Super Secret Cider Squeezy 6000

by nucnik

Chapter 7 - Reflections

By the time my introduction ended, the accompanying Guards had already stripped me of my uniform and saddlebags and were busily going through them. My heart felt as if it was squeezed by a pair of pliers and I felt the pressure in my veins building up. All this time, the weak lamp above drew ominous shadows on the robed ponies around me and the mare's voice didn’t stop for more than a brief breath.

“You have been found guilty of anti-Equestrian tendencies, corruption and manipulation of other ponies, gathering of illicit material and subterfuge. Is there anything you’d like to say before we decide on the sentence?”

The words felt like a splash of ice to the back of my head. Even in the damp, hot confines of the chamber I felt my lungs fill with fresh air and my eyes widen. To add to the harsh surprise, it was impossible to tell where the voice was coming from; to try and decipher from body language if what I had just heard was a tasteless joke. Only there was nothing to go by but the motionless shadowy figures ahead.

“I-I…”

“Do not attempt to stall. It will merely add to your sentence,” a different voice spoke, almost morbidly.

Lost for words, I focused on the one detail that was available to me: the voices. They were old ponies, both of them. One mare, one stallion, but that’s as much as I could read from their voices alone. I was nudging my head from one side to the other in an automatic, yet futile attempt to discern any distinguishing features of the shapes surrounding me and it was then that I noticed just how brighter I was than the rest. The lamp above was nowhere near powerful enough. The white circle of light that shone beneath me illuminated me, and only me – that was made by a unicorn hiding out of sight.

“Specialist Neigh, it is in your greatest interest to respond as rapidly as possible.”

“How?...” I mumbled out to everypony and nopony at the same time.

“How?” wondered a third voice, “By using your mouth, as you just did!”

I stuttered out, “N-no. How am I guilty?”

The response came as the most natural answer ever told, “We looked over the evidence and decided that you’re guilty.”

“But I haven’t…” I wanted to stop myself from saying I hadn’t done anything, but in the grand scheme of things, given what I’d been found guilty of, I really hadn’t. “I haven’t done anything,” I finally stammered out.

“Not done anything?” another new voice mockingly said, “The results of your trial say otherwise.”

“But I didn’t have a trial!”

“Of course you did.”

“When?!” There was no point holding back the frustration now.

“You had your trial in absence.”

The calmness of the voice forced me to counter it.

“I didn’t do anything!”

“How can you be sure of that when we haven’t even shown you the evidence we have against you?”

The voices started coming from random directions, all old, all eerily calm and carrying a hint of disdain mixed with condescension.

“You’ve had quite an eventful week, haven’t you?”

“Yes. Ponyville, Canterlot, Baltimare…”

“A new location, a new crime against Equestria.”

“What is it that drove you to it? Hate? Money? Love? Some strange delusion?”

A cocktail of words was rushing through my head, accompanied by still images of every place mentioned, only now there were shadowy ponies watching me gaze at the brother’s machine in Ponyville. And there they were again at the Fast Grass. And in the University. The Greenlit, Dodge City… Ponies watching from the shadows, from behind corners…

No. I shook the visions away. That never happened!

“Oh?” the old stallion wondered, “Having difficulties facing reality?”

“No.” I didn’t know if I was looking at him, so I slowly looked at each of the figures before me.

A few brief murmurs from my accusers later, a stallion continued, “Let’s help you with that, shall we?”

The moment he stopped speaking, a small table with a single large box on it teleported into existence directly in front of me with a yellow burst of magic. Thick dark-yellow files, filled with white paper, lined the box. I could barely scrounge my eyebrows at them when the magical aura started enveloping each file, opening it and almost throwing it at my face before rushing it back into the box again as the voice narrated.

“Exhibit Alpha: Ponyville report. Exhibit Beta: Ponyville report II. Exhibit Gama: Severe misconduct report and corrective action. Exhibit Delta: Baltimare AWOL. Exhibit Epilon: General observation report. Exhibit Zeta: Special observation report. Exhibits Eta, Theta, Rho and Sigma: Testimonies from witnesses… Need we go on?”

Whatever was in those files would remain shrouded in mystery. I tried grabbing the file, only to find that I was once again glued to the floor, and even that wouldn’t have been as bad had it not been for the way the evidence was presented to me. The speed at which the pages were being turned made it impossible to make out any details with the exception of a few pictures of myself from different angles and distances. Most were from Baltimare.

The table with everything on it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. In the confusion of everything that was happening, there was only one thing I now thought of doing. The one lifeline that would put me level with the ponies around me.

I stated, as calmly as I could force myself to be, “I want a lawyer.”

“You don’t have one. This isn’t the Royal Court.”

I let that sink in. First I was abducted, then sentenced without a trial, and now I wasn’t even going to get a chance to challenge any of this, or at least get somepony to explain the whole mess in a way I could comprehend it? What was there left to do?

“Well what is this?!”

“This is the Council for Equestrian Integrity.”

“The bottom line is, Specialist Neigh – or mayhaps I should say former Specialist Neigh, given that you’re no longer in position of being eligible for a Specialist-” Of all the things I’d heard up to this point, none took my breath away quite as much as that sentence, “– that you are standing with three legs in permanent confinement as a result of these transgressions.”

The doors behind me started sliding open, bringing the proceeding to a temporary halt and allowing me take a deep breath of the hot, moist air in the cavern. A Royal Guard flew into the chamber and landed to my left, bowing to the ponies ahead.

“What have you found?” a stallion said, his voice full of anticipation.

Then came the restrained answer,“Nothing, your excellence.”

Suddenly, the beehive was awoken. Whispers and murmurs filled the chamber, and robes shook from side to side as my accusers struggled to reach an agreement. Then a second question came forth.

“Thank you. Was there anything on him?”

The Royal Guards that had gone through my things raised their heads, and the squad leader announced, “Only this.”

In his hoof were two books, one from the University library and the other allegedly from my dad. He carried them slowly to the ponies ahead. As the Guard retreated, I could see the books being passed around; briefly examined by each pony that got his hooves on them, before passing them on. There was a sense of general confusion, until a single piece of paper flew to the ground.

“What is this?”

Somepony picked up the paper and was examining it and in that brief moment I had actually been given a real question to answer; a chance to show that they had the wrong pony, and I wasn’t going to fail now.

I calmly said, “It’s an invitation to Dodge City.”

There was an unnerving moment of silence.

“So, you’ve decided to cooperate?”

The words sent a sting of fury through my stomach, but getting angry wouldn’t have resolved anything. I didn’t know what protocols they operated under for this situation to have come about in the first place, but I had the means to change course.

“Yes. I know what you’re looking for. And who.”

For the next few minutes I told them, as calmly as I could, of the events of the past week. I spared no detail, not of my talk to dad not of the unfortunate request I had made to Silverline, explaining each action in as reasonable as manner as I could. Then I came to the book – well, all three of them to be precise, and how I used the information in the first to get the idea of Dodge City, how the message in the second brought me there, and how the third made me sick to my stomach through its disturbing content.

They asked me about the ponies on the way; I told them all there was to tell. I made special care to slow my voice, as if speaking to a child, when I came to the Flim-Flam brothers and their transformation spells. I told them everything I knew of Desert Carrot and the mare who ferried me around.

They listened intently, saying nothing. After I was done, the absolute silence around me gave me pause to hope. Thoughts about the absurdity of everything I had just told them tried burrowing their way to the surface, but the hope was there to drown them out.

“I see,” said the old stallion, before going quiet for a moment. “Self-preservation is a powerful tool.”

My heart fell into my hooves.

“True,” agreed the old mare, “You might be of service yet. As soon as we confirm your testimony.”

There was no time to respond to that – the two Guards to my sides grabbed me and pushed me to the side. At the same time, the robed ponies started walking away to an opening exit in the distance.

A dim light at the end of the darkness signaled my destination, and I had never been as happy to be dragged off to confinement by two Royal Guard as I was in that moment. Everything is going to be fine, I kept repeating, They’ll get Carrot and the book, and everything will be sorted out.

I had a smile on my face as the Guards guided me into a narrow corridor, sharp slabs of rock protruding from the ceiling and the walls, some of the jagged shapes even reflecting light as mirrors. The sight of a waiting pony, hidden as the rest behind a heavy cloak, brought my attention back. Without a word, he turned to the side and cast a circle of white magic onto the wall. A hole, marked with a thin ring of flowing magic, appeared in its place and I could see a strangely bright space beyond; a small enclosed room with jagged rocks as walls.

They can’t just seal me in there.

A shove from the Guards ended my question before I could say it out loud and a glance behind revealed only two stern faces expecting me to step inside. My hooves shook as I stepped over the threshold of the portal, the sound of each echoing slightly as I made my way into the tight confines of the cell.

This is wrong, I thought and spun around to try to reason with the ponies outside, only to be met by small bright sphere of the rapidly closing portal on the only straight wall in the cell.

“No!” I banged my hoof against the rock before dropping my head and stepping away.

It was fruitless to try and resist, I knew that. For a brief moment I felt a tinge of shame at throwing myself at the wall like that. Doesn’t matter if they heard me or not, I’m trapped in here until they see Dodge. Annoying them would only prolong that process, in turn prolonging my captivity. The only thing I could do was to wait it out; a mind-numbing task unless I found a way to distract myself. The cell became my first target.

My containment was nothing more than a collection of rock and crystals surrounding a flat floor. No doors, no bed, no openings for supplying food and water and even no, ahem, drains that would point to a place where one could relieve himself. The only reason I could even see everything that I was missing was the faint glow seemingly emanating from all around, the likes of which I’d never seen before. The bad news was that the crystals, randomly strewn among the slabs of rock, also reflected light, meaning I saw a scattered version of myself every time I approached a wall.

On the upside, at least it wasn’t as hot as in the trial chamber. As much as my mind started going blank in that place, the cooler air inside the cell brought it back to life with the first deep inhale. I needed something to do, stat, so I spent what felt like hours looking for the smallest crack or hole in the walls and ceiling until I eventually gave up and settled for staring into the crystals and rock formations. While there was still nothing there that would tell me where to relieve myself when the need came, there was at least something to take my mind off that scenario: The previous visitors were just as trapped as I was.

Scratches and letters were inscribed into the sides of the rock slabs that faced away from where the temporary opening was magically created to throw the authors, and myself, into this place. I automatically looked down at my hooves, but quickly decided that I didn’t want to have the time to wonder how they managed to carve into the rock.

Steel food plates?

I inspected the scratches further. Lines were drawn one next to the other and crossed out; somepony had counted the days they were trapped here, although how they managed that without a watch or a calendar was beyond me. This place was deep underground and it wasn’t like the Guards allowed any personal items in the cell if the fate of my uniform and saddlebags was anything to go by.

What did they do to those? The last I’d seen them, they were lying on the ground when the Guards escorted me here. Taken as evidence, probably. I really needed to focus on something other than the trial, so I took to the engravings instead.

It wasn’t the number of them that made me uneasy, or that there were actual scribbles mixed in with the random words and shapes, it was their uniformity that got me the most. Somepony spent an awfully long time here. The conclusion would stay with me for a while, I was sure of it. The only thing I could hope for was that I wouldn’t have to search for empty spaces to scratch my own messages into the rock out of sheer boredom.

For the first time since the train, while I was trying to piece together the cryptic lines in the rock, I felt my nose clogging up again and my breathing grow heavier; even my immune system had returned in full now that I wasn’t being sentenced to permanent confinement. How did they come to that, anyway? I shrugged. It wouldn’t be long before it didn’t matter.

The feeling of having my whole body held together by sweat now also returned. I didn’t bother trying to sniff out my fur to see how badly I smelled – by now I was too used to it to notice. The idea of a shower was now firmly implanted in my mind, though, but when I looked at the wall to the corridor, I noticed something that I had to scoff at.

The cell bore a striking similarity to me, in a way. Its walls were chaotic, thanks to the explosion of angled lines and reflective crystal, all leading in different directions. Condensation formed water droplets in the multitude of tiny indentations and scratches along the rock surfaces, and those droplets glimmered ever so slightly. I didn’t need to remind myself of how scruffy and sweaty I looked at the time to draw the connection.

How did I end up here?

The question was sudden, yet not aimed at retracing my steps or unveiling the path of wrong decisions I’d taken to get me here. It was a much more somber question, as I started seeing the alternatives to my current situation for the first time.

I could have been in Baltimare now, getting new assignments and talking to Silverline. The closeness of the possibility cut a dark shadow in my heart. I could have gone to the gym in the evening. With every scenario my optimism was ever more replaced by the thought that, yes, I’d done something unbelievably stupid to find myself in a strange prison cell instead of picking up points for my future in Baltimare.

This is about as far away from progress as I could’ve gotten, isn’t it? This won’t go away.

Even once the misunderstanding was out of the way, I’d have a permanent mark on my record. What can they do to me for this? The feeling that the mark wouldn’t be official was growing stronger the longer I lingered on it. I hadn’t known about the Council up until this point, and I didn’t even know there was a prison underneath the great mountain that Canterlot was built upon. This was going to be kept under wraps, there was no doubt about that, but what did that mean for my future?

Pearl…

That was an obvious answer, though I hadn’t heard her voice in the proceeding. Not that that was saying much, as I couldn’t say I heard every pony there speak. But my future would inevitably cross her path again, if nothing else than for leaving back to Canterlot on such a short notice. She would know I’d left, and probably why. Or will she?

Whatever the case, I’d get to face her again to defend myself for missing out on the rest of my assignments in Baltimare, whatever they were. Whether the repercussions would be threatening to my ambitions or not, that was not for me to say and in that light it didn’t really matter if they were real or arranged.

I got up and started doing slow circles around the cell, just enough to stretch my legs and free my thoughts. The ground moving below me became very interesting.

They’re going to throw me in the grinder for helping them out.

The sudden burst stopped me in my tracks and I looked up, blankly, into the side wall. No, I forced my legs to move again, Maybe not. They’ll get Carrot, they’ll get those two and everyone that’s helped them, and they’ll thank me for my help in all of this.

I stopped again, this time for a different reason. A half-smirk formed on my lips.

OK, maybe they won’t thank me as such. That was far more realistic, so I allowed myself to continue the walk in a touch more spirited manner. They’ll scold me for leaving to Dodge and I’ll be back at Pearl’s for another talk or some menial punishment, and that’ll be the end of it.

The positive ending to the scenario didn’t stop my thoughts about other possibilities, but they were now more expanding on the two possible outcomes; punishment or praise. There were a thousand different ways that either could go down, so I took some time entertaining ideas about both, trying to discern which specific way my future would go.

It was all in vain, I knew that – as much as I knew that I was stuck in a tiny holding cell until word came from whoever was in charge of the investigation that my story checks out.

I stopped again and peaked my ears. Then I held my breath.

Silence.

Nothing but silence in the cell. No tremor of ponies walking around outside, no nothing.

Oh… This is going to be a long day.

I’m not sure if I can say that the next minutes passed like hours seeing how I had no way to tell time. The downside of my newfound calm was the lack of any kind of stimuli that would keep my mind occupied, and the background noise that were the thoughts on scenarios was causing me a light headache. Or maybe it was the cold that returned. Either way, I needed to focus on doing something, anything to pass the time.

It was then that I realized how little I actually felt of my environment. There was heat, but that was coming from me thanks to the return of a light fever. And there was…

Nothing.

The air was stale and I couldn’t say if it was cold or warm. The floor was the same. I touched the wall to see if it would feel cold to the touch – no. The lack of noise was already obvious the moment the Guards left so all that was left was the strangely even light seemingly radiating from the rock itself.

“Hey!”

Even at the time I wasn’t sure why I shouted that out. The need to hear somepony came out of nowhere; that intense desire to know that there was someone else there and that you haven’t been forgotten. I didn’t wait for the reply that wouldn’t come and took a deep breath instead, only for two thoughts to crystalize in my mind.

First, it wasn’t the imprisonment or the lack of anyone to answer that was slowly driving me to panic. It was the stillness of… everything. Nothing changed, not the temperature, nor the light and there was no outside noise to begin with. Ponies just weren’t designed to be in a sensory-deprivation tank.

The second thought was a question. Why was I so certain that nopony would answer? Where was the logic in that? Everyone in Equestria has certain rights, no matter what they did to get themselves arrested – as seldom as arrests even happen. There’s only one prison in Equestria and even that one has a library larger than all the cells combined, as the tour we had there as colts taught us. Those ponies didn’t seem to lack pony contact, and that was how they seemed to me before I became old enough to understand all the jokes about them. Yet here I was, isolated from everyone and everything, and I had somehow decided that it was normal?

I’ll be here forever.

The thought started off as an uncertain statement, but grew into a definitive answer every time I popped back into my mind. Then it was joined by another one.

How long have I been in here for?

What if it really wasn’t hours but minutes? I looked around, frantically searching for anything that could help me determine the time. A small change in the brightness of the cell around me, any kind of shadows or sounds, anything that I could use as a reference. Terror slowly crept up on me until I could hear myself breathing like I’d run a marathon. I swiveled my head around like a madpony, until something clicked in my mind. We’d been warned of this in training, and I finally realized what was happening.

“STOP IT!” I shouted at myself, and threw my legs far apart as if to keep me tethered to reality. “Calm down.”

Panic would only make things worse. I couldn’t allow it to spread, and I knew just the technique for stalling it.

I started going through everything I could lay my eyes on. Lacking the needed variety of physical objects in my cell, that meant naming every part of my body I could see and touch, and the bones and muscles underneath it, to my best knowledge of anatomy. With every mouthed word, the small world around me felt less and less like a strait jacket. Even after the desire to break down the wall passed, I stood still for a long time, forcing my breathing to slow down and listening to my heartbeat as it got quieter and quieter, until I had to feel for a pulse to know my heart was still working and working normally again.

I can’t let this happen. Not to me.

Panic, that precursor to madness, was tamed now that I knew what to look for and I sat down in the corner with newfound resolve. From Ponyville to Dodge, I had been framed, and the truth will come out soon enough. The shock of the day, as it had been so far, cleared and I felt a heavy weight lifted off my chest.

“Heh,” I chuckled at that.

Here I was in a lifeless cell, locked away underneath a mountain thanks to the strangest trial I’d ever heard of in my life, and there was really nothing to worry about. Nothing, as long as I kept an eye out on my mind. Or so I tried convincing myself.

I slumped down on my haunches. At least I could feel something new; a light shiver in my legs. I don’t know how long I sat there, staring blankly at the wall, and when I dozed off, only that I was awakened by the sound of hooves slamming against the ground, as the two Royal Guards rushed into the cell before I could get up.

“What’s-”

The handle of the spear cracking against my skull made sure I didn’t finish the question. The dizziness and double vision worked with the pain to keep me curved up in a ball on the floor. Hoofsteps shuffled around me as I prepared for another blow.

“Is this your idea of fun?!” My jailer suddenly became chatty, only not in a good way. “What did you think was going to happen, huh? That we’d say, ‘Oh, there’s nothing here, let’s just forget about it?!’ Huh?!” He turned to leave as quickly as he appeared.

I craned my head at him, only to have a set of white legs cross my view. In a matter of moments, the two Guards pulled me up by my shoulders and dragged me out of the cell. The robed pony walked away, only he wasn’t going for the cavern.

“You should’ve taken the verdict like a stallion, or help yourself out. Not mess with our work. What, you think having them investigate some backwards town made it easier for your friends to hide? We’ll find them all, don’t you worry about that!”

My hind legs were struggling to keep me stable under the unyielding grip of the Guards that dragged me forward. The path down was lit only by the magic of the robed pony; meant only to help the Guards and himself see, while I skipped along, slipping on the jagged floor with every other step.

“Make us look the fool, will you… They gave you the benefit of the doubt and this is how you repay us?”

Any attempt at an answer was followed by a knee to the jaw by either of the Guards. When I felt a numb pain in the entire row of teeth on my right side, I decided to stop with responses and just let him go through the monologue.

“Stupid. Stupid is what you are.”

The dim light ahead revealed an outline of a concrete doorframe built into the mountain. It was the first sign of an actual structure I’d seen underground. The sharp edge where the uneven ground met the level floor snagged my hooves in a painful pull. If the situation would have been any lighter, I would have been thanking the Guards for holding me tight, and stopping a direct faceplant onto the now level floor.

I didn’t have much time to appreciate the straight, high ceiling or the narrow table to my right – signs of advanced civilization after the ragged cell – as I once again felt something catching my hooves, then being pushed away to the tune of a weird, almost jingling noise. Didn’t have the time to explore that either.

“Suppose you think this is all a big game?”

In the brief moment that he turned around to face me, I saw the dark orange eyes look at me, a shadow cutting across his brown face. Then came kick to the stomach that got me on the ground, but even that was just the beginning.

“Hold him tight.”

With a well-practiced swing, straight out of Crowd Dispersal at the Academy, the two Guards flipped me onto my back, only instead of cuffing me they strapped me to the floor with leather straps. I now saw what the source of the jingling was: Steel rings moving over steel plates, affixed to the concrete below. My view was short lived. The Guards grabbed my head and forced it up, level with my body. The gag and head strap came a second later. The goggles were last.

“Are you comfortable? Anything more we can get for you? No? Good! Let’s try to bring you to terms with yourself, shall we?”

The goggles were more like diving goggles than those used by Pegasi athletes, and I understood why the moment they fogged up. A faint glow of magic cast a round blob on the fog, until the lenses cleared and I saw…

Canterlot?

It was a sunny day in and I was standing in the middle of a road, surrounded by cafes and boutiques, as much as that didn’t make any sense. The towers of the Canterlot castle rose in the distance, partly obscured by the mountainside and ponies were walking about, as they would, only there was something off about them. Something in the way they cheerfully strolled about with energetic smiles and happy gestures that made me just a bit uneasy, if the fact that I couldn’t move or discern what they were saying didn’t instill enough discomfort in me.

Surprisingly, I could move my head, only to see more of the suspiciously happy ponies walking around. And they were all so bright, like the sun was shining through a magnifying glass, not that it seemed to bother anypony. They were just walking, talking, drinking their drinks and going in and out of buildings I couldn’t recognize. The whole street was white, white from marble and white from the glare. Even the cobblestone road beneath me was so bright gray it didn’t do more than make its presence known.

Where am I?

I’d never seen that street before. Much like the ponies around me, that didn’t feel right. Canterlot is many things, but a sprawling metropolis it’s not. If the scene would have taken place in any of Equestria’s mayor cities, I’d have no problem conceding that I was in an unknown part of town, but Canterlot I knew like the back of my hoof, and I’d never seen this before. Then it appeared; a sound so distinctive I knew I’d never heard it before.

I twisted my head around, if I can even say that, as I couldn’t see any part of my body, and I saw ponies craning their heads to meet the same sound. A machine was coming toward me, looking somewhat similar to the brother’s machine, yet different at the same time. It was smaller in every way, and from the front bore only a passing similarity to the locomotives that helped create the Cider Squeezy 6000. Neither did it have the sound or the electrical wizardry of that machine.

Instead, it carried at a slow and noisy pace two grinning Earth ponies, who were too busy waving to the passers-by to slow down for the disembodied head watching them approach. And everyone was happy, just so happy!

Then the scene shifted.

Now I saw a giant concrete building in the middle of a decrepit town. It fit into its surrounding perfectly; a dirty-light-brown monument with few windows in front of a row of small, equally brown apartment buildings and dried up grass. The sky had a yellow tint to it, a gentle mist diffusing the sunlight ever so gently. But it wasn’t the lifeless shell of a city that I was most interested in, it was the long line of ragtag ponies entering and exiting the large building directly ahead. From the distance, they were a thin black line, with patches of stained color where their clothes left gaps, a thin black line to mimic the thick black line rising into the sky above from the two chimneys of the factory, broken apart by patches of tinted sky where the smoke left gaps.

The building was on fire in the next scene. And in the fourth scene I was moving through dark alleyways hiding entire families; fathers scrounging from dumpsters as young fillies and colts slept in their mothers' embraces. The one thing missing from my journey so far, besides the lack of feel for touch and heat, was smell. Seeing the puddles and filth on the floor, I was thankful to have been spared that sense.

Poverty. Poverty was everywhere, on the streets and in the flats. Ponies with bleeding gums and broken limbs begged on the streets, as passers-by hastened their step to avoid catching the same fate by lending a hoof. Only the same faces appeared again, a few years older, taking their turn at the community kitchens and fighting with the older hobos on the streets for a place to spend the night. The corpses I’d stopped counting.

“Do you see that?!” the angry, heartfelt shout was timed with the removal of the spectacles, dissolving the vision instantly. “That is what you’re fighting for!” The manic grin finished off the display.

“Oh yes, I’m certain your friends didn’t tell you about that part now, did they?” he lurched at me, stopping just short of my skull and looking intently at me.

Then I saw it, the focus behind his eyes. I don’t know what he saw lying beneath him, but it wasn’t me. Nopony looks at another pony like that. It was a piercing stare, full of hate and pity; disbelief boiling over to the surface. No, he didn’t see me. He saw the whole idea that he was fighting against embodied before him and it wouldn’t matter if the pony on the ground was Desert Carrot or a random Specialist.

I was powerless. There would be no reasoning here, or mercy. Whatever I had hoped for when I sent the Council on Carrot’s tail was gone. Even if the Council could still be swayed, they weren’t here in the isolated chamber of visions. Only one of their henchponies was keeping me company with two Guards to protect him should I snap the straps or shatter the steel keeping me pinned to the floor.

“Let’s continue, shall we?”

The words allowed me to take a deep breath. The show would go on for a little longer, each minute spent under the spell guaranteeing strange peace instead of seeking violence.

Go with it. Just go with it, was the only thing I kept saying to myself as the goggles found their way back over my eyes.

The skies were filled with wide white clouds that slowly moved around like giant icebergs through the sky, but the cyan pony flying next to me didn’t seem to mind. It must have been warm up there, for a Pegasus at least, as she swayed gently from left to right, cutting a snake-like path through the sky and taking me along for the ride with her, even though she never saw me. She kept nudging her head up and down, her eyes half-closed, enjoying the flight with every fiber in her body. It wasn’t hard to see why.

The small town below us was casually giving way to idle fields and green forests, birds flying low below us. It was so different flying without a chariot blocking the view down, but a thin cloud soon did that job instead. I looked back up. The white stream that had spoiled my view was merely the beginning of a giant cloud we were straying in. My guide woke from her daydreaming and straightened her path. The narrowed eyes focused on the cloud ahead and she soon flapped her wings like a pony possessed, aiming straight at it.

The cloud wrapped itself around us until there was nothing to see but the grayish-white glow of the behemoth. The Pegasus to my left didn’t flinch for a second, and now I could see the hint of a grin on her muzzle. We punched through the cloud a few seconds later, the happiness pervading her face now. She shook her head, droplets of water falling from her mane with each swing. The next moment, she looked right past me, up and to the right, at the next target. One inspired sweep was all it took to lock on to the cloud above us.

I could see her straining now, taking on speed and altitude with every flap of her wings, and an occasional glance at the forest far below told me where we were going next. Like it or not, I was being taken for the flight of my life, but before the inevitable loop down, she had to get through the cloud. The mist was already forming around us, blurring the vision ahead, when it happened.

In an instant, I stopped moving. The Pegasus flew ahead, as determined as before, and that’s when it shot out of the cloud. My heart stopped. A cloud of feathers flying through the air was all that remained in front of me. To my left, I saw a strange object rapidly dropping to the ground in a prolonged curve, pieces falling off as it spun. It took me a while to find the other end of that equation – a lifeless spec falling down below me.

The vision was just that, but the churning in my stomach was all real. I’d never seen anypony die before. I knew that I was on the verge of heaving. I could feel the muscles in my throat moving with the light jerking of my body, yet I was perfectly still, hovering at the height of clouds. Then I noticed the dark line on the horizon.

The sky was black now. I didn’t notice at first that I was no longer suspended midair, the black lake stretching out in front of me, reflecting the sky, made sure of that. Had it not been for the white outlines of dead fish at the shore, I might not have known for even longer. The forest behind me was no different, if I can even call a field of withered black trunks a forest. Tiny skeletons replaced the fish bones as the remnants of the usual population. In the back of my mind I felt anger and hate building up, but the sight I saw just moments ago still dominated my every thought. Not even a toxic wasteland could overpower that.

It was time to see what had caused this, I knew that, and it didn’t take long for my view to shift all by itself to a building complex further down the shore. Black-coated brick structures stood among massive cylinders, connected with the thickest pipes I’d ever seen. Open drainage tubes, leading from the buildings, dripped black liquid into the lake. And it didn’t make any more difference to me than the landscape before. If anything, I felt my breathing ease up among the black on gray on lighter gray surroundings that were there to further disgust me.

At least I wasn’t seeing anypony die before my eyes.

“You like that?!”

The scene was shattered with the shout.

“You enjoy seeing Equestria go to Tartarus?!”

The first kick nearly broke my ribs. The next tried to top that, as the Guards joined in. The straps holding me down strained against my body with every fruitless move I made to ease the blows. Then, just as quickly as the violence started, it stopped. The robed pony shook his forelegs and took a few short breaths.

“Don’t worry,” he said while catching his breath, “You’ll see more of it.”

He nodded. The Guards unstrapped me and dragged me back to the cell. I was on the floor before the portal closed, curled up into a ball. Numb pain moved from my back to my barrel, spreading from one place to another with every minute movement I made to ease it. I stared blankly into the wall ahead, just as bright as it had always been, and wondered if I wasn’t having the worst nightmare of my life.

And then I saw it: Light mist was forming in front of me and disappearing just as fast. It was my own breath. The temperature had dropped and I suddenly knew how the other ponies measured time, even if it wasn’t the most precise clock in Equestria. Despite the pain, I smiled at that discovery. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in the next minute or the next days, but now I at least had a way of knowing when the next day will arrive.

Or will I?

The hidden chamber beneath Canterlot, the secret trial, the forced visions and the beating that followed. All those lead to a different conclusion.

No.

My smile vanished. Nothing was to be trusted here. The light was still the same as it was before. Whatever its source was, it was being maintained, just like the visions. So whatever was causing the mist was being controlled with the same level of precision and the same intention – to drive me mad.

I lifted my head off the ground, against the protest of my spine and every muscle in my neck.

They would be back for me soon enough.