Bound Elemental

by Kendallonian

Entry 15: A Bad Trip

Twilight can be kinda scary in how… obsessive she can be. Yesterday she tried to get me to open a book without burning it. Today she locked herself in her library looking for some sort of magical solution. Honestly, I don’t think I’d want one if she found it.

Luckily, I think she got a bit derailed when she started looking for ways to understand my problem rather than outright cure it. The way I heard it, she found several-hundred diagnostic and empathic spells that might have worked if I was just a bit more… biological. Then of course, Starlight came in on the study session and made a few suggestions, which resulted in an indescribable mishmash of matrices and incantations that could hardly be contained by a single notepad. The notepad in question, which was bursting with sticky notes and stray bits of paper that looped around onto other pages, was then brought to my room by a giddy alicorn and her hopeful, if wary, Unicorn student.

“So, let’s go over this again; what exactly is this spell supposed to do?” I asked.

Twilight launched into explanation;

“Well, in short, it’s supposed to allow Starlight to maintain a bridge between our minds, allowing us to construct a fictitious realm in which you would be able to show me your innermost frustrations and vices.”

I looked at Starlight, an unamused expression on my face.

“It makes you dream the same dream so Twilight can figure out how your brain works.” Starlight helpfully supplied.

“Ah.” I said. Of course, I didn’t really know what dreams were other than from second-hand accounts, but I got the jist; you experience something without it actually happening, then you wake up.

“Of course, this spell would be extremely… intimate.” Twilight continued. “Sharing your innermost thoughts isn’t something we’d ever want to do without your permission, and it may turn out to be unnecessary, but I think it might be worth a try, if you agree of course.”

I nodded slowly. “And.. what will happen in the dream?”

Twilight hesitated. “There’s no real way to know that. What we do know is that it will be your dream, so you may be able to control aspects of it, or I might just be sent an amalgamation of your subconscious thoughts in metaphor… We won’t know precisely until we try. If we try.”

I looked at Twilight. Clearly she was eager to see if this worked, but she was holding herself back for my sake. Starlight, on the other hand, seemed profoundly uncomfortable.

A spark of an idea lit inside me.

“I might agree to this… under one condition.” I said.

“What condition?” Twilight asked eagerly.

“I want Starlight to try it first.”

Starlight visibly stiffened. Twilight did a moment later.

“Why would you… want that?” Twilight ventured.

“Let’s just say I know from experience my mind isn’t a pleasant place to be.” I said. “Or, at least not since a couple of weeks ago.”

Not since she imprisoned me. I didn’t say. But I thought it, and I think Starlight got the message regardless.

Starlight closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Emerald,” Twilight began. I got the impression that she was going to try and talk me out of it, but Starlight spoke up before she could continue.

“I’ll do it.” she said. The steadiness of her voice didn’t quite hide the fear behind it.

Twilight looked at Starlight. It looked like she was going to object, but then she bit her lip. It didn’t stop the worry in her eyes.

“Are you sure, Starlight?” Twilight asked. “She’s…”

Not going to go easy on you. I finished the statement in my mind. I had no doubt Twilight was thinking something similar.

“I’m sure.” Starlight said. “You maintain the bridge, and I’ll hop in.”

Twilight seemed hesitant, but eventually nodded confirmation. “Alright. Give me the signal once you’re ready to come out.”

Starlight nodded and sat on her haunches in front of my forcefield. She was taking deep breaths. I sat down across from her, trying to keep a wicked smile from crossing my face.

After another deep breath, Starlight opened her eyes and stared into mine. “I’m ready.” she said.

…For anything you’ve got. Her eyes said.

“Me too.” I said.

Are you sure? My eyes said back.

Then Twilight started the spell, and everything went dark.

---

Burning. Everything was burning.

And I loved it.

I was back in the plane of fire, frolicking through the infinite, three-dimensional expanse without a care in the world. My own pale green glow contrasted against the omnipresent yellows and oranges; fire in a thousand different shapes and colors refracted through the atmosphere, lighting everything in flickering prisms of warm light. My form stretched and shifted as I willed,sometimes extending flippers like a manta ray, sometimes spreading wings like a phoenix, and sometimes just stretching all over the place with no logic at all. As I touched the fire around me it reciprocated, and I could feel everything for miles around me; floating planetoids of ash drifting about, trees and fruit growing from them composed entirely out of fire; Other elementals touched back in greeting as they all played through the skies, everything was so… familiar. This was home.

The one unfamiliar thing here was a small presence that was relatively nearby. A pony-shaped presence that seemed particularly out of place.

Starlight floated through the sea of fire, conspicuously unburned. She seemed to be looking around in confusion.

“What is this?” she asked.

“Welcome home.” I replied. “This is the plane of fire.” I was suddenly nearby, doing something resembling a backstroke in the shape of an otter.

Starlight’s pony form did a doggy-paddle to keep up. “Well, this is about what I expected, I guess. Everything is on fire. That’s about it.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re not doing it right.” I said. “You’re not… connecting.”

“I’m not what?”

“Connecting!” I said. “You’re here to try and understand me, right? Well you can’t do that as a boring pony! You need… spark. Uh… how do I describe… oh wait, this is my dream, isn’t it? I can just…”

I thought at her, and she blinked, new information coming in. Slowly her physical form dissolved, leaving behind a pony-shaped blob of pink fire.

“Whoa…” she said. “I’m a…”

“...An elemental.” I finished for her. “And with it you get to connect and communicate with all of the other elementals on this plane. Come on, let’s go have some fun!” I turned into something resembling a sea-snake and rocketed my way into the expanse.

Starlight chased after me, but she couldn’t keep up. Her pony form wasn’t ideal for swimming through the incandescent void.

“No, no, no.” I said as I returned, swimming like a fish. “You’re thinking far too rigidly. Loosen up! Let yourself become who you need to be; who you want to be!”

Starlight gave me a confused look, but soon afterward that look morphed, literally, into that of a paper airplane. She actually made decent time in that shape.

“That’s more like it!” I said. “Now, see if you can keep up!” I rocketed away once more, but this time when I looked back, she was gaining. Her form had stretched into a single, piercing point that cut through the incandescent sea like hot butter.

If I had a face then, I might have giggled. Instead, though, I began cutting through the air with a point of my own, shooting under and between arches and loops formed from jettisoned solar matter from no direction in particular. I’d occasionally take a flatter form, like a hawk spreading it’s wings, to take the tight corners. Occasionally I’d even refract myself through solar crystals that were floating in the wind, sending myself in six different directions simultaneously and then reforming on the other end. All the time we were conversing and sharing our fun with all of the elementals around us, and they were sharing their impossible feats with us as well.

No, it… doesn’t exactly make sense when I say it now. The sensations I had in the plane of fire are very difficult to describe in your language, at least what I know of it. The good news is that Starlight and I had no need for language just then; she was practically experiencing it first-hand. I guided her through everything I knew of my home, and soon enough we’d traveled to hers.

Between our two worlds is a wide gulf; many miles across. Most ponies wouldn’t dream of being able to cross it, but us fire elementals don’t like the word impossible. We just gain speed and launch ourselves across; it normally takes a few days to get to the other side, but I cheated and shortened the journey for lack of time.

Starlight and I impacted the ground, green and pink comets out of a clear blue sky. When the dust cleared, we were tiny creatures, no bigger than torches, in a place surrounded by trees that might have been a part of the Everfree forest.

Starlight’s pink flame took the form of a pony again and looked around.

“I can’t… I can't feel you anymore.” Starlight said.

“No. We’re no longer connected. Maybe we should fix that.”

“How?” Starlight asked.

“How do you think?” I asked. I twisted myself around a nearby tree, growing as I did so. Soon it was part of me; I could feel everything it said, crackling and dissolving into pure light and heat. Starlight soon joined me from another tree, and before we knew it we were racing to see who could envelop more of the forest faster.

Not that it was truly a race. In the end our goals were the same; to build, consume, and connect everything. We needed to share this joy with everyone; the trees, the grass, the pinecones…

And it was at that moment that I decided it was the opportune moment to strike.

In an instant, Starlight’s essence was bottled up and pinned to the ground, only it wasn’t the ground, it was a bookshelf in Twilight’s library, and she was being held by a telekinetic field. She panicked, parts of her wriggling free of this thing’s influence, but soon getting stuffed back into her. A giant metal claw snapped into place around her, pinning all four of her hooves in shackles.

“Now you know what you took from me.” I said, my green eyes staring at her from the shadows. She struggled slightly before I slammed her back into the wall with a sheet of metal; one that began to twist and wrap around her like snakes, preventing her from moving an inch; it was exactly what I had felt when she had imprisoned me.

“Stop… I … I understand!” she said.

“You understand NOTHING!” I shouted, my form becoming larger, growing teeth. My voice was becoming compounded upon itself, like I was speaking many times at once. “I have given you the tiniest taste of the freedom I had enjoyed before you chained me down! Now you can experience it being ripped away again and again and again until you finally understand what you have done!”

Another Starlight approached from the darkness; this one was a memory, still emblazoned into my mind from two weeks ago; This memory of Starlight lit her horn, and Starlight’s mind, still pinned on the wall, cried in agony. It was my agony. Starlight was once again wrapped in copper bands and then slammed to the ground, but then I started the whole thing over again.

I was so… mad. I look back and find that I had no intention of stopping until Starlight’s mind had broken; at least then she would have experienced a fraction of my real pain; not just what I had been able to give her, but the loss of identity and sheer upside-downness of being ripped from your home and chained in a body designed by another. I poured it all into her, over and over and over, until eventually she managed to light her horn.

According to Twilight, we had both been comatose for a few minutes when Starlight’s horn lit up on her unconscious body. I saw it in the dream realm, too, but before I could react she struck back.

Except, she didn’t strike back to defend herself. Instead she attacked very much like I had, with ideas and memories.

I saw a friend, my best friend, taken away from me to go to magic school. I saw myself grow in hate for the mark that had shown up on his flank, and all marks like it. I grew to hate my own mark, as much as I needed it. I felt the need for vengeance as my utopia was pulled out from under me by Twilight Sparkle. I felt the relief of giving up that same vengeance, and the joy I had received for offering the same relief to others. Trixie, Discord, Chrysalis… that last one hadn’t ended well, but it had felt good to make the offer, all the same.

Then I saw myself, my elemental self, flying around Twilight’s library, setting fire to everything I could touch. I felt Starlight’s panic at her mistake, and her rush to fix it; I felt the spell being cast to imprison my elemental self into my prison, even as a part of me yelled at myself to stop. I saw my elemental self drop to the floor, limbs leaden and unable to move, and was surprised through the next few moments to feel… regret. Not my regret, Starlights. She watched as I struggled to stand, to take my first steps as a phoenix with clipped wings. Wings I- she- had clipped. My heart longed to reach out and tell the clipped phoenix that everything was okay; that I’d fix everything as soon as I figured out how; and then both I and Starlight realized that there was no how. Starlight’s mistake was permanent, and there was nothing either of us could do about it.

---

In an instant, we both woke, reeling from each other's pain. I think I forgot which one I was for a second there as I oriented myself within my cell. I was taking deep, heaving breaths to feed a fire in my chest that was significantly colder than it had been before. Had I been using my own heat to punish her within the dream?

Starlight, who was prone on the other side of the forcefield, was hugging herself and shivering. It took me a few moments to register that it was because she had gotten so used to being literally made of fire that her own body felt cold, now. Twilight had rushed to her side, but she was unresponsive at the moment.

I was on the ground as well; we were mirrors of each other across the forcefield. I nursed a pain that went deeper than my body; I can only assume she was doing the same.

“Emerald, what happened?” Twilight asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Emerald!” Twilight shouted.

“W-we… shared. And fought.” I said, still trembling. I looked at her face and saw my own for a moment. I closed my eyes. Napalm tears streamed down my face.

“I’m sorry.” I said under my breath, and in the moment I wasn’t sure if I was talking to her or myself.

Author's Note:

This chapter was... hard to write. I'm still not sure I got it right, but if you're exhausted by the time you reach the end, either something went really well or really wrong.

Comments

[Teraunce]

This was written well and ouch.

“I’m sorry.” I said under my breath, and in the moment I wasn’t sure if I was talking to her or myself.

My bet is on both. But you both now understand each other better in a way words couldn't.