//------------------------------// // The Price // Story: The Price of a Smile // by Trick Question //------------------------------// Twilight Sparkle sat on the dirty, rocky cavern floor. It was cold, damp, and drafty in the caves beneath Canterlot Castle, just as she remembered them, but now in much more vivid greys and browns. Strangely enough, the colors didn't make the caves seem any more beautiful. Instead they became dark, ugly, and hollow. Twilight's memories had been restored to perfect clarity. Even though many moons had passed, it seemed like only yesterday when she'd freed Princess Cadance from her imprisonment here. Cadance had looked so awful back then, all bloody and bruised and filthy, almost as filthy as the caverns themselves seemed now. These vaulted, dreary hollows were the perfect location to hide, for who would visit such a dark and dreadful place of their own free will? It was cold, and Twilight shivered. Reflexively, she tried to fluff her wings about her, only to be reminded once again she wasn't an alicorn princess after all. So, she pulled the dirty blanket more tightly around her scrawny legs, and took tiny sips of the warm but revolting mushroom broth Princess Luna had provided her. Luna was asleep, exhausted by the difficult long-distance teleportation spells she'd recently cast to keep them both safe. Twilight was tempted to curl up under her wing, but being that close to Luna made her feel awkward deep in her stomach. She suspected that a small part of Luna had actually wanted her to come here to abate her own loneliness, and she didn't know how to feel about that. Even though she didn't understand them, the sensations in Twilight's groin made her feel uncomfortable and ashamed. So instead, Twilight Sparkle envied Princess Luna's slumbering form from a safe distance. Unlike her benefactor, she didn't have the ability to enter the dream world where her friends resided, and she didn't even know if it were possible for a mere unicorn like herself. The only way to see her friends again might require bringing them into this Tartarus with her, and Luna had been right about one thing. Twilight wasn't sure she could do it. She sat there uncomfortably upon the hard, damp rock, wide awake, as her mind stubbornly refused to rest. It kept replaying the same scene in all its ghastly detail, over and over and over again. It was a blur, that first bit of waking memory, in the moments just before Luna had teleported her to the safety of the caverns, before she would have the chance to expel cups of sludge from her lungs and begin regaining her senses. She had been confused and weak when her body unceremoniously splatted onto the greasy floor of the throne room. She'd tried and failed to stand on shaky legs, unable to speak or even breathe. She had wiped the slime from her eyes quickly enough to witness Princess Luna sealing a crude wax version of Twilight Sparkle into its new home on the ceiling. Yet even in those dawning moments, before she would take her first breath in more than ten months, Twilight had already witnessed a vision she knew would inevitably follow her to the end of her days. Oddly enough, the horrifying image was not the pods dangling above her; the pods containing her emaciated friends, her brother, her foal-sitter, and her mentor; the pods where each pony floated in a shared telepathic fantasy world carefully controlled by dreaming changelings, where the magic of friendship and adventure would keep their slowly-beating hearts brimming with a steady supply of love upon which the monsters would feed. No, the image that had burned itself indelibly into Twilight's memory was far more terrible, despite its haunting beauty. It was their smiles.