The Twilit Tower

by Fresh Coat

The Wheel of Fortune — Chapter IV

The elevator hissed slowly upwards, and Twilight waited. The quiet hum of whatever hidden magic or machinery powered it was unnerving. Twilight had encountered elevators only once before, on a trip to Manehatten the summer before, when the family had accompanied Twilight Velvet to present her latest paper at a conference at Manehatten University. Those elevators had moved only with the distant thudding of hooves, as the muscular earth ponies that powered them thundered along on the treadmill hidden somewhere beyond the urbane mirrors and tinkling music.

There were no earth ponies moving this contraption. In this place, Twilight Sparkle was quite sure that she was more alone than she had ever been.

Twilight stood very small at the centre of the cuboid space and tried to ready herself for whatever was coming. The only problem was that she had no idea what that was.

She was somewhere intensely magical, that was clear. Somewhere designed by a mage of almost unimaginable power — capable of creating pocket dimensions, of remotely teleporting desired individuals from anywhere in Equestria. Capable of dream manipulation. These were skills so impossible that not even Princess Celestia herself possessed them.

Two years ago Twilight had begun swimming lessons at her local pool. Physical exertion had never been among her favourite pastimes, but the lessons had taught her one truly valuable skill.

The ability to spot when she was well and truly out of her depth.

And the worst of it was that she had been coming here unintentionally for years. She had skirted the Dream’s edges unwittingly, believing herself the victim of simple foalish nightmares. And only now that it had pulled her well and truly into its maw did it reveal its true nature.

The elevator halted. Twilight tensed, ready to flee or cast her closest approximation of Shiny’s shield — but the doors did not open. Instead the entire elevator lurched disturbingly to the side, and just as Twilight’s mind summoned a horribly realistic image of the steel cables holding her up beginning to fray and snap, one by one, it began to move once more.

But this time it was travelling unmistakeable sideways.

Twilight was not a particularly mechanically-inclined scholar. Intricate mechanical instruments could be interesting, but most of their value lay in what they could tell her about thaumaturgical energies. But by Celestia, she knew enough to know that elevators did not move horizontally.

This mage was not only pushing the boundaries of magic — but also of physics itself.

For a moment, she began to feel queasy, but she swallowed the bile, ignoring the burning in her throat, and strove for calm. She already knew their capabilities. Had she not seen the hidden room beyond the tunnel, the way the tunnel itself warped and shrank? No, she knew what she was up against. This was just more proof atop an already too-large pile.

The elevator jerked again, and continued its journey in another entirely new direction. Twilight stumbled but just about managed to maintain her balance. It wasn’t until the elevator stopped that she finally lost her footing.

She was still clambering back to her hooves when the doors hissed open.

The world beyond the elevator’s golden-lit square was empty and black. Twilight pushed down another wave of fright and tried to master herself. Celestia help her — this horrible place had reduced her back to a trembling four-year-old, afraid to sleep alone after Shiny had moved out of their shared nursery into his big-boy room.

Twilight waited, just in case anything was about to jump out at her, but everything was dark and still, and the elevator doors showed no sign of closing again. Clearly, this was where she was meant to disembark.

Cautiously, she inched toward the doors. Skipping straight out into the dark would be lunacy, and she had an unpleasant feeling that the second she was through those doors the elevator would instantly depart, or possibly even vanish. She wanted to be sure she knew what was out there before she gave it the chance to do so.

The lobby had been creepy, but at least she had been able to see what was going on.

She poked her muzzle through the sliding doors and waited, wide-eyed, for her vision to adjust. The bright glare from the elevator lights didn’t exactly help, but after a few minutes of concentrated peering into the gloom, she began to think she could make out some shapes.

Shelving. Lots and lots of shelving.

Row after row of it stretched away into the dark. Shadowed recesses of glossy black wood.

Twilight’s mouth formed a little ‘O’ of surprise. “A library.”

Reassured despite herself, she took a couple of steps forward. A library was familiar. A library was safe. Even one as huge and shadowy as this. She approached the nearest shelf and peered into it, ears tipping back again as she saw that there was nothing on it but dust. She checked the next, and the next, but they were all the same.

This library was completely devoid of books.

And as she was checking the fourth aisle, just to be sure — she heard the quiet ding of the elevator doors closing.

“No!” She whirled back, but it was too late.

There was nothing there but a smooth, blank wall.

Twilight stood for a moment, flanks heaving, jaw clenched so tight that her teeth were grinding against one another. This stupid tower kept trapping her. It wasn’t fair.

Spinning back to face the empty library — what sort of books might a place as magical as this have contained? — Twilight steeled herself. Another floor, another puzzle. There was a pattern emerging. Very well. She would solve it, and find the elevator again. Go up another floor, and maybe she’d reach the exit sometime soon.

She drew closer to the shelves, and trotted alongside the aisles for a few paces. Every one appeared identical, but she could see no further than twenty paces down each. The shadows swallowed up everything beyond that. Even her brightest horn-light could not pierce it.

Just to be sure she hadn’t missed anything — calm and methodical, just like doing a test paper — she double-checked the area in which she was standing for clues or hints. Nothing but dry, dust-choked carpet tiles, and shelves upon shelves stretching away in both directions.

She needed to go in.

Pulling in a deep breath and reminding herself firmly that she was not afraid of the dark, Twilight squared up to the nearest aisle of shadows. She didn’t linger; there was no point. She stepped into the penumbra of the shelves, and she didn’t look back.

Dust filled the air and scratched in her throat, thick as ash. It lay deep enough on the bookshelves to give everything bathed in Twilight’s pink field of light a strangely fuzzy look. Like everything was somehow made of felt.

Having assumed that the shelves would run parallel to one another all the way to the other side of this shadowy room, Twilight was perturbed when she came across her first corner. She followed it readily enough, but when she reached a junction where the path branched off into three separate paths, each lined by the same dusty shelves — then she did pause.

“Is this…a maze?” She spoke the words aloud and then immediately regretted it. One small voice in the great darkness, in a twisting web of shelves…it just made her feel even smaller.

I wasn’t ready for a maze. Perhaps I’d better turn back and think again. It was possible one of the other aisles would lead directly to whatever door lay on the other side of the shelves. Not likely, but possible.

She trotted back to the previous corner and turned, ready to head back out to the open area and choose another aisle — but the corner did not lead to the same long straight section that she had originally followed. Instead Twilight found herself at another junction. With five branching paths this time.

Twilight sat down on the floor hard enough to send a mushroom-cloud of dust puffing out in every direction. More space-warping trickery. It shouldn’t surprise her, not after the lobby, but somehow she hadn’t expected it to alter in real time.

For a moment she wondered if she might cry — Celestia knew she felt tired and hopeless enough to do so — but no tears came, and eventually she hauled herself back to her feet. It was just a puzzle. Like the lobby. Okay, that was scary — but it was alright in the end. Twilight was good at puzzles. She could do puzzles.

After a moment of indecision, she picked a path at random and plunged deeper into the maze.

One junction led to another, and another and another, in a fractal pattern so fragmented that Twilight soon lost all track of the direction the elevator originally lay in. The bookshelves were all identical. Dark wood, mahogany or black oak, polished until it shone and reflected dim purple lights back at her. Smothered in dust on any horizontal surfaces, and utterly empty. And always eight shelves high, far taller than even an adult pony would be able to see over.

For perhaps the first time in her life, Twilight almost wished that she were a pegasus instead of a unicorn.

By the time she reached the small clearing Twilight was flagging — not that calling it a clearing felt right, she was in a library, not a forest. But the little space between the narrow aisles, with eight new passages splitting off on its far side, seemed much more of a clearing than a room or any other comparative descriptor.

Twilight sighed and sank once more to her haunches. Shouldn’t she be hungry by now? She ought to be. But she felt nothing other than a little soreness in her muscles. Would she be able to sleep, if she tried to? Could one dream within a Dream?

She didn’t know. She just wanted it to be over already.

And then Twilight heard hoofsteps.

“Twilight?” said a voice, a mare’s voice, husky and deep. “Twilight Sparkle, is that you?”

The voice emanated from the darkness behind her, and Twilight flinched. She did not know that voice.

Her mother’s words echoed in the back of her mind, repeated every time she was halfway out the door, en route to the library with a saddlebag stuffed full of overdue books. Hurry back, Twilight, and don’t talk to strangers.

Slowly, she turned, and saw a mare emerging from yet another aisle. Her horn glowed with her own yellow light, and where it overlaid Twilight’s purple the shelves and floor were illuminated in a shade of dusky orange.

The mare herself was shaded in yellow as bright as her magic, with a mane of fierce red and amber. Only her eyes were not yellow-toned; blue and even, and staring at Twilight with something remarkably akin to recognition.

“Twilight?” The mare sounded less certain now. “It’s me. Sunset.”

Twilight shook her head, and backed away, eyes on the nearest aisle. This was the first living pony she had seen in this strange ghost-building, and she wasn’t sure whether to be glad or afraid. On the one hoof, this could be another person trapped by the tower in the same way that she was — or it could be the tower’s mysterious architect, come to toy with her further. The urge to run warred with the age-old instinct that safety lay with the herd, and she finally settled with hovering just by the entrance to the aisle of shelving; ready to flee in an instant if the stranger grew hostile.

“I don’t know you,” she said at last, and the stranger called Sunset looked utterly lost.

“But you are her. I know you are. I mean, you’re maybe a bit…smaller, than the Twilight I knew, now I think about it,” she inspected Twilight with a critical eye, and the foal shrank away, “But it’s all the same. Your hair, your eyes, your cutie ma—”

Twilight turned more deliberately as Sunset spoke, displaying her flank. Still blank as the day she was born, and that was enough to stop Sunset short.

“—Oh. Maybe…maybe you’re not her, then.”

“I don’t know you,” Twilight repeated, a little stubbornly.

Sunset shrugged. “Well, there’s already two Twilights, that I know of. What’s one more?”

This rather cryptic statement did little to settle Twilight’s nerves, and she shot another longing look at the dusty shelving behind her. If she darted down it, surely it would rearrange itself behind her, blocking the stranger from following her. It seemed fairly foolproof, as escape plans went — though it was dependent on the assumption that this mare was a victim of the tower too, and not somehow controlling it.

But Sunset didn’t look like the sort of all-powerful mage that would be needed to create somewhere like this. She wasn’t an alicorn, for a start. Just a unicorn. And a jumpy-looking unicorn at that.

“Are there more of me here?” Twilight asked cautiously. Cloning spells were…not unheard of. The legend of Uthelred the Unwise was a popular fairytale; a bumbling wizard who had tried to work on too many things at once and bitten off far more than he could chew. But it was still magic Twilight had never read about as being something actually achievable.

“Not here,” was the not-quite-reassuring reply. “At home. Where I come from.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Not…not Equestria.”

She seemed unwilling to expand further, and Twilight was forced to content herself with that non-answer. Somewhere beyond Equestria’s borders there were two ponies who looked unsettlingly similar to her, but larger. Ugh. Hopefully they were just distant cousins, and not anything more sinister.

“How did you get here?” Twilight asked abruptly, eager to change the subject. If Sunset could describe how she got in and it was a different route to the one Twilight had taken, perhaps it would be a viable route out.

“I just…I…” Sunset seemed at a loss. “I don’t know. I think I just woke up here?”

“I dreamed myself in here,” Twilight replied. “Did you start off in the lobby too?”

“The lobby? No. There wasn’t a lobby.”

“Where have you been, then?”

The mare looked perturbed. “A room with…with a bear. A great big bear made of stars. And there was a room with moving platforms — and another one that didn’t seem like it had anything in it at all. Just blackness. And voices.”

Twilight did not bother trying to suppress a shudder. The lobby had been bad enough, but if ursa majors and rooms full of voids awaited her…it might not be as simple as she had hoped.

“But at least I’ve found you now.” Sunset was smiling now, hopeful again. “You know the way out, right?”

Twilight blinked. “What? No.”

The smile vanished. “What do you mean, no? Come on, Twilight, you must have something up your sleeve.”

A glance down at her legs showed Twilight that she was still unclothed; the tower hadn’t suddenly changed her body as well as her environment. “I don’t have sleeves.”

“It’s…it’s an expression. I mean, you’re a bit younger than my Twilight, sure, but — you always have a solution. You’re Twilight Sparkle!”

Twilight shifted her weight and pawed uncertainly at the ground. Sunset seemed to think she knew what being Twilight Sparkle meant better than Twilight herself. “I…I really don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“I want to go home, Twilight,” Sunset said, coming closer, her tone growing more insistent. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice the colours of this place? Everything’s lavender and pink and purple! It’s obvious.”

Whatever it was, it wasn’t obvious to Twilight, and she began to back away. “I—I don’t know what you mean.”

“I don’t get why you had to put me on four legs again, but fine.” Sunset no longer seemed to be listening. “I’m willing to put up with it and learn my friendship lesson from whichever of you wanted to teach it to me — but I’m getting tired now. I want to go home.”

“I do too,” Twilight said, earnestly, trying to keep the tremor from her voice. Did Sunset think she was the one keeping her trapped here?

Sunset sniffed, and she suddenly looked close to crying. Her horn-light began to flicker. “Send me home, Twilight.”

“I can’t.” Twilight’s voice was little more than a whisper.

Her brows lowering and a tinge of desperation entering her voice, Sunset pressed forward again. “Send me home, Twilight.”

“I — I—” Twilight scrambled to her hooves and began to back away. “I can’t.”

Anger flared in Sunset’s eyes, red and hot, and Twilight bolted.

“Twilight, wait!” The strange mare fell, seemingly tripping over her own hooves. She landed flat on her face and looked up with a snarled oath. “Damn these stupid legs — Twilight, don’t go! I just want to talk!”

Twilight saw the corner before her — a corner that if she could make it around, would surely rearrange itself and safely separate her from this half-crazed stranger — and she dove for it. As soon as the mare was out of sight, the bookshelf groaned into motion, and this time Twilight was glad of it.

She kept up her pace for a good few seconds, darting around one corner, then another, relief flooding through her veins with the certainty that she had left Sunset well and truly behind.

“Twilight!” the mare howled, behind her. “Twilight, come back!”

Twilight shook her head hard. Not a chance.

Then came a sharp crack, like the noise a whip makes as it slices through the air. Twilight’s ears rotated as she listened — what had that been?

“Twilight?” called Sunset’s voice again, from somewhere up ahead now. “Where are you?”

Pupils contracting into pinpricks of terror, Twilight skidded to a halt and took a hard left instead of the dead ahead she had intended. Sunset had moved.

Another crack, another call — further away this time. “Twilight!”

And Twilight’s brain finally connected the dots. Eleven months ago, she had first read A Guide to the Higher Magicks by Wollycobbles the Wise. Chapter thirty-three: Objeckt-Summonning and Displacements Magick: Also Known as the Arte of Teleportation. The language had been dense and the prose frustratingly vague, but it had been clear enough on the very basics. A teleportation spell will always result in a snap of displaced air.

Sunset was teleporting in pursuit of her.

Suddenly the theory that Sunset was the Wizard seemed a whole lot more feasible. Twilight had never met a wizard capable of teleportation, and she had met a great many of her Mom’s professor friends.

Twilight’s hooves drummed faster on the wooden floorboards, and she took the corners at such speed that she skidded and overshot more than once. And all the while: crack, crack, crack — a merciless rhythm of Sunset’s desperate efforts to get to her location.

But though the whole library seemed to be full of Sunset’s voice calling her name, Twilight’s fear gradually faded back into a more mild state. Sunset evidently had no control over the maze’s movements, or she would be able to teleport to the right spot. As long as she kept moving, Twilight should be safe.

Just as the pounding of her heart had finally begun to slow, there was another snap of displaced air — far too close this time — and Sunset’s voice rang out from only a shelf or two away.

“Twilight, I can hear you! Will you stop already?”

Swallowing her sob of fear, Twilight hurled herself into a flat-out gallop once more, eyes on the next junction ahead of her. And then the floor beneath her hooves opened up and Twilight’s headlong run became a tumble, and then a free-spinning fall, a scream pulled from her throat as she plummeted end over end down into the darkness.