//------------------------------// // 2. So Close, So Far // Story: The Night That Never Ended // by BronyCray //------------------------------//             The doors to the throne room flew open before Nightmare Moon. The palace guards were arrayed before her by the dozens, honed wings outstretched. "I will give you one chance," boomed Nightmare Moon, "to surrender yourselves before my mercy. Celestia is gone, which makes me the rightful queen of Equestria!" The expressions of the guards never softened, and as one they charged forward, loyal to their beloved ruler. Nightmare Moon laughed as her mane flicked outward again and again, their bodies crumpling to the floor. As she strode past their corpses, she looked around the empty hall. Plans for her new order began forming in her mind as she finally sat upon her throne. “But Pinkie Pie, we aren’t dead!” Dash said for the hundredth time, hovering beside the grim faced Pinkie. She cantered in a beeline into the darkness, Twilight hurrying behind to keep her in sight. Pinkie only ever stared directly ahead with a mouth full of singed papers, ignoring Rainbow Dash and Twilight alike. Twilight had long given up trying to get her to say more, reserving what little energy she had left for staying upright and keeping her horn glowing. They had spent over an hour in the burnt library watching pinkie root through ashes to find scraps of sooty paper, and had only just left without her having said another word. Twilight wondered how she could see where she was going, but even she had noticed by now the telltale signs of madness in her friend. So far, they had travelled in a straight line from the burnt tree, but nothing else had passed through Twilight’s small field of light. There could be towering building or sheer drops just a few feet away from them and she’d never know it, a thought that made Twilight shiver. On top of that, several minutes of walking had begun to unnerve her. The void pushed in relentlessly, and Twilight had to keep her focus on her horn to keep her light radius from shrinking. The longer her horn glowed, the heavier the darkness seemed to become, and though it had begun by smothering vision outside the immediate light radius quickly, it had solidified into a solid wall of seemingly tangible blackness. Horrible visions of ravenous shadows crashing down on them all filled Twilight’s mind and she redoubled her focus on keeping the light going once more. Coupled with her fatigue from the teleport spell, she was struggling to just keep moving forward. She was slowly losing ground, literally, and she was contemplating warning Dash when finally, her horn began to illuminate a nearby wall. They walked along side it for a moment and around the corner there was revealed a door that Pinkie continued through, and then the inside of a very familiar bakery.             “Oh no Dash, this is Sugarcube Corner. We’re definitely still in Ponyville.” Twilight tried to piece together this new realization with her surroundings as she took in the sight before her. The floor was covered in small stones and splintered wood, bigger piles of which had been swept into the corners. By contrast, the counter and sections of walls looked to be newly constructed, unsanded plywood contradicting the older, gritty boards. The building looked as though it had been demolished and rebuilt with scraps and fresh materials alike more than once. As the door swung closed behind them, Twilight noticed that her horn’s light immediately expanded to fill the room, and she turned down the level to conserve her energy. The darkness here seemed much less intimidating now that it wasn’t pouring in from all sides, strangely enough.             “Wait, what? That’s just not possible, not unless you teleported us to the future or something crazy.” Dash stopped hovering beside Pinkie and dropped back to walk with Twilight so that they could talk under their breath. Although she never answered back, Pinkie always tensed visibly whenever she heard either of them start speaking. The silent darkness made talking at anything above a whisper seem dangerous too, even though they hadn’t seen any reason to think that danger lurked outside. Future or not, this was still Ponyville, and although Twilight’s house was gone and something was obviously terribly wrong, the knowledge that they were home was still at least a little relieving. Being out of the strange darkness from outside didn’t hurt, either. “You couldn’t have actually teleported us to the future, right?”             “I really don’t know, Rainbow Dash. I thought I accounted for everything, it should have been perfect! At most we should have ended up just a little bit off-center, but that’s just a change in details. And there was this strange tug while I was casting, and I’ve never felt that before while teleporting.”             “A kind of inside-out pull? Yea, I felt that too. Can you get us back to where we came from?”             “I think so, but first I need to find out what happened to us. If I don’t know where we are, I can’t calibrate the spell correctly.” At this point, they had arrived to the door to Pinkie’s room above the bakery. Pinkie stopped at the door and turned the knob very slowly before going in, hugging the wall as soon as she stepped through the doorway. Inside, the room was completely dark as well, and Twilight’s horn didn’t shine enough light to find what Pinkie Pie was avoiding.             “Don’t move ghosties, or else Mr. Slide will giggle at you again. Mean old ghosties that haunt Pinkie don’t like giggles, mean old ghosties scream and then Pinkie has to clean up the ghostie’s little bitsy-wittsies and put Mr. Slide back together again.”             Dash and Twilight looked at eachother worriedly, but neither was prepared to ignore a warning like that by moving. After a few seconds, there was a snap, crackle, and pop as a light flared to life within the room. Pinkie’s hoof appeared in the doorway, beckoning them inside. As they stepped in, she closed the door behind them and went to sit next to the fire she had started.             As Pinkie fed some of her scavenged papers into the flame, the light cast back the shadows enough that Twilight could get a better view of the room. The windows were boarded shut and all the furniture was piled against one wall, even the bed stood unused while a heap of blankets on the floor clearly marked Pinkie’s sleeping space. In the middle of the room, taking up easily a half of the available space, was a towering column of rocks of every size that reached to the ceiling. In the glint of the firelight, twilight could see a piano wire extend from the middle of the unsteady looking column to a nail next to the door, then across the doorframe. Anyone walking carelessly into the room would have a rockslide coming down on them, certainly not what one would expect inside a building and on the second floor.  Something about the implausibility seemed perfectly suited to Pinkie Pie, even if in a twisted and violent way. “Did you meet Mr. Slide? He’s been my friend for a long time, ever since my other friends left. He was just three stones at one point, but look how big he’s gotten!” Twilight forced a smile and tried to distract herself from the presence she suddenly felt of a very displeased looking rockslide-waiting-to-happen. Twilight looked around some more, and saw that parts of the ceiling were hung with kitchen knives, and some pieces of wall were almost comically fake. Pinkie had apparently gone through a great deal of trouble to trap the single entrance to this room, though against what Twilight had no idea. Her observations, however, were interrupted as Pinkie began to speak again.             “Ok ghosties. Ghosties, ghosties, ghosties. One ghostie that saved my life and one ghostie that almost got me killed. You get one question each and we’re even. Then you have to leave, or Mr. Slide will show you out.” Not once did even a hint of a smile cross Pinkie’s features, and she glared at the space between the two ponies while she waited for a question.             Dash and Twilight looked at eachother. They had so many questions to ask, picking only two was difficult. Eventually, Twilight coughed politely and asked, “Pinkie, I know we are in Ponyville, but where is everypony? And why is it so dark out?”             Pinkie’s frown turned into an angry scowl, but she didn’t turn to look directly at Twilight. “That was two questions; I said you get one each! But wait, they share an answer, so I will answer both. Okie Dokie, It is so dark because there’s no sun, silly. And there are no people because there is only night and the dark. Only night means no sun, no sun means no food, and no food means no ponies. “             “I’ve got a question!” spurted Dash, wings leaping outward. “Why do you keep calling us ghosties? We aren’t ghosts! We’re alive and lost and very confused so if you could please drop the crazy, that would be great” Frayed nerves had obviously begun to get the better of Rainbow Dash, though she was doing her best to hide it. Pinkie’s head never wavered from the spot she was staring at.             “You are ghosties because you died, silly. The same night that everything happened, the night when Nightmare Moon attacked.” “What? You mean she came back? I thought Celestia made goody-goody with Luna and they were living in the palace together now,” interrupted Dash. “She couldn’t have come back, silly, she never left.” Pinkie’s eyes began to twitch more rapidly, which Dash recognized as a sign of irritation. “After the night we tried to stop her, she took control of the kingdom and has been ruling ever since. Celestia disappeared right before Nightmare Moon came, and Nightmare Moon didn’t take over her duties after she took control.” Twilight contemplated this for a moment. It’s true, Celestia had gone missing right before Luna was released from her exile, and nopony had ever bothered to ask where she had gone. Pinkie continued speaking, and Twilight struggled to keep up with her increasing speed. “But instead of the night never ending, the night still starts and ends. Instead, there’s just no day. Round and round the moon goes, except now it’s the sun because we have no sun, and now it’s the sun because the day is darker than then the night and in the darkness you can hide but in the darkness you can’t run so you have to hide. At night it’s bright so you can see again, and you open your windows to let the light in.”             Twilight and Dash shared another glance as Pinkie devolved into murmurs and gibberish. After a few tense moments, Dash interrupted her quietly. “Pinkie Pie, whatever happened I am so sorry, but you need to tell us. How did we… die?”             Pinkie slowly stopped muttering and turned to look at Dash, the first time she had looked directly at either of them since meeting they had met. As she began talking, her voice carried slightly more bounce and her eyes focused more. Her returning lucidity showed in her words. “Something…something went wrong. With the sixth element. It disappeared before Twilight got it, and Nightmare Moon...Nightmare Moon killed Twilight! In front of all of us! One second we were glaring her down, poised to defeat her, and the next Twilight’s screams were fading beneath that purple smoke. So we ran and we ran and I cried the whole time and Dashie you said I had to stop crying because Nightmare Moon was gonna catch us!” Twilight fought an instinctive desire to cover her ears with her hooves. She looked away from Pinkie and let her eyes rest on Mr. Slide. The flickering fire cast shadows over the cracks and crevices of the rocks, giving the appearance of rapidly changing faces. Always changing, but seemingly always angry. As his bulk loomed over Pinkie Pie, what little sanity she had gained began to slip away. Her words quickened and her eyes began twitching nonstop as she continued. “At the bottom of the ruins Nightmare Moon was already there! And you yelled for the rest of us to run and just flew right at her! Dashie I didn’t want to leave you! I told you that but you keep coming back and telling me that I left you but Applejack and Rarity pulled me away and I tried to go back and help but they pulled me and I heard you scream and I heard Nightmare Moon laugh but we were so deep in the forest already and we just kept running and running until I couldn’t remember anything except running. All I could hear was her laugh and you screaming and I haven’t laughed or smiled since then. Not once Dashie, no matter how hard I try.” Pinkie was breathing quickly, looking desperately to Dash. Twilight stood ignored to the side, and kept perfectly still to avoid unbalancing her friend again. Dash, on the other hand, reached out a hoof to Pinkie’s shoulder. She jumped at the touch, but kept her eyes locked on Dash. “Pinkie, look. You can feel me, you can hear me, we aren’t ghosts. Mr. Slide is just a pile of rocks and we don’t know where our friends are, so will you please snap out of it?” Pinkie’s eyes widened at the mention of Mr. Slide, and she looked worriedly over her shoulder at the behemoth. When she turned back, he eyes had become crossed again, and a telltale twitch told Twilight that Dash’s approach had been the wrong one. “Oh no no no, sillies! Mr. Slide is my friend; he has been since you left! He’s helped me keep the ghosties out and has never left me alone, not like you!” Pinkie’s blank face returned to her frown from earlier. “Mean old ghosties keep coming back though, and Mr. Slide says that I don’t need you! He’s right, too. You left me, you both left me, and now I have new friends!”                     At this, Pinkie’s head abruptly shot back to its original location between Twilight and Rainbow Dash, and she began mumbling to herself. Twilight’s blood ran cold as she began to make out the words of Pinkie’s chant: giggle at the ghostly guffaw at the grossly crack up at the creepy. And over her chant, Pinkie began to giggle, slowly at first then steadily louder until any pretense of her chant was gone. Twilight knew that this was the most unnerving sound she would hear in her entire life, for not the slightest trace of a smile crossed Pinkie’s features while her giggle turned quickly into maniacal laughter, her eyes growing wider and more vacant with every guffaw. Twilight heard Dash scream something and then saw Pinkie jerk her back leg forward, which Twilight now saw was tied to a piano wire.             Oh no. Something hit her flank just as the first stones began toppling, and Twilight thought she was pinned beneath a boulder for a terrible moment until she felt herself moving. She turned to see that she was being carried by Dash, who yelled something that was lost beneath the din of falling rocks all around them. Twilight turned back ahead just in time to see a boarded up window inches from her face. She tensed right as she made contact, heard a splintering roar, and then everything faded to black again.   _____________________________________   Twilight drearily opened her eyes and rolled over in bed, trying to go back to sleep. Everything hurt, especially her head. As she tried to remember why, everything came flooding back to her from before she lost consciousness and she sat bolt upright. Where the hay was she now? “Rainbow Dash? Are you there? Where are we? Dash!?” Twilight’s voice was swallowed by the darkness, and she cast another illuminating spell through her horn. This time, instead of giving just a small circle of light, the entire room was bathed in a soft glow. This was not the heavy darkness of a day with no sun, this was simply a lack of light. Twilight looked around to try and take in where she was. She was in a large bed, too large for any one pony, with fancy sheets that had been ravaged by neglect. The room around her was a mess of toppled furniture, but had the unmistakable marks of a bedroom with the only window boarded tightly shut. A small bed for a pet of some sort lay shredded against one wall, its stuffing stuck to the once purple wallpaper with a dark brown substance. As Twilight’s tired mind began to catch up with her eyes, she made the connection. She was in Rarity’s boutique! A surge of hoped flowed through her as she scrambled out of bed and to the door. Just as she reached the door with a wince of pain, she heard fast hoofsteps coming from the other side. Flattening herself against the wall, she waited until the door flew open and revealed a frantic Rainbow Dash, who ran to the bed and then began calling out. “Twi? I thought I heard your voice! Are you here!? TWI?!” “It’s ok Rainbow Dash, I’m right here. I didn’t know who was coming so I just wanted to be cautious.” “Twilight! You’re awake! Oh hay, I was so worried after that crash. How are you feeling? Is anything broken? I’m not much of a doctor but I tried to make you comfortable.” Rainbow Dash trotted over to Twilight, giving her a fond nuzzle. “I’m fine,” Twilight answered, surprised by the concern in her friend’s frantic voice. “I must have just hit my head a little hard going out of that window. What happened after that, and how did we get here? Where’s Rarity?” Dash backed off and shook her head, trying to get her thoughts back. “Oh, yea. After we broke out of the window, I was pretty dazed by the hit too. I kinda maybe crashed into the ground a little bit, bu-but I made sure I hit the ground below you! Anyway, Pinkie’s entire house collapsed under that rockslide, it was a miracle that the building could support that much weight on the second floor without it moving every which way. When I hit the ground I must have blacked out too, ‘cause when I opened my eyes I could see the stars and moon!” Dash stopped for a minute, and Twilight could see on her face just how much the natural light of nighttime had meant to the pegasus pony. After a moment Twilight coughed, bringing Dash back to the conversation. “Oh, uh, right. So then I started thinking that if we wanted to get out of here, our best bet was to find the rest of our friends. Pinkie said that they all escaped after the two of us- er, after Nightmare Moon attacked, so I thought maybe they were still in Ponyville. Rarity’s boutique was the closest one besides your library, so I brought you here to rest while you recovered.” Twilight was impressed with the thorough thinking of her friend. She may be brash at times, but Rainbow Dash worked well under pressure. “And what happened to Pinkie? And Rarity?” Twilight couldn’t get her answers fast enough. There were so many questions that she didn’t get to ask Pinkie Pie, assuming she was sane enough to still answer them. And crazy or not, Twilight didn’t want to think about Pinkie being buried beneath her own trap. Dash sighed and pawed at the ground dejectedly. “The boutique was long deserted by the time we got here, probably for months. I spent the entirety of that night searching for Pinkie Pie, but I couldn’t find any trace of her in the wreckage. Either she got out her own way, or she was was…well, I assume she got out. Even Pinkie didn’t seem crazy enough to kill herself just to scare off some hallucinations. And she said that she had had to rebuild Mr. Slide before, so maybe this isn’t the first time this has happened.” Twilight sighed and winced at the pain in her head. Even the noise of room level conversation was enough to make her headache throb, so she walked back over to the bed and lay down on it. “Thank you, Rainbow Dash. This was good thinking, and I really needed some time to rest.” Dash smiled warmly, blushing slightly from the praise. Twilight didn’t notice however as she began thinking of what to do next. “Ok, so Pinkie Pie can’t help us any more, even if we could find her again she’d probably try to kill us or escape. And Rarity is gone and her house deserted, so where does that leave us?” Dash raised her head excitedly, a grin forming on her face. “Yes! Planning! That’s exactly what we need, a plan! I can scout the skies for signs of other ponies, and you can work on a spell to get us home, and-” a loud gurgle interrupted her as Dash’s long empty stomach began to protest. “Oh, uh, I suppose some food might be good too, heh heh.” Twilight finally noticed that her stomach was its own knot of agony. She was hungrier than she could ever remember being, and she had gone long stretches of time with no food on her study binges. “Dash, how long was I unconscious for? I feel like I haven’t eaten in days.” Rainbow Dash pawed the ground again. “Uh, let’s see, we got here during the day and got away from Pinkie that night, soooooo you’ve been out for two days since then.” A shocked look from Twilight prompted her to fill the silence with her defense. “Look, I’ve seen plenty of head-on collisions from crashes before, but I’m like I said I’m no doctor. You just looked like you were sleeping, so I figured letting you rest was the best thing to do, ok? I’ve been sleeping downstairs during the day and trying to get food at night, but all I’ve managed was some water from the town well. Pinkie was right, there’s no plant life left in the town, and when I tried flying to Sweet Apple Acres…Twilight, the entire orchard was burned! Even Applejack’s barn is just scorched earth.” Twilight shook her head in disbelief. This was a nightmare, where could she even begin? Well first things first, they needed food. “Dash, I think I can get us home, but it’s going to take time. We’ll need to find food if we want to stay alive that long. And…I don’t think we should stay in Ponyville. Something bad happened here, and not just the lack of food and light. The town is deserted completely and we’ve seen two areas that were burned, including my house. If Nightmare Moon did this, then we should lay low and try to find shelter. Where else can we go that isn’t in Ponyville?” “Hmm,” Dash rubbed her chin with her hoof, deep in concentration. “We could try Fluttershy’s cottage! It’s right on the edge of the Everfree Forest, and there are plenty of places to hide in there. Plus, we can look for Fluttershy while we’re laying low, maybe she can get help us out.” “That’s brilliant Rainbow Dash! If we leave now, can we get there by daytime?” Dash brightened up, “Not by hoof, it’s pretty late. But I am the fastest flyer in Equestria! Just hold tight Twilight, we can leave whenever you’re ready!” Twilight spent the next few minutes sitting on Rarity’s bed thinking while Dash went into the other room. The boutique had been abandoned for months, probably since Nightmare Moon attacked. It had been months since Nightmare Moon attacked her version of Ponyville as well, and she had arrived at this world during the same time of “day” as she had left, judging by Dash’s account. Her teleportation spell hadn’t moved them through time; she had only moved them forward spatially, but both her and Dash had felt a tug in another direction, or sense of direction, as well. If she hadn’t moved through time, then what was this world where everything was wrong? Dash called from the other side of the boutique, and Twilight got out of bed again to go to her. As she trotted over, Dash pushed forward a bucket of water. Twilight took a few grateful gulps, knowing that they may be her last until they found a new source of water, and the two ponies trotted out the door side by side. Unnoticed by both Ponies, a poofy-haired silhouette watched them from around a corner as they exited the boutique. It gave an experimental laugh and, with some effort, even managed a slight smile, then turned to pick up a nicely sized rock in her mouth. Pinkie watched her ghosties leave and then turned away to begin rebuilding her home again. ____________________________________   Far above, a pegasus pony flew over the ruins of the town below. Her eyes scanned the ground halfheartedly, knowing that all its residents had long since fled. A black bodysuit let her flip over aerodynamically as she watched the sky above her, admiring the beautiful stars. She turned back around at the sound of voices, and saw a rainbow streak flying low to the ground far beneath her. Her goggles let her keep them in clear view as she flew into the wind, but she could already tell where the rainbow was headed. As she alighted on a cloud, she lay down and looked again at the night sky. I’ll report it to the captain first, she thought. Then it’s in her hands whether or not she tells the queen.