“No.”
Parch Mint raised an eyebrow. “No?”
Twilight shook her head. “No. We’re not staying here that long.”
“Fascinating.” His eyes narrowed as he stroked his scruffy beard. “And just how do you intend to escape this forgotten realm, eh? I seem to remember you asking exactly how to do that in the first place.”
“We did that once already,” Spike interjected. “Right, Twi?”
She nodded firmly.
Parch Mint’s sceptical frown didn’t change. “Are you certain? This place as a tendency to addle the mind. I remember having rather vivid hallucinations from time to time in my first decade here.”
Are we?
Twilight remembered entering the castle grounds to search for information on the Tree of Harmony. The rest of her friends had gone there for reasons of their own as well, and she remembered leaving it all together after having scared each other silly all day. She remembered returning in the morning after discovering that she’d forgotten to retrieve the princesses’ journal, and subsequently getting herself and Spike trapped again.
Can we even trust my memories?
She had two clearly distinguishable versions of the castle in her mind: the one with the ideal aesthetics of a ruin that looked more like a museum’s set-piece, and the more grounded, truly ruined version with rotting books, crumbling floors and hundreds of years’ worth of accumulated organic filth. She shuddered at the memory of the guano-filled chamber. The latter corresponded with her wakefulness, before she’d allowed the star spider to bite her and trigger whatever conditions that allowed her to enter this astral projection.
In theory, at least. She wasn’t sure if she could actually prove any of that. Still, better to hold on to the hope for now; she didn’t want to put the weight of Parch Mint’s implications on Spike until they had exhausted all options.
“Okay, I can’t prove it yet, but I’m sure that we weren’t dreaming when we left this place. Just tell us what you know so we can start working on a solution.”
“Hmm…” Parch Mint still didn’t drop his frown. Instead, his horn started glowing, and the next second, his mouth twisted into a grimace before grunted and ended his spell. “Well, that’s fair enough, I suppose. At the very least I’ll have something different to do for once.”
“Did you just cast a scrying spell?” she asked.
“Ah, smart filly. You recognised it. But I suppose that’s to be expected of an alicorn. How did that come about?” He flashed her a rather dirty grin. “Did Princess Celestia finally allow a stallion to take her to heaven and back?”
Twilight tilted her head.
“Well, we wouldn’t know. But Princess Celestia doesn’t have any foals, either,” Spike pointed out.
It took a moment for the implications of the stallion’s and dragon’s words to sink in. When they did, for some reason, Twilight’s brain decided to picture Celestia with her father, Night Light in bed and—
Aagh, no! Why?
“Of course not. We’re not even related!” she half-shrieked, feeling her face grow hot. “Princess Celestia is my teacher; nothing more!” Then, rounding on Spike, she growled, “And how did you even know what he was talking about?”
Spike shrugged. “We were rearranging the biology section all day last week. You can’t expect me to not read some of them. Especially the ones with pictures.”
“With pictures? Wha—” Her jaw dropped. “I… Okay. We’ll get back onto this another time. For now, let’s just focus on our current problem.”
“Heh. Sure. Can you imagine if—”
“I just did, and I wish I had a memory-wipe spell on hoof right about now,” she grumbled.
“Huh? What did you pic—”
She could feel her face turning redder still. “Moving on, Spike!”
“Fine, sheesh.” He rolled his eyes and folded his arms. “Don’t know why you’re so worked up about the idea of being Celestia’s kid. It’s not like you don’t treat her like a mother half the time, anyway.”
“My, my,” said Parch Mint, still sporting a gleeful grin. “You two really are quite the pair! Come, have a seat. I must hear more of what has happened for the last two hundred years.”
His horn glowed, and Twilight jumped aside as a swarm of cushions whirled around them briefly before settling down to form two pillow-nests nearly identical to his. He then patted on a puffy cushion in invitation, and they both gingerly made themselves comfortable.
“Hungry?” he asked. “You technically don’t need to eat in here, but I remember taking a really long time to discard the habit. What’ll you have?”
“Uh…”
Spike’s eyes glinted. “Any chance you got sapphires?”
“I don’t think that’s something anypony will have lying around just like that,” Twilight began pointing out, just as Parch Mint levitated a stack of books aside to reveal a bowl filled with neatly cut sapphire gems.
“Hey, cool!” Spike wasted no time in grabbing the bowl and munching away contentedly.
“But how did—were those lying there the whole time?” Twilight swept her gaze over the rest of his impressive book fort, wondering what else he had stashed in every nook and cranny.
“They weren’t until they were.”
She frowned. “What kind of an answer is that?”
“The simplest kind. I just want something, and that something appears, usually within easy reach.”
Twilight stared at him for a moment before shifting her gaze to a nearby cushion. Slowly, she peeled it up from the floor, hoping to find a first-edition of Thaumaturgy Divided or something similarly rare underneath, but at the same time bracing for the possibility of something nasty leaping out at her.
She found nothing.
“Well, that didn’t work,” said Spike through a mouthful of sapphire.
Parch Mint shrugged when she threw him a questioning look. “My best approximation of the mechanism is that you have to want it and believe it at the same time. Or at the very least, not doubt it. Sometimes, even the things you do not desire can manifest if they occupy enough of your thoughts. Actually, just forget logic; thinking too much about the why and how tends to hinder the process.”
Logic… won’t help?
Somewhere inside, a tiny part of Twilight wailed in anguish.
“You know, this kind of explains how we kept running into all those weird things last time,” Spike pointed out. “Seriously, none of those trapdoors made any sense.”
Twilight stared at her hooves in silence as she recalled everypony’s accounts of their shenanigans in the castle. Pinkie and her fully functional organ, Angel Bunny and his bowl of carrots, the pristine suits of armour, secret passages leading to all sorts of places without rhyme or reason. But still…
“Does that mean you can get anything you want?”
Parch Mint shook his head. “Sadly, no. There are limits, though it’s not clear exactly where the boundary lies.”
She glanced around. “So… did you will all of these into existence just by wanting them?”
“Again, no.” He gestured towards his books. “Most of these are as constant as the castle itself, having existed as plain paper before I began working on them. Those that I summon directly tend to vanish if I forget about them.” He had a wistful look on his face for a moment before he shook his head and waved the topic aside with a hoof. “Anyway, on to more interesting things! I must’ve missed so many goings on in the outside world.”
Twilight hesitated. “But… our bodies—”
“Please, indulge me this one thing for a while.” Parch Mint’s composure cracked for a moment, just long enough for her to see the flash of desperation in his eyes – the look of a stallion who’d been alone for far too long. “I promise not to keep you overlong, and I’ll help you as best I can when we are finished.”
She turned to Spike, who gave her a noncommittal shrug.
“I—all right, I guess it wouldn’t hurt. Anything in particular you’d like to know?”
Parch Mint gestured vaguely with a hoof. “Surprise me. But your names would be a good start, so I can call you something other than filly and dragon.”
“Oh, right. I’m Twilight Sparkle, and this is Spike.” She paused for a moment to gather her thoughts. “Say, how much do you know about the Mare in the Moon?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Eh?”
Twilight balked for a moment. Then, the thought sank in.
He doesn’t know.
She felt a grin coming on as she quickly organised her points to remedy that gap in his knowledge.
Spike rolled his eyes. “Oh boy. You just triggered her lecture mode.”
* * * * *
If Parch Mint felt bad about the fact that he and most of his colleagues had completely and wrongfully dismissed the significance of the Mare in the Moon all their careers, he didn’t show it. His scholarly look had turned into that of an awed student as he listened raptly to her recount of the return of Nightmare Moon and her subsequent defeat by the Elements of Harmony. To his credit, he didn’t seem to have any objections to Celestia sharing her rule with Princess Luna after her recovery.
He did admit to a little confusion about the presence of four alicorn princesses, though. Seemed to think that having more than one cheapened the status. Twilight didn’t blame him; at times she did wonder about her future as an alicorn, and whether they would see any other ascensions within her lifetime. At any rate, Parch Mint seemed familiar with the concept of Princess Celestia grooming Twilight as an apprentice, though she could not recall Celestia taking anypony else under her wing before.
Spike’s hatching did get a raised eyebrow from him, along with a bit of muttering in the gist of wishing he had a dragon assistant with instantaneous messaging to boot. Spike’s eye-roll made his opinion on the matter clear enough.
They moved on to general history after that. She briefed him as best she could on the most significant discoveries since his time, along with the founding of various cities and settlements whenever he voiced his unfamiliarity with certain names.
At some point, they exhausted the topic and came back around to the castle itself. Despite feeling certain that several hours had gone by, Twilight couldn’t find any way to mark the passage of time aside from Spike’s empty bowl. She wondered if Parch Mint counted that as a blessing, given how long he had remained trapped in this… nightmare. The term seemed appropriate enough.
“What about the other ponies?” she asked, tilting her head towards the listless figures wandering about in the distance. “How long have they been here?”
“They’re not really ponies, else I would be more welcoming of their company,” he said with a disapproving glance towards a mare sweeping the floor. “Have you ever used a scrying spell in here? Near one of them, I mean.”
“I know about the castle, but what about them?”
“See for yourself.”
Frowning, Twilight closed her eyes and gingerly channelled the spell. As expected, the overwhelming brightness of the arcane threads surrounding them quickly generated pain behind her eyes and in her horn, so she didn’t have time to waste. In contrast to their surroundings, Spike and Parch Mint had a more subtle, organic glow to their auras. The other ponies dotting the undercroft’s landscape, on the other hoof, had brilliant figures like lit trees on Hearth’s Warming Eve – as artificial as the pocket realm they occupied. Fighting the growing headache, she rapidly zipped her attention from one to the next, hoping to find a real pony amongst them.
Eventually, though, the pain compelled her to terminate the spell.
“You understand, now.” Parch Mint commented dryly.
“What’s he talking about?” Spike asked, switching his gaze repeatedly between them.
Twilight had to take a moment to massage her temples before answering, “They’re constructs, just like the castle.” She shook her head and groaned. “No wonder they acted so… weird. Where did they come from?”
“You’ll have to ask the librarian yourself, I’m afraid. Even with all these at my disposal,” – here, he gestured towards his mountain of books – “I have not determined the mechanism by which she brought them into being. She either has knowledge and skill far beyond mine, or has discovered a way to create simulacra the same way we can summon petty objects from thin air in this place. At least, I am quite certain that she’s responsible; she had names for each of them.”
“She was kind of lonely, huh?” Spike asked.
“In all likelihood, she’s been here for far longer than I have. I could never learn much about her past; her lips were rather tight in that regard, but every now and then I managed to glean some little titbit when she was feeling unusually chatty. That mare – Summer Cloud’s her name – once corrected me on some facts concerning the exodus from Everfree; I suspect she might have witnessed it herself, if not lived as one of the colonists.”
Twilight remained silent. She could barely fathom living alone for a couple of hundred years, let alone close to a thousand.
“At any rate, the poor filly had—”
“Isn’t she technically older than you?” Spike interjected.
That earned him a scowl from Parch Mint. “She looked barely older than my niece when we first met. Anyway, as I was saying, she’d surrounded herself with these poor imitations of ponies for company when I first explored these ruins. A nice little community of servants, happy readers and a couple of guards. Threw me for a loop, I can tell you.”
Twilight raised a hoof. “Are you the only other real pony to have found her in all these years? Until us, I mean.”
Parch Mint’s ears drooped, and he stared at the floor for quite a while before answering, “No. At least, I’m certain Longshot and Ferrite were real. Two self-styled explorers – grave robbers, more likely – that got a lot more than they bargained for. Funny guys, once you got over the fact that they were here to pick the castle clean of leftover valuables, the scoundrels.” He chuckled wryly. “I hadn’t yet figured out my predicament when I first met them, so I never confirmed it with scrying. But they had too much personality to be simulacra. I do miss them, crass language and all.”
“So where are they now?”
His mouth settled into a grim line. “None of us knew how to escape. We didn’t know how much control Summer had in here; we just thought her another unlucky explorer. More on that in a moment.”
He shook his head. “Poor slobs didn’t have any interest in books, no matter how often I advised them to poke their snouts into one. I wonder if that’s a pegasus thing. Went stir-crazy from boredom after they got tired of stealing things from a place they couldn’t leave. Summer Cloud played librarian, studied and transcribed to keep herself occupied, and I had access to volumes lost to the ages for writing my dissertations that nopony will ever look at – you could be the first, though.”
Spike eyed the impressive pile of worksheets next to Parch Mint and frowned. “What does all that have to do with anything?”
“I wasn’t joking about staving off insanity,” Parch Mint growled. “Longshot and Ferrite went berserk turning the place inside out in their search for an exit. Summer had been happy to ignore them for the most part, until they started wrecking her materials. They blamed her, since she was here the longest and didn’t seem all that troubled. Probably in denial, but they pushed her until she snapped and banished them underground.”
Something about his tone made the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and Twilight had to peer around a stack of books to get a view of the rest of the undercroft just to assure herself that somepony wasn’t sneaking up on them. She couldn’t spot any shadowy figures lurking around aside from the wandering simulacra, but that didn’t make her feel much better.
“So… where are they now? And how did you end up here?” she asked.
“This place addles the mind, as you probably know by now. Between the lost books and all the time in the world, I was happily doing research and writing papers for the better part of four… maybe five months. Possibly six; it’s hard to remember. I didn’t question much until those two arrived, and even then, I still acted like I was on a lengthy expedition.”
He sighed. “When she banished the poor fellows, I realised her connection to this place. I, too, confronted her when I began wondering about ever returning to Canterlot. Apparently, she didn’t not like her illusion of normalcy challenged, and it was off to the dungeons with me.”
“And the other two?”
Parch Mint gave them a piercing stare. A deep weariness lurked in the depths of his eyes, and Twilight shivered involuntarily as he said, “We were confined; the gate was shut, and there were no windows or drains. We roared, we begged and we cried. Hour upon hour, scouring every little corner and shadow looking for a possible way out. We drove ourselves insane. They turned on me, blaming me for lacking the skill to teleport us out. So I simply kept away and despaired on my own.
“The things I did to—actually, never mind. I’ll spare you the tedium of hearing about the turmoil I went through before recovering some semblance of a clear mind. Suffice to say, after anything between a week and maybe a decade or two, I gave up and carried on as best I could, wishing quills and ink into existence to write anything I fancied on the walls.
“In the meantime, simulacra started appearing down here. I don’t know what drove Summer to discard them, but I doubt she did it out of a desire to provide us with cheap company. Perhaps she got tired of their falseness herself. The ‘servants’ annoyed me to no end when they kept cleaning up my scribbling.”
Parch Mint’s gaze had wandered a little during his narration, but his eyes suddenly darted back to Twilight when she fidgeted.
“Yes, yes. I’m getting to what happened to the two boys.” His eyes grew distant for a moment. “You ever set hoof into a mental asylum? I think you would’ve considered this one during that time. True despair is… ugly and frightening. I kept my distance, and thankfully, they seldom saw fit to bother me. Over time, they became like those fellows.” He waved his hoof in the general direction of one of the blank-faced simulacra.
Spike shifted closer to Twilight, pressing to her side, and she involuntarily wrapped a foreleg around him. She could feel him shivering a little. Or maybe she was the one trembling; she couldn’t tell. Upon glancing down and seeing his nervous gulp, she grit her teeth behind her lips and tightened her hold on him as if to say, I won’t ever let that happen to us.
“They eventually disappeared, though,” Parch Mint carried on, oblivious to their exchange. “Just gone, one day.”
“They got out?” Twilight asked hopefully.
“I don’t know. I checked everywhere and never found them, but at the same time, I’m not so sure if it did them any good.”
“Hang on,” Spike interjected, raising a claw. “How’d you even check everywhere? I thought you were stuck down here.”
“I teleported.”
“Wait, I thought you said—”
Parch Mint fixed them a wry grin. “That I couldn’t do it? I already knew the theory; I just lacked the skill and never had a reason to master something so far beyond my ability it until then. Mind you, I still took the better part of a blasted lifetime to master it, but I eventually managed to make my way to the top again.”
“Uh, Twilight?”
She scratched the back of her neck and grinned sheepishly at Spike. “Yeah, I should’ve thought about that. It’s very risky, though. I don’t know the exact dimensions to make a safe jump.” She then focused on Parch Mint. “But I suppose you do.”
He nodded. “I can show you later, but back to the two boys for now. I searched the whole castle, but I never found a trace of them. Unless Summer has another pocket reality to banish them to, they had either escaped, or…”
“Or what?” Twilight pressed.
Parch Mint patted himself on the chest. “What are we, right now? I’m certain we aren’t organic; I’ve not eaten or relieved myself for ages. What about pure consciousness? Souls? Can we… unravel in this state?”
He shook his head. “Never mind. The answers probably won’t be very helpful right now. I’ll just say this: I never saw those boys again. If they truly escaped, good on them, I suppose. Otherwise, there’s the possibility that true apathy can utterly destroy a soul. I even wrote two whole books exploring the theory, if you care to read.”
“Umm, maybe later.” She had bigger things to worry about, like why he had opted to lurk in the undercroft when he apparently had access to most of the castle. “So… why are you still down here?”
“Oh, she simply banished me again that one time I actually tried to fight her; I lost, in case you didn’t realise.”
Spike raised an eye ridge. “She sent you back to the place that you can leave whenever you like?”
“Well, what else can she do? Execute me?” He chuckled heartily at first, but they soon faded away when Twilight and Spike didn’t join in, leaving them in awkward silence. “Eh, forgive me. Death doesn’t look the same anymore.” He cleared his throat as if to reset the conversation and went on. “I stay here because it’s the closest thing to home. I’m far from her, and she tolerates the odd book I pilfer every now and then so long as I return it within a month. If I like it, I make a copy before she comes after me. And so this has gone on, year after year, until you youngsters showed up.”
His tale apparently finished, Parch Mint reached behind a stack of books and fished out another bowl of sapphires, which he offered to Spike. “Another round for you?”
Spike glanced at the empty bowl in his claws, then tentatively massaged his belly before frowning and shaking his head. “Uh, I’ll pass. They were sort of good, but I—I don’t think they’re really doing anything for me. I still feel kinda empty.”
Parch Mint nodded. “A fleeting pleasure, sadly.”
The silence closed in on them once more. Twilight gazed at his mountain of books, wondering what it would’ve felt like to go through them endlessly, day in and day out, working whilst the outside world aged past without a care. Could she ever tire of that? Looking back at how she’d often seclude herself in the library to conduct research or write reports, she saw an uncomfortable likeness between her behaviour and Parch Mint’s. If she could lock out the world, suspend all distracting bodily functions and focus all her time and energy on academic pursuits, would she?
The old Twilight might, before she had friends.
She glanced at the old stallion and shivered internally; she did not want to share his fate. Life had a lot more to offer than that, and the thought of trapping Spike here for a fantasy he did not share burned at her conscience.
We can’t stay here.
“Eh? Did you say something?” Parch Mint asked.
“We can’t stay here,” Twilight repeated as she rose to all fours. “Can you show me the coordinates for a safe teleport out?”
“What’s your plan?”
“I’ll talk to her again. Now that I know more of the story, I might be able to get through to her.”
He chuckled ruefully. “I wish shared your optimism. She’s a stubborn one. But if you can corner her, then perhaps she might show more respect a student of the Princess, especially if you are as magically adept as I believe.”
Twilight bit her lip. “I—I’d rather not have to fight, if that’s what you mean.”
“I’d bet you can take her on,” Spike pointed out, springing to his feet. “Those guards won’t stand a chance, either.”
“It may very well come to that,” Parch Mint warned, also getting to all fours. “Come with me.”
He led them to a darker, more secluded corner in the chamber, away from any books or junk that might get damaged by a ‘potentially faulty’ teleport, as he put it. Along the way, he furnished her with the necessary coordinates to make a safe jump back to the castle’s courtyard, which she dutifully committed to memory.
“Say, what’re you getting out of this?”
The old stallion arched an eyebrow at Spike, then grinned. “Drama, hopefully. Changing the status quo. Anything to break the monotony, really.”
“You… you can’t really go back, can you?” Twilight said in an undertone. “Your body can’t have survived until now.”
“I have moved past it,” he huffed. “Save your tears for the girl who still hasn’t come to terms with her fate.”
* * * * *
Teleporting within a variant of astral projection felt very different from bypassing normal space. Instead of sensory nullification, traversing the arcane threads gave her a massive amount of thaumic feedback, like a mild case of getting struck by lightning.
Twilight emerged back into the courtyard gritting her teeth and groaning, accompanied by a small explosion of heat and smoke that incinerated the grass at her hooves. Spike’s loud cry rang in her ears a moment before he toppled off her back and landed belly-first, creating a ripple of fine ash. Her hooves wobbled, but she managed to steady herself in time and glared at Parch Mint, who apparently hadn’t had much trouble with the spell at all.
“Ugh. You know, that was a lot more than ‘just a little shock’,” she grumbled.
Spike groaned and began cleaning his sooty face with a rag, all the while giving the stallion a bit of the stink eye. “Yeah, not cool at all.”
“Heh, my mistake.” He dipped his head in apology. “I’ve had my, uh, standards for agony significantly raised by a few botched attempts to escape.”
“What did you do?”
“Oh, just a little bit of impalement, incineration, and visceral disruption… maybe a touch of petrification here and there,” he said, gesturing vaguely with a hoof.
Twilight and Spike simply stared at him, open-mouthed.
Parch Mint shrugged. “Did I mention that conventional methods for offing oneself don’t work?”
“I’m so gonna need therapy after this,” Spike muttered.
Twilight gently patted him on the shoulder. “Hang in there. Ice cream and full day at the spa after we get out. My treat.”
“Lovely sentiment, but let us focus on your task before thinking about celebrating, eh?”
She followed his gaze to the massive doors to the great hall. Thick clouds hung in the evening sky, shedding just enough light on the stone griffons perched on the roofs and walls to give them an eerie outline as the wind howled and whistled through the castle’s many windows. Deep inside, an ancient library filled with forgotten knowledge, guarded by a lonely, lost mare wielding strange magic. Collateral damage looked very likely if things got heated, but would any of that matter if the books weren’t real?
The great doors rumbled as Twilight pushed them open with magic. She paused just at the threshold and took a deep breath to steady her racing heart. Then, glancing back, she saw Spike following with grim determination on his face. Parch Mint had a more leisurely stance as he trotted along.
Well, here goes.
The wind at her back blew a storm of dead leaves and grass through the gaping doorway, and she resolutely marched forth into the shadows.