I wanted—no needed—to be alone to deal with Morpheus’ news. The idea that Bon Bon was a… that I hadn’t noticed her being… It was too much for me. I was shaken and afraid and feeling like such a hypocrite for thinking just like my friends did the night before.
With a practice storm coming in from Cloudsdale, though, I wasn’t going to find a good place to be alone in Ponyville. Foal that I was, I flew out over the Everfree thinking everything would be fine. I thought I could get to the Castle of the Two Sisters and ride the storm out there, but I missed the warning signs of something far worse than a Cloudsdale ‘wild’ storm.
For the Everfree is like Pinkie Pie. It defies the world as we know it, and it is best to approach its oddities with half a leap of faith. There are many dangers contained within, but it is remarkable how often there is a warning to the danger before it strikes.
Everfree wild storms, for example, have the peculiar warning of thunder followed by lighting as the sky gathers energy from the forest below. There are no ominous clouds in the distance to signal a wild storm. One second it’ll be clear skies, and the next there will be clouds on top of us. The only warning is the reverse lightning strikes which—oddly enough—also foretell the exact number of normal lightning strikes during the storm.
I didn’t follow the rules this time, though. I flew on after I finally saw the warning for what it was.
The roar of thunder washed over me from the right, sending me tumbling through the air. I had to teleport blindly to avoid being cooked, and rematerialized to see a bolt of lightning arcing into the air less than twenty trots from me. The heat from the blast sent a tingling sensation across my coat, and I arced to my left only to find myself shooting toward the canopy below.
“Discord damn it all!” I corrected my flight pattern as fast as my protesting wings would allow. My hooves briefly skimmed the canopy before I rose again, and a sloppy healing spell handled the damage to my hearing as best it could. That was the fifth strike to almost hit. I couldn’t afford to be so close to the canopy in case I needed to teleport again.
My feathers were in disarray, and I felt the muscles in my wings throb with each wretched flap. My primaries all but screamed in agony at the slightest rotation. The only thing keeping me going at this point was the adrenaline.
“If I make it out of this, I need to add teleporting mid-flight to my studies. This is ridic—” I teleported again, dodging the sixth bolt “—ulous!”
I arced upwards this time to quickly find I’d come in upside down. Turning it into a rather shaky loop, I managed to right myself a little faster this time.
My cry of victory—feeble, but well-earned—was drowned along with my brief rush of endorphins as another reverse strike formed in the distance. Grimacing, I looked back towards Ponyville to see the Cloudsdale practice storm still in full swing. And the Everfree storm was picking up momentum faster than I’d hoped it would. The rumble of thunder was constant, and spears of lightning continually pierced the heavens on all sides. Possibly the biggest storm of the century was forming.
And it was close to coalescing.
The strikes were only seconds apart at most – maybe even less – and it’d be foolish to continue pretending I could risk going on to the Castle of the Two Sisters any longer. Soon the Everfree would be giving birth to a very healthy, very strong, and very violent storm.
I scanned the trees below, looking for an opening to descend. A sea of verdant emerald, moss, and hunter green met my gaze. The forest glowed with life, yet paradoxically buried itself in shadows.
The darkness flitted and danced with feral glee promising strength and wisdom to those who lived through the night to see another day. It made my heart beat faster—impossible as that was—and made the throbbing ache in my wings bleed together into one uniform pain. Manic drums sounded in time with the blood pounding in my ears, and the wind couldn’t decide whether to whip me from side to side or send me surging forward with a speed I’d never felt before.
It was sheer, absolute, madness. I was going to crash. I was going to die and—
Taking as deep a breath as I could, I winced at how taut everything felt. Holding it in, I waited for a second and released. It wasn’t slow, but it was no longer quite so fast, and I repeated the process as I looked for a clearing.
Then the seventh bolt came, and I wasn’t prepared.
A massive column of light erupted from the ground about a hundred trots from me. Normally, that’d be perfectly fine for me, but the bolt was as thick as a tree.
The light seared my eyes, blinding me as the wave of heat that washed over me blew me back. I felt thousands of little needles prick me. Rain—tiny, fast, and cold—was pelting me from everywhere, and the air that had been displaced from the sudden heat of that last lightning bolt suddenly found itself torn apart a second time amid the rain’s deathly chill.
I heard a branch crash into the ground above me, and struggled to right myself. Hovering—or rather stumbling in one place as the wind pushed me around—I cast a minor healing spell on my eyes.
And my heart stopped when the darkness didn’t fade.
Then, a flash of lightning jump started it to unhealthy speeds again.
I waited for the next boltto get a frame of reference in this all-encompassing darkness. The bolt came, and it was like Celestia herself was pointing the way. The final reverse bolt that had pulled the storm together had created a clearing in the canopy. Even in the rain I could hear the fragile branches crackling, and I could taste the smoke in my mouth.
Thanking the stars, I flew towards the hole, correcting my path whenever more lightning came. As I finally made it, the wind all but shoved me down the breach, and I whimpered as branch after branch cushioned the fall to the ground below.
When I finally stopped, I laid in the moss and whimpered, letting the rain wash over me.
Beneath the canopy, the rain was soothing and gentle. Each drop kneaded my coat just the slightest bit, providing a light massage. The cold of the rain didn’t reach into the depths of the forest. It was damp and muggy, but oddly cozy, and I was tempted to give in to my exhaustion right there.
The bed of moss I’d landed on was just luminescent enough to chase the shadows away, but not enough to hamper sleep if I choose to nod off. It was lush and springy, and it smelled like a garden of citrus fruit.
It was a heady and wonderful scent that did an amazing job at masking the smell of scorched wood from the lightning. Even the rotting carcass on the next bed over smelled simply delightful.
I snuggled into my own bed even as alarm bells were ringing in the back of my mind. I shoved my head under the moss like it was a pillow and ignored them, wanting just five more minutes of rest.
Then, a timberwolf howled in the distance, and it jolted me back into awareness.
I struggled to my feet—not in pain but exhaustion. My whole body was numb as I stepped from my almost-bed, and I desperately wished to feel the shiver I could only imagine was running down my spine.
Moss covered stones were littered between the trees. All of them were about the size of a bed – or perhaps a coffin. And all of them gave off the most wonderful scent of pleasant dreams that would last a very long time. Some of them held creatures wrapped in sweet slumber, while others held corpses in a slow state of decay.
Tiptoeing past the manticores and other assorted monsters, I fought the urge to get back to my stone and sleep. I didn’t know whether I should be grateful or terrified I had landed in Looming Slumber. Any more exposure to it, and I would have fallen asleep while being slowly digested by sweet smelling acid, completely none-the-wiser.
I stumbled through the forest with as much care as I could—which wasn’t much with my body as numb as it was. Thankfully, the rain masked the noise. At least I think it did, I could barely hear the racket I imagined myself to be making as I tripped over roots and scraped past untold numbers of trees.
The few times I dared to give myself the slightest bit of light, I’d found it almost crushed within the rain and shadows, and quickly banished it to save energy. I had caught a brief glimpse of mud and purple in a puddle, though, so at least I knew I didn’t look tasty to predators.
Hopefully….
I stumbled about in darkness hoping to find one of the paths Zecora had made before hypothermia set in. The cold was starting to send shivers down my spine, and—
Wait.
If I could feel my shivering, that meant the aches and pains from my crash would start inching back soon. When the Looming Slumber’s anesthesia wore off, I probably wouldn’t be able to continue. I’d collapse from cold or pain or something worse.
I needed to find shelter or a path before that happened.
I walked and walked and walked until the weight of the situation was far too much to bear. It made me want to scream to the heavens, consequences be damned!
“Rainbow! Can you hear me?! Applejack! Pinkie! Rarity! Fluttershy! Anypony!”
No pony answered.
“Anything?” My voice trailed off.
A twig snapped behind me, and with a flash of my horn I teleported as far away as I could.
The rain had stopped a while ago. I wasn’t sure when.
It had certainly done its job though.
I trudged on as the cold bit into my body, and I couldn’t tell if the numbness was more from the all-encompassing chill or the remnants of the Looming Slumber.
I didn’t exactly have the energy to care either. I was crawling with a snail as large as myself, working up the willpower to take a fresh step every five seconds or so. It was stoically silent in the face of my moaning, and trundled on regardless of what I said.
The wind tickled my ears, and for a second I swore I heard a violin. Faint notes skittered through my head, and I froze. Racking my brain for potential threats that used music, I couldn’t think of any, but I was so tired at that point. I could have easily been inventing half the monsters I was recalling from The Big Book of Monsters Everfree. Hay, I might have even invented the title for all I knew.
The breeze came again, and my ears swatted the haunting music away. Another tingle ran down my spine, and I felt the first throb of blood in my wings as they spread to the sound of a single violin.
Wind didn’t reach this deep into the forest. It couldn’t. It could breach the thinner trees at the Everfree’s edge, but then it always faltered against the mighty walls of the older trees farther in—where brambles and thickets and thorns choked the ground so much only narrow paths remained.
That was where I’d been when I teleported, and I now walked even deeper in the forest—within the inner sanctum. The ancient trunks stood taller and thicker than some of the spires of Canterlot, and there weren’t any bushes to scramble through or undergrowth to trip on. If I wasn’t walking on dusty mulch, I was walking over a root large enough to act as a small bridge. No sunlight could ever reach the dank and musty air here. Only the occasional bioluminescence from a bit of moss provided light, and even those flickered and sputtered like dying torches as they struggled to live off the dead and decaying leaves from the canopy above.
Still, there was always enough light to see the outlines.
Far off in the distance—or perhaps closer than I realized—the faint shape of massive beasts shambled through the woods. Titans and behemoths stalked the open spaces between each mighty tree, and there was just the slightest tremor to the earth at all times. I had almost been stepped on once, but the creature hadn’t noticed me—ant that I was compared to it.
My pace finally exceeded that of the snail’s, and I shambled forward with no idea where to go. I doubted my friends would find me this deep in the forest, and—
The violin picked up speed, and I began to trot towards it. I felt the muffled screams of numb muscles, but the music was as good a goal as any. There was the incredibly small chance it actually was a violin, and a violin meant a potential rescuer.
Faster and faster went the tune of the lonely little instrument, and my trot became a canter. I ran with abandon as the song flitted away, fading into the distance faster than I could try to catch it.
And then, it suddenly fractured to surround me in a torrent of sound.
My ears flattened against my head at the sound. The forest had been deadly quiet, the violin nothing but a faint tickling in my ear. Now, there were dozens of them stabbing at my ears from all sides.
In those echoes something chittered. “Well, well, well… if it isn’t the crystal caverns all over again. Ve told the others you’d become as lost as you possibly could. I suppose noling knows you like I do, though. We are the best of enemies, after all. That’s how it works, right?”
“Who’s there?” I groaned at how much the noise hurt. The voice buzzed like a swarm of wasps, and each one stabbed at my sleep-deprived mind.
I needed to stop. I couldn’t move anymore.
As I collapsed on the ground, the chittering continued. “Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I’ll forgive you for the social faux pas of not recognizing me immediately. It’s probably a wonder you can even talk.”
The chittering became a cackle. “Still… as much as I love to see you in such exquisite agony, business comes before both revenge and pleasure. I can’t have you blacking out on me before my little speech is done.”
Something appeared before me—a sharp outline in the darkness. Its horn glowed with a green I was all too familiar with, and the former queen of the changelings banished the darkness around us.
I think I might have preferred it the other way.
“Chrysa—” My scream was nothing more than a feeble croak that broke into a coughing fit halfway through.
“Yes, yes. It’s me.” She bared her fangs in a grin that sent shivers down my spine. “There won’t be any sunshine here to wake you this time, Twilight. How’d that ridiculous rhyme go again? It was something about a spider eating a ladybug?”
The queen was just as I remembered her. Her fangs glinted in an arrogant smirk as she chittered, and she stood tall and proud with the aura of somepony who knew she was better than everypony else—and delighted in reminding them. Where Celestia had dignity and grace, the former queen was haughty and gaunt. The holes in her mane and hooves only added to the appearance of somepony with a black hole for a heart.
Wait. No. There was one difference.
There was a series of… scars on her flank? How had she gotten those?
The bands on her side shifted like Morpheus’ had earlier that day, and a small crystal floated out. Her little bouts of chittering stopped, and the buzz to her voice sharpened to something closer to what it had been at the wedding. It was a little lower—a little colder.
“I was saving this for our inevitable showdown, but it seems I have to waste it now. That nymph of mine is an idealistic foal for thinking his pathetic peace attempt will work—just like he’s a foal in everything else he does.” She let out a savage hiss, chittering several foreign words before pointedly smiling. “But… he needs to learn that through experience if he ever wants to properly rule.”
She popped the crystal in her mouth, and leaned down to stare straight into my eyes. “He’ll never get that chance if you die here. In fact, he’ll be trapped in that castle of yours forever, because you were idiotic enough to fly straight into a storm.”
I quivered, and tried not to wince in pain. My body had dredged up enough adrenaline for one last futile spike to the flight-or-fight system. With no energy to run, though, all that came from it was an end to the numbness as my body struggled to go into overdrive.
“Want to know what he’s doing right now? He’s desperately coordinating a search party from the castle because taking a step outside to do it himself would literally stop his heart.” Chrysalis’ voice fractured briefly. “Did you even think through the actual consequences of what he gave you?! You probably thought of all the ways he might abuse it, but what of all the ways you could abuse him through that moronic gamble of his?! He willingly gave you the death warrant of what he assumed was his entire species! Did you even think of how you could have wiped us from the map with a single systematic strike?!”
The cold now stabbed at me instead of simply biting. A pounding ache filled my body as blood rushed to every corner of it. The dozens of tiny scratches marring me suddenly stung to the high heavens as I felt little bits of mud crumbling from my coat into them.
Chrysalis snorted while sucking upon the crystal. “And then, your lofty goddesses of the sun and moon had the gall to accuse him of genocide when you were the ones being given the power. It’s a complete disaster! Ve’ve already had to divert at least a quarter of our agents to cutting off assassination attempts on you two, because you were all idiotic enough to bind my son—not the other lords, who are a much, much larger threat.”
My vision was tunneling so that all I could see was Chrysalis. I could barely hear. I was too tired despite the adrenaline’s best efforts.
A flash of green fire turned the queen into me. I think she was shouting, but her voice was nothing but a dull drone to my ears. “It would be so easy to replace you right now and fix everything! Ve could use you to get to Celestia, and our entire plan would fall into place!”
The queen quivered above me. “But no! That’s not an option! I can’t do that and get that idiot of mine out of this mess. He’s as good as dead if I do, and—even if he isn’t—he won’t learn anything from it!”
My eyes started to close.
“Now kiss me.”
Even on the precipice of blacking out, I noticed the discrepancy between that statement and the current context.
“What?” I managed to croak before a tongue that was far too elastic entered my mouth and shoved a piece of candy down my throat.
Warmth infused me, and the scent of rose petals and steel filled my nostrils while honey and saliva mingled in my mouth. I expected it to burn given all my injuries, but it soothed. I could feel the cuts closing and the swelling recede. Small pricks flew over my wings as if somepony was gently preening them, and my feathers aligned into a more comfortable position.
I still felt dirty and ragged.
I still ached all over.
But I was refreshed and rejuvenated all the same.
I also felt incredibly dirty in an entirely new way that had nothing to do with the mud on me. The first action I elected to do with my newfound energy was pull back and shriek like a banshee. “What the hay was that?!”
The arrogant grin was so much more than that now, and it was particularly unsettling on my own face. “Aww… I only get hay? I thought for sure that deserved a buck. Don’t be mad. It’s not like you can digest crystalized love on your own. You needed the proper enzymes, and I provided.”
I rose to my feet, wobbling. “And why should I buy that?! You could have eaten it yourself and cast a healing spell if you wanted to just save me.”
She tittered just like me, and my insides squirmed. I couldn’t see the difference from when I practiced speaking in the mirror. “But it’s so much more satisfying to give you your brother’s love directly. There are so many taboo undertones to watch you struggle with. Don’t you just love the taste?”
She flared her wings out—my wings—provocatively. “Or perhaps you’re a fan of this particularly narcissistic image?”
The flames of her transformation couldn’t burn her statements from my mind.
Back to her normal self, the tittering became chittering. “Or maybe you’re into Oubliettes and Ogres like your brother? Ve think that was our favorite. I actually still have the chains.”
I stumbled back trying to bleach my brain. “Stop it, and start making sense! What do you want? Why did you help me, and what are you going to do with me?”
“I’m not making sense?” Chrysalis’s grin dripped with maliciousness. “Then I guess my acting classes are paying off.”
“Are you joking?” I was back to croaking as my throat ached.
The former queen’s face went flat. The buzzing echo quieted to a drone. “I could be, or maybe I’m testing you? Can you tell the difference? Am I the taunting mastermind who greeted you? Or am I the ranting villain who bumbled her plans to replace Celestia? Perhaps I’m the twisted nymphomaniac who kissed you. I could even be the mother whose mask slipped and wants to keep her son safe, although I doubt you of all ponies believe that one.”
Green flames left a brown earth pony in front of me. “Can you tell what is what in a world where there is no true reality—only a number of possibilities and probable results? Go on and try the changeling detection spell. I dare you. See how flimsy your reality is.”
I scrounged together the magic and stumbled back at the negative result.
Another flash fire consumed her, and a teal pegasus stood in front of me. “You need to learn as much as he does. You’re idiots and foals, all of you. Care to try this one?”
There was another negative, and I couldn’t manage the words flying through my head.
Another burst of flames left a familiar alabaster alicorn before me. “How about me, my most faithful student? Can you pass this test?”
I trembled, and used the last of the magic I’d regained from Chrysalis’ ‘gift’, sagging to the ground at the result.
“Positive.” I whispered.
“For now….” The thing that was not Celestia ruffled her wings. She had the same serene smile that let me know things would always work out in the end. “But mark my words, Twilight Sparkle. You had better hope my son succeeds at his foal’s errand, because ve can almost guarantee you won’t like plan C.”
A familiar portal of fire surrounded me. One last whisper of wind reached me as it closed. “And ve can assure you it’ll be so much worse if he ends up harmed in any way.”
Much like before, I felt pressure on all sides. I managed to stay conscious almost all the way to the end of the spell this time, but I blacked out inches from the exit of the stifling nothingness within.
It was enough, however. There was a familiar echoing buzz calling my name from the other end, and it was definitely not Chrysalis. Other quickly voices chimed in, and I heard the rest of my friends.
I sighed in relief as much needed sleep claimed me.
