The Twilit Tower

by Fresh Coat

The Wheel of Fortune — Chapter III

Eyes wide, Twilight Sparkle padded further into the strange room. It resembled nothing so much as a hotel lobby — there were sofas, chairs, a parquet floor; even a reception desk. It looked almost normal, apart from the fact everything was decorated exclusively in varying shades of the same dull lavender as the walls. The only thing missing was the ponies.

Slowly, cautiously, she skirted the edges of the room. The wide purple carpet led toward a vague rectangular outline carved into the wall, but there were no doors leading to a foyer outside. When Twilight glanced over her shoulder, even the tiny door she had entered through had vanished.

In all other respects than its total lack of doors and windows, the lobby was a standard one. It could have belonged to any of the many hotels she had stayed at with her family over the years. Her father wouldn’t have looked out of place on that settee, sipping tea while he read one of his detective novels. Her mother would be leaning against the reception desk, chatting with the staff about the weather and the local tourist attractions. Shiny would be running riot through the lobby, dodging imaginary enemies and wielding his wooden sword with righteous anger.

A smile quirked the edges of Twilight’s lips. This empty hotel lobby inside a tower too small to contain it was creepy, no matter how she looked at it — but she just had to remember that it wasn’t real. This was all just a dream, and soon enough she would wake up and be home with them.

And she would take her entrance exam, and she would get that scholarship, and she would learn magic from the Princess herself. No knowledge would be beyond her, and life would be everything she had ever dreamed.

“I’ll wake up soon,” Twilight promised herself, to make it true. “This is just a…a game until I do.”

She completed her circuit of the room and paused back where she had started. The only real aperture that the lobby contained was a single pair of elevator doors. They might be false, of course, with nothing behind them. But given that the other spots in the room where doors might be contained only indentations, it seemed unlikely that the elevator doors would have nothing behind. Twilight was more concerned with the lack of a strong earth pony to power the elevator’s passage up to whatever other rooms the tower contained. Then again, this was a dream. Perhaps she would be able to power the elevator by magic, or something.

On closer inspection, the elevator did not possess a call button. The metal plate where a button should be bore only a small keyhole. There was no key in sight.

Twilight scowled. Even her own subconscious was unwilling to make this easy for her, it seemed.

Fine. So she needed a key. She was in a lobby — where would a key be in a hotel lobby?

Her gaze flicked to the reception desk, where she had imagined Twilight Velvet chatting with a non-existent concierge. Bingo. The reception desk was where they kept the room keys.

Moving faster now that she had identified a potential solution, Twilight bounded over to the desk, and with only a moment’s hesitation, slipped across that invisible border between ‘guest’ and ‘staff’.

Wriggling up into the plush chair behind the desk, Twilight peered into the shadowy recesses of the concierge’s domain. The desk seemed ordinary enough at first glance. Pencils in pots, a clipboard, a binder or two. No keys hanging on hooks, though. The dim light from the purple-tinted bulbs above did not permeate into the deepest corners of the desk, and Twilight stretched out her hoof, feeling blindly in case there was anything hidden there. She strained to touch the wall of the desk, which she knew must be there, as she had stood on the other side of it not a moment before.

But from the concierge’s side the reception desk seemed much deeper. No matter how far she reached, she could not find the desk’s limits. And with her head down here as well it was so confoundedly dark — wait a minute! Twilight groaned aloud. She was a day away from the entrance exam to Equestria’s most prestigious magic school, and it hadn’t even occurred to her to use the very simplest spell taught to toddlers just learning how to use their telekinesis.

Twilight Sparkle lit her horn, and gasped aloud.

The desk was not a desk at all from this side. It was a tunnel, and it stretched on further than the limits of her purple-pink light could reveal. She hesitated for a second, then shrugged. It was only a dream, after all. With a little wriggling, the rest of her followed the initial hoof into the hidden space beneath the reception desk, leaving the concierge’s chair spinning behind her.

The tunnel was not tall enough to stand upright in, but Twilight was a small and determined foal, and she made good progress through the passage, squirming along on her belly. Her horn-light revealed about five yards ahead of her, and it was hard to measure the progress she was making when the pink circle of illumination moved along with her.

When she saw a pale shape ahead of her she cut the spell immediately. The darkness plunged back toward her, and she had to stifle an instinctive squeal of fright. Relax, Twilight! It’s just like Shiny says. The dark can’t hurt you.

The indistinct shape ahead of her resolved itself into a rectangle of light, roughly the same size as the desk alcove she had entered through. With a final shove of her hind legs, she was through, tumbling down to land on her rump on a hard stone floor.

Twilight picked herself up and peered around. The room was small and cuboid, completely devoid of furniture. The only decoration was on the walls — hundreds, if not thousands of little hooks adorned every wall, and from every hook hung a small, shiny key.

Well. Looked like she had found the key cupboard. Surely one of these would open the elevator.

Twilight did a cursory lap of the room, but every key looked identical. Small, silvery, with the same tines and lumps. Impatient, she huffed air out through her nostrils. Stupid dream couldn’t even bother to make more than one key. Well, perhaps it didn’t matter which key she took? Maybe they were all the same.

She picked one at random and wrapped it in her magic, floating it down towards her. As soon as it left the hook, something changed. If she hadn’t been using her magic, or perhaps even if the key had not been wrapped in her magical field, she would have missed it. But she felt it. A little pulse, accompanied by a small grinding noise from behind her. She turned, but nothing had changed. The tunnel was there, same as before, stretching on into the pitch black, the lobby waiting unseen beyond it.

She shrugged and trotted back toward the exit, the key floating beside her. Rearing up onto her hind legs, she reached for the lip of the tunnel entrance, ready to pull herself up onto it — but when her hoof approached it, she met resistance. She tried again, frowning, and again the same thing happened — an invisible barrier was blocking her way. She tapped on it experimentally, then banged, but no matter how hard she hit it, the barrier was the same. Flush to the wall, blocking the tunnel entrance.

Locking her in.

A frisson of fear rippled down her spine, but Twilight kept herself steady. She was made of sterner stuff than this. It was some sort of — a shield spell, maybe? Like Shiny’s. It had locked down when she took the key. It stood to reason that it would unlock when the key touched it.

She floated the key toward the shield to test her theory, but nothing changed. Twilight frowned and let the key fall. Every key in here was identical, but clearly she had picked the wrong one.

Stretching out her magic again, she picked up four different keys at random points from across the room. She kept her eyes on the tunnel entrance as she did so, and this time she saw exactly what happened.

As the keys lifted off their hooks, the grinding noise began anew, and the four walls of the tunnel moved inwards. It was not by much — half the span of her hoof, perhaps — but the tunnel definitely shrank.

A lump rose in Twilight’s throat. Without the right key, whichever key it was, she could not exit. And every time she tried a key, the tunnel would shrink. How many tries did she have? She performed a few quick mental sums — if every key took an inch off the tunnel’s height and width — well, that was forty attempts, at an absolute maximum.

That crawling feeling on her spine was back, and much stronger than before. Twilight was not claustrophobic (a word that she had enjoyed the taste of ever since she first read the thesaurus cover-to-cover at the age of four years old) but she began to feel like perhaps she was developing it.

Just in case, she tried each of the four keys held in her magic, but none produced any effect, and her hoof still could not pass through the wall. Panic rose in her throat, and it was a struggle to stay calm.

“Okay,” Twilight said, and the shock of her own voice was loud enough to make her flinch. “Okay, Twilight Sparkle. You are smart. You can solve this.”

There was silence for a moment as she thought.

“Try one more key, just in case.”

It was not the very best plan, but it was worth one more roll of the dice. It might be her lucky day. And she had a little more leeway before the tunnel would become difficult to traverse.

She scanned the wall of keys once more, and selected one that seemed especially shiny. She pulled it off the key, tensed for that rumbling noise — and sure enough, there it was.

The key joined the other five on the ground; a pile of failures.

“I tried the key,” said Twilight, answering her own suggestion. “Didn’t work. What now?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, honestly. “I have no idea what to do.”

“Okay,” she said, striving to hit a positive note. “What would…what would Shiny do? What would Clover the Clever do?”

“Use magic,” was the prompt answer, “Clover the Clever would have a spell for this.”

“What spell?”

“I don’t know! I’m seven."

“Ugh!” Twilight stomped her hoof on the ground in sheer frustration. This self-talk was getting her nowhere, and was just making her feel like a crazy pony, as well as a lonely pony.

“Clover the Clever would look at the problem, and work out what spell would be best,” she said, pacing back and forth in front of the tunnel. “She’d…she’d use the Sight.”

Bingo. That was the solution, right there.

Twilight had only read about the spell in the vaguest of terms — it involved opening oneself up, and seeing the truth of things beneath the matter of things, but none of the textbooks were terribly specific.

After a lot of late-night sessions and a lot of reading in the age-restricted advanced section of the library, she had finally reached a point where she could — sometimes — in the quiet of her room, after an hour of quiet thought and slow effort, catch a glimpse of a faint, shimmery thing out of the corner of her eye that she thought might be a leyline.

But when you got really good, when a real mage looked at the lines with her mage’s sight, you could see everything. The way the world worked, the way the clouds and the seasons moved. The way the trees grew. The way magic flowed through ponies.

Twilight wanted to be good enough to see all that one day. And with enough work, and the right school, she knew she would be good enough. It was only a matter of time.

And for right now, maybe even her limited skills would be enough to see if any of the keys was more magical than another.

She shut her eyes and tried to empty her mind. She cast her magical senses outward, brushing over every corner of the room, every key, with her telekinesis. Just touching without taking hold. That alone was more magic than many ponies could dream of. But she was Twilight Sparkle, and nothing could stop her.

Twilight Sparkle, future Grand High Archmage of Canterlot University, opened her eyes.

And screamed.

The lines, always hazy at the best of times, suddenly sprang into dreadful and vivid reality. Twilight had never sensed them so clearly — nor had she ever been somewhere with such a horrifying whirl of energy. The normally peaceful lines, laid out in an orderly pattern of mild curves and straight lines, whirled and tangled around the room in a dizzying mess. And worse, they were moving. The lines did not move. They simply were. What manner of place was this?

Twilight blinked and blinked again, harder and harder, trying to shut off her magical sight. But it would not go — the lines were still there, writhing and gyrating like living things, pulsing closer with every passing second — and stars, what would happen if one touched her? Twilight backed away, pressing herself against the wall that appeared to her magical vision only as a faint sketch, while the lines that were all too real twisted and spun in every direction. They paid no heed to mundane concerns like floor or ceiling, and the hideous whirl of lines that Twilight could make out above her must be the rest of the tower.

She shook her head from side to side, and then she saw it. A blaze of purple light in her peripheral vision. She turned to it with reluctance, praying it would not be some fresh horror like a knot in the leylines. They were supposed to be ordered. All the books said so. The cosmic framework that lies beneath our world, the celestial clockwork, Hayhoof called it. That was an image that Twilight had loved. That was what she had tried to see every time she shut her eyes and cast the spell for Sight, a feat that was beyond even her parents’ capabilities.

Thank the stars, it was not a knot. It was a — an object? Something glowing so bright that it almost rivalled the lines themselves.

Squinting against the brightness did nothing, of course, because it was a magical signal her brain was only interpreting as visual stimulus, but nonetheless Twilight squinted as she approached it.

Once she was close enough that her nose almost brushed it, she could finally make out the shape within the inferno.

A key.

Twilight reached out with her magic and seized it, and to her surprise it did not burn her. Shaking her head hard to clear it from the Sight and the terrifying tangle of the leylines — of the order of the world! — she made for the tunnel.

With a sob of relief, she scrambled into its now-tighter confines. It did not resist her this time. The invisible shield was gone. Crawling was much harder than it had been, but she fought her way through the tunnel’s confines with an overwhelming sense of gratitude. For one horrible moment, she had really thought she might be trapped in there for good.

Bursting out of the far end of the shrunken passageway, Twilight collapsed onto the parquet floor, the key falling from between her teeth. Trembling, she lay very still for a moment, and then finally began to sob.

The horror of what she had witnessed finally began to sink in, and in the darkness behind her eyes she could still see the dreadful twisting mass of leylines. There was no way that her subconscious could ever make up something like that. Twilight was clever, but she was not imaginative. She liked science books, not storybooks. History was as close as she ever got to fiction. The bizarre things in this place had not come from her imagination.

And even if it had, the terror she had felt in that room — when the door began to close, and then when she saw the lines — that ought to have been enough to scare herself awake from even the deepest of sleeps.

The evidence was mounting. Twilight was beginning to believe that the Dream was not a dream at all.

She had no comprehension of magic as advanced as the magic that must have created the tower. It was the work of an archmage, or a Princess — but someone as powerful as that would surely be able to find a way to draw ponies in as they slept. Had she been trapped here, somehow? But by who? What evil wizard worth his salt would waste his high-powered magical traps on a seven-year-old?

Her mind was whirling as she staggered over to the elevator door and fitted the key in the lock. The pneumatic doors hissed open, without even a hint of magic to move them, and the foal climbed inside.

The panel held no buttons, and the only directional arrow showed up. The doors slid shut, and Twilight, too numb to wonder if this was wise, let it happen. The same two thoughts chased each other round and round her skull, like dogs fighting over a bone.

What is this place? And how do I get home?

Comments

[Octoskan]

This is very intriguing, will follow with great interest.