Oneohtrix Point Never

by Regidar

Zones Without Ponies

Click.

Twilight sighed, rubbing her temple with a sore hoof, tapping her other against the brass of her telescope.

“I should be looking down there,” she whispered to herself, and took off.

---

“Twilight’s been acting strange lately,” Spike said. He and Sweetie Belle were wandering around the outskirts of Ponyville, not too far from Fluttershy’s cottage. “She hasn’t left the place in days and spends most her time on the roof… branches… thing looking at the sky. I’ve caught her outside just sort of… pawing at the dirt? Like she’s trying to dig with her hooves, but she isn’t making any progress. Any time I try to ask her about it she—“

“—pretends nothing’s wrong? I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” Sweetie Belle said, frowning and turning her gaze to focus on anything but Spike. “I think something happened when I was there last.”

“You think?”

Sweetie made a face. “Yeah, well, I can’t be too sure honestly; she insists nothing is wrong, but…” Sweetie told him about the teleportation incident. Spike wore a frown that deepened the entire time.

“That’s definitely not good. What did she say again right after she came back?” Spike had stopped walking.

“‘Replica.’” Sweetie stopped as well. “She said ‘replica’. I don’t have even the slightest clue as to what that’s supposed to mean, though.”

Spike pursed his lips. “She mighta just been disoriented from the teleportation. Probably didn’t have any idea what she was saying. She didn’t bring it up again?”

Sweetie Belle shook her head. “Nope. Rushed to get me out of there as fast as possible once I bandaged her hoof up. She didn’t let on, but I think she maybe was pretty angry at me for what I did.” Sweetie felt a pang as if she’d just been bucked in the chest, and her posture slumped. “Ugh, and by the sound of it I’ve really gone and messed things up.”

There was the scrabble of talons over dirt, and a soft gasp of surprise escaped Sweetie as she felt Spike pull her into a tight hug.

“Hey,” Spike said, his tail slapping gently off the ground behind him. “Don’t say that, alright? It’s not your fault. I’m sure whatever’s happening with Twilight is just stress related. I love her, and you know I’m remiss to say anything bad about her, but… y’know…”

They were both quiet for a moment. After what seemed like perhaps a bit too long, with Spike’s arms still wrapped around her, Sweetie finally broke the silence.

“Do you want me to say it so you don’t have to?”

Spike gave her a relieved smile. “Would you?”

Sweetie Belle laughed, the sound delicate and musical. “Twilight is kinda like a powder keg of mental duress waiting for the littles spark of stress to set it off, isn’t she?” It took a moment, but Spike found himself laughing along as well.

“A powder keg of duress in a wildfire of stress.” Spike heaved a weary sigh, a final giggle catching the tail end of it in spite of himself. “Really, we shouldn’t be too hard on Twilight, she spreads herself so thin but it’s because of how much she cares.”

“Oh, no! Don’t get me wrong!” Sweetie quickly covered. “Twilight’s amazing! But she is… well, she’s overworking herself into insanity, it sounds like. And she wouldn’t let me look at the thing in her hoof.”

“What?” Spike tilted his head, his brow furrowed. “What do you mean, ‘she wouldn’t let me look at the thing in her hoof’? What ‘thing’?”

“Well, I didn’t get a great look at it, but it was probably a rock of some kind; that’s how she cut her hoof and all.” Sweetie shrugged. “Why? Do you think that’s important?”

Spike had a very uneasy and highly perturbed expression donned. “I dunno…” he said slowly. “But that’s definitely very strange behavior. Not like Twilight at all not to be meticulous about anything much less something medical like that.”

Sweetie felt a shiver run down her spine, which was strange because it was 83 degrees in the late-afternoon sun, and she had a dragon hanging off her.

“Oh, sorry,” Spike said, letting go of Sweetie. Her coughed, his cheeks flushing for a moment as he looked directly up at the slowly deepening blue of the sky.

Sweetie smiled. “Hey, nothing to apologize for, right?”

Spike returned her smile, and Sweetie felt the exact opposite sensation of the shiver that had just run through her.

---

Click.

“You’ll never find them out there, you know,” Twilight muttered to herself. She looked down from her telescope lens and down at the charts she’d been marking up; they were completely unintelligible now, covered with scrawls of ink—half completed thoughts, random tangents, in-identifiable symbols, and the occasional good-old-fashioned bout of profanity.

To Twilight, of course, it made total sense; she hadn’t spent the last week and a half staring at the sky day and night for nothing.

“Ah, but you’d doubt me, wouldn’t you?” she murmured, her horn glowing for a moment as she, in her eagerness to make a new documentation of the position of a Replica, had forgotten her wound.

Agonizing pain shot through her head, driving down into her skull through the core of her horn like an icepick. Twilight let out a pained gasp as her body seized partially; both her wings curled inward, her untreated sprain sending further discomfort through her. She could hardly care about that though.

“My horn,” Twilight whined softly. “No, not another layer…”

She brought her hoof to her horn, and in real time, she felt another layer coil and curl off it, as if it were the page of a burning book turned to ash.

Twilight held this section of her horn. How many times? How many times?

She carefully put it aside the others that had shed during her near two-weeks up here. This made the fourth layer. Each one resembled the last, with one exception: there was always more each time.

Now it didn’t matter, because their voices were singing in her ears. They told her she was loved, that they loved her, and her whole body was aglow with warmth.

All you’re even going to want to do is go back there.

Twilight tore the bandages from her hoof, holding it up to the light. The jet black shard imbedded in her frog glittered with a brilliant sheen, drinking the sunlight. It was greedy, and drank far after it was full. Twilight could feel it growing warmer and warmed with each passing moment, its surface aglow with a black light she knew she shouldn’t be able to see.

Yet there it was, surrounding the shard in an aurora of fractured color. Color that Twilight had never seen, couldn’t know, and absolutely loved.

“None of them believe you.” Twilight was talking to herself, about herself, but it sure did seem like the shard in her hoof were the subject in both cases. “They don’t know what it’s like. To be ripped apart. Torn away. None of them.”

She stared deeply into its wonderful, dazzling heat. She brought it close to her chest, pressed it against her ribcage until the smell of burt hair and frying flesh became too much to bear; when she took it away, she missed how it beat in synch with her heart.

It was whispering to her. Trying to speak again.

“What’s that?” she asked kindly, far kinder than she’d spoken to anypony recently.

Twilight Sparkle brought the shard to her ear, and it spoke to her.

“ZONES. WITHOUT. PONIES.” The voice was booming, deep, echoing around her skull. She knew she was the only one to hear it. She was proud of that. Nopony else deserved to hear them speak.

“Zones without ponies,” she whispered back.

“ZONES. WITHOUT. PONIES.”

Twilight looked back up at the night sky. The stars twinkled mockingly back. She shot them a manic grin.

“I understand,” she said, a tear forming in the corner of her eye. She brought her hoof to her mouth, and kissed the shard. The moisture of her saliva hissed as it turned to steam.

“Twilight?”

Twilight spun around; she’d clearly instructed Spike to leave her alone while she was doing this important research. What could the impudent whelp want now?

“Twilight?” Spike asked again. Why did he look so crestfallen? “Are you feeling alright?”

“Of course I’m feeling alright, Spike,” Twilight said, the dismissal crystal clear in her tone. She waved her hoof at him. She didn’t even bother to look in his direction. “Leave me be. I’ve got important astronomy to attend to.”

Spike made a weird little noise. “Twilight, really. This is starting to get concerning.”

“If you were concerned, you and the rest of my so-called ‘friends’ would have tried to help me out with my horn already!” Twilight gestured wildly to the gnarl of branches she’d been using as a shelf/desk.

Spike knew better than to point out the area was empty and that her horn looked fine. “You’ve got us all worried.”

“Really, it’s ME who should be worried about all of YOU,” Twilight spat with utter and pure unadulterated spite at Spike. “Having to put up with constant lies and conspiracies against me by you petty thieves and ungrateful heatstealers!”

Spike couldn’t have looked more bewildered even if he had tried. “Wh… what? Heatstealers? Twilight, what are you talking about?”

“Get out of my sight,” Twilight hissed at him, her entire muzzle contorted in a scowl that was quite unlike her to make. “Get out before I make you.” She could feel the raw bubbling energy building inside her, the heat emanating from the shard so intense that she was half-convinced a fireball was forming there right above it.

Spike sighed. “Alright, Twilight. I’ll leave you alone. But really, you’re starting to scare me. This isn’t like you at all.”

Twilight stared at Spike with a look not unlike that a cat gives a particularly plump rat right before tearing its head off. She then took a deep, measured breath and closed her eyes before exhaling slowly. “Spike, I’m fine. I’m just overworked right now, and you’re really making it a lot harder for me to get the things I need to do done.” She’d tried to speak as calmly and soothing as she could, but she’d said everything through grit teeth and with a very grating strain to her voice.

“I get the message,” Spike muttered, fighting every urge to roll his eyes. “Okay Twilight, if you say so; I’ll leave you alone now.”

“Good,” Twilight sneered. Spike obliged Twilight, and left immediately. Unbeknownst to her, he’d set off to the Carousel Boutique the second he’d left the palace, but even if Twilight had know that would have hardly been the first of her concerns.

“Try to take the heat from me,” she mumbled, grinding the shard gently against her face. “Try to take me from the heart.”

there they were again, those marvelous and beautiful voice singing and harmonizing in her mind, making her feel as though she were right and beautiful and trusted even though she'd already been all those things before and had known that they had shown her she was simply just a replica from the highest heavens brought down to the warmth of the earth

She pulled her hoof from her face. A small trail of blood connected the shard to her cheek.

Twilight flung herself half-off the branches that formed the rooftop of her palace. She grinned ear to ear, the evening wind whipping her mane this way and that as she dangled by her lower belly and hind hooves thirty feet from the ground. Her sprained wing twitched feebly.

She was staring directly at the front lawn of her palace, but to her she might as well have been gazing right through it; she could see the great black mass in the earth, twisting and writhing slowly over itself like no stone should do.

Twilight Sparkle was going to enter the zones without ponies.

Comments

[Zaid ValRoa]

I've had this in my RL shelf since you published it. I look forward to reading it once it's complete.

[Ice Star]

Damn, well all the stakes just went up. Twilight's slowly losing her mind and Sweetie and Spike are too nice to not think she might be lying to them.