It was the screaming that Twilight remembered afterwards: her own screaming, wordless and wrenching, echoing from the steel and ceramic around her. Sliding slowly into consciousness now, her body cushioned on what she thought might be pink clouds, she found that she could barely swallow, her throat scraped raw and jagged like she'd caught a head cold.
The smells, too, made her nose twitch even though the shuddering breath she was taking came to her entirely free of the awful stinks that had assaulted her earlier: urine, feces, vomit, blood, again all her own and all filling her lungs each time she had to suck in more air to continue screaming.
And of course the way every agonizing stroke of Panacea's blades had seemed to somehow dig directly into her reservoir of magic, the way her skin had shredded under the repeated blasts of the energy those knives had coaxed forth, the way her augmented alicorn physique had raced into overdrive to repair the damage only for those healed places again to be expertly slit open and peeled back, causing new heights of—
No. No. She couldn't remember that. She refused to remember that. She would never forget the screaming and the stink and the fountaining explosions of magic emptying her repeatedly to nothing but skin and bones. But the pain itself, the horrible, grinding, slicing, jabbing—
"Here." Several drops of something cool and sweet and damp touched her lips, and Twilight almost lunged forward, trying to get more of it onto her parched tongue. "Careful, Twilight! Just a little at a time!"
Pinkie's voice. And blinking, she saw that the soft, downy pinkness surrounding her came from Pinkie's blankets, Pinkie's sheets, Pinkie's comforter. Pinkie herself sat on the floor beside the bed, a box of apple juice between her front hoofs, the straw pointed in Twilight's direction.
The sight of Pinkie made Twilight's whole body recoil, and if she hadn't been exhausted and lying flat on her back, she was fairly certain she would've raced screaming from the room. Well, probably not screaming, she thought, wrestling her reactions down and figuratively stomping on them. Not with her throat like this.
She nodded, not quite ready to try talking, reached for the box, but stopped at the sight of her forelegs, dozens of parallel ridges running along the fetlocks and pasterns. As she stared, though, the scars smoothed, receded, vanished, the soreness in her throat fading with each swallow. Taking the juice box, she sipped a quarter mouthful, licked her lips, and asked, "One hour?"
"Oh, Twilight!" Pinkie was vibrating where she sat. "It was incredible! I've never felt anything like it! I mean, an hour with you bought us a whole moon! I'm abso-tively sure of it!"
"A moon?" More than she'd thought, certainly, but to make sure, she asked, "D'you mean from now till the end of this moon? Or a full four weeks?"
"At least four weeks! You were amazing!" Pinkie reached for Twilight's hoofs—
And Twilight couldn't stop her instinctual reaction, couldn't keep from jerking away, couldn't stop seeing the knives that had seemed to sprout from every inch of Panacea to slice into her own purple flesh.
Pinkie jerked back as well, her face flinching like Twilight had struck her.
"No!" Twilight cried out. "Pinkie, I'm sorry!" Setting the juice box down on Pinkie's bedside table, she slowly and deliberately wrapped her hoofs around Pinkie's, just as deliberately ignoring the clenching in her stomach and the pounding in her chest. "I'm still a little shaky is all." She forced herself to focus on the positive, found a smile coming pretty easily to her lips. "But it worked, didn't it? Equestria's OK for another four weeks!"
The smile that pulled at Pinkie's snout had more than a little of Panacea's wistfulness in it, and the way her cold hoofs trembled spoke volumes to Twilight. "But...are we OK?" Pinkie asked.
"We are," Twilight said, and it was close enough to the truth that she almost didn't feel a twinge saying it. With a shift of her shoulders, she let go of Pinkie's hoofs, pushed the blankets aside, and gingerly lowered herself onto the floor. Flexing her knees gave her a brief flashback of her knees bending in ways that they shouldn't, but again she pushed it down.
"Wow..." Pinkie's eyes gleamed, but when she went on, it was with Panacea's whisper: "How can you be standing after that?"
In fact, Twilight wanted nothing more than to lie back down. But when she'd set the juice box on the nightstand, she'd caught a glimpse of Pinkie's alarm clock. "It's ten till two," she said, ruffling her wings into place along her back. "I've got to get back to the castle for the afternoon session of Friendship Court."
Another slow blink from Pinkie, and her mane puffed up like pink meringue. "Then I'm going, too! 'Cause it's like you said: it's you and me till we get this all fixed!"
Able to hide her wince this time, Twilight nodded, and having Pinkie along for the walk home and for Court actually did prove helpful. Twilight had been feeling better and better since waking up, but she was still grateful that Pinkie was there for her to lean on the last few blocks. During Court, Pinkie and Spike stretched a gigantic string sculpture along the throne room's walls, its geometric swirls and patterns oddly soothing whenever Twilight glanced up from the books she'd asked Spike to pile around her.
The laughing comments of her two friends soothed her as well and made it much easier to push down the jags of panic that jabbed her chest whenever Pinkie spun or leaped or somersaulted from one part of the room to another. Because Twilight couldn't afford panic; Equestria couldn't afford it. Yes, Pinkie had done things to her that Twilight knew would be kicking her awake every night for the next four weeks, but her highly disciplined mind was already busily building walls around the shivering memories of those things so that they wouldn't impinge upon her conscious thoughts.
It wasn't the best way to handle this sort of trauma—she knew that, too—but she couldn't deny that it could be an effective stop-gap measure. Whatever it took to keep her from dissolving into a puddle of shrieking tears at the sight of Pinkie Pie, Twilight decided that she would do, erecting mental partitions across her entire psyche if necessary.
Which she had to do since Pinkie came back for the evening session after hopping out to fetch a mouth-watering baba ghanoush for the three of them for supper. And true to her word, she came back for every session over the next four weeks, morning, afternoon, and evening. "It's fun!" she told Rainbow Dash at the end of the third week when Dash asked what Pinkie was doing. "Helping other ponies is the best feeling in the world!"
Twilight understood the sentiment entirely, and the more she inched her way around the apparent parameters of Panacea's spell, the more she saw how important the parties and the laughter and the joy were to Pinkie. That she should be connected to the ponies she tortured and killed seemed to be vital somehow, though even after researching every aspect of spellcraft she could think of, Twilight couldn't figure out why. Maybe since Panacea's basic objective was to wring suffering from her subjects, the spell gained strength if Panacea herself suffered? That would mean that being close to her subjects would definitely help in the task of keeping the dark magics satiated and at bay...
So many dead ends, though! She'd sent requests through Spike for more information from Celestia and Luna, but the answers they'd provided pushed her down fruitless paths just as often as they gave her an insight. Reading Starswirl's notebooks again helped her see his touch in the magic that crackled around Pinkie Pie, but the sloppiness of the whole thing just made her itchy.
Even worse, the deeper she got into the mechanics of the spell's construction, the more concerned she became about what effect trying to fix or improve the spell might have on Pinkie. After all, she was the spell, the manifestation of its power in the material world, and anything Twilight did to alter the spell was almost certainly going to change Pinkie in some way.
Crumpled scroll followed crumpled scroll over the whole four weeks, the silent ticking of that invisible clock keeping Twilight from sleeping at all that last week. Pinkie had been getting quieter and quieter on her throne, too, and on the Thursday exactly four weeks after Twilight had first heard the name Panacea, she nodded to Pinkie at the eleven o'clock chime, pushed herself up from among her stacks of books, and said to Spike, "Pinkie and I'll be back for the afternoon session."
Spike's tail scraped back and forth on the flagstones. "Is...is something wrong, Twilight? You don't look so good."
She gave him as much of a smile as she could piece together. "I'm just a little disappointed I haven't gotten further along on this research project."
His wrinkled brow told her the answer didn't satisfy him. Stepping over to him, she bent down to poke the side of his head with her snout. "You're in charge till I get back."
Instead of his usual jaunty salute, he touched several gentle claws to her mane. "You got it, Twilight," he more whispered than said, and Twilight turned away before the tightness in her stomach and throat could make her blurt out things she really didn't want to say.
Through town, then, the crisp, not-quite-winter air just serving to give her the shivers, she walked alongside Pinkie and refused to let her knees fold her to the ground. The cupcake shape of Sugarcube Corner reminded her of a toadstool more than anything else, and she just nodded and smiled at Mr. Cake's attempted banter before hurrying with Pinkie Pie to the stairwell and up.
She'd been so sure! An entire lunar cycle was plenty of time for an intelligent student of magic to parse out a spell! But she'd wasted it, wasted all 28 days! And now she had to pay.
Unless—
Her mind flashed back to that day in the park, to Pinkie's gasp and Panacea's voice naming Bon Bon as the pony who—
"No!" Stomping the floor outside Pinkie's room, Twilight wanted to smack herself right across the face. But instead she followed Pinkie inside, walked with her through the impossible door, along the impossible hall, down the impossible stairs and into that horrible, impossible room, more and more of her mind whimpering with each step.
"One hour," Panacea whispered behind her, and Twilight was forcing her reluctant legs to start toward the table when—
"No!" came a shout from the stairway, and snapping her head around, Twilight saw Princess Celestia come leaping into the room. "Your questions these past weeks, Twilight Sparkle, have disturbed me no end, but now that I've finally put the pieces together and realized what you mean to do, I forbid it! You'll not lay a hoof upon her, Panacea!" And her horn began flaring up.
"Princess!" Twilight stumbled backwards, spread her wings, threw herself in front of Pinkie Pie. "Wait! I've already been through it once, and it's the only way! The only way!"
"Already—?" Even in the noontime brightness of Celestia's horn, Twilight could see her ancient teacher's eyes go wide. "How...how can this be? Panacea slays her victims!"
"Subjects," Pinkie muttered.
Twilight gave her a sideways glare, then turned her attention back to Celestia. "Not immediately," she said. "And I'm a bit tougher than the average pony." Slipping into her lecturing tone—a tone she'd learned at the hoofs of the pony in front of her—she proceeded to detail the results of her and Panacea's last session.
Celestia's eyes got wider and wider. "Four weeks?" she asked. "In exchange for a mere hour under the knives?"
The mention of the knives sent a chill ratcheting through Twilight, but she managed to nod. "We'll buy another moon here this afternoon, and another in four weeks if I haven't figured a way around the spell's base parameters by then." The back of her brain itched and squirmed, the slightest edge of a theory starting to poke its way into her consciousness, but she'd had the same nagging feeling for weeks now. "The answer's here: I just haven't found all the pieces yet." She looked up at the princess. "But we need to keep the dark magics quiet. We need the time the next hour will pay for." She swallowed. "I need to strap myself to that table."
"No." Princess Celestia's wings flared, her primary feathers nearly reaching from one wall to the other. "Return to your castle, Twilight Sparkle. I will spend this hour under Panacea's knives."
Panacea gasped behind her, but Twilight barely noticed. "No!" she shouted.
The princess's eyes narrowed. "You have done more than your part, Twilight. But if anypony is to face this torture from now on, it will be me."
"Oh, that's not what I'm saying 'no' to." Twilight held up a hoof. "I mean, I don't object to you taking my place on the table, Princess. It's just that, if you do—" She prodded at the partially formed theory in the back of her brain and hated the conclusion her studies all now seemed to be pointing her toward. "Then I think I need to stay and watch."