Panacea

by AugieDog

Diagnosis - III

Out in the streets of Ponyville again, Pinkie hopping along beside her, Twilight set the back of her brain to work on the problem. And a nasty problem it was, too.

Back in the chamber, she'd gotten Celestia and Luna to show her the structure they'd used all those hundreds of years ago to conjure Panacea. It had made most of her want to fall down quivering in horror, yes, but a part of Twilight had just sucked in the details. The spell had almost no elegance to it, very stark and utilitarian, and that, she felt, was its greatest weakness. Magic didn't respond well to clubs and cudgels, and the way this spell kicked and punched its way through the latticework of existence just proved that old adage.

Unfortunately, that probably meant that picking the thing to pieces and replacing the bad parts wasn't an option. She would need to rewrite it entirely, she was almost certain, and that would take time, time they apparently didn't exactly have...

It took some effort not to shout Run! at the happy, smiling ponies wishing her and Pinkie a 'good afternoon' as they passed through town. The thought that one of them, one of the very ponies Pinkie was calling by name and greeting with a laugh and a smile, would soon be strapped to Panacea's table and tortured to death—

"Twilight?" They were crossing the park when Pinkie whispered to her with just a hint of Panacea's hollowness. "This'd be way easier on both of us if you let me do it myself."

"No." Her spine tight as a bowstring, Twilight stopped by the park's little pond, took a shaky breath, and watched the ponies eating their lunches in the shade of the trees, the foals too young to be at school running and rolling in the grass. "I don't like anything about this, Pinkie, but you've been doing it by yourself for way too long. You're my friend, and I'm not going to walk away from that. So while I'm working on reshaping this spell, I'll be right here with you." She shuddered, the metal table and all those various knives flashing in her memory. "No matter what."

The sudden stillness made her glance over, Pinkie completely motionless. "Thank you," she murmured, and even though it was still Panacea's voice, there was a warmth there that Twilight hadn't heard before.

"Also, I—" Twilight drew a shaky breath. "I don't want this to be easy, not at all. I want to look whoever you pick in the eye, call them by name, and make sure they know that there's one pony in the world at least who will never forget them."

"I never forget them," came that whisper again. "Any of them. I could tell you every name and cutie mark and life story."

"Don't," Twilight said and immediately winced. "I mean, it's great that you do, Pinkie, but this whole thing, it just...I don't—"

"You'll stop it." Pinkie put a hoof on Twilight's shoulder. "You'll make it so every pony is safe from the monsters, and no ponies hafta die for it. 'Cause that's what you do: make things better."

The roller coaster of emotions Twilight had been riding all day took another spin. She lunged forward, hugged Pinkie, and muttered, "Thank you."

A hoof patted her back, then it froze, Pinkie's warmth against her whisking away like a cold front blowing in. Starting back, Twilight saw Pinkie staring past her, her eyes wide and her mouth pinched into a little 'o' shape. "There," she said.

Another chill washed across Twilight, and she glanced over her shoulder, two laughing voices perking her ears. Moving to sit on one of the park benches a quarter of the way around the pond were Lyra and Bon Bon, two milkshakes floating in the glow of Lyra's horn.

Twilight's mouth went dry. "Both of them?" she managed to ask.

"Just Bon Bon," Panacea answered, and this time, there was nothing of Pinkie about her at all.

The temperature seemed to drop even further around Twilight as she watched the two climb onto the bench, their bright eyes focused only on each other. Her mind twitched, and she suddenly saw herself sitting there with Rarity, then with Fluttershy, then with Applejack, then with Rainbow Dash, then with Pinkie, an aurora of knives surrounding her. "We'll take her when they finish their drinks," Pinkie said with Panacea's voice.

The ice everywhere threatened to overwhelm her completely, but the two friends chatting away made a spark crackle up inside her chest. "No," Twilight said.

"Twilight?"

Whether it was Pinkie or Panacea asking didn't matter; Twilight pushed her answer out again through gritted teeth: "No!" And before she could change her mind, she activated her horn, popped herself and Pinkie Pie through the spaces between space to Pinkie's room upstairs at Sugarcube Corner.

"Twilight?"

This time, it was definitely Pinkie asking, but Twilight couldn't look at her. "Open the door, Pinkie," she said, her attention focused on the wall beside the rainbow poster.

"But—"

"I know." Her neck felt rusty, but she forced her head to turn, forced herself to meet Pinkie's wide eyes. "When you open the door, you have to go through, you and whoever you're with. Well, it's just you and me, Panacea, so I'm going to be your subject." The word almost caught in her throat, but she was sure she would've choked just as much on the word 'victim.'

"But—"

Flaring her wings, she let the magic waver to life around her horn. "Have you ever done an alicorn?"

Pinkie was sitting back on her haunches, her front legs tucked against her shivering chest. "No," she said after a moment. "I...I can't even imagine what it'd be like."

"Then let's find out." Twilight shook her head against the memory of those knives. "If I understand what you and Princess Celestia were saying, you don't kill your subjects right away. The spell's all about making them suffer first, right?"

After another moment, Pinkie nodded.

"All right." Gesturing toward the wall, Twilight pulled some ideas from the back of her brain, still humming away on the problem of the Panacea spell. "We'll have you torture me for, say, an hour, and see how much fuel that provides to feed the— What did Luna call them? 'The deep, dark magics of the world'?" She forced a smile. "You can compare how much you get from me to how much you'd normally get from a pony during that same time period, and if my current hypothesis is right, it'll be substantially more."

Those big blue eyes had somehow gotten even bigger. "And then I'd let you go? Is...is that what you're saying?"

Twilight skimmed through the spell structure in her mind. "Unless I'm missing it, there's nothing in your conjuration that specifically says you have to keep your subject imprisoned the whole time. So if my hour on the table gives us, say, a week without the gates of Tartarus bursting open, I can spend the time rewriting the spell, then come back next week for another session if I need to and so on like that."

"Eeeee!" Pinkie's mane sprang into its usual bubble-gum tangle for maybe the first time since Twilight had first seen her this morning. "That'll work! That'll work! I can feel it!" She threw her front legs around Twilight and squeezed her. "I've always kept 'em locked up 'cause, I mean, I had to so I could keep working on 'em! But I can let you go after 'cause you'll prob'bly heal up faster and ev'rything!"

Just as Twilight was moving to return her hug, though, Pinkie went cold and still, pushing away with Panacea's hollow expression spreading over her. "Except it means I'll hafta work on you, Twilight. And I...I don't know if I can...if I can—"

"We don't have a choice." Once again, Twilight gestured to the wall. "The only ponies going through that door till I figure this out are you and me. So let's go."

For a dozen heartbeats, Pinkie just sat. But at last she stood, dragged herself to the wall, reached out, and pulled open the impossible door. Twilight moved along the corridor beyond beside her in silence again, then down the stairs and into—

The room sat exactly as she'd remembered it, clean and bright and horrible to her every sense. "What—" She had to stop and clear her throat. "What do I do?"

"Up on the table." It was Panacea's voice again, that whispery wisp of sound. "My subjects are usually unconscious when I do this, though I always wait for them to come around before I begin...."

Looking at that sharp, shiny table with the racks of sharp, shiny objects on the walls around it, Twilight's knees started shaking. With a snort, she leaped upward, flapped her wings, and threw herself at the thing with a twist so she landed on her back. Not stopping to think, she stretched her front legs up to the top clasps, focused through her horn, and snapped the restraints closed around her fetlocks; raising her head, she looked down along her chest, straightened her hind legs, and concentrated on locking them into place as well. "All right," she said, and her voice broke, a sour taste at the back of her throat. She swallowed against it and went on: "Whenever you're ready."

Silence filled the room, and Twilight glanced over, fear of what she might see tightening her already spasming muscles.

But it was just Pinkie sitting there, her eyes dark even in the pure white light flooding from the ceiling, her mane hanging down to cast her face in shadow. Slowly, then, she rose onto her hind legs and stood, her front legs dangling down like they were maybe a little too long and maybe didn't have the same bones in them that a pony's legs would.

Twilight swallowed. Because this wasn't Pinkie, she realized. This was Panacea, the thing the princesses had summoned more than fifteen hundred years ago, the spell that had kept Equestria safe since then. Trying her utmost to concentrate on the word 'safe,' she watched Panacea sway on her hind legs over to the nearest rack, knives of various lengths and thicknesses gleaming there. As sinuously as a snake, Panacea's right front leg slithered through the air, its hoof touching a point below several of the blades, and—

Magic blazed over Twilight in a soundless explosion and made her wince against the shackles she'd lashed herself into. And the knives on the wall, they shimmered, flowed like quicksilver to surrounded Panacea's hoof, and became a sort of glove, each knife bristling out like Spike's claws. Only longer and sharper and pointier.

Panacea's head swiveled toward Twilight. "One hour," that voice rustled in Twilight's ears, and like a scarecrow caught in a windstorm, Panacea lurched forward, her knives flashing.

Comments

[Lurks-no-More]

Gyaaaah! The contrasts are great, making the darkness stand out so much better.

[Csquared08]

I won't imagine all the pain
I won't imagine all the pain
I won't imagine all the pain
I won't imagine all the pain
I won't imagine all the pain
I won't imagine all the pain

...I imagined the pain

[PresentPerfect]

NO NOT BON BON D:

I am so impressed by Twilight in this.