Twilight Sparkle's favorite season was always summer. Her birthday was in spring, so summer was when she could demonstrate one small occasion of pride. She allowed herself and stand a little taller and say how much older she was to everypony who dared to ask — and who she dared to reply to. Twilight was rather inept in that regard, after all. Still, pretend-pride was always something she found a small shred of fun in — pretending to be confident was so different from who she really was!
There were other reasons to love summer. There was ice cream to look forward to. Her favorite flavor was vanilla and she always got it in a cup because she hated spilling things and it was neat. She never got sprinkles because they got stuck in her teeth, and always she ate her treat neatly with a spoon because her mother taught her to have good manners ages ago. As a foal, Twilight would get to play with Shining Armor — who was now long dead — and she could never forget Summer Sun Celebrations, because they had Celestia, who she adored.
She didn't want to forget Celestia, ever, but Twilight Sparkle was old and a demigod. She did not have the memory of a god. She had forgotten the exact color of Celestia's eyes and her brother's favorite movie. Maybe that was natural; Shining Armor was dead, and Celestia wasn't.
Twilight kicked at the sand with her hoof. She was an old fart, as Spike liked to put it. Her mane was mostly gray and pulled into a very neat bun. Her bangs were just gray, but otherwise the same. She had just never thought of trying anything else. Twilight's coat was a little duller and her eyes stared best at papers directly under her muzzle. She looked like she was somewhere in her sixties, but was pushing something far older. Cadance had once told her that demigods — the proper name for what she and Cady were was not 'lesser alicorns' which was a term now forgotten by anypony who knew much of anything — have a maximum lifespan of one thousand and one hundred years. The limited magic that kept them alive was complicated, primal, and generous compared to the mortal pony's two hundred thirty years on the planet.
Cadance died when she was six hundred and forty-seven.
It wasn't like it hadn't been coming. She went easy. Twilight didn't need a doctor's opinion about that. She had died in her sleep. Twilight Sparkle knew that the strangest little smile Cadance had on her face in her casket had been natural, though eerie all the same.
They were sisters-in-law, so why wouldn't they?
Luna says they talked, but only in the barest words. She never told her what Cadance said. Twilight rarely spoke with her anyway. Twilight had just been glad throughout the entire ordeal. This was because when all the majority of mourning was over, she and Luna had made up for that last fight months before her final rest. It meant they could grieve separately, but without bitterness. It hurt her, it really did, to see her fight with her only remaining sort-of family member like that. On rare occasions, she and Cadance fought too, but always found their bond could be mended in a way hers and Luna's couldn't be. Cadance took defense every time, and had managed a frosty passiveness that Twilight hadn't known in her before she moved to the Crystal Empire.
Cadance would tell Twilight that what she saw as her own calling was wrong. That she needed to let go and open her eyes and think for herself. She had the nerve to call the school of thought that Twilight had never stopped defending — otherwise known as the Celestian ideals — 'rigid' and 'fanatical' when they were based on the same teachings that the benevolent Celestia taught them in their respective youths. They were the kinds of teachings that none of them were supposed to let go, especially when things became tough — even when that unjust toughness was the world itself.
And things used to get very ugly.
Used to.
Now, with a castle empty of proper residents that were not her or her staff, a Twilight Sparkle of one thousand and fifteen years would find herself surrounded by a particularly uncomfortable kind of silence. It happened between her usual activities, as it wormed its way into her ever-organized schedule and infected parts of her day.
Here, Twilight Sparkle heard that same infection of silence in the desert where she stood.
Lonely dunes of sand stretched out before her, and she could see no place without them. Here, even the wind was quiet, but the direction of Twilight's ears and the workings of her mind were not focused on that. There was just soft sand and a dusky twilight sky. Twilight's response to noting this was a very simple, quick blink. There had been a little bit of sand caught in her eyelashes, too. Her expression was not filled with the dorky perkiness and general sense of friendliness that she showed around ponies, but a neutral expression. Her mouth was in a straight line. Simple. Plain.
She disliked this, the whole mystic presence. Mysticism was a thorn in her side, the antithesis to the logical and predictable mystery. There had been no villains stirring in centuries, so this was not their work. Twilight Sparkle was certain that she was sure of that, and her thoughts moved on.
She disliked this because Twilight Sparkle, Princess of Friendship, did not like to be plopped in remote areas and uncivilized places. She liked to see the faces of ponies and all creatures who embraced friendship and Harmony. She liked to talk to them and hear their voices. The only 'remote' place she really enjoyed was a quiet place to read and the only 'uncivilized' place she didn't mind was her castle before spring cleaning.
Absentmindedly, she kicked at the sand again. The coming night air made it cold to the touch, and she shivered quietly. Thoughts of summer pierced the fog in her mind, but the comfort she received from such hazy recollections — she forgot a lot more recently — was... inadequate.
Nothing stirred, and Twilight would speak if there was somepony to speak to. It wasn't that she didn't want to speak — the sound of any voice at all out here would bring her relief — but the lonely silence felt so overwhelming and unnatural, especially to the Princess of Friendship.
Silence was usually always lonely to Twilight Sparkle.
She began to walk in no direction at all — just aimlessly attempting to follow whatever light of the sun that she could. She always remembered when Celestia still raised it — those images were burned in her mind forever — and she remembered when Luna was still a princess. Why would Twilight not follow the sun? To do so was already an instinct.
She moved with the sand, hopping down the dunes with finicky caution, muttering quick exclamations of discontent that didn't mean anything. She just wanted to hear the sound of her own voice. Any voice. So, Twilight babbled to herself about this and that. That the sand was too cold. Where she could possibly be. How she got there. Spike not visiting enough. Something to remind one of her maids about tomorrow. An old song she couldn't sing that well. Anything that held little meaning at the moment escaped her lips.
Eventually, Twilight Sparkle stumbled down a dune. Her wings were flapping, and it was hard to remember not having them now. She was squawking in alarm as her long out-of-practice — Twilight preferred 'retired' — hooves fumbled through the soft, shifting ground.
After a few shakes of her coat, careful not to disturb the elegant graying bun of her mane, Twilight managed to dislodge most of the sand that still clung to her.
Under her hooves, the sand did not shift, and that deviation from normalcy suddenly had Twilight's attention.
Sand that was completely still? Her eyes narrowed faintly in the direction of the darker part of the distant, unmoving horizon. Odd.
Twilight Sparkle had come to dislike 'odd' things. Age and experience taught her full well what they could do.
"Hello...?" she called into the distance, letting her social habits take over without a second thought.
She only heard her own echo.
"Anypony here? Hello...?"
Twilight paused briefly. Still, she heard only echoes in an abnormally still world.
"Do you speak Equestrian?"
Nothing. Her ears flopped downward.
"Anypony at all...?"
When her sad call wasn't answered, Twilight lit her horn with a faint magenta glow. She let her aura flare out, sparkling in the dark with many of the colors of the sky.
The life-sensing spell returned to Twilight... and sensed only her.
"Oh," she said sadly, a small frown crossing her muzzle. She had no knowledge of where she was, which made worry creep into her. The largest deserts on the Eastern hemisphere were south of Equestria, which was located on the northern continent. Those deserts were in Saddle Arabia, a nation she hadn't visited diplomatically all that often.
But then again, the Arabian deserts also stretched into parts of Maretonia...
Twilight stepped forward and eyed the sand again. Maybe she was in Maretonia, then. It was less populated than Saddle Arabia. Either way, she wouldn't be able to teleport. Everything would be out of range. She could manage the occasional cross-country teleportation — if she wasn't heading anywhere by train or airship, that was her preferred method of travel — but anything on this scale? And while being wholly unfamiliar with the territory as well?
Twilight Sparkle snorted. She wasn't a god.
She wasn't Celestia.
There was a faint tightness in her throat. It wasn't all that sudden, Twilight knew why it was there. Her legs shifted awkwardly, but she stood firmly in place and felt all the more comfortable for doing so if Twilight worked very hard to ignore everything else. She hated to act on impulse.
Her wings shifted too, and the only sound Twilight heard was her heart pumping and her feathers rustle. She wished for it to be noisier.
There was the soft tinkling sound of something stranger than wind chimes, and yet not so strange at all.
Magic.
And it wasn't hers.
Her heartbeat increased with a mixture of emotions she didn't stop to identify and Twilight's ears perked forward. Her eyes widened as she attempted to search the dark sky for any sign of the still-going sound.
The pressure in her throat was almost forgotten.
Because—
In the darkening sky, there was light — and in the mind of Twilight Sparkle, it was true light. It was bright, white, and radiant. It did not blend with the darkness, but drew the purple demigod's eyes away from it. This light took the form of a butterfly whose fluttering formed the sound that had reached Twilight's ears, which twitched. Twilight Sparkle was absolutely certain that she had never seen this butterfly before. Twilight knew it the way that she knew she wanted to study magic when she first saw Princess Celestia raise the sun all those years ago...
She stared at this butterfly because as soon as she acknowledged it with her confused purple eyes, it drew closer to Twilight. The way it approached her made Twilight think that the butterfly was familiar with her... even if she had never seen it before in her life, and this had quite obviously never happened before. She dug her hooves into the sand and continued to watch it. Even if she hadn't thought about her long-gone friends like this in a long while, memories of Fluttershy were hard to ignore when something so delicate fluttered about right in front of her.
"F-Fluttershy...?" Twilight whispered shakily. The faint sound in the still desert contained more emotion than she'd put into saying the name of her deceased friend since... she didn't know. At her age, many early memories often escaped her without physical reminders.
Twilight Sparkle wrinkled up her muzzle when the butterfly landed on her face, its movements careful and light.
"No," the butterfly whispered back in the high, clear voice of a child. "I am not a butter-shy. Do you still call them butterflies? I cannot remember!" The voice had become a pleading whine. "I can never remember! Not like this!"
The way that the voice stumbled over each 'I' made Twilight think that this odd child — or creature — wasn't used to speaking so. Perhaps it had a lisp. A few faint questions hummed in the recesses of Twilight's mind, but were overwhelmed by her confusion, and the focus she gave it.
"Fluttershy," Twilight whisper-corrected, sounding slightly offended. "Her name was Fluttershy."
When the butterfly gave her wings — Twilight had decided that the voice sounded like a filly's — a gentle flutter. Twilight finally did sneeze, disturbing the thing.
"Aiiii!" the butterfly squeaked. "How rude!" It was hard for such a childish voice to scold, but she certainly seemed surprised.
"I'm sorry," Twilight said simply, the ghost of a friendly expression buried in her still-present confusion. She extended a hoof in politeness. Her teacher, her Canterlot upbringing, her society, morals, and more had her always ready to show manners to such harmless creatures such as this. "Your wings were tickling my muzzle, I sure hope I didn't get anything on you!"
Twilight Sparkle smiled politely, and didn't think to guess if the filly-butterfly could sense this or not.
"Sneezing on a princess!" it made a sound almost like a cute little snort before pausing. "Are you a princess too?"
Twilight blinked twice. "Err... what?"
"I am a princess," the butterfly said with a careful, polite primness, "are you a princess too?"
Years of diplomatic experience and centuries of niceties took over, and Twilight kept herself from gaping while nodding politely. "I am a princess. What are you the princess of... Miss... erm, what is your name?"
The last part was purely to humor the 'creature' that was about as real as a demon, but Twilight waited with a mask of calm anyway.
"I cannot remember my name," the butterfly said sadly, her flapping slowed. "I cannot remember anything! There is the desert and there is the mountain. There is a brother — there are two! Both are older. One is funny! And the other..."
The butterfly trails off into painful silence. Twilight picks up on some of this, disliking the sudden discomfort of it all.
"Well... umm... can you remember anything else?"
"Which one is mine?!" the false creature wailed. "I do not remember! I do not remember! W-Where is Nora?" The last part came out like a sniffle.
"Nora?" Twilight repeated. "Is that your name?"
The butterfly was quiet before she stammered out an answer. "...N-N— M-Maybe?"
Twilight looked at the whimpering being of light. "Can I call you that?"
The butterfly bobbed itself in a sort of bizarre affirmation.
Throughout her life, Twilight Sparkle had never known anypony who went by 'Nora' or anything like it. The name sounded very exotic to her ears... but somehow, deceptively familiar as well.
"Well, Nora, why are you here?" Twilight had never said the name before. It ended up sitting on her tongue with the same, startling familiarity that 'Shiny' did, and she wasn't sure why. "Are you lost?"
"Maybe...?" The fluttering of the butterfly's wings had become nervous. "Are you?"
"Yes," Twilight replied automatically.
"Why do you not remember me?" the butterfly asked with a voice like a whimper.
Twilight froze, her confusion now obvious. "I've never s-seen you before, how could I remember you?" Her throat felt drier.
Once more, the butterfly flew close to her muzzle and landed there. If she had eyes, Twilight swore that Nora would be peering at her curiously with them. Above them, a sky full of stars twinkled with a multitude of purples.
"I remember you!" Nora said with a tone that bordered on pleading. "Why can you not remember me?"
Twilight opened her mouth and instantly tried to think of what she could say to make this odd little insect feel better. It reminded her of her own two foals from long ago.
"I've never seen you," she whispered weakly instead.
"You never remember me," Nora whispered back, wings drooping with sadness.
There was a small tear poking at the corner of Twilight's eye and she didn't know why. She didn't even know which one, she just knew that confusion hung over her as heavily as a thick blanket. There were questions to be asked, but she couldn't even fathom which ones, and why... and just... If this had happened before, why didn't she know? Shouldn't she?
The sand felt much colder under her hooves and she swallowed nervously. "Is there anything you can tell me? About what's happening?"
With a careful flare of her wings, Nora decided upon folding them properly. Now Twilight was certain that if she had any eyes, Nora would be fixing an important stare upon the demigod.
"Why do you never remember?" Nora's voice was quiet, and though it was a child's, there was a sudden maturity to it.
"I don't know," Twilight said calmly. "What am I supposed to remember?"
"The desert."
Twilight's muzzle scrunched up again. "Um."
"Your home."
"I'm from Canterlot," Twilight said, her tone that of a parent correcting a foal's mistake.
The air was still. "You are not."
Now it was Twilight who was still. "P-Pardon...?"
The tingling feeling that came from having the mystical creature perched on her muzzle made Twilight want to sneeze again. This time, she held back.
"You... and I... I remember that we met."
One of Twilight's ears lifted, and her confused expression had returned as she stood tall in the sand while the stars glittered on. "We... have?" She eked out her words carefully, and yet it still sounded like she stumbled over them.
"Almost every night," Nora says sadly, and Twilight gasped.
"But... why can't I remember?"
Nora was silent before whispering her response: "I do not know. You never remember the desert. You do not remember the city. You never remember your sister."
"Sister?!" Twilight squawked. "I'm really confused now! Why hasn't Luna entered my dreams yet if—?"
"Your dreams of butterflies have never called to her," Nora said with a delicate stretch of her wings as a soft desert wind blew by. "The Luna you speak of does not follow dreams with a plan... at least... that is not what I can sense from what she has told you..."
Luna had told Twilight bits about dreamwalking before, over the course of the centuries they had known one another. Yet,'known' was such a strong word. With each passing year, Twilight knew less and less about the mysterious mare who was the face of Equestria. Luna insisted on a relationship that was nothing but professional between them. It had always been distant, and grew so with each and every day. Sometimes, this reality caused Twilight's heart to ache for reasons she dare not focus on. Not here.
"I'm dreaming?" Her question felt pointless, and her voice was unsure, but she spoke anyway.
"You are, and you dream oh-so-deeply right now."
Tilting her head to the side slightly, Twilight tucked a strand of her mane back into her impeccable bun and realized that she wasn't wearing her crown. She always wore her crown, even in dreams. Maybe she didn't don it in the first two hundred or so years as a demigod, but it soon became a known fixture and icon of the mare known as Twilight Sparkle.
...And it was so silly of her to forget that she had it! Though, that had been happening a lot more lately...
"How long have you been... here?" Twilight waved a forehoof toward the desert.
"Since... forever, I think," Nora mumbled, tone as bumbling as a little filly, unsure of the answer to a teacher's question. Twilight heard more of herself than she was comfortable with acknowledging in that voice. She could only wonder why she hadn't noticed something so uncanny before. Drawing in a deep enough breath — she didn't wish to scare the entity known as Nora — Twilight did the age-old technique that Cadance had taught her a long, long time ago... was it at the restoration of the Crystal Empire?
That's what Twilight's mind supplied, at least. It was hard to remember.
Finally tired of all this, Nora flew from Twilight's muzzle and fluttered off another way. She took care to still stay within Twilight's range of vision. She danced about in the air quite eagerly and waited there. Picking up on the cue, Twilight unfolded her wings carefully and bridged the gap between them with a short flight. How natural her wings felt!
"Where do you want us to go?" Twilight pretended she didn't hear that her voice sounded nervous. She wasn't even sure why it did. There was no evil in this dream. And yet...
"Home," said Nora as if it was the simplest thing in the world, and all had been explained.
Watching silently, Twilight swallowed and debated what she should do. Shaking her head — carefully though, to keep her mane intact — she trotted after Nora. Hopefully, this would not turn into an adventure, and she would get answers.
Suddenly, when she approached Nora, wanting to talk more about the matter, Nora took off. Reeling backward and sputtering slightly, Twilight's eyes widened with surprise as she looked on. Nora began to fly away, and quicker than Twilight thought possible, not bothering to wait for the demigod to follow her rapid movements. This left Twilight with the option of galloping to catch up with the almost-apparition who claimed to haunt Twilight's many other dreams. Her ears pricked forward to hear the newest sound that broke the silence of the desert that Twilight thought so lonely. From where she flew, Twilight Sparkle could easily hear the adorable, high singing of Nora. She was singing an old song - perhaps a lullaby? It certainly sounded like one: there was childish imagery in there, and innocent, silly words describing the great walls of a city Twilight never knew—
—and none of the words were in Equestrian.
This brought Twilight's hoofsteps to a stop. Over the years, Twilight Sparkle had picked up on a few foreign languages. She had learned one or two to their fullest, and spoke them as though they were her own. She wasn't the most experienced of polyglots, but she had still opened doors that connected her with other ponies.
And somehow, she had failed to notice this... was it some kind of translation or perception-altering magic? Twilight hadn't cast any translating spells... she hadn't even realized there was a language barrier until the unusual singing of Nora started. Only then did Twilight realize her song sounded very un-Equestrian.
This whole time, Twilight had communicated with her—
Out of pure frustration, Twilight stomped her hoof into the loose sand, her expression souring before she galloped after the fading butterfly of light disappearing into the horizon. It was difficult not to think of ghosts seeing that sight. Twilight Sparkle could not remember the last time she galloped across an unfamiliar terrain with adrenaline flowing throughout her and her mane threatening to fly loose. Her hooves pounded the sand wildly — she had to keep herself from slipping — and she was nowhere for more than a second. Her throat ached for air as she chased what couldn't be much more than a ghost.
Twilight stopped focusing on what was around her, and let the colors of the desert bleed together in her mind. Browns, golds, purples, blues, and other shades both inky and earthy became indistinct to her as she pressed on, her hooves pounding at the sand as fast as she could force them to. Heat touched her mind, waving across her sweaty coat and coming into contact with the freezing air of the night in a noticeable contrast of two extremes. Eventually, when her chest ached even more for air that couldn't come fast enough and her aged legs wobbled, Nora's flight ceased.
And Twilight Sparkle stopped with her. From here, she could look down upon all of the wreckage. Nora hovered by her side.
Before Twilight Sparkle was the grave of a city. She had no idea what happened here, other than it caused her aching heart to drop in her chest, as though it were shirking away from something other than physical exhaustion.
The sight would haunt her, no doubt.
Here the air hung still with the air of something possibly worth than death. Twilight felt that in her old bones, and she also felt dwarfed by the remains of this catastrophe. Dunes of sand had already built up around the rare piece of rubble that was charred so that the otherworldly craftsmanship of stone and metal was reduced to something no enchantment could possibly protect it from. Everything had been seared with scars of evil and desecrated like fire against an unguarded paper. Of all the pieces that were upon the desert's surface, few were recognizable as much of anything. Defining features had been warped to be little at all. She just knew that this had been part of something, it's just that every sign of what that was had been stolen from her.
Now, all was sand dunes snaking their way into this desolation and burying it. All was being pulled deeper into the earth as time and the elements wore on.
Once again, there were tears shining in Twilight's eyes. "Where are we?" she croaked. Why was she so sad? There was the obvious: ponies had died here, of that she had no doubt. Still, where had this irrational and almost personal sadness sprung from?
"Marecca," Nora whispered, "or what is left of it from ages ago. There is nothing you shall find now."
"But—"
Twilight swallowed uncomfortably, unable to bear the sight of the ruins. She turned away and tried to blink away those tears, years of professionalism and maturity reining in the emotion she refused to let control her already hazy mind. She paused, noting that Nora's voice sounded much more like hers than she thought under the thick accent. Younger, of course, and with an odd elegance to her speech. Maybe it was a local dialect from... well, wherever she was from.
"Is this your home?" Twilight had never heard of Marecca. It sounded Arabian, just only vaguely so... and oh, all of this was giving Twilight a headache.
"I cannot remember if it was home, but I almost remember Marecca." Nora flitted to Twilight's ear and landed there.
The sensation was not unwelcome either. Twilight was reminded of how Spike would cling to her when he was younger and so much smaller. Occasionally, she would miss things like that, but there was little clarity to those memories now. Twilight had grown used to such feelings, and they had lost their grip on her so that pleasant, fuzzy detachment could get hold of her. She still talked to Spike and she had many more friends, as she had for centuries.
"What was Marecca like?" Twilight offered. A friendly discussion could be informative. She didn't really care about this city, in particular, the sadness tearing at her heart was one she had not willed. The ache in her chest was at the thought of all the lives lost. The vast expanse before her — unless it was altered in whatever destruction hit this city — could house a city that would easily make Canterlot seem like the tiniest of hamlets. Was something like that even possible? Even the biggest of cities Twilight had visited never had that effect.
"A grand citadel of..." Nora trailed off, melancholy and lost as well as utterly unsure of what to say. "Brother and I built sandcastles," she informed instead.
Twilight frowned a little. "Well, what was your brother like, Nora?"
"H-His eyes were green?" Nora offers with a stutter. "He was so c-calm... and he always helped me."
Twilight cracked a small, polite smile as memories of her own brother filled her. Even thinking of everything tied up in the idea of her 'BBBFF' was such a source of nostalgia for her now, though she hadn't spoken the phrase in centuries. He'd since become Shining Armor, ruling Prince of the Crystal Empire, beloved husband to Crystal Empress Mi Amore Cadenza, loving father to the deceased Princess Skyla, and one of the two founders of the House of Snjórinn.
He was a hero, just like her.
"Whoever he was, he sounds like a lovely brother." Twilight wasn't lying. A nice sibling was something to compliment. It was also the Celestian to way to say such things — to be kind, to be humble, to do good, to be social, and neighborly... to encourage such normalcy among creatures.
"Something went wrong," Nora whispered. "He did something wrong, and I cannot remember. I never can!" Her sudden scream rang across the desert, echoing through the rubble.
Twilight drew a calming breath. "Nora, I'm sure that your brother was great. Maybe you two just had..." Confused, she looked outward toward the ruins, thinking of what would make her feel best, "...a little itty-bitty fight?"
"M-Maybe..." Nora whimpered.
"See!" Twilight said, a positive smile on her face. "I'm sure that all of this is from something different..." She swallowed, "...something far worse."
Nora didn't respond.
"Nora?" Twilight said carefully. "What is it you want me to remember and why?"
If Nora was capable of taking a deep breath, Twilight heard something like it emit from the dream-creature. "I want you to remember you."
"What?!" Twilight said with a yelp as her eyes widened in the dark. "Remember me? Now I really must be going senile! I'm the Princess of Friendship, well, I was the third... or fourth in terms of... okay, never mind that. I am the Lady Twilight Sparkle of the Equestrian Empire, Princess of Friendship under Celestia's Equestria. The point is, I must be bonkers if I'm dreaming about made-up cities and butterflies who sound like me when I was a filly, only they don't speak Equestrian a-and—"
Twilight realized what she was doing. She quickly shut her mouth and lowered the hoof she had flung about all too accusingly. Nora fluttered mournfully in front of Twilight's tired, frantic muzzle, distancing herself from the mare she had clung to.
"Y-You never remember," the butterfly whispered, choked. That was the tone of somepony who had had a dream shattered again and again... and somehow Twilight was aiding this.
She wasn't being a good friend.
She was being honest.
Twilight sucked in another breath and looked upon Nora with more confusion than she could ever hide, no matter how much time she had spent as a Princess had taught her otherwise.
Nora was fluttering with rapid flaps of her wings, frantically and desperately beating. When she spoke to Twilight Sparkle next with a voice that bordered on a broken wail, she was begging.