would let them in her room if she knew all of her friends were there for her. Maybe she would finally let them know what was bothering her, and then they could finally help her through whatever she was suffering through.

On the other hoof, she’d learned from past experiences that this was a very sensitive issue, and even so much as standing outside her bedroom door and offering their support might just come across as imposing.

“I don’t know... as much as I want to be there for her, it seems like everything everypony has tried has just made her withdraw further. Maybe it’s best to hold off until she comes forward to us about it, or I can think of some new approach. Besides, I still have to make up with Spike. This is the second time in four days that I’ve left him at the library while I went out to spend time with my friends, and I haven’t done a whole lot for him to make him feel less ostracized than he probably already does.”

Twilight sighed, and made to walk back home. “I should probably get back to the library. But please; if you do manage to connect with Pinkie, let me know.”

“Very well, then. Adieu, Twilight.” Rarity waved.

“Bye, Twilight. See you later,” Fluttershy said.

With that, the three went their separate ways. Rarity and Fluttershy trotted off for Sugarcube Corner, while Twilight began to make her way back to her library.

Before she left the plaza, Twilight turned to watch Rarity and Fluttershy go. She felt her heart pull against her, and for a moment she had half a mind to gallop to their side and tell them that she had reconsidered, if just to stay with them for a little longer.

Spike’s not going anywhere; he can wait.

She realized what she’d thought and internally smacked herself for it. Spike was a friend, too; one who even after she’d experienced how terrible life was without him, she now had the audacity to neglect.

But that’s because—

THAT’S NO EXCUSE. Reason’s voice echoed inside her head, making Twilight jump.
We’ve been over this.

Twilight conceded. We have.

So, what are you going to do?

Go back home, and try and make up with Spike. Twilight snorted a little. Which is what I was doing before you showed up.

Hey, don’t try and get smart with yourself. Reason shot back as Twilight resumed her slow pace with her vision directed towards the ground. So, what are you going to do to make peace with Spike?

Twilight thought about it for a moment, but still came upon the same conclusion.

I don’t know yet.

She could almost feel the searing eyes of Reason’s incredulous stare bore into her. You don’t know yet?

That’s right, I don’t know yet. I can’t just up and tell him everything, for obvious reasons, but I can’t just give him some token for an apology because that’s just sugar coating the real problem. I can try and explain why I’ve been acting how I have without giving away everything, but if he’s still upset, that might sound like I’m trying to justify my behavior…

Twilight carried on her loop for almost the entire way back home, without her paradox between apologizing, explaining the situation, or trying to do something to make amends ever reaching a conclusion.

Reason interrupted her rambling. I think you’re over complicating things, as usual.
 
So what am I supposed to do?

Just say that you’re sorry. Explain just enough so that he knows you haven’t been treating him the way you have just to be a jerk, apologize for what you’ve done wrong, and for the love of Celestia, be nicer to him, so he knows that you still care about him. It might not go back to normal immediately, but in time, he might forgive you.

I suppose you’re... wait, what’s that?

Something on the ground caught her attention: a short line of tiny red droplets. The largest of the splatter was pointed in her direction, trailed by smaller specks in a line parallel to her.

She raised her eyebrows, and suddenly was stricken with the feeling that her stomach was walking on a plank over a fissure. She picked up the pace of her trot, all the more eager to get home. She only made it a few paces before she saw another trail of red splatter. This one was on the same linear path of the last, and the way they pointed kicked the bottom out from under her guts.

Oh no...

They led back to the library.

Twilight took off at a gallop for home, her speed fueled by her mounting worry with each new hoofbeat. She saw more droplets and trails of spatter in the dusty road at increasingly frequent intervals, each one leading her back home.

Oh no; no no no no no no...

She skidded around the corner of the street to see her library and the trail that led straight to it. She galloped up the cobblestone path towards her home, where more of the trail had soaked into the wood on the porch, and passed right underneath the front door.

Twilight leaped through the air, smashing her hooves into the front door. It swung wide open and banged off the wall adjacent to it, bowing to the frantic unicorn’s urgent entry.

“Spike!” she cried out into the library. “SPIKE!”

He didn’t answer. Her eyes darted around the room, taking in every detail with snapshot precision: each book in its proper place on the shelf;  the horse-head statue on the table, staring at her; all the neatly organized quills and parchment on her desk; Pee-Wee worriedly inspecting of the trail of blood that lead to the base of the stairs.

She gasped, feeling like cold needles had been stabbed into her heart. She darted over the the trail’s beginning.

The cupboard built into the tree across from the base of the stairs had been obliterated. Only a fraction of the shattered doors still remained, hanging limp from the hinges; the rest lay scattered in shards and splinters around the destruction. All of the contents within had been smashed and broken, piled into the remains of the crushed shelves.

Blood was smeared across parts of the broken cupboard. One of her brother’s old shields that he’d left for her as a memorabilia item lay amongst the wreckage. There was a particularly large dent in one part along its bladed edge that was covered in blood. Several of Spike’s scales lay nearby, with bits of epidermal tissue still clinging to them, like they’d been ripped straight out of his sublayer of skin.

But there was still no sign of her friend.

Twilight’s mounting angst was making her do a fitful prace in place. On impulse she lifted her head and cried out into the library again.

“Spike! Where are you?!”

No answer.

Twilight’s breath was starting to come in deep, rapid gasps to fight against the panic gripping her throat. She looked back at the blood trail leading out of the library, and darted back to the door, only to find her way suddenly obstructed, and she skidded to a halt.

“Twilight! Oh, thank Celestia we found ya!”

“Apple Bloom?!” Twilight burted.

The filly wasn’t alone. Right behind her were Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo. All three were panting for breath, and each was carrying an instrument; Apple Bloom had a keyboard tied to her back, Scootaloo had a tuba wrapped around her neck, and Sweetie Belle had a violin sticking out of her saddle bag.

“Have you seen Spike?!” Twilight exclaimed before any of them could get in a proper greeting.

Apple Bloom’s eyes opened up wide. “Yeah! That’s what we came here ta get ya for!”

Scootaloo cut in, rapidly explaining the without hardly stopping to breathe. “Sweetie’s sister gave us some money so we could have some fun so long as we Pinkie Promised not to use it on something that involved dirt, so we were all like “Hey, let’s get our film score musicians cutie marks!” So then we were on our way to a music shop to rent some instruments, but then we ran into Dinky and her friends, and they were all like, “Hey, what’s up?” And we were all like, “Oh nothing much, just going to get our film score musician cutie marks!” And they were all like, “That’s cool,” but then Sweetie was like “Hey, we’ve got more than enough bits; wanna join us?” And they we like, “Sure, sounds fun!”

“So then we go to the store, and then we start talking about the kinds of instruments we’ll need, and then we start trying to decide who gets what, and then we get our instruments, but then we start heading back to the clubhouse, and we run into Spike!”

“He was hurt pretty bad!” Sweetie Belle interjected with a squeak. “We offered to take him to the hospital, but he kept trying to avoid us, and he kept glancing off in some other direction, like he was more worried about something else other than the big cut over his eye!”

“Finally we convinced him ta let us help, and he said ta come get ya while he made the rest of his way ta the hospital, so we’ve been runnin’ all over town lookin’ for ya for the last half an hour!”

Twilight didn’t even wait for them to finish or to thank them for the information. She just bolted past the three fillies, following the trail to Ponyville General.

She galloped until her breath seared and her blood sizzled in her veins. Even when her muscles quaked with exertion and the pain in her sides muscled past her adrenalin rush and began to scream in her ears, she kept galloping.

How could I have been so careless? she thought, too preoccupied with getting as much oxygen as possible into the muscles in her legs to waste her breath on speaking her self-directed chastisement.

Oh Spike... what did I let happen to you?


- - - - - -


Spike sat morosely at the desk in the bedroom, face pressed to the wood, rolling his fiery marble back and forth across it merely to have something to do: something to distract him from his sullen mood.

It wasn't working.

The marble had been the first thing that he’d ever owned, back when he was just a little whelpling. He had added many to his collection since then, but this one had always been his favorite. So while his thoughts would occasionally drift to the item’s significance to him, and he would try to stay on the happy thoughts of a treasured possession, for the most part they kept dwelling on how Rarity had shot him down when he just wanted to be of use to her, again. And how Twilight had brusquely saddled him with the sole upkeep of the library while she got to go dally about with her friends. Again.

He didn’t do his chores, however. First thing he had done after the mares had left was head straight upstairs to take a nap. That hadn’t gone so well, as his sour mood wouldn’t let him do anything more than doze in a half-awake slump.

Eventually he had gotten too restless to sleep, so he got up to look for something else to do. Only he had found himself without anything to do except sulk. He’d even for a moment gone back into the foyer and considered doing what Twilight had told him to do: double-check the books to make sure he’d reshelved them correctly.

A moment later, he had dismissed that thought.

Forget Twilight and her stupid checklists. By now, I know my way around the library better than she does, and I darn well know when a book is out of place.

So he had marched back upstairs, looking for something to do to keep him entertained. And that was how he’d ended up in the bedroom, with his cheek pressed up against Twilight’s desk while twiddling his fire-colored marble across its surface, bored and brooding.

Spike took his head off the desk and looked around the library, searching for something else to distract him, and saw Pee-Wee perched on a window behind him, grooming himself.

"Hey buddy," Spike said in an encouraging tone. "Want to learn how to play fetch?"

Pee-Wee didn't respond, and simply carried on with what he was doing.

Spike groaned on the inside. Still, he tried to coax his pet. "C'mon, it's easy," he said. "Just bring the marble back to me after I throw it. Ready... fetch!" Spike tossed the marble, and it landed with a soft thump on the rug.

Pee-Wee remained where he was and continued to run his beak through his feathers.

"Fine, have it your way. Apparently I can't have anything my way..." Spike grumbled.

Suddenly Pee-Wee's head perked up. "Oh, now you want to play," Spike muttered, though he was a little happier now. "Okay, I'll get the marble."

The sound of a door banging open and the terrific crash of several items falling to the floor downstairs made him nearly jump out of his scales. Somepony had just broken into the library. Spike’s thoughts raced.

It must be the mysterious thief. It has to be!

Spike jumped out of the chair, and ran down the stairs towards the door to the kitchen.

He ran as quickly and silently as he could, not wanting to alert the thief to his presence. As he neared the kitchen door, he pressed himself against the wall and listened intently to the noises coming from within.

Whoever it was sounded like they were carrying a lot of stuff already, because he could hear the clattering of lots of objects bumping into each other and occasionally hitting the floor. Then a grunt of exertion, and the back door banging shut. Then the thief began to make their way towards his door. An ominous chill struck Spike as he listened to its pacing. Instead of the soft clopping of hooves, it was the harsh scraping of claws.

Something told Spike to turn and run back up the stairs, but it was too late. The door to the kitchen burst open. “Fight or flight” had kicked in, and Spike chose the first option. He charged the thief from the side, yelling the most convincing war cry that he could muster, only for it to turn to a blood-curdling scream of terror.

The thief looked down upon him. “I really don’t see why you’re so surprised. I did tell you that we were going to be seeing each other a lot more, didn’t I?”

Spike's pulse was racing. His chest heaved from his panicked, heavy breathing. He wanted to run, but his feet had turned into lead and his legs into jelly. He tried to make a noise, but his heart was currently blocking up his throat.

Avarice, however, had no such trouble speaking.

"Are you going to help me hide all this, or just stand there like you've seen a dragon?"

Spike regained a fraction of his ability to speak.

"Huh... bu.... guh-wuh...."

"Standing and gawking like you have half a brain it is then. Fine; I'll just put this all away myself."

Avarice turned away from Spike and walked towards the central post with the floorboards. Unceremoniously prying one loose with his foot, he then casually dumped the mountain of stuff into the space beneath. Then he turned around and began gathering up the trail of fallen items from the kitchen door, which included several birdhouses, a leash, a bag of birdseed, some fence posts, and a dog collar with a small gemstone in it.

Spike stood dumbfounded as he watched Avarice gather up the last of the things and dump them into the pile, then stamp everything flat before grabbing the floorboard and slamming it back into place. Then he got down on one knee, craned his head down to the floorboards, and inhaled deeply.

Spike reflexively stepped towards Avarice, reaching out a claw, but he knew he was already too late to stop him from burning the house down.

That didn't happen. Instead, tiny tongues of red flame emerged from his maw and drifted across the floorboards before seeping into the cracks, illuminating each plank that covered the trench for a brief moment. Avarice then stood back up and began hopping on the floorboards, which suddenly had a lot less give. Giving a small grunt of satisfaction, he turned and walked back to Spike.

"So," said Avarice as he brushed his claws together, "You're probably bursting with questions right now, but I'm just not in the mood for all that, so you only get three."

Avarice casually leaned against the door frame and crossed his arms. Spike gulped, trying to shove his heart back down his throat as he looked up into the piercing stare of the dragon who towered over him with a height at least three times his own.

"I'm waiting..."

The only way Spike could free his tongue was to ask the first question that came to mind.

"Was... was all that Fluttershy's?"

"Indeed it was. A pity your pale yellow friend wasn't home. Sure, it would have complicated things more than I want to deal with right now, but at least I could have given her a tan." Avarice chuckled.

Despite his fear, Spike felt a little spark of anger begin to grow. "If you lay one claw on my friends..."

"You'll do... what?" Avarice interrupted, leaning in right into Spike's face. A very long moment passed as they simply stared at each other.

"Don't you have two more questions?" Avarice said, breaking the silence.

"What are you doing here?"

"Acquiring some things that I happened to like. Or did you not notice?"

"That's not what I meant!"

"Then ask what you mean."

Spike took a deep breath to steady himself. "How did you get here?"

Avarice stood back up to his full height and mock-thoughtfully scratched his chin.

"Hmm... well, that's a loaded question now, isn't it? If you're asking specifically what path I took to get from here to Fluttershy's and back again, well, let's just say it was an exhilarating misadventure through the sewers. But I take it that's not what you're asking, is it? I bet what you're asking is, how did I ever get out from behind that door that you, the Rarity you wish you had, and... her, had locked." Avarice said “her” with a sudden, vicious snarl, causing Spike to almost jump back in fear.

"Her name is Tw-Tw-Twilight..." Spike stuttered.

"I KNOW! “Avarice roared, slamming a fist into the wall, a wave of rage contorting his face. Spike stood frozen in fear as Avarice stood there, chest heaving with aggression. Avarice closed his eyes and his breathing slowed as he regained his composure. "I know her name. Oh, how I know far more than just her name..."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm not telling you. And besides, you've already used up your three questions."

"That's not fair!"

"Not fair? Not fair?! I'll tell you what's not fair!" Avarice retorted as he began to advance, causing Spike to slowly back up towards the stairs. "Stuck there, trapped inside your mind, not even knowing what's real and what's not, while you frolic about with a bunch of damned ponies!" 

Spike's heel bumped against the bottom step, and he tripped back into a sitting position on the stairs. Avarice reached for him with outstretched claws...

"You didn't answer my last question!" Spike blurted out while reflexively raising his arms. Avarice halted in mid-stride.

"You're right. I didn't," Avarice said flatly, lowering his arms. "Well, in that case, you haven't coughed up any more wads of oily black phlegm, have you?"

Spike had a sudden mental image of a disgusting blob of black clinging with sticky tendrils to the edge of a drain, but the memory felt vague, distant, and hazy. "I... I don't know..." he muttered.

"Hmph. Well, considering I'm standing right here before you, I'd say you have. Hence my intimate acquaintance with Ponyville's sewers," Avarice replied.

Spike thought about it harder. That time in the shower had felt surreal, just like all those months ago, when he was in the boutique. "I felt like I was dreaming, though..." Spike said, desperate for an alternative explanation. "I had to have been dreaming, I had to! I've only seen you in my dreams! Wait..." Spike looked up and met Avarice’s gaze. "I must be dreaming right now."

Spike let out a triumphant little laugh, and stood up against his nemesis. “I’m dreaming! I’m still taking a nap in my bed, and this is all just a nightmare that will end as soon as I wake up!”

Avarice's blank expression didn't change as he lunged forward and grabbed Spike's head. Spike gave a yelp of surprise followed by a cry of pain he was picked up into the air and slammed headfirst into the cabinet at the base of the stairs. Then again. And again.

"Wha... OW! AH! Stop! OW! PLEASE STOP!" Spike begged and whimpered as his head was pulverized a fourth, then a fifth time. Everything paused just as he thought his head was about to get bashed in again, and he was dropped ungraciously to the floor.

Spike gave a long groan of pain as he put a hand to a rapidly swelling, painful bump on his cheek. He looked up through a haze of anguish to see Avarice standing above him, a somewhat bemused expression on his face.

"Feel real enough now?" Avarice chided. Then his expression changed from amusement to mild annoyance as his eyes went to something on Spike's head that had just then made itself known. A burning hotness spread across Spike's forehead just above his right eye.

"Damn..." grumbled Avarice as Spike let out another painful groan.

Avarice squatted down to get a closer look just as Spike put a hand to his brow. A large trickle of blood was running into his eye.

"It seems you're even more fragile in real life than I thought you'd be," he muttered. Avarice grabbed Spike by the wrist, hauled him to his feet, and began to drag him towards the door. Spike began to protest and try to pull away from Avarice's grip.

"Wh.. where are you taking me?"

"Ponyville General," Avarice replied without tone. "You need stitches. And a good explanation, in writing, for how you got so banged up. One that doesn’t include your alter-ego reconstituting itself into its own separate physical form and beating you to a pulp."

Spike could say no more as Avarice hauled him out the door of the library and into the cooling evening air. His mind was spinning out of control, trying to make sense of what was happening, but it could find no purchase on anything.

A trail of blood droplets marked his passage, trailing behind him as he tried to keep up with Avarice and keep pressure on the laceration. Neither was proving to be easy, as Spike’s scales were getting constantly more slippery from his own blood, and Avarice kept yanking on Spike’s arm like he was trying to dislocate his shoulder whenever he started falling behind.

Avarice looked back to Spike, and spoke with quiet, deathly seriousness. “Our deal is still in effect. You are not to say a single word to any living being that so much as indicates that you are aware of my existence.”

“What? But you’re already out of the cave!”

Avarice stopped dead in his tracks and got right in Spike’s face. “At what point in time did I say the deal was off when I escaped from your incarceration?!”

Spike cowered from the brazenness. “What am I supposed to do, just pretend like you’re not there?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re standing right here! Am I just supposed to act like you don’t exist?”

“Easy; you’ve had acting experience before.”

“What? Wait... no, that was just narrating the play for the story of Hearth’s Warming Eve!”

Avarice snorted. “Exactly. If you can pretend that all the plot holes and inconsistencies in that asinine mess don’t exist, and convince an entire audience that they don’t exist, then pretending I’m not here should be easier than stealing candy from a foal.”

“Huh? What plot holes?”

Avarice’s eyes flicked back to Spike for a second, then he looked forward again, and grumbled. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand. Your head would probably explode if I told you.”

Spike scowled. “And since when did you become concerned for my well-being?”

“I haven’t. But I’ll be damned if I tell you and make your brain go “ka-boom” when I don’t have a camera around to take a picture of your stupefied face.”

Avarice stopped in his tracks, and Spike ran straight into him. Spike wiped more blood from his eyes and looked up at his driver. Avarice was staring at the open window on the second story of a house that they had just been passing.

“Speaking of taking candy from foals,” Avarice smirked, and sniffed the air a few times. “Doesn’t smell like anyone is home.” Avarice lowered his head, and pulled Spike in closer. “Wait here. Don’t you dare move.”

Avarice let go of Spike’s wrist, bounded over to the house, and climbed the wall up to the window. He put one arm through the open window, and looked back to Spike. “Don’t. Move.”

Avarice squirmed his way through the rest of the window, banging against the sill with his wings and scratching at it with his claws. Finally he squeezed through, and his tail slipped out of sight.

You can’t be serious, Spike thought as he watched. The sounds of crashing came from inside as doors and dressers were ripped open and items were tossed about.

He is.

Spike looked around the street, flexing his sore wrist now that it was free from Avarice’s vice grip. He was alone, standing by himself in front of somepony’s house that was being ransacked by a vicious dragon while blood still dripped from a huge cut above his right eye. His mind was still reeling from everything he’d just gone through in the last ten minutes.

There’s no way this is real. This just can’t be real! He can’t really be here in reality, there’s just no way!

Another crash came from inside. Spike fidgeted, looking around the still empty street and wondering why nopony was hearing the racket. He looked around in every direction, his mind compiling every possible route off the street.

Maybe I can get away while he’s distracted. I can go find somepony to get help. This is my chance to escape!

Spike turned around, and took a step back towards the library.

“I SAID DON’T MOVE!”

Spike jumped in surprise, making a fresh new set of droplets hit the ground. More rummaging came from inside before Avarice reemerged from the window, and glided back down to Spike. He grabbed his wrist again, and started pulling him along the path once more.

“Come on,” Avarice growled.

“What, you’re not taking anything?”

“No, that was just a scouting run. There’s no point in taking anything while I’m busy dragging you around, especially if you’re getting cold feet.”

At the end of the street, a mare came from behind the corner and turned to walk down their road. Avarice yanked on Spike’s arm so hard that it felt like it was going to come out of the socket, pulling him into one of the back-alleys behind the buildings.

“Ow! What was that for?” Spike whined while Avarice still deftly lead him along through the narrow corridors.

“I’d rather not be seen until we get to where we’re going, especially not by anyone you know.”

Spike tried to worm out of Avarice’s grip, but to no avail. “Why does it matter if somepony sees you?”

Avarice stopped in the dark alley to whip around and face Spike. “Because ponies are quite fond of sticking their snot-dripping noses where they don’t belong. One of them sees me, and they’ll start asking questions. And if one of them has accomplished the incredible feat of having more working brain cells than they have hooves, than they might think that there’s a connection between a string of thefts and a new dragon showing up in town.”

Another voice echoed through the alley from behind them. “Spike? Are you still in here?” It was Golden Harvest. “I thought I saw you go down this way, and there’s a fresh trail of blood leading in here. Are you hurt?”

Avarice growled, picked Spike up, and began to run through the alley.

“Is that you Spike?” The sound of rapid hooves clopping across the ground followed them into the alley. ”Don’t run, I want to help you!”

Spike opened his mouth to call out to her, but Avarice grabbed his muzzle and force it shut.

“Not. A. Word,” he hissed.

Avarice turned, skidding across the loose gravel and whipped into a separate alley. This lead them down a few more twists and turns until it came to an abrupt dead end.

The sound of Golden’s galloping was getting closer. “Please, Spike! I just want to help!”

Avarice grumbled in annoyance. He turned to a drain pipe faceted to one of the walls of the enclosing building and vaulted up it with one arm, carrying Spike along in the other. They reached the roof, and Avarice scrambled up the thatched incline, then slid down the decline of the other side. He leaped just before hitting the edge, using their momentum to help carry them to the roof of the next building.

The two moved down the street, Avarice bounding from rooftop to rooftop as he carried his helpless progenitor along for the ride. Spike looked down at the ponies in the street below, going about their daily business, oblivious to him.

If I could get just one of them to look up...

Avarice caught Spike staring down into the street below. “Don’t even think about it.” He paused for a moment to jump to another building. “I’m not in the mood to go on a killing spree.”

Spike felt his throat go dry. “You wouldn’t...”

“Oh, I would, but at the moment, I wouldn’t enjoy spontaneous damage control as much as I would a premeditated rampage; that’s why I’m not in the mood. Still won’t keep me from ripping out a few throats if you make me have to.”

They reached the last building on the street. Avarice turned back towards the alley, and climbed over the side of the building, holding onto the edge of the roof with his free claw. Then he jumped down and landed on a dumpster. He hopped off, looked around the corner, then ran back into the street. He only moved a few paces before skidding to a halt.

A group of six fillies: Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Dinky, Noi, and Alula, all carrying various instruments, had just exited a music store right in front of them.

Avarice grumbled some indecipherable curses to himself, then turned his attention to Spike, and quickly hissed to him, “Get rid of them. Not a word about me.”

Then Avarice dropped Spike, and pounced into the shadows of another alley.

Spike hit the ground, grunting at his unceremonious landing. All six fillies turned to look at him. and gasped at the sight of him, beaten and bruised with half of his face covered in his own blood. All of them galloped up to him. Applebloom was the first to speak.

“Spike? Oh sweet Celestia, what happened to ya?”

“Oh, um... hi girls.” His eyes flicked down the alley where Avarice impatiently waited. “Nothing. Nothing happened at all...”

“Nothing?!” Scootaloo blurted. “You look like you got into a fight with a manticore!”

“Or a hydra!” Sweetie Belle squeaked.

“Or another dragon!” Noi added, adjusting the cello on her back. “A really big, mean dragon!”

“Oh, hey, yeah, ha ha! What a... silly... idea...” Spike started blinking with his remaining good eye rapidly, and was twisting the end of his tail with his free hand as he shied away from them. He looked back down the alley at Avarice, who intensified his leer and jerked his head in the relative direction of the filly interlopers. Spike snapped his head back to them.

Dinky stepped forward, putting the flute she had been holding in her mouth back into her saddle bag. “Spike, easy; we’re here to help you,” she said with practiced calm, trying to hide the nervous shake in her voice. “You look very seriously injured. We need to get you to the hospital!”

“Ah, funny! I was just heading there!” Spike nervously chuckled, and slowly moved to make his way past the six little foals. “So, if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll just be heading off now: alone, without anydrago—ANYPONY! Without anypony... yeah, that’s... that’s what I meant...”

“You want to go to the hospital alone?” Alula interjected. “You can’t do that!”

“So what if I do?” Spike asked.

Alula craned her neck back. “Well, um... it’s just stupid! I mean, look; you’re still bleeding!”

Scootaloo stepped forward. “We can’t let you go alone, Spike!”

Spike heard a slight growl come from the alley. He looked back and saw Avarice, still glaring at him, but he had found a piece of cardboard, on the top of which he’d written, “GET RID OF THEM.”

“Why can’t you? The longer we keep standing here arguing about this, the longer I’ll keep bleeding! Do you even know where the hospital is?”

Scootaloo huffed at this. “C’ha; I’ve been there like four times already!”

Noi’s eyes went wide. “Four times?! How have you already ended up there four times?”

“Well, the first time was when I didn’t believe that Pinkie Sense was real. So when her tail started twitching, I didn’t take cover, and I got a concussion.”

Dinky sighed. “And mom already told you, she was sorry.”

“The second time was when I ripped the... what are they called...” Scootaloo put a hoof to her chin. “Ligamonks... legomints...”

“Ligaments,” Sweetie corrected.

“When I ripped the ligaments in my... startornis... satirious...”

“Sartorius.”

“What she said. When I ripped the ligaments there after that one incident with the skateboard.”

Noi look at Scootaloo with concern. “Oh my! Did you crash?”

“No...” Scootaloo looked away and mumbled, “I stepped off it wrong... But the third time was after we tried to get our shock-value stunt performer cutie marks.”

Apple Bloom chuckled. “Yeah... that one with the rocket was pretty funny, though.”

“And then the last time was thanks to some spaghetti that apparently Twilight had made, so that one wasn’t my fault.”

“Ya still ate it, Scootaloo. Ya ate it!” Apple Bloom interrupted. “I’m surprised ya ain’t dead!”

“Yeah, well I only did it because you said you’d give me ten bits if I did!” Scootaloo shot back.

“Wasn’t that when we were still in Canterlot after the wedding, though?” Sweetie inquired.

“Oh yeah, I guess it was. Everything is a little hazy in between the time I nibbled the end of that stray noodle and when the paramedics revived me.”

Dinky cut back in. “As amusing as it is to hear about all the times Scootaloo did something foolish, don’t we have a bigger issue to deal with?”

Spike heard another low growl from the alley. He looked back and cringed. Avarice was piercing him with a hateful gaze that would make a cockatrice shudder, and was tapping upon his piece of cardboard. It still had its original message: “GET RID OF THEM.” But underneath, Avarice had added, “OR ELSE...”

Avarice had used the rest of the space underneath his warning to draw a sketch of himself, holding up a sharpened pole. Apple Bloom, Sweetie Belle, and Scootaloo had all been impaled through their sides upon it. Their limbs hung limp and their tongues lulled from out of their lifeless mouths, while Avarice was using his fire to roast their corpses like a shish kabob.

A hard lump clenched Spike’s dry throat, and his pupils shrunk to needle-thin slits. He whipped his head back to the fillies and tried to skirt around them. “Hey, Dinky’s right, so I think I’lljustbegoingnowkbye!”

Alula stamped down on the end of his tail with her hoof, stopping him in his tracks. “You can’t just go alone, Spike! You should let us help take you there!”

“No!” Spike protested, using his free arm to try and pull the end of his tail out from Alula’s hoof. “You’ll just slow me down! You’ve already held me back long enough as it is!”

Noi piped up. “We should at least go get a grown-up!”

Dinky nodded in agreement. “I could go get my mom...”

“NO!” the other five fillies all blurted in panicked unison.

Noi’s proposition had given Spike an idea. “I know what you could do; go get Twilight!”

Spike heard a smack come from the alley, so he stole another glance in that direction. Avarice’s palm had collided with his forehead and was digging into his own face as he dragged his claws down while his teeth were bared in frustration.

Sweetie Belle tilted her head at Spike. “Wait, you mean to say that Twilight wasn’t around when this happened?”

Spike rolled his good eye. “Do you think that if Twilight hadn’t left me alone at the library that she would have made me walk to the hospital myself instead of taking me? Or that she’d let me get dragged around by—”

A snarl from the alley cut him off by surprise, making him jump. Spike chanced another peek at Avarice. He was glaring at him with a look ready to kill and was exhaling fire through his nostrils, igniting the cardboard in his claws.

Apple Bloom spoke up. “So if Twilight ain’t at the library, where is she?”

“Probably still at the spa,” Spike replied. “If she’s not still there, then she’s probably at the cafe, or the bookstore... or any of the other places she likes to go when she wants to leave me behind to take care of everything...”

Apple Bloom nodded. “Alright then, we should split up; us crusaders can check the spa an’ the library just in case Twilight got back while we were here yappin’!”

“Noi, Alula, and I can investigate the cafe and the bookstore. Come on,” Dinky motioned to her two compatriots, “to Barns and Stable!”

“We’ll all meet up at the clubhouse in half an hour! Come on girls; we gotta go find Twilight!”

Spike watched the six fillies gallop down the street, waiting for them to go their separate paths. As soon as they all rounded the corner, he turned to go on his way again, only to find Avarice’s axe-like snout in his face and a powerful set of claws around his throat.

“Are you TRYING to get caught?! You almost screwed everything up SEVEN TIMES in the last THREE MINUTES! Do I have to beat it into your thick skull how to handle situations like this, or do I have to write it out for you with the blood of one of your friends?”

Spike tried desperately to pry the strangulating hold off from his throat, but to no avail.

“You see that dumpster down there?” Avarice motioned his head in the direction of the alley he had just been hiding in. “I had half a mind to hurl it into their faces while you took your sweet time squabbling with them. Then that useless dodo could have added a fifth visit to an infirmary to her list; in a body bag, along with the pulverized remains of her friends and associates. Is that what you want?”

A surge of adrenaline coursed through Spike, and he pried enough space between Avarice’s fingers and his neck to gasp for air. “NO! I’m sorry! You never said how to make them go away, but they’re gone now! Just please, let go! I’m sorry!”

Avarice sneered at Spike one last time, then let go. Spike fell back, rubbing his throat and gasping for air to catch his breath again. But before he could, Avarice grabbed Spike by the wrist and started dragging him down another alley.

“Come on; thanks to you and those six wastes of equine tissue, we’ve got even less time before she gets involved and starts sticking her nose in places it doesn’t belong again.”

Spike looked back up at Avarice as he struggled to keep up. “Wait; what do you mean by “again?””

Avarice blinked once. “That impertinent mare is overly-curious and intrusive to the point of recklessness. The moment she encounters you again, she’s going to start asking questions. And if that last conversation you just had is any indication, you’re not going to be able to hold this little secret of ours very well. 

“Actually...” Avarice adopted a thoughtful look, stopped and turned to face Spike again. “Here’s a little piece of advice; if you’re ever in danger of slipping up when Twilight is trying to dig an answer out of you, just think of the end to that dream you had four days ago.”

The mention of “that dream“ summoned horrible images from Spike’s memory, and he felt himself go even colder. “No... no, please!”

Avarice responded with a wry expression that was somewhere between a grin and a grimace. “Well, that’s up to you whether or not I kill her, isn’t it? So long as you don’t say anything about me to anyone, especially to her, I promise that won’t lay a claw on her. But if you can’t keep quiet, she’s toast, except it’ll be for real this time. You can count on that; I’m a dragon of my word.”

Avarice turned around and started pulling Spike along again. “Come on; we’re almost there, and believe it or not, I’d rather that you didn’t bleed out on me. That would be counter-productive.”

Spike’s expression hardened. “Why? You don’t care about me, or anypony else but yourself.”

Avarice smirked. “You’re right, I don’t. But I still have to obtain a camera and tell you the story of Hearth’s Warming Day, don’t I?”

Avarice stopped at the building at the end of the alley, and looked around the corner. “Our destination is right around the corner. Coast is clear... come on.”

Just like that, Avarice bolted around the corner, dragging Spike along almost faster than his little legs could carry him. The were at the hospital in seconds. Avarice pressed himself up against the wall next to the glass doors and took a quick peek around the corner and through the door.

“Good, the receptionists aren’t anyone you know. Now go on; just like we rehearsed.”

“Hey, wait, we didn’t rehearse anythi—”

Spike didn’t get a chance to finish before Avarice opened the door, pulled Spike around, and kicked him in the rear into the building.

Spike stumbled through the open doors and into the sterile white waiting room. He almost slipped and fell from skidding across the shiny, polished linoleum and from stepping on more of his blood splatter as he tried to regain his balance.

There came a gasp from behind the front desk, and then a rush of hooves galloped up to meet him. “Oh, dearest Celestia! Hello? Can you hear me? What happened to you?”

Spike looked part-way up at the earth pony mare with a powder blue coat, seafoam mane, and pink eyes pouring with concern.

“Yeah, I can hear you just fine,” Spike muttered. “I… um… well, I got hurt.”

The nurse turned to look back at her associate, who was still at the desk, watching the scene with rapt worry.

“Who do we have that’s available at the moment?” the blue mare asked.

“I think Dr. Mend is open,” the other nurse replied, heading off for another room. “I’ll tell him to meet you two in primary patient care!” And then she rushed off, leaving the two alone.

The blue mare returned her attention to Spike. “Okay, don’t worry. Help is on the way,” she said, offering him as much comfort as she could lend with her soothing voice. “My name is Nurse Tenderheart. What’s yours?”

“Spike,” he mumbled back.

“May I look at your injury, Spike?”

Spike hesitated at first, then slowly pulled his hand away from the gash above his eye. He winced a little as the cool air of the waiting room made contact with the cut, stinging the exposed flesh. Blood still seeped from the wound, mingling with the rest of the blood that had already gotten smeared over half of his face like war paint.

Tenderheart gasped once more. “Oh dear, you’re still bleeding! Come on,” she motioned towards a hallway leading out of the room, “I’ll take you to patient care.”

Nurse Tenderheart rushed back behind the front desk and procured a wheelchair and an ice pack sealed in sterilized gauze. She helped Spike up into the seat, gave him the ice pack to cover his cut, and began to transport him down the halls. Tenderheart continued her patient evaluation along the way.

“You look like a very young dragon. Do you live alone?”

“No, I live at the Golden Oaks library with Twilight Sparkle,” Spike divulged with dour tonality. Once again, his overwhelmed thoughts turned inward. This… this just can’t be real. I’m being pushed around a hospital to get a cut over my eye sewn shut because something evil from my mind bashed my face open after it somehow found its way into real life! This just CAN’T be real!

“Spike? Are you still with me?”

“Wha—oh… Yeah, I’m still here. What?”

“I was just saying that I wish we could have met under better circumstances is all. Anyway, I was asking if Twilight was present when this happened. This did occur at home, yes?”

“Yeah, it did,” Spike answered. Then he slumped over in his chair, and grumbled, “But Twilight wasn’t around when it happened.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did you come all the way here by yourself, then?”

“Um...” Spike twisted in his seat, checking every visible inch of the hallway in front of them, behind them, to each side, and even the ceiling for good measure. They were completely alone. He swiveled in his seat, trying to make eye contact with Tenderheart.

“Look, I know we just met, but there’s something that I just need to tell somepony. I—AH!“

Just as Spike had begun to confess, they had passed a window, and out on the corner of his unobscured eye, he saw the evil formerly endogenous of his mind.

Spike recoiled from fright and stared in terror. Fear gripped his throat too tightly for him to speak. Avarice glowered at him and snorted fire from his nostrils, leaving little scorch-marks on the window. Then just as suddenly as he appeared, he whisked away, leaving the view of the window.

“Spike? Spike!” Tenderheart waved a hoof in front of his terrified face. “What’s wrong?” She looked out the window that just seconds ago had shown Spike’s nemesis. “Did you see something?”

A subdued Spike slumped back into his seat. “No...”

“Okay… you were about to say something to me, then?”

“No. Never mind, it was nothing.”

Nurse Tenderheart took in the situation with several grains of bitter salt. She moved around from the back of the wheelchair to Spike’s side to converse with him face to face. “Spike… did somepony do this to you?”

Spike blinked rapidly a few times, and his gaze darted in another direction for a moment. But then he look right back at Tenderheart, straight and true. “No. Nopony did this.”

“Okay, then can you tell me what happened?”

The machines in his mind started spinning, but he maintained eye contact. “I’ll… uh… tell you when I can… remember.”

Tenderheart craned her neck back, and raised an eyebrow at him. “You don’t remember?”

“I… don’t. But I’m pretty sure I hit my head pretty hard. How else could, you know...” he made a small motion towards his injury with the hand holding the ice pack, “this, have happened?”

Tenderheart’s dubious look dissipated, but only just. “Well, okay then.” She resumed running him down the hallway, but the questions were less numerous and inquisitive from there.

They arrived at patient care shortly after. Tenderheart set him down on one of the beds in the otherwise unoccupied room, then she disappeared for a moment and returned with several medicinal items. She gently applied an antihemorrhagic styptic to the open wound on his brow. It stung an awful lot, but at least it stopped the bleeding. Then she cleaned the blood from the wound and his scales with a stockpile of cotton balls and towelettes that had been moistened with rubbing alcohol, which to his immense discontent, stung even worse than the aluminum sulfide of the styptic did.

“I’ll go see if Nurse Sweetheart has managed to get a hold of Dr. Mend. Will you be alright on your own for a moment?”

Spike weighed his options internally. Company that I can’t talk to, or loneliness without the unsettling questions and awkward silence? Finally, he muttered, “Yeah, I’ll be fine.”

She gave him a reassuring smile. “I’ll be right back. Try not to disturb your injury, okay?”

With that, Tenderheart took the bloodied ice pack, turned, and left the room. She closed the door behind her and leaving Spike alone with his troubled thoughts.

There’s no way this is real… this can’t be real… this is… this is like the time Rainbow ended up in here with a broken wing. He exhaled a long, impoverished sigh. Maybe there’s someway I could write somepony a letter in secret about this… I still just can’t believe this is real: that he is real...

There came a sound of sharp tapping from the window. Spike jumped, turned to look, and let out another small scream.

Avarice had returned with a cruel, knowing smirk. He slid open the window and let himself part way inside, taking up a seat on the window sill. He slouched over with his head resting on the frame, legs dangling over the sides, and his arms crossed over his chest. The end of his tail twitched like a cat sunbathing on its favorite couch.

“Spike, I’m disappointed with you.”

Spike’s expression hardened. “There’s a big surprise,” he grumbled. “Why did you follow me in here? I thought you didn’t want to be seen.”

“And as you’re too stupid to have guessed from the lack panicked mares screaming “Oh my Celestia, it’s a dragon,” I’ve thus far managed to remain inconspicuous. No thanks to you.”

Spike squirmed under Avarice’s leer. “Aren’t you worried that somepony is going to walk in?”

Avarice smirked again. “I’ve got keen enough hearing that with enough attentiveness, I could detect a squirrel walking down the end of the hall. And that’s not even taking into account my predatorial sense of smell. There’s no way some mere pony could sneak up on me. So with superior senses like mine, I’m more than capable of picking up on any coming interlopers… or when one bad little dragon is about to break his promise...”

Spike shied away, averting his direct gaze. “You couldn’t have known exactly what I was about to say...”

“Oh?” Avarice left his seat on the sill and strode over to where Spike sat on the bed. The tiny dragon shriveled underneath the towering presence of his enemy. “So what were you about to say to Nurse Tenderheart then?”

Spike tried to form words: tried to think of any little white lie to cover his tracks, but he could hardly even breathe properly with Avarice’s stare impaling him like that, making him feel weak and transparent. All he could do was blink rapidly.

Avarice chuckled with a dark undertone. “That’s what I thought.” He crossed his arms again and leaned back against the wall.

Spike broke eye contact with Avarice, and instead opted to fiddle with the masses of bunch-up bedsheets he was clutching in his claws. “Geez, what are you trying to pass yourself off as? Some kind of mind-reader?”

“No, not at all,” Avarice answered, nonchalant. “You’re just too easy to predict is all. And for that matter,” Avarice gently whapped Spike on the uninjured side of his head, making him flinch. “I’d rather read a self-insert, gratuitous romance fiction that some monkey wrote than have to cypher through your vapid thoughts again. At least then, I could burn the parchment and the writer afterwards, then flush the ashes away, like what you’re supposed to do with used toilet paper.” Avarice grimaced. “I’ve already spent far too long digging through whatever vacant notions that you call cognition as it is.”

Avarice removed himself from his place on the wall, and looked down at Spike again. “Tell me, do you like needles?”

Spike felt his scales go clammy. “Not really.”

Avarice smirked at him, derisive. “Oh well,” he said and walked away, pulling a curtain in between his bed and the window shut.

“Don’t get any funny ideas,” Avarice added with an edge.

Spike heard him sit back down on the window sill again. For a moment he sat in uncomfortable silence, then a new sound met his ears: a cantering of hooves clopping down the hallway towards his room.

The door handle jerked downward in one rapid motion, and the door swung open to reveal a lithe, earth pony stallion, with Nurse Tenderheart close behind. The stallion wore a white overcoat, and had pale, dusty red fur with a very short cut, dull, rusty mane. His ears had an unnatural curve to them, almost like little horns, and his dark eyes never rested on any one object for more than a fraction of a second.

“Patient number 005446: Name: Spike. Species: dragon. Subspecies: unknown. Currently residing with one unicorn mare, Twilight Sparkle, yes?” His speech was extremely rapid, and the tone of his voice carried an abnormally high pitch.

“Uh… yeah, that’s me.”

“Ah, yes. I am Doctor Paroxysmal Mending; you may call me Dr. Mend,” he said as quickly as ever, giving a little customary bow of his head.

He strode forward, looking back and forth between Spike and a clipboard for a moment before setting the clipboard upon the bedside table and moving in closer to Spike, peering intently at his wounds.

“Patient exhibits several minor to moderate contusions. Doesn’t appear too serious; a minor cryotherapeutic application should be all that is required.” He turned to Tenderheart. “Nurse; a fresh ice pack please.”

“Right away, doctor,” she said, and trotted away.

Dr. Mend turned back to Spike, and inspected the deep gash across his forehead.

“Patient is contending with a laceration above the right oculus. Hmm, much more severe. I also see you have suffered a severance of several osteodermic plates from the epidermal layer.”

“Wait; my what?”

“A few scales were torn out of your skin.”

“Oh, right.”

Mend jumped right back into doctorate mode. “Diagnosis: problematic, but perfectly treatable. The wound has been cleaned and treated, but will need stitches. I’d say, hmm… no more than seven. Then a hermetic application of bandages over the afflicted area, all procedures will be complete, and you’ll be ready to go. Full recovery can be expected in about two weeks.”

Spike gulped. “It won’t hurt, will it?”

“Oh, no no no no,” Mend rapid-fire answered as he pulled his own medicinal sewing kit from his pocket. “Some minor discomfort, maybe, but these are special needles, exclusively crafted for patient care. It’ll hurt less than getting poked by a sewing needle.” 

Mend procured a pre-threaded needle from his pack. “This should take no more than ten minutes: nine and a half, if all goes perfectly. Plus I’m a professional. Back at the university, I used to stitch up injured, frantic hummingbirds for practice.”

Spike just stared at Mend for a moment. “And… how, exactly, do you stitch up hummingbirds?”

Mend looked Spike straight in the eye, and answered without an ounce of disingenuous seriousness. “Carefully.”

At that, Mend got to work. Spike winced as the first needle punctured his skin and dug its tiny path through his flesh, lending itself to a most uncomfortable sensation, but Mend’s proclamations of his own abilities were not exaggerated. Each movement was quick, deliberate, and precise, even considering the stallion’s twitchy, almost spasmodic jerkiness.

The first stitch had been sewn and tied in just over a minute. Even considering his dislike for being stabbed by little pieces of metal, he found the unpleasantness of the situation was far more due to the alien sensations than actual physical distress. Mostly undisrupted by pain, his sullen thoughts returned to their trails of bleak gloom.

I guess… this is actually real… he thought, with no definite level of despair. No dream has ever felt this real.

Well, no dream, except for… that dream...

He could feel fractures in his heart ripping open again as he thought back to that dream, where he had been left alone in a dark cave, weeping beyond control, and holding the dead body of his dearest friend.

The scrape of claws across tile came from the other side of the curtain.

Fire and indignant rage began to burn in his beaten heart, knowing the Twilight in his dreams had been murdered. By him.

But now, it was only his word, or lack of divulging it, that was keeping his dearest friend alive.

He forcibly ejected himself from mulling over his dour situation; he just couldn’t take any more of it at the moment.

Dr. Mend was completely engrossed in his own little world, expertly weaving his needle and thread through muscle and skin with the focus of a laser as he hummed some nameless, wordless tune to himself.

Spike heard movement from the window. And to his immense surprise, Avarice spoke.

“He fell down some stairs.”

Mend paused halfway through tying the last stitch. “Hm? Sorry, did you say something?”

Spike’s expression of despondence grew. He could only imagine Avarice sitting in the window sill with that arrogant smirk on his face, just waiting, daring Spike to say something.

Spike exhaled in dejected submission.

“I fell down some stairs.”

“Oh. I shall add that to the files then,” he said as he finished the knot. Mend then took out a bandage, wrapped it around Spike’s forehead, then took a stopwatch out of his pocket and halted it’s ticking. “Nine minutes and forty-three seconds. Not bad. Good, even. Hm, yes; very good in fact. How do you feel?”

Spike just lay there, staring up at the ceiling, limp with the apathy of a prisoner.

“Peachy. My life is just peachy.”

Dr. Mend pursed his lips ever so slightly at this. “Um… okay then.” He pointed a hoof towards the door. “I will go finalize my reports, then. A nurse will be by shortly to see that you are comfortable until your legal guardian can be contacted to officially discharge you. Don’t be afraid to call should you need further care. Farewell, Spike.”

With that, Dr. Paroxysmal Mending left the room, leaving Spike to loneliness once more.

Spike sat up in his bed, pulled his knees to his chest, curled his tail around his legs, then crossed his arms and rested his head upon them. He couldn’t do anything but stare at whatever happened to be in front of him. His eyes began to blur with tears. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t think, and he couldn’t feel anything but sorrow.

The curtains next to the bed were suddenly ripped back. He looked up at Avarice with fear and angst, watching his every move in alarm with the premonition that another assault was imminent. Avarice merely looked down upon him with stern, hostile pensiveness. The two just stared at each other for a prolonged time, without any words passing between them.

Avarice just tilted his head and smirked at Spike with a soft, dark chortle. Then he turned around, walked over to the window, and crawled through it to the outside. He started climbing up the building, and shut the window with the end of his tail.

Spike continued to stare out the window, with his thoughts adrift in anxiety and his heart overwhelmed by a myriad of conflicting emotions. However long he looked through the glass portal, he didn’t know. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t going to change anything.

The door behind him slammed open.

“Spike?!”

His eyes shot wide and his heart jolted from the outburst. He whipped his head around to look at his latest visitor.

Twilight Sparkle stood upon the threshold of the hospital room door. Her face was a disaster of fear, worry, panic, and regret. She remained rooted in place for several passing seconds: unblinking, unmoving, as if Spike was some illusion that might dissolve if she moved to soon.

The moment passed, and he still remained fixed in reality.

“SPIKE!”

Twilight flung herself across the room, plowing into Spike and wrapping her hooves around him with such force that it almost knocked the wind out of him and tackled him out of the bed.

“Spike, I’m so sorry! I was so worried; if only I had known...” Twilight was hugging him so tightly that he could feel each one of her shuddering, trembling breaths. “I’m sorry; how could I have been so careless? I should have let you come with us! I should have never left you in the library alone!”

Spike’s expression hardened. He unceremoniously draped an arm over Twilight’s neck, not quite returning her hug. “That’s right, you shouldn’t have...” The stone in his throat was making it hard for him to speak.

Twilight’s fervent grip around Spike tightened as the first of her tears dripped onto his shoulder. “I’m so sorry… I don’t know what I’d do without you. Spike… I’m so sorry...” 

Spike felt his heart become burdened by lead weights, deepening his frown as his feelings were dragged down with it. He couldn’t form words. His body began to tremble. Something in that simple, honestly contrite gesture tore down every defense he’d mounted against his pent-up anxiety and buried him underneath the wreckage. And from under what was to be his inglorious tomb, only one thought still resonated inside his overwhelmed mind:

This is real.

Spike latched onto Twilight, gripping her around the neck with a tight, desperate hug of his own, and let himself cry in their embrace.

Yet there had never been a time when he had held Twilight so close but felt less comforted by the gesture. Because he knew ultimately, it didn’t matter. He knew this wouldn’t change a single thing.

He knew he still hadn’t fully reconnected with Twilight. He knew that he couldn’t be completely honest and open with her anymore. He knew that he now had a terrible weight to bear, and that he would carry it alone. He knew it could possibly drive him to be alone, forever. And Spike knew it would have to stay that way… because he was still out there.

All he could do was use this moment to hold onto his dear Twilight as tightly as he could, and cry until he had run out of tears.


- - - - - -


Month five, day twenty eight, entry four hundred and ninety.

The sun had gone down some time ago. Twilight hadn’t been able to get Spike to talk very much; all he would say when she had asked him what happened was that he had fallen down the stairs. Since then, he had remained almost hauntingly quiet for the entire time that she had taken him upstairs to rest, and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Knowing that she needed to complete Dreamscape now more than ever, she spent her time for research, development, and documentation.

I took me long enough, but I think I managed to write a new line of code that subverts the death glitch.

Finally.

More importantly, I managed to write the new segment of code and integrate it into the rest of the system in a fashion that will allow it to function properly without adversely interfering with every other line in the matrix, thus rendering the Dreamscape Spell an inoperable mess.

Initial checks of the arcane writ look promising, but considering the significance of this new revision, I think I’d feel more comfortable after re-checking it a few more times...

The aura surrounding the quill sputtered and died, and the quill fell upon the desk with a gentle tap as Twilight put her hooves to her forehead, wincing in pain through ragged breathing.

And I would check it now, if I could concentrate without this cursed pain in my sides!

Ever since Twilight had returned from Ponyville General Hospital with a stitched-up Spike, her sides had been killing her. She had even taken another double dose of her pain relievers, exceeding the maximum dosage per day, but it had done little to alleviate her tourments. Her own body was turning against her, and it wasn’t happy that she was resisting, or that she had managed to go for a while earlier in the mourning unafflicted, and now that lost time had been avenged sevenfold.

 Some spiteful part of her mind reasoned that she would rather be giving birth to a foal right now. At least that agony would be guaranteed to end eventually, and her suffering would be rewarded with a precious foal to love, nurture, and cherish. This was just suffering for the sake of relentless, unmitigated suffering, and she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why.

Twilight squeezed her eyes shut and gritted her teeth. Her torment reached a fever pitch, and she had to take it back; now she knew why, because her mind could identify every single cell as it screamed in pain.

She could feel it in her bones, feeling like wood screws were being drilled into every single one: from the humerus, to the ulna and the radius, down to every single metacarpal. She could feel every fiber and ligament screaming in agony, from her biceps and triceps to anywhere that there was flesh. She could feel each micrometer in its torment, down to every last feather...

Twilight could take it no more. In her final gesture of indignant intolerance, she rapted her forehooves violently upon the desk, stood up on her hind legs, and in the middle of her quiet and placid library, she screamed:

“WHY DO MY WINGS HURT SO MUCH?!”

She stood there for a moment in the silence, her own words still ringing in her ears. Slowly, it dawned on her, and her mouth drew open in horror.

“I... don’t have wings...”

But I did in...

A tuba blasted from behind her.

“AAAAAAAH!” Twilight screamed in shock.

Scootaloo, still harnessing her rented tuba, recoiled from the outburst, then shied away, abashed. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you! It’s just... okay, I had rented the last Daring Do book because I wanted to finish it before the new one comes out, and I didn’t realize I still had it until we were halfway through rehearsals, so I galloped all the way here because I didn’t want to get a late fee, because I’m short on bits, because my parents docked my allowance over the mud bath incident, but I didn’t want to leave my tuba behind because, well,” the little filly chuckled, “this thing is fun!”

She took a deep breath, put the mouthpiece to her lips, and blew again.

Scootaloo’s little wings flapped in elation from the epic note. “See? This thing is a blast!” Her ears dropped down a little. “Unfortunately, that’s the only thing I know how to do with this thing... but what if you could make an entire soundtrack around that... man, that’d be awesome!” Her wings started buzzing again.

Twilight caught herself staring at Scootaloo’s wings, watching each flap, reciting every single movement of muscle and bone, recounting every neural command firing to orchestrate it...

“Say, Scootaloo; what would you say I waved the late fee if you assisted me in a little experiment?”

“Well, okay, I guess. What did you have in mi—whoa, hey!” Scootaloo didn’t even get a chance to finish before Twilight had taken her by the hoof and whisked her downstairs into the basement lab, strapped the neural transmission helmet onto her head, slapped some receptory sensor patches onto her wings, and turned on the machine.

“Wha-what are you doing?” Scootaloo nervously asked.

“A science experiment,” Twilight hurriedly answered as she zipped around the laboratory, making sure everything was in order.

“Uh... what for?”

“For science!” Twilight blurted, loading a new roll of paper into the machine.

“O-okay, but... what am I supposed to do?” Scootaloo shifted away from Twilight.

“Simple,” Twilight said, knocking on the machine with a hoof for good measure before getting right back up in Scootaloo’s personal space. “Just flap your wings for me okay?”

“O-okay...” Scootaloo responded, shutting her eyes as she started to flap her little wings.

Twilight whipped back and forth between watching the little pegasus to the needles jump and arc upon the graphs, oscillating in time to each wing beat.

The waves stopped for a second, and Twilight snapped back to Scootaloo.

“Keep flapping!”

“Okay, I’m sorry!” Scootaloo kept on flapping.

Twilight circled around behind Scootaloo, and activated her magic. Her horn crackled with energy as electricity danced around it. “Okay, now this might hurt a little bit...”

“Wait, you didn’t say anything abo—OOOOOOWWWW!” Scootaloo howled in pain as Twilight electrocuted her wings with a hundred volts of low ampere electricity.

“WHAT WAS THAT FOR?!”

“For science,” Twilight said, rushing back to the machine.

Scootaloo grimaced. “Am I done here?”

Twilight looked over the sheets for a moment. “Yeah, you’re done. Thanks.”

Scootaloo pulled the helmet and patches off as soon as the words left Twilight’s mouth. “Good,” she sneered, glaring at Twilight. “I’d say you owe me now.”

“Sure; there are some donuts in the fridge. Help yourself,” Twilight said without even looking at Scootaloo as she switched the machine to standby and hurriedly strapped the helmet to her own head.

Scootaloo’s wings jumped open. “Donuts? Awesome!”

Twilight didn’t even reply. She was just holding one of the patches with her magic, staring at it with an expression of dread upon her face.

“Um, see ya’ later, I guess...” the little filly said.

“What? Oh, sure. Bye.”

Scootaloo peered quizzically at the inscrutable unicorn for a moment, slowly backing away until she reached the stairs. Then she turned tail and galloped away, leaving Twilight alone in the labs.

Twilight grimaced at the harmless receptor patch. Okay, nothing to it but to execute the function...

Twilight slowly moved the patches over her sides, and cried out in pain as they gently pressed up against her and stuck to her fur.

Okay, I can do this... I can do this... she attempted to spur herself as she switched on the machine again.

She took a few quick, deep breaths, shut her eyes tight, focused her efforts on commands her brain hadn’t executed in days, and started imagining she was flapping a set of wings.

Pins. Needles. Guns. Razors. Knives. Ropes. Daggers. Chains. Rocks. Lasers. Acid. Torment. Agony. Pain. Suffering. It drilled throughout her and penetrated her like she’d been gored by a furious minotaur. Still, she forced her brain to continue until she could take it no more. With one last push of exertion, she screamed out until her teeth were left with a tingling feeling in them.

Finally she stopped, and she almost fell to her face from the trembling in her legs. Her whole body shook, and her sides burned from the red-hot maces still stuck to them. She took a moment to catch her breath, then when she could walk with the confidence of not falling from her own physical tremors, she shut off the machine and compared the graphs side by side.

Admittedly, the experiment was a sloppy one, but the results told her all she needed to know: everything that she already knew. The separate lines on Scootaloo’s graph showed corresponding waves between the neural commands in the brain and the electrical pulses traveling along the nerve endings in her wings, with dramatic spikes in response to Twilight zapping her with enough volts to stun a cow.

And then there were her charts, with the exact same kinds of readings as Scootaloo’s had when Twilight had inflicted pain upon the orange pegasi’s wings.

The light around Twilight’s horn died, and she left the sheets of paper fall to the ground as she stared off into space, dumbfounded. Eventually, she pulled her hooves off of the ground, and made her slow ascent up the stairs.

Her upended mind reeled, flashing through her memories as she traced the idea back to its inception.

Staring at the the endless plain after she had just created the sun, bringing light to a dark world, and realizing the infinite void wasn’t just an empty wasteland; it was a blank canvas. She could do anything. The power of creation itself was in her hooves.

Looking out the window of her bathroom at the shining moon in its magnificent night after she had spent all day trying to invent a new means of transportation around her city. She felt weary, partially from the tedious task of having to raise both the sun and moon wearing on her. In that moment she appreciated Celestia and Luna that much more, now that she had to perform their duties. And that’s when it hit her.

Wings...

That one simple idea took hold in her mind, and she could not let it go.

I’m going to be just like Celestia!

Days of research rushing by in seconds, until she stood in front of the mirror in her laboratory, working one of the most complicated pieces of magic she’d ever orchestrated upon herself. Her flesh writhed and buckled, twisted and turned, elongated and grew until finally, blessedly, the spell came to a close, and she looked back at herself in the mirror. She was no longer a unicorn; she was more.

Looking Rainbow in the eyes, and asking, “What’s flying like, Dash?”

Flipping through one of her psychology books, seeking answers to help Spike. Remembering seeing it as she looked through the glossary for ‘psychological disorders’, but thinking little of it at the time: phantom limb syndrome.

Avarice in her dream, pinning her to the ground, and hissing in her ear:

“You’re not supposed to have these.”

Her mind was causing her pain because it couldn’t find its own wings.

Wings she had given herself in another realm because of one simple idea.

An idea for which she was the sole contributor to its inception.

Twilight had made her way back up the stairs by now, still in a daze. Her hooves slowly shuffled across the wooden floor, carrying her back to her desk. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t even know what to think. She wasn’t prepared for this. She could have never prepared for this.

After some deliberation, she set the last entry that she had been writing aside, procured a new sheet of paper, dipped her quill back into the inkwell, and began to write.

Month five, day twenty eight, entry four hundred and ninety-one.

This... changes everything. 

The most radical notion of them all.

Inception.

“Twilight?”

The unicorn yelped in surprise, whipping her head back around to Spike, standing at the top of the stairs with bandages still over his eye.

“I thought I heard screaming a few moments ago. Is... everything alright?”

Twilight paused, looking back and forth between Spike and the paper. No, it’s not alright; my brain is in a state of disarray because it subconsciously thinks I’m supposed to have wings!

“No, everything’s fine. It’s just...”

She couldn’t find the words to finish her sentence. She still couldn’t get over the fact she had accidentally revised her own mind to make it think that she was supposed to have wings.

“I’m going to go take a shower, okay?” she said, climbing the stairs and skirting her way past him. “Try to get enough rest, Spike. I don’t want anything else to happen to you.”

“Sure,” Spike muttered.

He watched Twilight as she slinked into the bathroom and shut the door behind her, leaving him alone in the hall. He exhaled in a half sigh, half grumble, and lugged his still sore self back into his little bed as the sounds of active plumbing coming from the bathroom kicked in.

Spike lay there, listening to the rain begin to patter down upon the tree. He usually found the sound of rainfall relaxing, but tonight, it brought him no solace. He twisted and turned in his bed for a good half hour, fidgeting in unease and anxiety, just like he had been ever since Twilight brought him back home.

His mind wandered down dark roads of contemplation in it’s woe. With immeasurable gloom, he wondered if he could still even call his abode “home,” because it sure didn’t feel like home anymore.

Not with him around.

Spike sat up in his bed, hunched over, staring off into nothing. The rain was coming down harder now. He usually liked the rain. Now it just seemed like even the clouds were mourning for him.

Spike raised his head to stare at the bedroom door. His thoughts drifted to Twilight, sitting in the bathroom: alone, unguarded, and vulnerable.

Maybe I should just go tell her now, while we’re both alone and we have some place to talk in private. He wouldn’t know...

From outside, Spike heard a whoosh, then a light thud as something heavy landed in the branches, followed by the scraping sound of claws digging into bark and crawling across the trunk.

Instantly, Spike dispelled his previous thought.

He let out a pined, whimpering sigh. Spike pulled himself out of bed, dragged his feet across the bedroom floor, opened the door, and left the bedroom.

His descent down the stairs was an especially cautious one. He clung to the railing and never moved down a step without planting both feet on the one below first. He kept his gaze pointed at the floor, as he’d otherwise have to look at the destroyed cabinet at the base of the stairs, and he didn’t feel like doing that right now.

Spike was still staring at the floor went he got to the kitchen. He didn’t lift his head up until he’d gotten to the refrigerator and morosely pulled the door open.

He stopped, puzzled. There was a wide open space where the box of donuts should have been. He looked over every individual shelf in the fridge, looking for his sought-after comfort food, but to no avail.

“Looking for these?”

Spike’s grip on the door handle tightened until his claws dug into his palm. He drew in a breath of air and held it for a moment. When he exhaled, it shuddered with all his pent-up trepidation and indignation. Slowly, he turned to look behind him.

Avarice sat on the countertop, slouched over to an obscene degree, holding the box of donuts while he munched on a caramel glaze. His scales had a slight sheen to them in the low light from the rainwater that still clung to him.

Spike was shaking in place, gripping the handle so tightly it was in danger of snapping. “You shouldn’t have those.”

“Really now?” Avarice tossed a whole other donut into his gaping, toothy maw. “I didn’t see them in your guarded cave of material possessions that you’re only supposed to leave to get more stuff... in which case...”

Avarice slid off the countertop and walked past Spike through the kitchen door. Spike followed him out into the main room.

“Why couldn’t you have just gone away and left me alone?”

Avarice turned around and sat down on the table, being tall enough to make a bench out of it.

“Two reasons. The first is that it’s warm and dry in here, it’s raining outside, and I hate it when it rains in small towns. It drives all those pony flea-bags inside, and obviously it’s harder to ransack a house when it’s currently occupied.”

Avarice took a moment to lick the sugary residue off of his claw. His tongue wrapped around his fingers like a snake coiling around the branches of a tree, then it snapped back into his mouth.

“The second reason is I need to stick around to make sure that you’re good on your end of our bargain and you don’t say a word about me. I don’t even want you to think about saying a word to anyone... especially to Twilight.” Avarice flexed his powerful, razor-sharp claws. “You haven’t been thinking about breaking our deal and talking to her about me, have you?”

Spike blinked a few times, then hung his head. “No...” he mumbled.

“Good.” Avarice rummaged through the box for a second. “Catch.”

Spike looked up and had just enough time to catch the apple fritter Avarice tossed his way. He looked down at it, inspecting it with detached interest as he turned it over in his claws. He didn’t feel like eating now.

His stomach disagreed with his sentiment, letting out a grumble of protest. Spike sat down on the floor, and took a small, sullen bite from his food.

“Now, if we were in Canterlot when it’s raining this hard, that be a whole other story.”

Spike hard-swallowed the chewed lump of pastry. “Why’s that?” he muttered.

“Downpours at night like this given a fantastic environmental advantage for infiltrating high-security strongholds... like the Canterlot palace.”

Spike whipped his head up to stare shock at Avarice, who continued regardless of his reaction.

“You’d have cloud cover for increased darkness, decreased visibility thanks to the sheets of rain, the pounding from thousands of water droplets smashing onto every exposed surface to muffle any noises you might make, and most of the guards will be sticking to lighted, covered areas. Sure, there might be a few spotters lurking in the shadows, and there are also the teams of pegasi in the clouds to consider, but when you’ve got eyes that are built to see crystal clear even in a dark cave, you’ll be able to spot them long before they’ll even suspect you’re there.”

Avarice blinked with his vertical set of under eyelids, then parted his lips with a smirk, revealing those vicious rows of fangs. “And with all those veils and all that patter to disguise your sounds, you can easily eliminate a squad if you have to, and you’ll have plenty of shadows to hide the bodies.”

Spike stood up, backing away from Avarice with a look of horror on his face. “You’re crazy!”

“‘Ambitious’ is the proper word; learn some better vocabulary.” Avarice tilted his head to the side. “Besides, I thought you were fond of that shadow operative, Tom Prancy’s Splinter Colt type of material.”

“Yeah, but that’s because they’re the good guys!” Spike shot back.

Whatever enjoyment Avarice wore on his countenance vanished in an instant. “They’re the “good guys?”” he spat.

Avarice set the box aside and slide of the table, advancing towards Spike on all fours. His claws dug into the hardwood floor with every pace. Spike backed away as Avarice spoke.

“You indoctrinated little lizard... the titles of “good guys” and “bad guys” as you so boorishly refer to them are nothing more than labels used by every victor in history to justify themselves.” Avarice scowled. “History is full of liars.”

Spike backed up into the bookshelf behind him. Avarice got mere inches from his face.

“Equines have been the victor for over a millennium, and they’ve gotten far too comfortable on that throne. And if you hadn’t been hatched into their captivity and raised to bow to them in servitude, you’d be just another “bad guy,” too.” Avarice leered at Spike. “The state of our relationship and my mere existence is proof of that.”

Avarice’s eyes widened from the squinted glower he was stabbing into Spike. He raised his head, sniffing the air while his horned ears moved from side to side, scouring the distant patter of rain still pouring down on the tree.

Avarice looked back to Spike, all business. “You’ve got company incoming.” he said, getting back up to a standing position and walking away. “Have fun.”

Avarice stopped halfway to the door that lead into the other room, looking back and forth between the door and the box on the table. He walked over to the table, grabbed a few more donuts out of the box, and continued back on his path for the adjacent room.

“Remember, don’t mention me,” Avarice said, then shut the door behind him.

Spike stared at the door that Avarice had just left through in a stupor, nerves still frayed and feet still rooted to the floor where he stood.

A desperate hammering upon the front door made Spike yelp in surprise. He stared at the front door for a second, then put a claw to his chest in an attempt to calm his rapidly beating heart and steady his breathing. He pulled himself from the spot where Avarice had just cornered him, cautiously approached the door, and opened it.

The constant crash from the pouring summer rain met his ears, and the warm humidity brushed past him before he saw the sopping wet mare standing on the doorstep. She was shaking terribly, like she had an awful cold. Even through the sound of the pouring rain, her sniffling and occasional whimpers could be heard. Her head was pointed at the ground in front of her hooves, and her flattened, drenched mane hung in a tangled mess around her face.

Spike gasped at the sight of her.

“Pinkie?”

With the slow demeanor of a mare facing the gallows, Pinkie Pie raised her head to look at Spike. Her face was scarred by an infectious frown. Pain and heartbreak poured out from her bloodshot, tear-streaked, shattered eyes.

“Please...” Pinkie implored with a trembling whisper. Her voice cracked like she was on the verge of sobbing.

“Help...”