Rarity’s hooves clattered against the floor. More accurately, her three normal limbs were rather silent and her new one clattered. It was a hollow kind of sound.
“Do you have to? Rainbow, please, slow down!”
Rainbow Dash, her fiance, was marching through the dark halls of the Boutique. Rarity trailed behind her, eyes focused on the retreating form, a darker form than the dark around it, like a study in tenebrism. She wished she could see Rainbow. It would be easier if Rainbow would just turn around, but the pegasus was insistent.
“Look,” she said, her voice strained. “I’m sorry, Rares. Please, go back to bed. I promise I’ll be alright.”
Rarity saw the storefront up ahead, and something like panic welled up in her. She could see Rainbow walking out the door. Walking, because her wings were stuck by her sides. Useless. That word struck through her mind like the lightning which raged outside, lancing down from the heavens on an unsuspecting earth. Useless.
“Rainbow...”
But Dash was already out into the open shop. She turned. Outside, yet another lance of angry lightning flashed and it lit her face for a brief second. Rarity flinched as the thunder followed.
Once more, Rainbow was in deep shadow. “Rares... hey, come here.”
Rarity obeyed without a word. She lifted the false, metal leg slightly higher than the rest, avoiding the edge of the center rug. She’d learned that lesson the hard way. The world was a bit different.
Rainbow embraced her, and Rarity was still and silent in her hug. They stayed like that for a few moments, and Rarity didn’t want for it to end. She felt warm again, as if Rainbow hadn’t left their bed upstairs behind. As if there hadn’t been a knock on the window that disturbed their slumber, causing Rainbow to to draw her wonderfully present foreleg from around Rarity. Rarity hated the storm, and she bit her lip. She could feel it ending, even though Rainbow didn’t move away.
Rainbow kissed her mane. “Hey. Listen, I’ll be back. They need me. I can’t... fly yet, yeah, I get that. But I know how to do this better than any of them. I don’t go out there and Thunderlane is the only pony who’s competent enough to know how to handle a storm like this. He’s only one pony, Rares.”
She nodded. She knew this, already. In fact, Rarity knew what came next. She could have said it all by heart.
Rainbow continued. “It won’t be quick, but it’s late. It’s been a long day, Rares. Just... head back up to bed. I promise I’ll come back and try not to wake you up when I do.”
“I don’t care about being woken up.” Rarity glanced up at her, wishing there was light. Why hadn’t she turned on a light? Why hadn’t she made one? There should be light.
“I know you don’t.”
Rarity looked down again.
“Rares, go back to bed. I’ll see you in the morning. I have to do this.” The words were firm but the tone was gentle. She unwrapped her forelegs from Rarity and gently laid one hoof on her chest. “C’mon, Rares. It’s not a big deal.”
Rarity grimaced. Words came to her mind—many of them, and all of them were a bit sharp. But she bit her lip and they died stillborn on her tongue.
Rainbow—whatever she thought of the silence—stepped away after a few seconds. Rarity supposed she was flashing a smile, that trademark daredevil smirk that usually made her heart flutter. It did not.
And just like that, it was done. Rainbow waved as she left through the door, and sprinted through the night, but still she left. No amount of looking back could change it, and Rarity shivered.
She stood facing the door for some time, her eyes straight ahead, locked on the door. There was a squeak, and only then did Rarity realize that in her haste Rainbow hadn’t shut the door properly. She sighed. Typical.
She finally unrooted and walked over to the door. She could have simply used her magic, of course. Yes, she reminded herself of this as she held out a hoof. Magic would have been easier. Quicker. She could have finished this in a second and then turned around and gone back through the pitch black. Alone.
The door was snatched back by a sudden wind, and she was given a glimpse of the world outside the threshold. It was hard to recognize the rustic environs of Ponyville. With the aid of the streetlight two dozen yards away, she could see the vague impressions of the roiling, tenebrous storm clouds. Lightning came down, and sheets of rain poured into the open street. Rarity shivered again, and the rain splashing on her hooves from just outside her open door broke the spell. She grabbed the door in her magic and slammed it shut.
It was loud, far louder than she’d expected, and she jumped.
Alone, Rarity turned and faced the deep dark. It wasn’t so bad, after all. It was just a hallway, and then the living room. Then the stairs. Then the hall. Then her room. She had it all mapped out, and it was no big deal. Rainbow will be back. Off we go, back to the warm bed, Rarity.
Her legs did not move immediately. It was a few seconds of being frozen awkwardly backed up against the door before she could begin.
The noise of her false leg was obvious, even in the storm’s din. She couldn’t tell if it really was loud, or if she just noticed it more, but either way it made her feel hot. She grunted, for once not caring how undignified it sounded.
Dignity. What a word for one such as I. What a word for a unicorn who can no longer be whole. I might as well not be myself at all.
She growled, and then felt foolish. It was pointless to argue with oneself, especially alone. In the dark.
She hadn’t been afraid of the dark before Jannah. Sure, there had been many harrowing adventures in her youth, and she had had nightmares before. Many sleepless nights, and not a few scars. But in comparison to Jannah the trials and tribulations she had endured with her friends all seemed… benign. The adventures of a child’s story book, or bedside tales to a imaginative foal. Time and time again, Twilight and her friends had been there to help each other through, to help her through.
And they were still around, but…
But.
She shivered as another crash of thunder assaulted her eardrums. “Goodness…” Rarity whispered to the empty showroom.
She walked back towards the counter, summoning at last a little light with her horn. Sparks raced up the coiled bone and collected at a tiny pinpoint at the top before exploding out into her own personal sun. Gingerly, Rarity sent her little will o’ the whisp out before her, like an attendant.
It was hard, after Jannah, to ignore shadows of any kind. The way they danced and moved, the way they surrounded her in the night--like daggers of the mind, shadows plagued her these days.
She was tired, but there was no way Rarity could sleep. Sleeping was far beyond her at this point. No, she would simply have to find something to occupy her time.
And so that was how a weary, wary Rarity found herself in the back room, fumbling about for the lamp. Her whisp darted back and forth, and her eyes followed, but still the damned thing eluded her.
Rarity sighed.
“You simply had to go, didn’t you?” she said to nopony in particular, swiping at the darkness. It seemed less shameful to do so here, in the storage room, as if that were somehow more private than the showroom. “You couldn’t just ride this one out with me, Rainbow? Couldn’t put down the mantle for five measly minutes! The nerve. The… the gall! Ah! Lamp. Fantastic. Come here, you.”
She lit the wick on her little lamp, and flooded the storage closet with light.
It was filled with boxes and trunks of all sorts and sizes. Some were ornate, crafted by skilled hooves and horns. Others were simple cardboard. Somewhere in the back, out past the edge of her light, there was an armoire filled with old clothes her mother had unhelpfully passed down. Rarity had not exactly found them up par, but there was no need to inform her mother of that.
But only one of the containers had drawn her here.
It was foolish, really. Absolutely pointless. Revisiting that place, even in memory, was just going to cause her more pain. It was bad enough when she or Dash slept uneasily, or when she had to look at her prosthetic. Or when the nightmares came. Or when it was dark.
Rarity paused in the center of the room, floating the little lamp above her like a new sun, letting its weak searching light illumine the lost and forgotten things. Absurdly, she felt almost like Daring Do out of one of the books Rainbow kept on the bedside table.
Quaint. Rarity the Explorer, combing the lost tombs of So-and-So the Great, First Lady of Archaeology! She chuckled, and the noise died quietly, folding into the omnipresent torrential rain. Another thunderclap shattered the illusion of peace, and she sighed. No, she would not be an adventurer in tombs again, not if she could help it.
But it was nice, at least, to pretend. To imagine. Perchance, Rarity thought with her smile returning, to dream. Carefully, she moved deeper into the storeroom, searching for the box which held the relics she sought. This is more of the kind of adventure she would have preferred: searching for lost trinkets in a safe hole somewhere. Gems. Gems were nice, mildly safe, and she understood them.
Rarity came at last to the box. It was a simple wooden chest, a gift of sorts from Twilight, who had been clearing out the voluminous library basement. She had taken a liking to it at the time, enjoying the romanticism of an old treasure chest, with its ornate lock and skilled carvings. It was old.
But nothing was as old as Jannah. She could feel the chest’s oldness, but only as a spark against the flame of Jannah, like a feather set against an overhwelming boulder. It weighed on her back and on her mind and--
She shook her head and pulled the box with her magic, freeing it from its hiding place and upsetting a small cloud of dust.
“Ugh. I simply must clean in here,” she said, grimacing. She wouldn’t. Even a mare of her refinement and entrepreneur skill had her moments and spaces of laziness. Or dread. “Where is the key? Damn silver… ah. Kitchen.”
She hesitated, looking at the chest, and then shrugged. She’d prefer to bring it with her. Where there was more light.
The chest was deposited on the floor (after Rarity was quite sure it was free from dust) and then left alone. She wandered into the kitchen, casting her light around until she located the kitchen’s magitech circuit switch. It was so nice, having a bit of modernity in the home. She quite loved candles, but they were so inconvenient sometimes, with their burning and their wax.
The circuit hummed and the little circular lamp in the ceiling glowed brightly above her head, filling the room with artificial light. Rarity, too, hummed as she always did in response, and set her own lamp down on the counter while she rummaged through the drawers.
“Silver key… silver… key. Ah. Yes, of course. The junk drawer! How fitting,” she said with a sigh and produced the long, ornate instrument. It was a work of art, really, with the little engraving on the large handle piece. Two ponies danced in an open field. At least, that is what she thought it showed. Age had not been kind. The ages hardly were, were they?
Taking up her lamp, Rarity returned to the living room and set her light upon the coffee table, beside the chest. Light from the kitchen filled the rest of the house, dimly making the darkness bearable.
Rarity, for her own part, went still, hovering the key above its home. She imagined her home in the daytime, with Rainbow napping obnoxiously on the couch, with Sweetie Belle ambling about with oblivious mischief, with herself busy with all the ways and trials of a seamstress and a businessmare. When her adventure--no, don’t call it that, she told herself, adventure is not the word--when her sufferings had come at last to an end, she had come back to this little tiny speck on the map of the great, wide, vast, darkening world, and she had tried to return her life to normal, hadn’t she?
The key was thrust into the lock, and the box was opened.
The contents lay in shadow, which she supposed in a moment of strange feeling was quite proper. Her head buzzed. Her chest felt tight. Her legs protested a sudden weakness not of body but of spirit, a long-suffered illness of motivation. She lay on the ground beside the box, resting her weary head on the lip, her eyes peering down into it. She summoned another light from her horn, a tiny, tiny one, and let it fall like a raindrop down into the box.
“Hello,” she said softly, though she knew there would be no answer.
In the chest lay the ancestral arms of her forefather, Lord Iron Belle of Everfree. Or, at least, what was left of his ancestral weaponry. A thousand years tends to cast doubts upon the claims of a few unicorns living in a rather rustic outpost in the heartlands, and even when the identity of a thing can be sure, time is not kind. It is never kind, at least to the body.
First, hoofblades. Vicious looking, serrated things. She had never liked them and never would, no matter their history. She had tried them on only once, and the idea of being so close to anypony who would have need of their peculiar brand of discouragement had repulsed her so much she had kept them in her saddlebags.
That had not, of course, stopped her companions from making use of them. Rarity did not take the weapons out.
Next, her ancestor’s scattergun. It was strange to think of the beginning centuries of Celestia’s solo reign as a dark age, but so much had been lost that was only now being rediscovered. Carefully, she levitated the gun out. The wood was inlaid with gold, or with indentations where gold had once been. It fired. Rarity knew this from experience.
In an odd way, simply gripping the artifact in her magic made the darkness seem more solid and more manageable. What she felt was not comfort, for the weapon could not bring that to anypony who really understood it, and it was not safety, for Rarity was too wise now to think that anypony was ever really safe.
Even Rainbow Dash. Or Sweetie Belle. Even herself.
Perhaps even a Princess was not safe, in her own way.
She laid the gun by her side, crooked in her forelegs like a foal, but without any warmth. Her magic still rested on the frame, still waited.
The last artifact, excluding the smaller bits and pieces of her fulfilled quest such as ammunition and foreign coins, was her great grandfather’s seeing glass. She smiled and also removed this, opening it up as she had many times as a child. Rarity would have never told anypony--indeed, had not told Rainbow until only recently--but as a child, her first dream had not been of fashion or art or even of anything particularly refined. She had liked, once upon a time, to simply gaze at stars. Her great-grandfather had lingered into her foalhood, and the two of them had shared this secret vocation when she was small.
It had been useful in Jannah. Seeing far across the marble, white-washed tomb city had been invaluable for avoiding the wandering horrors. The mercenaries had been much easier to spot, bumbling with their armor and their lusts.
She caressed the instrument lovingly with her hooves. Why had she put this away? At the time, she supposed it had simply been another thing tied to the long nightmare. But perhaps her great grandfather’s seeing glass should not have been locked away from her new family’s eyes.
The usual connecting theme in all of their adventures--her closest friends and Rarity--was that Twilight always had a plan. Or, at least, she appeared to. In hindsight, which was eternal and piercing, it was quite plain that many times Twilight had constructed rather ill-suited plans, carried out and successful mostly because of her friend’s faith and her own exuberance. Rarity supposed there were many worse faults. It had all been very fun at the time, hadn’t it?
Time had changed this to. Rarity thought it was also fitting, if a little melancholy. One had always to face the facts of one's existence, the essence of one’s self, and by that alter the facts. So Twilight had done. Rarity was in fact present for one of the moments that had been a catalyst for that change, for the transfiguration of Twilight from exuberant but naive scholar into wise and sometimes troubled.
She had, in fact, helped cause it by kicking her friend in the face.
Ruefully, she recalled the feeling of utter terror that had driven her to Twilight’s library that night. The rain then was the same rain that fell without mercy or quarter even now, months later. In the hot, flashing grip of panic, no mare formed thoughts that mattered or could be deciphered. Rarity remembered no individual thoughts, no real plan or anything that could be put into words. What she had was an impression of fury, the feeling of pain, and the fire of shame as she stood over an already injured Twilight, breathing laboriously, soaked in rainwater.
Rarity yawned and played with her great grandfather’s seeing glass.
“Where?”
It had been her only word. She’d given no warning of her coming, no explanation. Twilight hadn’t needed them, and Rarity knew that. From the moment she stepped off the boat in Tall Tale, Twilight should have known that this moment, this tiny droplet of time could not stay suspended for long.
“I can explain! I’m sorry, I’m--”
Rarity’s chest heaved.
“Where?”
“In Jannah!” Twilight said, shaking.
Rarity saw now her wounds. She had seen them before, of course, but they had not really meant anything to her. Not at that particular moment. Now they did. Her right eye was hidden behind a white eyepatch. Her face and her body were bruised, her legs wrapped in bandages, her mane and tail recovering from fire. She was in horrific shape.
Rarity had, of course, greeted her at the door with a kick.
All at once she felt sick. Not metaphorically but physically, a deep twisting in her gut accompanied with a cold sweat. She looked down at her own hooves, trying to control her own body. One deep breath. Another. Another.
“Rarity?” Twilight’s rattled voice was like sandpaper on Rarity’s ears. Grate,grate, grate. “Rarity?” her voice shook even more. Rarity hated it. She hated every minute fluctuation Twilight inflicted on the air, every little imperfection Rarity inflicted upon that sweet voice with her own barbarity.
“Twilight, I’m not going to hurt you,” Rarity said flatly. Any more, she added, only for herself.
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” Twilight started, and then her voice broke and the rest came out as a flood. “I’m so sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t mean to… I mean, I tried to keep her safe, I wanted her to be safe, I tried and I tried and they were just everywhere and I followed them, but I couldn’t, I just couldn’t do it.”
“Twilight,” Rarity interjected, close to a whisper, like a thin stiletto. “Twilight, are you listening? Breathe. Breathe, darling. I’m sorry I hit you. I am. Don’t… don’t cry. Please.”
Every syllable was a command. She did not feel remorse, not quite. She felt pain and she felt wrongness. They were not quite remorse. They would be.
“Okay,” Twilight answered, with the halting uncertainty of a victim. Rarity’s stomach continued to twist. Her heart hurt.
“Tell me what happened.”
Twilight sniffed. Tears ran down her cheeks; Rarity saw the little streams catching Twilight’s candlelight. Rarity looked away. Twilight had been reading. Typical. What was not typical was the huge map laid out on the center table. The statue of the Saddle Arabian bust had been moved.
“I… I was….” Twilight coughed, and Rarity waited. It was hard to wait. “We were north of the ruins of Isdramir. It’s in the West, across the Endless Sea, west of Valon and along the old royal road.I was just taking samples, and Dash was bored… she didn’t want to camp in the woods but I was exhausted…”
“And so you were ambushed, correct?” Rarity asked, keeping her voice level. Reigning herself in. Calm, Rarity, be calm. Calm.
“Yes… yes, we were. There were two dozen of them. They had weapons and Dash tried to fight them and I tried to fight them and we just--”
“Breathe, Twilight. Breathe.”
“Sorry. We fought them the best that we could, but Dash couldn’t fly well with all of the trees and it being so dark, and they hit me in the back of the head with something hard.”
“How did you escape?” Rarity asked.
“They just left me there. I didn’t understand it. I still don’t, really. When I woke, they were gone. I tracked them the best I could, but it was more than just a dozen or so. It was hundreds, a small army, all of them headed towards… Jannah.” Twilight grimaced.
“Should I know that name?” Rarity asked, frowning. “Because I do not.”
“Not neccesarily. It’s old. The legends are almost lost… but Celestia made me promise not to go near it, that no one could ever go near it ever, that it was horrible. She was afraid, Rarity. They went over the walls. The huge gate wouldn’t budge. I…”
“You didn’t go in,” Rarity finished.
“No.”
“Why?”
“I was afraid.”
Rarity sighed and closed her eyes. She was almost calm. No heart can be furious at all times, nor be anxious at all times. Eventually the wild drum beating calms down, even if for a moment. She could think again. She could plan. This was not to say she could plan well. Already she was thinking of her ancestor’s tools stored in honor at her parent’s house, above the fireplace. She had a key. “Can you draw me a map?” she asked at length.
It was a long night.
She had had many long nights in her life. A few of them had been an awful lot like this one, spent waiting for Rainbow Dash to come back through the door. Such was life attached to Ponyville’s weather captain, the youngest one in the heartlands of the Central province in a century. She hadn’t gotten there by being timid. Rainbow slept a lot, but made up for it with being able to work at any time of day or night, all day or night, and doing it alone if she had to. Rainbow’s laziness was as much an exception as most ponies thought it was the norm. When you worked as hard and as fast as Rainbow could and often did, you earned your sleep.
And she slept hard, didn’t she? Rarity couldn’t help but grin as she set the seeing glass down beside her. Yes, her Rainbow, her darling girl, slept like a rock. Her snoring could wake the dead and probably did. Waking Rainbow up usually involved either cold water, physically pushing her out of bed, or… well. Other things.
And oddly enough, Rarity found it endearing. She supposed it was easy to find things endearing when you loved someone.
And that was an odd word, wasn’t it?
She hadn’t thought much about the word love when she’d thrown herself into finding Rainbow. Jungles, oceans, strange environs and places at the edge of creation where time and geography went soft… and through all of that, love hadn’t been on her mind. She hadn’t forgotten herself, almost, absorbed in nothing but Rainbow. Nothing had flown or crawled or walked in her mind but Rainbow Dash and her safety and her sanity and her homecoming.
Rarity yawned. It was getting on, wasn’t it?
The storm raged on, frightful as ever. The lightning bolts struck and the thunder crashed and the sound of heaven coming down filled what gaps there were in the quieting aura of Rarity’s thoughts.
Dash would be out there, in the storm. Ready for some tree to fall on her, or some pegasus to land on her, or some other ridiculous thing. Struck by lightning, falling and breaking her neck, being caught in a mudslide. Everfree monsters stirred up by the rain. Dash could not fly her way out of these things, especially not now.The possibilities were endless. The possibility of possibility was endless.
Jannah, too had been endless. It too had been battered by rain and lightning, had been host to things in the night that were unknowable and infathomable. A blood mage and his twisted mercenary army, come to take the secrets of a city miles and miles and miles wide, a city that went on forever, and Rarity followed them. She fed off of the city like a gnat on a horse, trembling and uncertain, moving from house to house. The city went on in all directions, with a dozen wards at least. Much of it was marble, white washed tombs of a day long gone, preserved by curses and the last barrier which held the horrible, forgotten mistakes of a lost tribe of equines.
Rarity stood, and replaced the gun, but she kept the seeing glass. She slowly locked up the chest and brought it with her back to the storage closet.
And how she had crawled in the underbelly of that city. Worms, great and terrible creatures the size of villages, writhed in its streets. They feasted at night. The beasts were creatures of unholy magic, born out of the dizzying possibility and horror in the voids between realities, and they sang songs that lapped at her soul like a lover, begging her to come out. Just as the original inhabitants had wandered out in a happy daze to stand in the streets and be devoured en masse. The houses were full of ghosts, unhappy, lost shadows of peasants and tradesponies and nobles. The gardens were eerily preserved, still in midbloom--the fountains, frozen as they had been the last moment of the city’s demise. And all the while she and the blood mage who had taken her Rainbow drew ever closer to the great acropolis.
Rarity walked back into the dark, searching for the chest’s home. She found it and carefully placed the thing back where it belonged, out of sight and out of mind. Or, at least, out of sight.
With the help of her two guides, she had climbed all the way to the top. She’d fought and bled and cried and… well.
And Rainbow was outside risking herself, wasn’t she?
That was really the point she was always coming back to. The danger. The inherent danger. The creeping, hiding, biding, hunting danger that lurked in the darkness. In Jannah it had been visable, massive, godlike. She had almost lost her mind trying to block out the horrible singing. But here? Where was the danger? She saw no monsters, heard no tell-tale sound of metal on metal that signalled a foe’s advance. She hadn’t been afraid of manticores since Fluttershy won one over.
So where was the danger? Why, she had reasoned, it was everywhere. Where wasn’t it? Everything was dangerous. Anything could be a trap or a sinkhole. Any pony could lose their minds at any moment. Any tree could fall and any building could collapse, and even the greatest flyer in Equestria could crash one day or be struck by lightning. And Rainbow did crash a lot, didn’t she? No matter how much Rarity begged her to be careful, to take a break, to come back inside where at least her magic and her home and her warm hearth love could do what little they could, Rainbow always, always left. She went out into the world. She went up, up and away, into the sky. She dared.
Rarity stepped back into her living room on infirm legs. She looked down at her prosthetic.
Her own magic hadn’t really kept her safe.
But that didn’t mean Rainbow had to run off! It didn’t… It didn’t mean she couldn’t try to be careful occasionally. She could exercise a bit of prudence, a tiny modicum of caution now and again, at least for Rarity’s sake!
Or maybe she did. How would Rarity know? She was always shutting her eyes, fretting.
She set the lamp down on the table while she thought, and it caught the edge and fell to the ground. Hot embers jumped and touched down on her carpet. Rarity jumped. “Ah! Damn! Damn,” she repeated, snuffing out each little flame before it could do any damage, and then she was in the dark again.
“No, please, no…. Where… where are you?” she scrambled frantically, trying to find the lamp. All at once she hit a bunched up spot in the rug and went sprawling, grazing her head on the table.
As if yanked back by magic, she was in Jannah, hiding in the dark. She was underneath a table, whimpering, tears running down her cheeks, soaked in her own sweat. Outside, somewhere out there in the impossible nighttime, something moved. It sang. Come outside come outside come outside come outside come outside…
She would look. She had to look. It wanted her to. She needed to look. She was going to look. She must. It was important. It was so, so important. The doorway was open. All she had to do was go outside… out into the street. Only seconds away. Only a few. Three steps, perhaps. Four. So close now. So very close. She was already moving, staring down at the floor tiles. Two more steps. Come outside, come outside. She was so close. It was so beautiful. So impossible. She could almost touch it...
And as quick as it had come over her, the nightmare passed. She was not under the table in Jannah, trapped in that house. She was on her own rug, in her own house, in Ponyville. The tears and the sweat were real. Her whole frame shook.
How long had she laid there, shaking? How much time had she missed?
She wanted to rise and find out, but fear kept her down. She musn’t move. It was dark. It was so dark. So blindingly dark. So deeply, deeply, dark with no hope of penetrating through to safety with any light. Already she could feel it pressing down on her from all sides, gathering her up like a great reaper,
Rarity took a deep, shaking breath, and then let it go. Another. Another. IT was difficult, almost impossible, but with each simple repetition it became easier.
It was the strangest thing, recovery. It came in steps and in flashes. Sometimes, it was slow. Other times, it was quick.
This time, it was quick. Rarity opened her eyes, and the tension in every muscle and in every synapse simply faded, because she had realized something.
The monster wasn’t there.
It simply wasn’t. There was no monster. Not here. Not in Ponyville, not in Equestria, not in the Great Continent. They were far, far away. And she was here, alone. The darkness could do nothing to her. It could frighten her, yes. It could make her forget herself and a thousand years of Belles, but it could inflict no harm upon her spirit.
She stood up.
It came into Rarity’s mind that in standing here, her breathing almost normal, that for the first time since she had left Jannah she did not feel frightened of the darkness around her. For once, she did not see anything lurking in the dark but a couch and a table, and with the flash of lightning outside her window, the poor little lamp which she scooped up.
It occured to Rarity that the worst of it was forgetting herself. Not in loving, for she would regret nothing of Jannah when she was not on the ground. But in the dark she forgot. It was the worst sort of depression, really, to forget oneself.
Rainbow was still out there, and Rarity remembered that the best part of the dark was Rainbow being there, sleeping like a contented idiot, her strange half-smile snoring ‘till morning.
Cautiously, without plans or thoughts that were really coherent, Rarity made her way to the showroom to stand before her front door. She supposed she could always go find Rainbow. If not bring her home, she could at least be with her.
The world was dangerous, after all. Always and forever, in some way or another. Whether there were monsters or not, she still loved, and that was dangerous. Very dangerous. Too dangerous, almost. But Rainbow had said once that daring was the only way. She had tried to, at least.
Rarity had summarized it differently. To dare was to lose one’s step, to stumble in the dark and drop the lamp and still open one’s eyes and stand up. To never dare was to lose oneself entirely.
Rarity found her coat on the rack beside the door, buckled it soundly, found her best and biggest umbrella, and opened the door. Outside, the storm raged, and Rarity walked out into it to find the treasured she had dared for, because she was tired of waiting and being afraid, alone in the dark.
And she was not anxious in the night.