• Published 25th Jan 2015
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Panacea - AugieDog



Pinkie Pie invites Twilight over to Sugarcube Corner and reveals a dark surprise.

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Diagnosis - II

Their hoofsteps echoed slightly from the walls, Twilight fairly sure that this was the first time she'd ever walked in silence beside Pinkie Pie. The hallway itself was completely square, the surfaces some sort of dark, polished metal. It caught the light from Pinkie's room behind them, but instead of reflecting, the light more oozed out in a dim glow, the whole place shadowy and cold, a staticky smell in the air like a thunderstorm was brewing.

They came to the stairs Pinkie had mentioned after a few dozen steps, and Pinkie slouched down them. "Wherever I live," she said, her voice almost lost in the silence, "one wall of my room, if I touch it, there's the door, the hall, and the stairs. It'd be kinda neat if it wasn't so...so—"

They reached the bottom, then, and passed through a square doorway into a room that made every hair in Twilight's mane prickle. Seamless white walls, floor, and ceiling; light from overhead bright and antiseptic; racks of sharp, gleaming metal implements; a steel table at the far end with clamps at the head and foot; the stink of blood and death and magic hitting Twilight like a barrel of ice water: "—so horrible," Pinkie finished in a whisper beside her.

"Pinkie?" Twilight couldn't've kept the quiver out of her voice if she'd tried, and she didn't want to try, all the carefully arranged knives and spikes and corkscrews and whatnot demanding a quiver. "What...what is this place?"

"My name's not really Pinkie." The voice beside her had become hollow somehow; frozen in place, Twilight couldn't make herself turn to look at the speaker. "It's Panacea. I'm not really a pony, and this is the place where for more than a hundred hundred years, I've made ponies suffer and die as painfully as I could so that the rest of Equestria gets to stay happy and safe."

"What?" Twilight let herself shout it this time, tore her hoofs from the floor, and spun on Pinkie. But staring at her friend standing there with her mane flat along her neck and shoulders, her face completely blank and focused on the metal table, Twilight couldn't think of anything to say except: "But I've met your sister."

A hummingbird flap of a smile whisked across Pinkie's muzzle. "To exist in this world, I need something to ground me, and there's nothing more grounding than rock farmers." A far-away look came into her eyes. "When Maud was born, she was my younger sister. Now she's my older sister. When she has foals, she'll become my mother and then eventually my grandmother." She gave a tiny sigh. "Just like all her ancestors."

"Pinkie, that...that's—!"

"Sadly true," came a voice behind her that Twilight knew she wasn't hearing. But when she spun in that direction, she saw another door had opened in the wall to the right of the stairway, and out of that doorway—

Princess Celestia, her usual smile nowhere to be seen, stepped through, Princess Luna drifting in behind her as quietly as a cloud across the face of the moon. Cadance followed, her head down and her eyes closed, and then Discord of all things, as angry a look on his face as Twilight had ever seen there.

"Panacea," Princess Celestia said, her warm sunniness muted in this cold, sterile place, "we hadn't yet agreed on when we would tell Twilight about you."

Another ghost of a smile twitched Pinkie's lips. "She's a princess now. She had to know."

"Hmmph!" Discord glanced sideways at the table and the instruments arrayed around it, and a shiver wavered through him from his horns to the tip of his tail. "Well, I'm not a princess, so I plan on spending as little time as possible in this gruesome place." His head wheeled around, his neck stretching to swing his grinning face to within a hair's breadth of Twilight's snout. "I just wanted to say 'Welcome to the conspiracy, Twilight Sparkle.'" He popped like a giant soap bubble, and a scent like mustard covered the awful blood stink in the air for a few seconds.

Twilight's brain stuttered and clicked. "You can't— It isn't— How can—?"

"Very well." Princess Celestia sounded tired, but then— "Attend me, Twilight Sparkle!" she said so forcefully that all Twilight's student instincts burst to the fore, snapping her attention to her teacher. "When Luna and I first became alicorns, Equestria was a place beset by monsters on all sides. Not only were ponies regularly killed and eaten, but they starved to death, contracted innumerable diseases, and died in childbirth. The world seemed to hate us more than it did the rest of its inhabitants combined, and Luna and I were determined to put a stop to it."

Just hearing the princess in lecture mode stroked Twilight's thoughts and let them start flowing the way they usually did. "Panacea. It...it means 'cure-all.'"

"It does indeed." Praise from the princess loosened the clamps throughout Twilight's body even further. "And with Starswirl's help, Luna and I fashioned a spell that would be exactly that: a cure to keep all ponies safe from the ills to which they were constantly falling victim."

"No," that hollow, not-quite-Pinkie voice said beside Twilight. "Not all ponies. All ponies except a few. And those ponies hafta suffer all the bad stuff that would've happened to everypony else."

"Yes, well..." Princess Celestia cleared her throat. "The magic demanded a heavy price, but it was one we felt worth paying."

"'We'?" Now that Twilight was thinking again, she couldn't stop her mind from drawing conclusions based on the information she was receiving: terrible, terrible conclusions. "But...you weren't the ones paying the price, were you?" It was impossible, but if what Pinkie had said was true, and if what the princess had said was true— Twilight couldn't keep from gasping. "Are you telling me that Pinkie or Panacea or whatever her name is has been torturing and killing ponies for more than a thousand years, and you've just been standing there letting it happen?"

Princess Celestia's ears folded. "Twilight, you must understand."

"Understand?" All the clamps were tightening back up inside Twilight. "You pick a pony at random to kill! What else do I need to know?"

"Not at random," Pinkie said quietly. "When the spell summoned me into being, it gave me my special senses. So I always know which ponies would be good and which ponies wouldn't."

Whirling in gathering outrage, Twilight opened her mouth to shout at the monster beside her, but seeing the little pink earth pony slumped nearly to the floor, she couldn't do it. Whatever else this Panacea was, she was also Pinkie, and leaping to her side, Twilight folded her into a hug. "It's all right," she said. "You're not the monster here."

"Enough!" Luna shouted, and when Twilight turned to glare at her, she was stomping one front hoof and leveling the other at Twilight. "Summoning Panacea was not a decision we made lightly or capriciously, Twilight Sparkle! You who did not live through those blood-soaked and horrendous days a millennium-and-a-half ago dare not judge those of us who sought any and all means to end them! But blood must spill to appease the deep, dark magics of the world, and Panacea allows us not merely to exist but also to thrive with the minimum amount of destruction meted out amongst our populace!"

That almost got Twilight shouting. "'Amongst our populace'? What about 'amongst us'? I mean, isn't it the job of a princess to protect her ponies?"

Luna flinched, but Celestia didn't. "When our ponies were still reeling from the barely rebuffed first onslaughts of Discord and Tirek and a hundred other names not recorded in even the most complete history of Equestria, which of us would you have sacrificed, Twilight Sparkle? The pony who brought stability to the day, or the pony who brought safety to the night?"

Still quivering, Twilight stopped herself from speaking, forced her mind to travel along this ghastly train of thought. "And after Luna's banishment, there was only you." Swallowing, she took a breath and blew out as much of her anger as she could. "I'm sorry, Luna. I didn't mean to say—"

"Do not apologize." Luna's gaze stayed fixed on the white ceramic floor. "For in truth, when I allowed the Nightmare to possess me those ten centuries ago, despair over Panacea drove my madness." She looked up, her face somehow shadowed in the pitiless light. "I would have destroyed every pony in Equestria if it would have freed us from this blight."

Beneath Twilight's wing, Pinkie shivered, and Twilight instinctively tightened her embrace. "There has to be a way," she said, her thoughts racing now. "There has to be!"

"Yes, yes, yes," Pinkie whimpered beside her. "Please, Twilight! You can find a way to stop me! I know you can!"

Princess Celestia was nodding. "If you could, Twilight, all of Equestria will be forever in your debt." The tiniest bit of a smile fitted across her face. "More in your debt than it already is, I mean."

"But..." Cadance's voice made Twilight turn with a blink: she'd forgotten her sister-in-law was even there. "Didn't you say that we'd run out of time?" Cadance was looking at Princess Celestia. "That we needed Panacea to go to work right now?"

Twilight caught her breath as Princess Celestia's ears folded. "I fear that to be the case. We've been coasting for several years on the strength of Panacea's last subjects—"

"Applejack's parents." Pinkie shivered again against Twilight, and it was all Twilight could do not to leap away from her. "They were so good, Twilight. So good."

"Indeed." The eternal flow of the princess's mane seemed to slow. "But with the changeling attack, the resurfacing of the Alicorn Amulet, and the returns of Discord, Sombra, and Tirek, we obviously need to replenish the spell, or we can expect things to get much worse."

"Worse?" Twilight swallowed. "Than Tirek?" She still woke some nights sweating from dreams where their fight went on and on and on, where they destroyed the whole world between them, where she hadn't been trusting enough to let go of everything in order to defeat him. Turning to Pinkie, she said, "Take me, then."

"No, no, no!" Pinkie whimpered this time. "You're the only one who can fix my spell! You'd be good, Twilight—really, really good—but if I took you as my subject, I mean, you're my only chance to stop!"

Not wanting to, Twilight still glanced at the others. Neither Luna nor Cadance would meet her gaze, but in Princess Celestia's eyes, Twilight saw something sad and old and weary. "A princess's job," Celestia said quietly, "is to protect her ponies. Or at least as many of her ponies as she can..."

It felt like there was a pinecone lodged in Twilight's throat. "All right," she said around it. She took her wing from Pinkie Pie's back and looked down at the misery etching her friend's face. "But I'm going with you when you pick your next subject."