Truthseeker

by RB_

Thrilling Days of Yesteryear 2

Lyra’s eyes flew open. Someone was in the room with her. She could hear them.

She was on her side. Something was casting light onto the wall she was facing, flickering light, from a candle.

Hoofsteps, behind her. The side of the room with the door. Muffled, slow, trying not to be heard.

She could hear their breathing, too, as they grew closer.

And then, they stopped. Lyra wished her heart wasn’t beating so loud.

The tell-tale tinkling sound of unicorn magic. Something was being levitated behind her, over her…

Lyra shrieked and rolled off of the bed, pulling a sheet with her and falling onto the floor. Behind her, she heard something impact the bed, then a ripping sound as the sheets caught on whatever it was.

Lyra rolled upright and jumped to her hooves, the torn sheet still partly wrapped around her barrel. There was a pony by her bed, holding a lantern.

And embedded in the mattress was a carving knife.

“Who are you?” Lyra shouted. “What do you want?”

Her assailant said nothing, instead lighting her horn. The knife’s blade glinted in the lanternlight as it was pulled from the mattress.

Lyra tensed her legs in preparation to move. “Put the knife down,” she said. “Whatever this is, we can talk about it…”

Instead, the pony lunged forward with the knife.

Lyra leapt to the side, scrambling out of the way as the blade sank into an exposed timber. She began to run, casting one look back to see the face of her attacker. It was the innkeeper, her face blank as she struggled to pull the knife out of the wall.

Lyra kept running. “Help!” she screamed as she tore through the inn. “I’m being attacked! Help!”

The inn’s door banged against its frame as she slammed it open, her rapid breaths coming out as clouds as she burst out of the inn and into the night. She stopped and glanced back. There was no sign of the innkeeper, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t coming. She looked around. The lights in the houses were dark, and there was no noise. No one had heard her cries.

“Help!” she called out again, as loud as she could, but still nothing. It was then, half-dazed as she was, that she realized the Hearthswarming decorations had reappeared.

She spotted movement inside the inn. A flash of metal. The keeper was coming.

Lyra turned and ran for the woods.

─────

She was still amongst the trees when the dawn broke.

She’d spent a few hours running, she thought, and had only stopped when she was sure she wasn’t being followed. She’d found a tree to sit under and waited out the rest, her only protection from the cold the torn bedsheet that had remained tangled around her waist. Now, with the sun up, she could actually see where she was going.

Namely, she could see the one landmark she needed: the top of Starswirl’s tower, poking up over the tops of the trees. She began walking.

What on Equis happened last night? she asked herself. The innkeeper seemed so nice…

Not for the first time since waking up, she wished that Bon Bon was with her.

Bonnie could have taken her down in two seconds, tops, Lyra thought. Bonnie wouldn’t have needed to run.

A pit grew in Lyra’s stomach, and suddenly it felt like it had gotten twice as cold.

She kept moving.

─────

Winter Bell?

Winter Bell? Can you hear me?

No response.

Though her legs were growing stiff, she kept moving.

─────

Lyra brought her hoof down on Starswirl’s door three times. Boom, boom, boom. She could hear the sound of the impact echoing inside.

No answer. She knocked again. Boom Boom Boom. Her leg was numb, she couldn’t feel the impacts.

Still nothing. She tried again.

Boom Boom Boo—

The door swung open. Starswirl was standing there.

“Who—L-lyra?” he stammered. “But… but that’s impossible!”

Lyra smiled. “Looks like… n-not so much…” she said, her teeth chattering.

“Sweet Equestria, you look half frozen!” Starswirl said. “Here, get inside, I’ll get the fire going—Notchleaf! Notchleaf, get a blanket!”

“Who is that?” the colt asked from the top of the staircase.

“Someone who shouldn’t be here,” Starswirl said. “Now go get a blanket! And put some tea on!”

Starswirl walked Lyra up the steps, stopping on one floor to have a blanket thrown over her, before being lead up the rest of the way to the study. A spark jumped from Starswirl’s horn to the logs in the fireplace, igniting them.

“There you go, he said. “Sit close to the fire, there you go…”

Lyra sat down on the floor, tugging the woolen blanket she’d been given around her and curling up inside. She held her forelegs out to the hearth, basking in its warmth as feeling began to creep back into her limbs.

“So,” she said, after her teeth had stopped chattering. “I’m still here.”

“Yes, I can… I can see that,” Starswirl said. “I don’t understand—this doesn’t make any sense! Nothing should be able to persist past the reset!”

Lyra sighed. “That’s not the only thing,” she said. “The Innkeeper tried to kill me this morning.”

She recounted the events of that morning, starting with the Inkeeper, to Starswirl, whose face grew progressively grimmer as she went on. Notchleaf came in partway through with the tea, which Lyra gratefully accepted.

“You’ve had quite the harrowing morning,” he said, once she’d finished.

“Mm,” Lyra said, taking a drink from her cup. Warmth flooded her insides, driving the last of the lingering chill from her body. “What’s going on, Starswirl? You’re supposed to be the smart one here.”

“Well, I…” his eyes darted about, and his mouth twisted to the side. “I… honestly have no idea. This is most bizarre. I know the Innkeeper well, she’d never… I’ve stayed in that inn overnight before, during the loop! Nothing like this has ever happened!”

He collapsed back into one of his chairs, brought a hoof up and rubbed it against his forehead. “And you still remember everything from yesterday?” he asked.

“Every second of it,” Lyra said.

Starswirl sighed. “I just don’t understand it. If it was just you, then perhaps I could write it off as some kind of anomaly, but with the Innkeeper… that’s new behavior, unprompted, unprecedented, and completely out of nowhere. That shouldn’t happen! You said this was after the reset occurred, correct?”

“It had to have been,” she said. “The decorations were up.”

“Right, the decorations.”

He stood up.

“I’m going into town,” he said. “If what you’ve said is true, then there should be evidence of it.”

“What, you don’t believe me?” Lyra asked.

“No,” he said, “I just need to see it for myself. You stay here and recuperate. If you need anything, ask Notchleaf, and he’ll get it for you. Speaking of which, Notchleaf! Get me my robes!”

Soon enough, Lyra found herself alone again. She stared into the fire as she drank her tea and pondered the situation.

The only conclusion she could come to, though, was that it made no sense. Time loops and murderous innkeepers—why would the Innkeeper want to kill her, anyway? She’d been nothing but cordial the night before…

Something strange was going on, Lyra decided. Something strange, even for her.

She sipped down the last of the tea and set her cup down on the floor. She shrugged the heavy blanket off of her shoulders, stood up, stretched the stiffness out of her knees, and looked around.

She had at least half an hour before Starswirl got back, and until then she had the entirety of the tower to explore.

Starswirl’s Tower had been the subject of a lot of academic discussion, back when Lyra had been surrounded by such things. The structure had been lost to time—until recently, she remembered. Its location had just recently been found in her time (the archeologist who had discovered it had remained anonymous in the papers, which meant Lyra knew exactly who had found it), but had been found to be mostly empty.

She started at the bottom, which was actually below the entrance, a basement. It was also a workshop, filled with benches and tools and glassware and row upon row of shelves containing all sorts of odd things. Charts plastered the walls, diagrams and drawings beyond Lyra’s comprehension.

A wooden box sat on one of the benches amidst piles of wood shavings, elegantly carved and painted. Lyra looked closer, and saw something had been carved into the top. “For Clover,” the inscription read, “at last my promise is fulfilled.”

The second floor was, of course, the entranceway, containing little more than the door and a rug. The floor above it was the library, where Lyra had first arrived, and above that was the study. The fire had halfway burned itself out, now. She peeked into the other room; it contained a wood-fired stove, several cupboards, and a table.

The floor above that was a bedroom, Starswirl’s if the robe on the end of the bed was any indication, and above that was a room protected by a trapdoor. Lyra reached out for the door’s wrought-iron handle, intent on seeing whether it would open or not.

“Hey!” someone whispered from below her. “Y-you can’t go up there!”

Lyra, halfway up the staircase, turned around and looked down. It was Notchleaf, standing at the bottom of the steps. His ears were folded back and he was glaring at her, but the quiver in his voice betrayed his nervousness.

“Why?” Lyra whispered. “What’s up there?”

“My mother’s quarters,” he said. “She’s very sick, and—and she needs to rest! You mustn’t disturb her!”

Lyra hesitated, then retreated back down the stairs. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t know…”

Notchleaf’s eyes followed Lyra as she retreated back down the staircase. As she passed him on her way to the floor below, she said:

“I really am sorry… Is there anything I can do to help?”

But he just shook his head and trotted up past her. It was then that Lyra noticed that he was carrying a tray of food on his back. He pushed the trapdoor open with his head and climbed inside. It swung shut a moment later, the impact echoing through the tower.

─────

The sound of the front door banging open brought Lyra’s attention away from the book she’d been attempting to read. She’d spent the last twenty minutes in the tower’s library, picking tomes off of the shelves at random to pass the time. Unfortunately, all she’d managed to learn was that she needed to brush up on her ancient Unicornian.

She placed the book back on the shelf she’d gotten it from, stood up, and walked downstairs. Starswirl was standing there, his face grim.

“It’s true,” he said, closing the door behind him. “Everything you said.”

“Everything I say generally is,” Lyra replied. “What did you find?”

“The Innkeeper was mending a bedsheet when I got there,” Starswirl said. “Said she didn’t know what had happened to it. Thought that maybe a wild cat had gotten in during the night. There was a gash in the wall of the inn, too, just as you said there would be.”

Lyra frowned. “The Innkeeper was normal?”

Starswirl nodded. “Just as I’ve always known her. She certainly didn’t try to attack me.” He moved past her and started down the staircase, Lyra following him into his workshop.

“So, what does that mean?” Lyra asked.

“It means something’s wrong,” Starswirl said. “Beyond that, I have no idea.”

Starswirl stepped off the stair and made his way across the workshop. “I need to talk to Ditzy about this,” he said. “This is beyond me.” He opened a drawer and began rummaging around inside.

“You’re going to try sending another scroll?” Lyra asked.

“Yes,” he said, still going through the drawer. “With you here, the odds are high that—”

He frowned. He opened another drawer and began going through that one, then another, and another. Then, he returned to the first one, levitating things out and onto the floor beside him.

Lyra walked up to him, carefully sidestepping the various cases, containers, and bottles that had been deposited in her way.

“Is something wrong?” she asked.

Starswirl stopped and turned to face her.

“The tempearl,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Comments

[Ze1a7in]

“The tempearl,” he said. “It’s gone.”

Well, duh. If Lyra is still there, it only stands to reason that whatever was used to bring her to you in the first place would still be used up. Otherwise you open the door for potential paradox situations. Common sense, Starswirl! Derpy could have told you this.

[TheStratovarian]

Wonder if the kids not trying to preserve his family's last day on the world?

And little by little, the sanity of things is catching up, and they are snapping..

[SaintAbsol]

Her mother is Hollyleaf(or the pony that was possessing her anyway), isn't she?

[erubianwarlord]

8684129
that makes more sense then it should here

[TheStratovarian]

8684973
Why thank you!

There's just enough truth it might be right, but just enough out of place that you can't be sure its not..

[Naturefang]

8684996
Honestly, I could see it. He lives in a tower with the two most powerful mages in Equestrian history so he's bound to have picked up a few tricks.

[FanOfMostEverything]

8684122
Likely the case. And that inability to perform a full reset may be driving the loop to remove the aberrant element, namely Lyra. It's nothing personal, just a sort of immune response.

Or it's Hollyleaf. Either or.

[Flod]

8685214
Or, ya'know. Inception. BWRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!