Wind, wind, wind. Wind, wind, wind. Twilight twisted the gears into place with delicate ease, only stopping when the metal snapped into place with a decisive ‘clink’. A piston went here. Here, a set of wires disappeared into a shimmering box of gold and copper. To the left she could see the springs straining against their bounds. The horn vented steam with a gentle hiss. A clicking noise coming from her left ear told her the motors were running. She closed the metal casing gingerly, taking time to avoid trapping her hoof between the artificial feathers. She looked down at the blueprints, then looked back up at the machine in front of her and smile. A quick check told her she had roughly another forty minutes before Spike would be back and she would have to wander back out into the real world, back into the loneliness and the world of regrets and failure and never letting go.
Fabrics floated in gusts of steam generated just behind the eggshell white audio sensors that qualified as ears. If she squinted, she could almost call them graceful. They didn’t have the same volume as the original, but the colours were spot on last she’d checked. Which had been--she glanced over at the blueprints--two months ago. She could hear mechanical noises that once had been meaningless chatter assemble themselves into the words “my faithful student”. The voice was not quite right--too rigid and jerky--but she could fix that in time. She checked the time again. Another thirty minutes, and then she’d have to come back to her world of failure and never letting go.
It was not, and would never be, of course, a replacement for what she had lost. It was more of a tribute, a work of art dedicated to the wonderful pony she had lost. She was resolute on that. For, she had declared those many months ago, she did not deserve anything less than to lose that which she loved most, and a replacement would be to cheat that well-earned punishment. Even if nopony else agreed. Even if the original model for this bad imitation would not have agreed. For every night, her dreams swam with the screams of an Empire dragged into slavery and shadows by the dark magic of its tyrant-king. Every night she heard them accuse and despise her, saw herself claimed by that door and saved at last only by that wonderful princess from on high. Every distant daydream reminded her of how she and her friends had been saved from the curse, how the others had not. Her sister, her brother. It had just been her. And every minute she was not building, she was living the self-exile she had imposed for her failure, which would never let her go.
Another twenty minutes, and then Spike would be back and she would be back to working on the spells to reverse it all. Time travel. Summon magic. Shadowmancy. Dispelling mind control. Another twenty minutes and she would throw herself back into her world of failure, but until those twenty minutes came…
Twilight folded up the tear-stained blueprints, walked her way towards the tribute to the mentor she no longer deserved and raised it up by its arms. She wrapped herself around the substitute and cried away her failure, hoping it would never let her go.