The train was empty. That was good. It meant the ride to the asylum would be quiet, giving Twilight a chance to collect her thoughts before she arrived; it also meant that no one would see where she got off.
Twilight was a good pony. She worked hard, she helped people, she was polite; but she wasn’t honest. She had a younger brother who’d been born five years after she became Celestia’s protégé, and was confined to a maximum security mental asylum when he was four years old. She’d never told any of her friends about him for the very simple reason that none of them would understand, but that didn’t stop her from being a good pony, right?
She’d never known him very well; partly because she avoided seeing him. Twilight didn’t like looking at things she didn’t understand, with problems she couldn’t fix for reasons she couldn’t comprehend. She visited him once a month, out of duty, and would have gladly visited him more often if she thought she was having even the slightest positive impact, but two thirds of the time he wouldn’t even acknowledge she was there.
Enigma was a savant, in the purest sense of the word. He never showed any need for pony contact. He never spoke. He rarely looked at anyone, and when he did it usually wasn’t with interest. He never studied or read any books, and yet he seemed to know more magic than Celestia. It was as if he’d been born knowing thousands of different spells, or else had an instinctual understanding of the fundamentals of magic so profound that he could invent any spell as he needed it.
The other reason Twilight hadn’t known him well before the asylum was that, with Shining Armor living in the barracks with rest of the royal guard, she really didn’t have any other reason to visit home. Twilight’s family had never been close; with her parents considerably more interested in whatever they were doing at The Restricted Archives then they were in their own children. Shining Armor had been as much a father to Twilight growing up as he was a big brother and any deranged fantasy Twilight had entertained of one day having a family-like relationship with her parents, died six days ago, when her parents formed the nucleus of an experimental assembly spell.
Their entire chapter of The Restricted Archives; all their research, all their instruments, and every colleague who’d been involved in their work, burnt to ashes within a matter of minutes. Celestia assured Twilight that the fire wasn’t suspicious, but didn’t say anything more.
It was only fitting.
When they were alive, Twilight had never known about her parent’s work, except that it was secret, important, and was periodically interrupted with a few years maternity leave. To miss them now would be pointless as she couldn’t lose something she never truly had. Twilight was still debating within herself whether or not it was logical for her to feel sad, but apparently, Enigma had decided that it was.
Yesterday, Twilight had received a sealed letter from Enigma’s doctors saying that for the last two nights, Enigma had been stressing out and refusing to go to sleep. No one had told him about his parents’ deaths, but no one who knew him found it hard to believe that he knew anyway, and was going through some kind of grieving process.
After his first night without sleep, his doctors had tried comforting him using all the usual methods, and when those didn’t work they showed him pictures of the burnt archives and his parent’s funeral. That seemed to pacify him for the time being, but by nightfall he was worse than before, and now they were asking either Twilight or Shining Armor to come visit him; hoping that seeing a blood relative might help him stabilize.
Shining Armor was unquestionably unavailable. Celestia was on the western frontier, visiting families of those who died in the accident and had left Luna to rule over Canterlot alone for the first time since her banishment. There were still some ponies that held Nightmare Moon against Luna, and so Celestia had made Shining Armor swear not to leave her side.
Twilight however was almost as busy: teetering on the precipice of a breakthrough which could finally explain how The Everfree Forest was bigger on the inside than on the outside. Lives depended on The Manehatten project, and Enigma had had broken sleep before; once going for nearly two weeks without sleeping for no apparent reason and then, after five days of doing very little but sleep, had resumed his normal rhythm with seemingly no ill effect. Twilight had written back, saying she’d visit that weekend, but the next morning Twilight had received another letter. This one sounded desperate, and so Twilight had locked her laboratory and taken a train.
The train had just pulled out of the second last stop; it wouldn’t be long now.
Twilight watched the sun, shining in its midday radiance, before being blotted out by a tunnel of cold earth which swallowed Twilight as she descended into a tunnel through the cliff face of the Canterhorn. For her, the sun would come back in about three minutes, when the train reached the other side of the mountain; but because of a promise Twilight had broken as a teenager, Enigma had been swallowed by a metal cell, and for him the sun had never come back and probably never would.
Was Twilight still a good pony?