//------------------------------// // Act I, scene ix - Education, Explosions, And Electrical Storms // Story: A World Rent Asunder // by NeverEatTheLemonsAlone //------------------------------// So. Pinkie Pie. Pinkamena Diane Pie. I'm in an exceedingly precarious place in life right now. As long as she stays happy, I should be fine. The instant she becomes dissatisfied, though, she'll snap and I don't know if I'll live through another of her psychotic episodes, given how many violent and brutal ways to murder me she has access to. I just need to stay here for long enough to fill my magical reserves again and then I can get as far away from this pony as possible. Until then, I'll be walking on a razor's edge. In order to escape from her psychotic ramblings, I've taken to wandering the deeper halls of the castle. Never too deeply, though; I don't want a repeat of what happened last time. Just in case, I always take along a small knife that I 'borrowed' from Pinkie [1], using it to leave small, inconspicuous arrows on the walls to direct me back to the relative security of the tower. So far, I've seen no echoes from the past. Maybe as long as I stay away from any of the large, important halls, I can avoid them altogether. In the absence of something trying to brutally murder me, though, I can actually look at the place around me. Sure, the walls may be carpeted in ice. Sure, there may be a distinct lack of anything alive. Sure, there may be the ever-present fear of one of Pinkie's experiments causing the whole building to collapse on my face. But even so, it's beautiful. And I don't mean that in the "ooh look at my ostentatious, flashy dress made entirely of mirrors" beautiful. Perhaps beautiful isn't even the right word. It's perfectly at peace. Nothing moves, nothing shifts, nothing explodes unless Pinkie makes it. It makes for a nice change from all of the death that I've seen in the last while. On the topic of 'in a while', I've completely given up measuring the time in days. Twenty-four hours is all well and good, but I don't have a reliable way to measure it. It's purposeless anyway; at this point, I just sleep until I'm not tired anymore. So, back to the on-topic present. I'm meandering through the halls when something catches my eye. A glowing light. Looks something like a candle. Curious, I enter the doorway that it's sprouting from and find my jaw resting firmly on the floor. A library. A massive, massive library. Hastily hacking a mark onto the wall with the knife, I barely suppress a very undignified schoolfilly giggle and limp my way along the shelves. Somehow, the entire place is lit up with candles. I can't even begin to imagine the kind of spell that would keep them burning for this long. Perhaps Celestia still feeds them with her light without even knowing. Maybe I can even find an answer to that question in here. One what appears to be an ancient study table, something catches my eye; an enormous map. Dead center in the middle is a bright red pin, a tiny little flag with 'Canterlot' written on it. So, that's where I am, is it? Eyes roving over the map, I spot an area slightly to the east of where I am now, a large expanse of beautifully rendered miniature trees labeled 'Everfree Forest'. I frown. That name has been tossed around in folklore for centuries. Supposedly, it was a beautiful forest, one of the few that governed itself without having ponies tend to it in the olden times. These days, though, most of nature does that on its own. I jump slightly as my synapses make the connection: it's smaller on the map, so I obviously wouldn't recognize it, but that forest is exactly where the heart of the Cullwood would be. [2] Shuddering momentarily, I take my eyes off of that particular area, letting them scan the paper. In the far north, past the borders of 'Equestria', there's a small blue pin entitled 'The Crystal Empire', and almost in a mirror, in the direct south, there's a final pin, dead black, simply labeled 'The Chaos Throne'. There are a few small sketches on the side of the map, and I look over them curiously. A trio of diamonds, a lightning bolt, a few balloons, a few other shapes that I don't recognize, my cutie mark... Hang on. What? Sure enough, there it is, staring at me in plain sight, on the paper. Now that I think about it, some of the others look familiar...I can't precisely place two of them, namely the lightning bolt and the diamonds, but I definitely recognize those balloons. That's Pinkie's mark. I take a step back, mildly disturbed. To the tiny, perfect lines, it's Pinkie and my cutie marks outlined on a piece of paper a millennium old. I wonder; what with those echoes, were the princesses messing with the timestream, or is there another, less obvious reason? Trying to distract myself from that quandary, I wrench my eyes away from the scribblings and cast them around at the rest of the library. It really is enormous, easily large enough to contain two or three of the library from the Solar Citadel. All of this knowledge, unknown, untouched. I wonder if there's anything here about that 'Chaos King' that Celestia's old diary had mentioned. Combing the shelves, I use a small quantity of magic to remove some that look rather interesting. Though it's irritating, the fact of the matter is that at the point my magic is right now, I can only carry a few books, so that's how many I take. It's a cause of concern for me how slow my magic is in returning. It's generally significantly faster than this. Perhaps, once again, this castle is making things different for me. Given that, completely by my own actions, there are actually holes torn through the aether here, it's entirely possible that the ambient magic that I need to recharge my own with is leaking out through. Grumbling, I begin to calculate briefly in my head, given the rate of how much magic I've gained in a usual day, and come up with approximately 17.33 (repeating, of course) days until my magical reserves are entirely refilled. If pressed, I can probably shave half a week or so off of that, but I'd really rather have enough to get me through the rest of my trip once I come down from this mountain. Anyway, those books. In order, the ones I remove from the shelves are entitled Faith, Folly, And Futility: A Dissertation On Time Divergence Arcane Crystal Dynamics A Theory On Destiny and finally, A History Of Equestria, In Brief. This should give me enough reading material to last a day or two. --- [1]: She won't even know it's gone. Shut up. [2]: I guess it found a different way to be a wilderness. After all, if most of nature acts like it, it loses the ability to defend itself. It simply got more...aggressive. --- In the next few days, I do my research, becoming extremely well-read on Equestria. It seems as though it was a society approaching utopian, and they'd developed quite a few extraordinarily interesting uses for crystal in magic. My personal favorite is using it as a battery, a sort of portable storage unit from which a unicorn from siphon magic at any time. They'd even done some research on how cutie marks affect a pony's destiny and the profound mental changes that can occur as a result of tampering with such things. The most interesting document by far, however, is the one on time divergences. I find myself endlessly fascinated by just how many possible timelines there are. In fact, every second, every microsecond, every tiny decision made by anypony in the entire world, even coincidences that occur by random chance, creates an entirely new universe and timeline all to itself. There are likely timelines in which I was never born, in which my brother lived through the attempt on his life, and probably where there is no war and Equestria continues to develop. I have to wonder; are there ways of switching from timeline to timeline? Nopony has ever discovered one, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe... I shake, bringing myself back to the world of the living. Seeing other futures would likely make mine seem worse. [1] Anyhow, over the course of the next several days, I devour whole sections of the library. Turns out that using a little bit of my magic to carry the books is actually sort of stretching it, and I'm gaining it more rapidly, throwing off my calculations. Only ten days in, I can lift entire bookshelves' worth of books. Not only that, but whatever that green liquid Pinkie has is, when she's in a good mood, it can heal days' worth of injury to my shoulder at a time. In not too long, I can walk and run at nearly 100 percent. When my magic has finally been restored to its fullest potential, I feel better than I have in quite some time. It's time to move on from this mountain, because I need to get back to what I was doing. I just hope Pinkie is content to let me leave. --- [1]: Unless I happened to look in on a post-apocalypse version. That would just be flat-out depressing. --- She's far more than content to let me go. In fact, she's so much more than content that she decides to tag along. So now, I'm carefully picking my down the slopes, grumbling quietly, with Pinkie following slowly in my hoofsteps. Still, she deserves to come off of that mountain. I was only up there for two weeks or so, and it's still more than enough. I can't even imagine months, or even years, spent up there, wandering through a castle in which time is in a permanent state of flux. I wonder how long it would take me to go insane just like she did? But those are thoughts for another time. Right now, I need to concentrate on not falling to my death. So Pinkie and I are carefully making our way through the pass, trying to make sure that we're both safe, until the path all-too-suddenly come to an end. It drops off into a sheer cliff, falling hundreds of feet into a raging, thunderous river. Peeking over the edge, I blanch and quickly backpedal. "We're going to have to find another way around, Pinkie. There's no way for us to get down that—" She body-slams me off of the cliff. "Pinkie!" I scream as we careen down towards the rapids beneath us, "Why in Tartarus would you do that!?" "Because you can shield us with magic, silly!" she replies with a giggle. "Are you insane?" I shriek back, momentarily forgetting who I'm talking to. "Do you have any idea how hard it is to make a magical shield that nullifies the impact from a fall this high?" She shrugs in midair. "Nope!" I close my eyes. Oh Celestia, she's not just insane. She's also an idiot. It's a bit early after refilling my magic to put it to the test in such a strenuous fashion, but needs must, and I'd rather not die horribly upon falling from a cliff. Keeping my eyes tighter, I do my best to neglect how fast we're moving as my horn begins to glow. The glow quickly becomes a pulse, which becomes a strobe, which becomes a nova of brilliant purple light. Finally, as I gasp and snap my eyes open, hoping for twin spheres to appear. They don't. Out of a pure instinct of self-preservation, I only managed to throw up a shield around myself. Pinkie is still woefully unprotected and her eyes widen as she realizes what just happen. Her gravity-defying hair poofs into the psychopathic straightness that I've come to fear and she tears an explosive from her belt and yells at me to light it. After a brief moment of incomprehension, I realize what she's planning. I swear, if she actually pulls this off, I'll be really, really amazed. My horn sparks one final time and the fuse ignites. With an incoherent shout, she fastballs it down as quickly as she can. It vanishes into the water that's just thirty or so feet beneath us and for a moment, everything is silent but the wind. Then the entire river erupts into a massive fountain of water that surges up against our falling forms. Unbelievably, it works; I can feel myself decelerating as the mass of flying water pounds against my shield. I can hardly see Pinkie through the spray and, acting purely on instinct, I send out a strand of magic, effectively binding us together so she doesn't get swept away. It's a tenuous hold at best, though; keeping the shield up is taking nearly all of my energy. [1] In what feels like both an eternity and only a few moments, the explosion is done and, amazingly, we're both alive. For now. Because now we're entering the river proper, and those rapids look mean. --- [1]: Interesting fact about magic, for those who don't know: its flow is selective. Think of it like a window. It's a gateway to the entire sun in all its massive power and glory, but only a small amount can escape at any given time. There are only two ways for this limit to be bypassed. The first is with an intense magic surge. Emotion and magic are strongly interconnected, and an excess of either at one time can cause dangerous phenomena for the other. The other way is for a unicorn to simply overpush themselves. When somepony does this, their horn overloads and can crack, fracture, or in the worst of cases, completely shatter. The first two can heal, given enough time. The last one cannot. So anyway, picture a piece of wood being held in front of the majority of that window. That's a spell like the shield that I was casting. Less light can enter, or rather, less magic can be used to create the tether. It's a simple self-preservation instinct to avoid horn damage. --- Ow ow ow ow ow My shield overloaded quite a while ago so that I could keep a hold on Pinkie, and now we're both careening down the intense rapids of this river. I keep looking for an eddy or a reprieve, but nothing appears. It's just raging white water for as far as I can see, in the brief moments where I actually have vision of what lies ahead. It's becoming difficult to reach air, and it feels like the rapids are only becoming worse. As we blast down the chute of a particularly heavy whitewater, I see something in the distance, streaking towards us at absurd speeds. Before I can actually see what it is, though, I go under again. This time, though, I can't come up. The water is just too fast, and my breath is starting to burst inside of my chest. Too much. Just too much. Damn it, Pinkie... is the last thing I think before I can't stop myself anymore and begin to inhale a huge lungful of water. There's a flash of scorching moonlight above my head, and it takes me a moment to register that I'm ascending at a mildly ridiculous pace, and actually breathing air. The magical leash is still holding and Pinkie is trailing behind me, eyes wide with fear as she watches the ground drop away from beneath her. Then I look up at what's holding me and see the last thing I ever expected. "Dash?!" Sure enough, Commander Dash is hauling me and, by extension, Pinkie, out of the river, saving us from certain death. Only one thing is really running through my befuddled mind now: Why? --- Perhaps thirty seconds later, Dash drops us unceremoniously onto a field of dry, unhealthy-looking grass. She glares at me, venom in her eye, and I quail in front of her icy stare. "Let me be very clear with you, Sparkle," she begins, her voice soft and deadly serious, "Just because I saved you doesn't make us allies or friends. I cannot in good conscious watch a pony die by drowning. On the other hand, I would have no qualms about killing you here and now if it wasn't for your magic." I nod without speaking. She's actually legitimately frightening. [1] As she turns away from me, I pose a question to her. "How did you know where I was? I thought you'd be a long way away by now." Her head turns back, a mirthless smile on it. "I've been following you. Eventually, there's going to be a chance for me to get my revenge, and you can bet that I'm going to be taking it." There's a brief hiss behind me and Dash's eyes widen. It's Pinkie, or rather, Pinkie's manic state—I'll just call her Mena from now on, I suppose—and she looks absolutely furious. "Is she threatening our friend? Yes, she is. Don't worry. I'll take care of her!" She lunges at the pegasus, who flinches backwards instinctively before I grab Mena with my magic, watching with surprise at how angry she is. Perhaps getting her off of that mountain cemented me as a friend in her mind? I'll ask later. As of now, I'm more concerned about the horizon. "Uh, Dash?" She grumbles angrily and looks at me in irritation. "What is it now?" I point with a hoof at a black cloud that hangs over the land in the distance, occasional flashes of glaring blue lightning erupting throughout. My voice is audibly shaking as I ask, "What in Equus is that?" She laughs grimly. "Oh, didn't you know? That's where we're going." I cock my head inquisitively and she bares her teeth in a predatory smile. "It's the Chasmlands." [2] [1]: Occasionally, Dash manages to stop being an idiot for a few moments, and when she does, then she's really something to be feared. [2]: So from what I can tell about maps, Pinkie and I dropped into the river at a point which is much more southern than the edge of Cullwood, and then we were carried southeast on the river, and then Dash flew us south. All in all, we were actually far closer than before.