The front door to Rarity’s house stood half open, light spilling out on the lawn. My body ached with every step I took toward it, my lungs burning with hunger.
I hesitated by the door, listening to the silence, and walked inside.
A dark-blue dress lay in a heap on the floor, her shoes farther away with several strides between them. The trail of clothes led to the door with the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign.
The edges of my vision blurred as I moved toward the second door. The aching hunger raged inside me, the moonlit lake flashing before my eyes. I bumped against the door, the world spinning around me. Everything felt wrong. I could barely breathe.
I walked inside, lurching like a drunkard, and found myself in a hallway of glass, the dark lawn stretching out beyond window panels and the firelit plume of smoke visible above neighboring rooftops.
There was a white door up at the end of the glass tunnel, slightly ajar, the light from the other side reflecting in the glass walls.
I pushed it open and stumbled inside.
The blinding light hit me first.
My eyes clenched shut on their own, but the light still burned through my lids, my head stinging like a million needles were pricking my brain.
The smell hit me second.
I covered my nose. The scent was like the dream lilies on the balcony, but… wrong, somehow. It was sickeningly poignant, more rotten than sweet, barely masked by the scents of earth and grass.
My eyes adjusted, and I blinked them open, squinting. Trees lined the glass walls of the greenhouse. Glaring lamps hummed with electricity from up high. It was like a small forest, complete with trees and bushes and overgrown paths.
“Rarity…” I meant to yell it, but it came out a dry wheeze. I coughed. My own throat was choking me, the dust hunger squeezing harder and harder. I shuffled on weak legs down the overgrown path, looking around the greenery, searching.
A clearing came into view around a bush. White and blue flowers covered the round space. But these were nothing like the lilies on the balcony; they were in varying states of decay, hunched and withered, stems blackened, heads oozing sparkling white pus.
And at the center of the rotting plants stood my sister, grunting as she stomped on the flowers, uprooting them with her magic and tearing them to pieces, her face twisted with grief and rage.
I stood behind the bush, watching her, too weak and terrified to show myself.
Rarity lashed out one final time at the lilies, and stopped. She wiped her brow and stood there, breathing hard. Her horn glowed, and a wine glass filled with a blood-red liquid hovered over to her from a table.
She downed the whole glass and filled it again from a wine bottle. Her magic wrapped around a second bottle, this one small and white, bringing it closer. She emptied a few pills in her hoof, threw them in her mouth, and washed it down with a glass full of wine.
My stomach sank, but I didn’t move.
Rarity raised the bottle of pills over her head and opened her mouth.
I lashed out with my magic, striking the bottle from the air, pills scattering amongst the rotting flowers.
Rarity startled and spun.
Our eyes met, and my guilt and withdrawal rose to a peak. A wave of dizziness hit me, and an icy numbness crawled through my body. My heart pounded. The pain grew so intense I wanted to scream, but I couldn't breathe. Something wet ran from my nose, and I tasted blood on my lips.
Rarity opened her mouth, and the world was blinding white.
I collapsed.
Next thing I knew, Rarity stood over me as I trembled on the earthen floor, her face a white blur in all that light. “What’s wrong?” Her voice cut through the ringing in my ears. “What’s happening?”
“Dust,” I croaked. It was all I could think of in the pain.
“Overdose?” Rarity asked, sounding horrified.
“No.” I looked down at the ground, shielding my eyes from the searing light.
“Withdrawal?” Rarity asked, her voice ripe with disbelief.
I moaned, feeling cold all over.
“Oh, Sweetie,” Rarity said. “You should have dealt with this years ago. Why are you… Does it hurt?”
I didn’t answer.
“What can I do?” she asked.
“Lights…”
A moment passed, and the glaring lamps died, shadow flooding into the greenhouse.
The darkness eased my headache a little.
“You can’t do this to me,” Rarity said. “Not now.” She sat down beside me. “I can’t stand to see you like this.”
“I’m sorry,” I whimpered. “I’m sorry I came back.”
“Shh.” Rarity put her hoof over my shoulders and pulled me into an embrace. “Don’t talk.”
I breathed into her coat, trembling.
“I didn’t know you were this serious about quitting.”
“I’m trying…” Tears stung my eyes.
“When will it stop?” she asked.
“It usually doesn’t… last this long. I’ll be fine. I can… tough it out.”
“I have painkillers.”
“No,” I said. “No painkillers.” I swallowed. “What… were those things? The pills.”
Rarity didn’t answer.
“You’re supposed to be… the smart one. Why would you...” I moaned in pain.
Rarity held me tighter. “You have to let me do something for you.”
I hesitated. “Talk."
Rarity looked down at me. “Talk?”
"Tell...” Pain choked my words. “Tell me about their house.”
“Mom and dad’s?”
“Please.” I breathed into her chest. “I only remember a little from before we moved. Help me... remember.”
Rarity stayed silent for a while, then spoke. “We... shared a bedroom on the second floor, at the end of a hallway with no lights. You were too scared to walk through it alone at night, so I always went with you.” She paused. “I’m sorry. I should get you something for the—”
“No, please. Don’t stop.”
She hesitated again. “There were these... books on a shelf in our room. Fairy tales. I’d read them for you.”
“You read for me?”
“You’d get mad if I refused. We’d stay up late in the night just reading. Filled your little head with imagination. No wonder you were scared of the dark.”
I smiled despite the pain.
“How are you feeling?” Rarity asked.
“It helps when you talk.”
“I don’t know what else to talk about,” Rarity said.
I hesitated. “Can you... tell me about the lake?”
Rarity looked at me silently.
“On the night before we moved to Ponyville.” I looked down. “I don’t know if you remember.”
“I remember,” Rarity said.
I pressed my cheek into her coat and stared at the dark grass as pain hammered in my skull. “I want to hear it from you. Please.”
Rarity held me in silence for a moment. “You had run out of the house late in the evening. I remember I went out looking for you and found you sitting in dad’s rowboat on the shore of the lake. You were angry with me for moving without you. I tried giving you the speech about leaving the nest and chasing dreams, but none of it meant anything to you, young as you were.”
“I climbed into the boat,” Rarity continued. “The thing wobbled so much I fell into it. And when I got back up, the boat had slid from the shore and drifted out onto the lake with you and me in it.”
I smiled weakly at the memory, my pain easing.
“I may have panicked a little,” Rarity said. “Boats are filthy things that I’ve never wanted to have anything to do with, but there I was, trying to work out which end of the oars went into the water so I could get us back to shore. But it was a beautiful night. Warm. I remember the sky was clear and the moon was full.”
Rarity paused, like she was just remembering something. “You began to cry.”
“Then what did you do?” I asked, itching for her to continue.
“I sat down next to you in the back of the boat, and I held you, just like this. And you told me...” Rarity stopped herself. “And you said…”
“I said if I were the big sister, I’d never leave you.” I loosened my hold on Rarity. It felt wrong being close to her, like I was a fraud pretending to be her real sister. “I told you that sisters didn’t leave each other, they stay together.” I blinked away tears. “And I changed your mind. You promised you’d convince mom and dad to let me move to Ponyville with you. You promised me you wouldn’t leave me behind.”
I felt Rarity swallow. She said nothing.
“But I was the one who left you behind,” I said, my tears soaking her coat. “I turned into… this. And when mom and dad died, I did terrible things and abandoned you when you needed family most.”
Sobs rocked my body. “I’m sorry,” I said through my sore throat. “They're dead, and I’ll never get to say I’m sorry. It’s all my fault. Everything. I’m poison, just like you said. You’re all I have left, and I came back and ruined everything all over again.” I pulled away from her, guilt choking me. “I just wish… I wish you’d care about me like you did when you read me those fairy tales. I wish you still loved me like you did when we were out on that lake.”
Rarity pulled me back into an embrace and held me trembling against her. “I never stopped caring.”
“You hated me.”
“No, Sweetie,” Rarity said. “I hated what you were doing to yourself, we all did. But I could never hate you.” She kissed the top of my head and pressed her cheek against it. “You are my sister and I love you. Nothing you could ever do will change that.”
I clung to her, my pains washed away by a wave of euphoria, and for the first time in what seemed a lifetime, I felt at home.
A long while passed as she held me. My trembling stopped. My breathing calmed. My tears dried. The fireglow in the sky faded away, like a wound finally healed.
“I’m going to die soon,” Rarity said, breaking the silence.
“No. You won’t.”
“I’m proud of you,” she said. “You’re stronger than I could ever be.”
I breathed into her coat. “I don’t understand.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Please,” I said. “Let me.”
The wind pushed against the glass panels of the greenhouse.
“I’ve done terrible things,” Rarity said. “The lilies… They rot and crystallize and turn into... poison. I knew what they would be used for, but I sold them anyway, so I could keep pretending.”
“Pretend what?”
She didn’t answer.
I looked up, and her face was shrouded in shadow. “How many of those pills did you take?”
“Not enough,” she breathed.
I frowned. “How can you still think like that? Don’t you see that I want to make things good again? I want it to be the way it was. I want to help you. I want—”
“It’s always about what you want, isn’t it?” Rarity didn’t look down at me. “What about what I want, have you ever thought of that? Have you asked? Have you even tried to understand what I want?” She drew a trembling breath.
I said nothing.
“I’m so tired, Sweetie. I want to stop moving, just for a moment, but the world won’t let me. It’s like something’s forcing me forward. I want to stop. I want the pushing to end. I want…” She squeezed her eyes closed, and tears glistened on her face. “I just want to fall asleep and never wake again.”
“You don’t mean that.”
Her embrace weakened and her head drooped. “If you have any love for me, you’ll let me go.” She breathed into my mane, and suddenly I was the one holding her.
I swallowed, and for a moment the only sound in the world was her breathing against my neck. “Let’s get you to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
With a hoof over her shoulder, I helped her up and led her out through the glass corridor into the house, down the hallway with the paintings, and up into the dimness of her bedroom.
Ponyville’s evening glow shone through the three windows, the light kissing the dream lily on the nightstand with its two flowerheads, white and blue.
I pulled open the bed canopy, knocked some pillows aside, and laid my sister down on the bare mattress. “You’ll be okay. I’ll make things better again, I promise.”
“It’s too late.” Rarity shifted on the bed, barely awake. “It’s five years too late. Too late to even try.”
“You’re wrong,” I said, sitting down on the bedside. “You’ll wake up in the morning, and I’ll be here for you. I’ll...” I turned to the grandfather clock in the corner of the room, barely visible in the light from the windows.
Less than a minute to midnight.
“Rarity,” I said, turning to her. “You need to listen to me. I have to ask you something important, and it’ll be the last time I do. The money mom and dad left us. I need—”
“There is no money.”
I blinked. “What?”
“It’s gone,” Rarity said, eyes closed. “All of it. I lost it years ago.”
“But... your parties, your—.”
“Borrowed money,” Rarity said, “and the last of it I’ll get. The banks will seize everything I have to cover my debt, and it hardly covers a fraction of what I owe. And the vultures... They smell blood.” She rolled over on her side. “I’ve ruined so many lives, just like yours, so I could have enough money to keep pretending.” She breathed in deep. “I’m tired, Sweetie. I’m so very tired.”
“But...” My eyes went back to the clock. “The money…” I wanted to throw up. “No...” I looked at Rarity.
She had fallen asleep, breathing quietly in the dark room.
The clock struck midnight.