• Published 19th Jan 2015
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Split Second - wille179



Twilight Sparkle broke time when she got her cutie mark. Now there's two of her with two different talents.

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To Recover the Lost

Sparkle woke from the first full night of real sleep to the sounds of a hospital. Despite the life force Thorn had injected into her being, the doctor had kept her overnight for observation. Sparkle had insisted that she was fine now, but the doctor would have none of it.

And, despite that life force injection, she still ached. It was a deep, physical ache, inflicted by that primitive part of a pony’s mind that commands a mother to love her child. It was grief, plain and simple.

But there was something else gnawing away at her mind, the idea that it just wasn’t fair. She was a necromancer! Shouldn’t she be able to bring back the dead?

Yes, she could animate a body and make it act as if it was that pony, and that it was alive, but in the end, it was just that: an act. It was no more alive than the corpse she’d started with, and it was no more that pony than she was. If anything, the reanimated body would have been less than a pony, for it lacked a true soul.

And yet, she didn’t know how to bring somepony truly back to life. Her books had alluded to it, and to ponies that had successfully done it, but none of them had ever instructed her specifically on how to do it.

A thought struck her. The Dread Necroptica. She had six of the seven tomes. Soul, Mind, Flesh, Blood, Bone, and Pain all sat on her shelf in her apartment. Only Death remained unclaimed by her. If she could find that book, then she’d never have to lose a loved one again.

The only thing that stood between her and that book was the knowledge of where it was. But, if her hunch was right, there was one individual who could tell her precisely where the book was: the information demon within the other books.

She darkened her horn with magic. Or, rather, she tried to. For the first time since she had awoken, she felt the cool weight of a magic suppression band around her horn. That would complicate things a bit.

She raised a hoof to her forehead and tried to push the ring off, to no avail. It was magically stuck to her head.

Sparkle let out a groan of defeat. She cracked open the link, just enough to speak into Thorn’s mind. “Thorn. Thorn!”

On the other end of the link, the dragon groaned. “Mom? Mom! You’re awake!”

“Yes, I am. Where are you?” She asked.

“Out in the lobby. I was sleeping on the couch, waiting for you to wake up,” he answered. “I was having the bloodbath dream again. Mina was there, and... and you probably don’t care,” Thorn realized, chuckling slightly. “Sorry. I’ll be in there in a second.”

Sparkle stopped him. “Actually, I need you to go home to get something for me. My horn’s sealed off, so I can’t use my magic at the moment and I can’t summon them here. Can you go and fetch all six of the Dread Necroptica books.”

“Sure thing, Mom,” The dragon replied. “I’ll get them now.” And with that statement, Sparkle felt the pull on their shared magic reserve as Thorn vanished from the hospital.

As he materialized in their apartment - his room, specifically - his mother asked, “Why did they put a suppression ring on my horn, anyway?”

“The doctor said it was just a precaution. With you being you, and with what happened with Savior-” Thorn was interrupted by a stab of emotional pain coming from Sparkle, “-he didn’t want you accidentally doing something we’d regret later.” Translation: He didn’t want Sparkle to go on a rampage because they couldn’t save her child.

Joy.

While Sparkle rolled her eyes, Thorn snatched the six books off the shelves. He was about to teleport back to the hospital when he thought of something else. “Mom, are you hungry? I could bring you something to eat so that you don’t have to eat hospital food.”

“No thanks,” she replied. “I’m fine.”

“Alright, but don’t complain when the food sucks,” Thorn said. “I’ll be back in a second.”

And true to his word, Thorn did arrive back in the pastel-blue hospital room within the span of a single second. “Here.”

“Thanks, Thorn. Love you.”

“Love you, too.”

“Anyway, let’s see what I can do with these.” Sparkle flipped open the leather-bound cover of Soul, the first book in the series. “Dread, I need information.”

What information do you seek?

“Where is your final book?” Sparkle demanded.

I cannot say.

“And why not?” Sparkle said. “You’ve considered me worthy of your other books; why won’t you tell me where your last book is?”

You misunderstand. I did not say that I will not say were my final book is. I said that I cannot say.

“You are physically incapable of saying?”

Yes.

Sparkle leaned back into bed. “Great, just great.”

Thorn picked up one of the other books on a whim and asked, “Hey, who was the last person to own the missing copy?”

One of my authors, King Sombra. He still owns my seventh book to this day.

“But he’s dead,” Sparkle replied after reading the demon’s answer. “He was defeated by the princesses.”

Defeated, yes. Killed? No, not at all.

“Then where is he?”

Under the crystal empire, sealed in the ice.

Now they were getting somewhere. Sparkle smiled. “Alright, one: Does King Sombra still have your seventh book with him? And two: where is the crystal empire?”

First question: Yes, he does possess my last book. He kept it in his personal laboratory.

The answer to the second question took a second longer for the book to write out, despite it being only a single word long.

Second question: Unknowable.

Before Sparkle could ask another question, the demon added some more text.

By “Unknowable,” I refer to the null location. The one place that isn’t a place.

“The void.”

Exactly.

“King Sombra must have banished the whole city into the void, and himself with it, when he was defeated by the Princesses,” Sparkle theorized. “But that would have been a death sentence normally. The void is between universes; he and the empire could have drifted anywhere in the entirety of the multiverse. And then there’s the fact that time doesn’t pass in the void like it does here. He would have no way of returning home, and no time to make a way home. That’s stupid. Why would someone as brilliant as him...?”

Her eyes widened as she realized that part of the answer was literally sitting right in her hooves. The Dread Necroptica was enchanted so that its parts could be alternately summoned and banished to and from locations at the will of its owner. If Sombra had banished the Empire, he could have left a magical anchor that would pull the empire back after enough time had passed.

That time period could be any length of time, or it might react to some other condition; there really was no way of telling. However, if there was an anchor - logic dictated that there would be - then Sparkle didn’t need to know how to trigger its return.

She could summon the empire back herself.

“Well, isn’t that ironic?”

“What?” asked Thorn, who hadn’t been privy to her internal thought processes.

Sparkle snorted mirthfully. “In order to learn how to violate one of the most fundamental forces in the universe - a personified force - and commit one of the most profane acts known to ponykind, we first have to rescue an entire empire.”

After Sparkle finished explaining her thoughts to Thorn, all he could think was, ‘That’s crazy.’ But, despite his concerns, he could see the excitement in Sparkle’s eyes and would admit that he too was rather excited by the whole prospect. “I’m looking forward to it. It would be nice to be a real hero for once. That battle last year doesn’t count - I was possessed for that one.”

“Well, I’m a long way off from being able to do that. I’ll really need to up my summoning skills so that we don’t end up with an eldritch abomination instead,” she said. While she tried to pass it off as a joke, she wasn’t kidding. Her summoning was only at the basic level, and if she tried to summon something from outside her universe - like the empire was - she had a real good chance of getting a very unwelcome visitor.


A nurse came in sometime later to check on her, while bringing her breakfast as well. “How are you doing?” the motherly-sounding pegasus asked.

“I’m feeling much better now,” Sparkle answered.

The nurse gave her a look that indicated that she didn’t quite believe Sparkle, but she didn’t press the issue any more than her profession demanded. “Any pain anywhere?”

“My chest was a bit tight when I woke up, but I’m fine now.”

“And how are you emotionally? Losing a child would be really hard on anypony, especially after your ailment,” the nurse said. “Just so you know, it’s perfectly alright to cry.”

“I know,” Sparkle replied. “But I got that out of my system already.”

“I see.” The nurse picked the breakfast tray off the cart she had brought it in on and attached it to a little holder on Sparkle’s bed. “Here’s breakfast; a blueberry muffin, toast with peanut butter and jam, scrambled eggs, and milk.”

“Thanks.” Sparkle looked down at the food. It looked alright. She looked back at the nurse. “Is there any chance you could get this suppressor off my horn?”

“Do you think that you are emotionally stable enough to accurately control your magic without hurting yourself or others?” Sparkle nodded. “Very well, I’ll go fetch the key.”

As the nurse departed, Sparkle picked up the fork with her good hoof. It felt weird, seeing as she hadn’t used her hooves for any nimble task for a long time. Shakily, she plunged the eating utensil into her eggs, and then lifted them into her mouth.

She chewed and swallowed. “This tastes disgusting,” she admitted.

“I told you,” Thorn quipped.

Sparkle didn’t reply, as another bite of poorly cooked eggs had already found its way into her hungry mouth.

Author's Note:

I picked the name "Savior" for a reason.

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