The Twilit Tower

by Fresh Coat

The Wheel of Fortune — Chapter V

The breath rushed from Twilight’s lungs as she impacted. Eyes still reflexively clenched shut, she swallowed hard and tried to get a sense of whether any of her bones were broken.

There was no pain. Everything seemed fine. The fall had been a short one, though the fright of it had made the moment seem to stretch out into infinity.

She had landed on something soft. Something…leathery? Something altogether too warm.

Her pulse stuttered as it clicked into place. Skin. It was skin beneath her back.

Not quite daring to open her eyes, Twilight tried to gird herself for the horror that would certainly await once she did. A room made of skin, perhaps? A horrifying facsimile of a pony, made from the stitched-together parts of the tower’s victims?

She had no choice but to face it, so she pulled in one last shaky breath and looked up, ready to meet her fate.

That same breath caught and died in her throat when she stared into the vast green eyes of the beast that had captured her. A — a dragon. One of the monsters from the fairytales she had used to enjoy, as a very young foal.

“Are you alright?” the monster asked her, in a voice that rumbled deep within his gargantuan chest. “You took quite a tumble there.”

Twilight stared upward, unable to utter a word, transfixed by the sight of those dreadful pointed teeth. Each of them was over twice as long as she was.

“Are you alright, Twilight?” The dragon offered her what might have been a sympathetic smile, if it were not attached to a mouth bigger than a cave.

He frowned when she did not answer, and once those horrible teeth were once more hidden from view, Twilight found her breath again. She had the presence of mind to glance around her, trying to work out what she could do — how she could escape.

The outlook was bleak. She was standing on the literal palm of a dragon. Those huge green talons could close over her and crush her with shocking ease if he was so inclined. The room they were in was gigantic, to accommodate the bulk of the similarly gigantic dragon. If she craned her neck, she could make out the tiny speck of the trapdoor she had fallen through, now sliding closed again. And if she looked down — well, the floor was a worrying distance below, but more arresting than that was the gem.

It was an emerald, levitating and spinning slowly in place, and enough magic was rolling off it to make the fur on Twilight’s neck stand on end.

The dragon followed her gaze down and a proud smile flickered across his snout. “It’s looking great, isn’t it? I think it’s nearly ready.”

Twilight’s eyes moved back up to his face and her ears tilted back. “Uh…yes? It’s — it’s very nice.”

“Seriously, though, Twilight, are you okay? I almost didn’t manage to grab you in time!”

It was only then that Twilight realised that this huge purple dragon — another total stranger — also seemed to know who she was. Alright. More clone troubles. If he knew her copies, perhaps that meant he would be less inclined to eat her than she had feared.

“I’m okay,” she answered slowly. “But…could you put me down, please?”

The dragon nodded amiably and began to lower his claw. “Sure!”

It was a sensation remarkably similar to that of the elevator; the strange tugging sensation in the gut as gravity pulls you down. Twilight’s eyes were fixed on the jewel as she descended past it. She had never read of magic like that. Gems could hold magic or even spells, if the cut and clarity were good enough — but something this big, giving off magic by itself? It was outside of anything she’d read about.

Twilight supposed a little bitterly that she should really be used to that by now.

The dragon pressed his knuckles flat to the floor and Twilight cautiously hopped off. Some part of her still expected him to just…squish her, or something. Weren’t dragons supposed to be evil?

“So it’s been a while, hasn’t it?” said the dragon before her now, perfectly genially.

“Uh…” replied Twilight. “Well, I haven’t — I don’t —”

He stared down at her for a moment and then something clicked into place. “Oh! Have we not met before?”

Twilight shook her head.

“Right, right.” He nodded vigorously. “Well — I guess I should introduce myself. I’m Spike.”

“I’m Twilight Sparkle,” replied Twilight, knowing it was completely redundant to do so. He already knew. Somehow.

“Pleased to meet you!” Carefully, Spike lowered his claw again, and extended one behemoth of a claw towards her.

Taking a few stumbling steps backward before she realised what he wanted, Twilight hastily recovered herself and pantomimed shaking the proffered claw. “Pleased to meet you.”

There was a pause.

“So…could you tell me how you know me?” It was a risky question; possibly he would not like it asked, and doing anything a dragon of this size would not like was very risky indeed. But he seemed ready enough to strike up a friendship. And unlike the other rooms, this one contained no threat more overt than Spike’s mere size — and given that he didn’t seem inclined to use it, she might actually get some answers for once.

“I guess I’d be pretty curious too,” he grinned, with another disturbing display of all those teeth.

But then before he could continue, he suddenly glanced at the jewel, called to it by some invisible signal. “Just one second, Twi.” He turned away from her, raising his neck until he was level with the jewel, and then opened his mouth and let rip a huge gout of green fire.

Twilight let out a soft eep of terror as the heat of it washed over her — the raw destructive power. Was he going to kill her after all?

But only the jewel was bathed in the inferno — not one stray spark came Twilight’s way.

And as suddenly as it had started, it was over. The gem was roiling with magical energy now, and Twilight wondered if Spike’s fire was magical. Perhaps the gem was an ordinary power storage sort of spell, on a vaster scale than anypony in Equestria had yet conceived of.

As Twilight stared up at it, she blinked, and when her eyes opened again she thought she saw the ghost of the leylines again, channeling all that power out of the gem to destinations unknown.

Spike leaned back down towards her, reclaiming her attention. “I suppose it would make the most sense if I just say we’ll be…really good friends, one day.”

“How would you know that?” Twilight said skeptically. “Can you see the future?” Was that a known draconic trait? Maybe. She would need some real research time to be able to answer that.

With a surprised laugh, Spike shook his head. “Me? No. I just — well, I guess I just have a good feeling about it, that’s all.”

Before Twilight could respond, he raised a claw to stop her.

“Sorry — hang on.” He paused and sent another belch of flame toward the purple jewel, which swallowed the proffered energy hungrily, every last green swirl vanishing into its maw.

Twilight watched the process with a critical eye, and noted the spike in the magical excess pouring off the gem. “What is that thing?”

He grinned down at her. “I’m not used to being the one answering the questions.”

She frowned. “You’re not offering many answers.”

“Right, right, sorry. Well, okay, you always — I mean, I always think it’s a good idea to answer a question with another question. What do you think it is, Twilight?”

She rolled the question over in her mind. The gem was pumping out enough raw magic to make her fur stand on end, but far more of it was being siphoned away by those near-invisible threads. Channeled away into the rest of the tower, to who knew what ends. “I think it’s a battery, of sorts. All the energy for a spell as gigantic and complex as this place has to come from somewhere; it can’t be completely self sustaining.”

“You’re smart,” he said with a smile, as though he had expected no less.

“So are you what powers this place?”

He laughed. “No. Well — I offer a bit of fire, sure. To help out. But someone else does most of the work. I’m just…a closed circuit, I guess you could say. I don’t power much beyond this room. It’s another person who does all the actual magic.”

“The Wizard,” Twilight offered.

He laughed again, though Twilight couldn’t see what was funny. “Sure. The Wizard. She’s real powerful.”

She. Twilight’s ears pricked up. This was the first real glimpse of the tower’s mysterious owner. “Do you know her?”

One corner of his mouth quirked, and Twilight was forced to make a conscious effort to tamp down her growing annoyance at all these secret jokes.

“I do,” he confirmed gravely.

“Do you know where she is?”

He shrugged. “She’s everywhere in this place.”

Twilight ground her hoof into the floor in mute frustration. “That’s ridiculous.” Nopony could transcend the need for a body, no matter how powerful they were. Even Princess Celestia, older than eternity, had a body.

He just shrugged, and the silence between them stretched.

“Do you know the way out, at least?” she asked at last.

He shook his great head. “There isn’t a way out for some of us.”

Her heart sank. “But…you’re a dragon. Surely nopony can keep you locked up.”

“No…” he said softly, and the word was a great long exhalation. “I’m not a dragon. I’m just…an echo, I think. A battery, like you said. Something that used to be.”

“How can that be right?” Twilight demanded, jabbing a sharp hoof into the scaly hide of his tail. “You’re real. I can feel you. You’re not an echo.”

The dragon arced his great neck to look down at her, and he smiled, but the expression seemed full of pain. “I’m your faithful assistant,” he said, and his vast green eyes swam with tears. “I always will be.”

Before she could question this bizarre statement — before she could even wonder what he meant — he was belching out another gout of fire, and another, and another — and the final one was so long and so hot that Twilight had to shut her eyes against the blaze.

The roar of the flames blasted on and on. And when it finally, abruptly, ceased, and Twilight opened her eyes, the dragon was gone.

— My name is Spike, and I’m your faithful assistant —

Twilight looked around, wondering if she had imagined that last echoing whisper.

The dragon was gone. In his place only an egg remained. It was huge, as far as eggs went. Twilight had seen chicken eggs as big as her hoof, but this egg was more like the size of her. But large as it was — it was nowhere near big enough to contain a dragon the size of the one who had been here only a moment ago.

It sat directly beneath the jewel, and both of them pulsed softly with green light.

Twilight walked a slow, incredulous circle around the egg. How could this be real? Full-grown creatures did not just relapse back into foetuses and eggs whenever the whim took them.

“Spike?” she asked, cautiously — just in case he would turn back into a dragon again if she asked him.

But the egg was unresponsive, and Twilight frowned as she considered her predicament. The room was vast — and echoingly empty now, without the bulk of the dragon to fill it. The now-sealed trapdoor she had entered through was miles above her and utterly unreachable without Spike’s help. All that was left in this huge, curving room was her, the jewel, and the egg.

It was another puzzle. It had to be. Just like the lobby. Solve the puzzle, unlock the door. Simple enough.

Twilight considered the egg and the jewel individually. Spike had referred to himself as a closed circuit, limited to this room only. He had been powering the gem, charging it up for something. And hadn’t he said it’s nearly ready?

A closed circuit wouldn’t end with a strange unbirth back into egg form. A circuit would continue. The egg would have to hatch again — and maybe that was what all the power in the gem was for. A self-spawning lifecycle; a warped parody of a phoenix.

Perhaps that was the solution to the puzzle. All Twilight had to do was serve as the bridge — close the circuit.

It made sense. So without further hesitation, Twilight reached out for the egg and the gem with her magic.

The egg felt ordinary enough. Smooth like stone, with a little spark of life deep inside. But when her magic brushed against the gem, Twilight stumbled and fell to her knees — awash in a sea of power. A burning ocean of dragonfire, with crackling green waves that tossed her to and fro.

Endless, endless fire — burning her without burning, igniting her magic and her brain and her soul itself — Twilight knew she was howling with the pain and the not-pain of it, but she couldn’t hear her own voice. All she could hear was the thunderous whisper of a thousand fires.

Twilight gasped and choked, utterly adrift from her own body, unable to feel even the breath she knew must be catching in her throat.

All that was left to her was the magic — her connection to the jewel.

And something else, a thinner thread; but persistent. A little flicker of life. What was it? It was hard to think beyond the fire, but she clung to that thread and followed it down until she found the cold, smooth surface of the egg.

The egg. Of course. That was it. Just connect the two. That was all she needed to do.

It was like trying to corral the ocean itself into a narrow gutter, but after seemingly endless attempts, Twilight finally managed to catch hold of a crackling flame and force it down the thread of her magic and into the egg.

Once those first few drops had gone, the next followed more easily — and more after them, and more again, until finally there was a flood of fire, rushing through Twilight to the egg, moving too quickly to even burn.

And when, at last, the jewel was empty, and Twilight came back to herself, panting with the exertion, she found herself curled up in a little ball on the floor, her horn smoking slightly. Beside her, the first cracks were beginning to form on the surface of the spotted egg.

And as she clambered back to her hooves, she saw a black spot in the wall that had not been there before. A door where there had been no door.

Despite her exhaustion, a thrill rushed through Twilight. She had solved the puzzle, she had passed the test. Her instincts had been right. And her magic had been strong enough.

With shaky steps, she moved toward the door. When she reached it, she found it to be as comically small as Spike’s room was overwhelmingly large. The lintel barely reached her chest. She pulled it open, and peered sceptically inside. The corridor was every bit as undersized as the door itself, and even a foal as small as Twilight would struggle to squeeze through. If it had been just a short tunnel with a subsequent widening, she wouldn’t have hesitated; but the tiny corridor stretched on out of sight, well-lit all the way, without even a hint of growth further down its length.

Twilight peered around the rest of the curved walls of Spike’s rooms, wondering if perhaps she had missed a second door. Then something caught her ear. Just at the edge of her hearing. She looked up —

From far above, at the zenith of the dome-shaped room, there came a grinding noise. The trapdoor was opening again.

“Twilight, are you down there?” It was that same voice again, husky and rough, and Twilight cursed her rotten luck. She had hoped that the rooms would shift and change behind her — how had Sunset managed to catch up?

“Twilight!” Sunset was peering down through the trapdoor, and Twilight turned her face upward, horn blazing with a deliberate display of her magical power.

“Leave me alone!”

Don’t talk to strangers, especially not here. Especially not when she’d just found out that the all-powerful wizard was a mare. And the one creature Twilight had seen in all her time here, other than the dragon who claimed to be an echo, was a mare. A very magically powerful mare.

Sunset was not a pony to be trusted.

“Just wait,” Sunset said, trying to inject a note of calm into her voice. “I want to talk to you.”

Twilight looked from her pursuer to the small doorway that had opened at the base of the wall. It was an ordinary door, reproduced in perfect miniature. Twilight had been concerned about fitting her own bulk through it — there was no way an adult pony would fit.

Far above, Sunset lit her own horn. “I’m coming down!”

Glancing up only long enough to see the horrifying spectacle of Sunset lifting herself bodily in her own magic, Twilight bolted for the door and hurled herself to her belly to squirm through it and into the passage beyond. Whatever horrors lay ahead would almost certainly be better than finding herself at the mercy of a mare powerful enough to teleport multiple times and still have the reserves of mana required for levitation.

Sunset claimed to be as trapped as Twilight was, and it might be true — she might not be the Wizard. But Twilight was not about to take that chance.

With one final wriggle, she squeezed her flanks through and the door slammed closed behind her with a reassuring finality. Unless Sunset really was the architect of this nightmarish place, Twilight was safe at last.