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I. Changeling Magic12,750 words
II. Fugitive13,603 words
III. Einsatz8,663 words
IV. Twilight in Solitude10,461 words
V. Hunted12,134 words
VI. To Return Home12,450 words
VII. Psalm of Locusts15,553 words
VIII. Life is Beautiful14,351 words
IX. This Enemy Ground10,054 words

IX. This Enemy Ground

Hey guys! I finally finished the next chapter. I'm so sorry, by the way, that I took so long to get this fixed up. I've been struggling with writer's block and depression for a long time, and in the last few months I've had some things going on irl that have made it difficult for me to get much writing done anyway. The other reason this chapter took a while is that it has some stuff in it that I wanted to do just right. ~~Still not~~ totally ~~satisfied~~ I don't think my perfectionism can get any more redundant. Either way, it's done and I'm back now! Thank you so much for putting up with my impressively slow working rate and psychotic perfectionism. You're wonderful readers. Please give my prereaders and editors your thanks, too! There's a list of them at the bottom that still needs to be completed =3. Also, don't forget to check out the response prompt!

Solitary Locust

Chapter IX. This Enemy Ground

Twilight swam through a thick, tarry ocean in search of some sort of awareness, some kind of comprehension, but there was little to be found except for a vague hint that she existed within a physical body and that some of her experiences were nonphysical thoughts.

Bizarre hallucinations jumped out at her every so often. Sometimes, she could look around and see every detail of the room she was in, only to realize that her eyelids had drooped shut and she couldn't see the faint light at all. When this happened, she would quickly open her eyes again and resolve to keep them open, and they would eventually close and the process would start all over again. Lights flittered around in the corners of her vision when she did have her eyes open. Once, an earsplitting bang jolted her upright, but there didn't seem to be any source for it.

She had awoken an indeterminable length of time earlier, although she had vague fragments of memories of feeling extremely uncomfortable before that, and wasn't certain if she'd been dreaming or just so stupefied that she'd fallen asleep again immediately after. There was ample evidence to suggest the latter—namely, that even after what felt like hours, Twilight was still yawning and catching herself on the verge of nodding off again.

Her head, which was lolling around weakly from left to right and back again, felt stuffed with cotton, and her mind seemed to be trying to work more quickly than it was capable of at the moment. Consequently, she kept losing her fleeting thoughts even as she attempted to hang onto them. It took some time before she was able to finally latch onto something concrete, and even then, she quickly lost it again.

Amidst the jumble inside her head, Twilight wondered briefly where she was, what was going on, and whether Spike and her friends were alright. None of these things received a great deal of dedicated consideration; rather, Twilight jumped around between these things and a few other irrelevancies—like what had happened to her notes about her condition. They would have been useful at the moment, as she could hardly remember what was going on.

The only concrete thing she could spare the energy to cling to for an extended period of time was the knowledge that she had to stay awake. It was very important that she not fall asleep again, and she reminded herself of it by mumbling 'I need to stay awake' under her breath from time to time. This mantra even seemed to pervade her dreams, in which she heard those words while she slipped out of her bonds and made her escape, only to awaken again and realize that she was still chained to the wall and ceiling.

Very slowly, bit by bit, her awareness increased, although the intense fatigue remained, and Twilight was still torn between obeying the inner voice shouting that she needed to stay awake or giving in to the other voice insisting that it was time to sleep. At some point, she was able to retrieve a few fragments of memories and knowledge, and put them together to conclude that she was being affected by a hypersomnia spell which had tricked her central nervous system into believing that it was deprived of sleep. In her altered state of consciousness, Twilight found it worthy of a dumb, confused giggle that she was able to recognize the mechanism of action the spell used when she could hardly remember what the thing on her head was called.

Her thoughts finally started to coagulate a little bit amidst the mud and gunk, allowing her to remember some of them for longer than a few seconds after having them. The soreness in her horn soon became apparent and increasingly distracting, as did the throbbing pain radiating up her leg. But at the same time, the pain helped her to focus herself further, cutting through the dimness of her mental fog like a sharp knife, dragging her away from the blissful ignorance her sleepiness offered.

Her forelegs were pulled above her head, and she'd been forced into an upright sitting position by the foreleg restraints and another set of restraints on her hind legs, as well as one around her neck that bound her to the wall. As best she could tell, she was seated on some kind of wooden bench, and the floor under her hooves was filthy enough that it felt more like dirt. Twilight tried pulling herself free of the restraints, but moving around only produced a loud clanking noise of chains knocking together.

There was a light, but it was muffled by what Twilight eventually realized was a cloth blindfold covering her eyes. With no way to clearly see the room in which she was trapped, she had no way of knowing how big it was or where she might be—but she was certain that there could not be another sentient creature inside with her, because surely not even a changeling would wait in the shadows for as long as she seemed to have been there; not without doing something that would reveal itself.

From here, from the vague image of an oversized insect with glowing pale blue eyes hiding in the darkness, waiting to strike, Twilight started to recall the events that had led up to her imprisonment—namely that she was currently wearing the skin of an inborn enemy of her entire race. This realization came back before the memory of how it had happened or what had happened after the transformation; and so for a moment it seemed to be a concept suspended by itself, with nothing concrete to precede or follow it.

The full memory hit only a second later in a torrent of pain, horror, green fire, ponies looking at her horn and suggesting that it be broken off, running through the woods, the stones and gravel cutting at her hooves, a sun setting and leaving her to suffer and cry by herself... And then the rest of it: the two pegasi, the bubble, Trixie, the town, Spike, the thing that was calling itself Twilight Sparkle and that had attacked her…

Twilight took a deep breath. She counted off in her head: One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten... and let it out again. Then she took several more breaths for good measure, dutifully counting to ten before letting each one out. The initial panic soon ebbed away and was replaced by the safe and familiar need to exercise control over the situation; to plan out every detail, to make order out of chaos, to organize everything into neat little categories and boxes and things that were safe and sensible.

“Step one of any coherent crisis management plan,” she croaked—entirely to herself, and so barely audible she might as well have mouthed the words. “Assess the situation and form as complete an understanding as possible of the context in which any future decisions are made.”

She tugged on the chains again, shaking from the residual terror as she did. This could not possibly be a changeling hive, she concluded, as changelings didn't use chains or forged steel or anything of that nature. Wherever she was, it had been created by ponies. The most likely place Twilight could immediately come up with was her own basement. Unless she'd missed out on something very important, her imprisonment was the direct result of her confrontation with the imposter in the library. She could have been dragged down there and tied her up.

But Twilight didn't keep any large, heavy chains in the basement, nor did she have a bench with a neck brace over it attached to the wall. She doubted the fake Twilight could have put something like that together in the time that she was asleep unless it had professional welding skills, which it most likely did not. That, and the room she was in seemed smaller. Twilight could tell because her overly sensitive hearing now allowed her to determine, roughly, how big the space she was confined in was based on the acoustics.

“Alright, alright... Other places nearby that might fit the description, then.”

The first thing that came to mind was a jail cell, although she didn't think Ponyville's single jail cell was as small as this room felt and sounded. It was definitely made by ponies, though, and not the changelings, who didn't use metal or artificial materials to build their hives. That meant Twilight was somewhere in Ponyville, probably in a place that was populated, and that in turn meant changelings were moving around the town.

And the implications of this were even more frightening once they became clearer. If there were changelings walking around town and using it if it were their own, then there was a good chance that they had taken control of the town completely. Perhaps they weren't being completely open about their presence, not yet, but it was likely that by then they had gnawed away at enough of the infrastructure to leave Ponyville hanging precariously on the edge of total chaos.

Irritatingly, there was no hard evidence of what she'd theorized; only inferences and implications and leaps of faith. Twilight was not the kind of pony who found faith an appealing reason to believe something—she was a scientist, and she needed evidence. But it was all she had at the moment.

She devised a crude test to soothe her inner skeptic:

“Hypothesis: the creatures that come through the door will be undisguised changelings or will identify themselves as changelings,” she whispered to herself, so quiet that she was practically mouthing the words. “Reasoning: their bold use of Ponyville's municipal structures for their own ends indicates that if changelings are indeed present in Ponyville, they have infiltrated far enough into the power structure that they either feel they no longer have to maintain disguises, or else their hand has been forced by the discovery of their network.”

As she thoughtfully licked the one of her fangs that didn't ache—it still felt like a lollipop stick or some other foreign object, rather than part of her body—and prepared to add other stipulations to her hypothesis, she remembered that they were holding her captive, and that there were implications to this that concerned her specifically.

“...If this is the case... if my test is successful... then I expect I'll either be killed very shortly after their entry into this room, or else they have some terrible fate in store for me. They can't possibly consider me one of their own if they've replaced me and the imposter has imprisoned me.”

Twilight thought back to the group of lunar guardsponies that had come to meet Trixie on the outskirts of Ponyville, and for the first time, she began to consider how bizarre Spitfire had been acting. It hadn't seemed to stand out at the time—compared to the rest of the events that were taking place, anyway—but it suddenly seemed to make quite a bit more sense. Those had not been real guards, Twilight realized, but imposters. Spitfire, too, was likely a changeling—she had not come out to protect the town, as Twilight had believed, but had been trying to stop Twilight from reaching it.

She suddenly felt an intense rush of gratitude for Trixie's belligerence and her unwillingness to accept anything but what she wanted. In a way, though it had caused her a great deal of pain and misery, it had probably saved her life. Had she been taken by the false Spitfire, she would probably have been taken somewhere quiet and disposed of, and nopony would have been any the wiser until the changelings were already too entrenched to weed out.

But they were entrenched now. They had come in somehow; like a deadly virus into an open wound, they had infiltrated Ponyville, and the disease had already begun to spread. Perhaps they had come with the Royal Guard, perhaps after, and perhaps they had been there for ages—but it mattered little at the moment. What did matter was that Twilight was at the mercy of creatures who would as soon kill her as make love to her.

That they hadn't killed her already seemed, at first, a light in the darkness—but upon a second examination, it was very likely that they intended to either keep her alive to torture for information, or perhaps as a bargaining chip. Perhaps they hadn't decided what to do with her yet, but thought she was valuable enough to keep around until they did come up with something. Maybe they were just more bureaucratic about kidnapping and murder than Chrysalis's chaotic hive had been.

Although, when she thought of Chrysalis, Twilight couldn't help but remember Cadance's weeks-long imprisonment in the catacombs under Canterlot. She'd never asked Cadance what had happened there, and it wasn't until she was chained to the wall and blindfolded during a changeling invasion that she really began to wonder if they had just left her down there to fend for herself, or if they had done more than that.

Twilight had, of course, read about the practice of murder and torture for information when she was creating the presentation that had ultimately turned her life inside-out. She had said the words out loud in front of Ponyville, and they had even carried a sense of gravity appropriate for the situation, in her opinion. But it hadn't completely sunk in until just then that changelings had probably tortured Cadance and they were probably going to torture Twilight too.

A new wave of panic flooded her as she began to imagine what methods of torture a changeling might utilize. Magic, knives, electricity, maybe psychological torture—Surely, a race of creatures that subsisted on identity theft would have invested significant time and effort into developing methods of information extraction.

And worse, Twilight thought, was what they would likely do with that information. The imposter had ingratiated itself with her friends—and by now, it had probably killed or replaced half of them.

Seized by a sudden rush of anger that overrode her fear, she thrashed around wildly, making the chains clank and bucking the air with such force that sometimes she was merely hanging by her upper hooves. The pain in her foreleg failed to register as relevant, as did the sensation of her other hoof nearly dislocating from all the violence. It was a completely silent activity save for her gasping intake and exhalation of breath.

It didn't take long for the adrenaline rush to die away, but even after it deteriorated, Twilight continued to move around weakly. Though her brain kept screeching to her that she needed to get somewhere safe. But she was too tired, and too weak, and too feeble, and too sick of running from friends and illusory enemies that could steal her skin and wear it like a coat.

To her left, Twilight heard muffled clop-clop-clop noises of hooves on the ground.

The panic surged up yet again and her already overtaxed nervous system went mad. She wanted to use magic, or run, or just vanish from existence—but she was once again paralyzed by that odd little instinct in the back of her head that believed if she didn't move, maybe the problem would just go away and leave her alone. She held her breath in spite of the urge to hyperventilate, only letting it out again when she was in danger of passing out.

Something rattled the chains that her hooves were tied to, and she instinctively tried to get away from them. All it did was make the chains clank more, and make the throbbing pain in Twilight's foreleg flare into something worse for a moment before dying back down. She gulped down another breath, still refusing to actively acknowledge that there were other things in the room.

“Can you hear me?” asked a male voice. “We know you're awake, so don't pretend otherwise. Can you hear what I'm saying?”

She didn't say anything for a while. Inside, she weighed the possibilities of responding or continuing to ignore them—there seemed to be equal reason to do either one, although she soon found, after some prodding of her own thoughts, that the latter was supported more by fear than logical reasoning. And, of course, logic always trumped emotion.

“...Y-yeah,” Twilight rasped, her voice still almost inaudibly small. “Yeah. Yes. I can hear you.”

“We're going to unchain you so that you can walk,” said the voice. “Apologies for the chains, by the way. They're required when dealing with changelings.”

“But you're changelings,” she said. “Not me.”

As she said this, the chains rattled some more, and then slackened a bit, allowing her to lower her hooves. Her forelegs were stiff and ached from being confined in such a position for so long, so she moved them around to get the blood flowing properly again.

Growing bolder, Twilight asked, “C-can you tell me where I'm being held?”

“Here,” her captor said, “I'll take off the blindfold. Sorry about that, too.”

The blindfold was loosened until it slid down around Twilight's neck, allowing light to flood into her world. She winced and turned away from the shockingly bright light shining down from the ceiling, shutting her eyes tightly. While she did this, somepony removed the shackles from her lower legs and unchained her neck from the wall.

When she opened her eyes, which were watering heavily, long enough to look around, she found that she had been rather off the mark about her location. She was actually in what seemed to be a tent, and furthermore she was chained to a metal frame near the center of it, close to the pole supporting the top, instead of to a wall.

Her captors were not changelings. They were stallions. Stallions wearing the golden armor of the Equestrian Royal Guard, their heads held high and proud. There were four of them in total; two carrying spears, one dressed in an officer’s armor, and one holding a scroll with a heavy, ornamental seal on it.

“Thank you,” was all she could think to say, and this was in reference to the removal of her blindfold; and for some time afterward, Twilight found herself completely tongue-tied, trying to compute how the changes in her settings would affect her understanding of the rest of the situation, and respond accordingly.

Eventually she added, “But you're not changelings,” her tone lost and confused.

“I don't know about the others,” said the guard who had removed her blindfold, “but I've been a pony all my life. If I were a changeling, I'd have gotten caught by the revealing spell a long time ago. They do regular random testing on us in the Royal Guard.”

These words took a moment to sink in. Then Twilight's stomach turned over, and she felt, for some reason, an intense sense of annoyance; the same feeling she experienced as a filly when she was unable to perform a spell she wanted to learn. The feeling was so strong that it overrode her fear for a moment, and she even tried to purse her lips, though it was difficult to do this with fangs.

When she spoke, it was no longer in a half-whisper, but a confident—if scratchy thanks to her dehydration—tone similar to what she used to lecture Spike about responsibility from time to time. “My hypothesis predicted overt admissions of changeling infiltration. The logical solution to this entire puzzle is that you're all changelings.”

The guard just made a little shrugging motion. “I don't know anything about that. We've come here for you; to take you to Canterlot to see Princess Celestia, as Her Highness has commanded of us.”

Twilight forgot everything else for a moment. Where there had been a clear road ahead, there was now an immense concrete wall blocking her: surely they would not bother to deceive her like this, would they? She was at their mercy—why would they need to trick her? Why would they lie just to get her to their hive, and if that wasn't the case, why would they send her to Princess Celestia?

“But...” she said, feeling both lost and rather upset, “my hypothesis... predicted... admissions... of infiltration...”

“I don't know anything about infiltration, changeling. Alright, that's it. Nothing else is coming off—the limiter is standard procedure. We have to keep your magic bound.”

Twilight nodded stupidly. “Yes, yes, I understand. Procedure is important... Rules are important...”

They helped her up. Twilight reluctantly stretched her legs, which were aching and sore from being restrained in the same position for an indefinite period of time.

“This way,” one of them said, gesturing towards the tent's entrance flap. “There's a chariot waiting outside to take you to Canterlot. There, you'll be given a chance to speak to the Princess, and explain yourself, given the unusual circumstances of your situation.”

She nodded again.

Princess Celestia had called her home at last, it seemed; had put a stop to the madness, apparently, and made everything sane again. It hardly mattered whether they thought of her as a changeling or a pony, because Celestia would know the truth. She was older than Equestria itself, and she was the wisest of all the ponies Twilight had ever met. Celestia would know.

But it didn't make Twilight feel any safer, for some reason. There was something so dreadfully wrong with the scenario that was playing out, and it was making Twilight increasingly anxious that she couldn't figure out what it was, other than the impossible idea of her being so completely wrong.

Outside, it was raining. Thunder rumbled in the distance, although now Twilight could see that she had been confined in silence because there was a spell on the tent to mute sound. Raindrops fell on Twilight's head. She guessed that the weather was getting out-of-control, since the Royal Guard had probably restricted the weather team's movements since their arrival.

“Taking it to Canterlot,” said the first guard to another that they came across, and the one with the scroll showed it to him. “Leere already approved it. We're supposed to move it as quickly as possible to prevent the changeling hive from trying to take it back, just in case it knows something important.”

“My hypothesis, my scientific hypothesis, cannot be so wrong,” Twilight mumbled. “It can't be... No, no, of course you're lying to me, aren't you? But there's no proof. Why would you need to hide? I have nothing, I can't fight...”

Something was definitely very out of place; something small, something at once insignificant and mortally important. It was nagging at her like an out-of-tune violin, playing higher and higher, screeching painfully into her ears, screaming to be noticed.

“Did she get the letter? Or my notes?” she asked the nearest Royal Guard. “Princess Celestia, I mean.”

“I have no idea,” he replied.

“Oh.”

They stopped again, and Twilight half-listened to them talking to the guards, repeating the same information to another sentry: Princess Celestia ordered her to be taken to Canterlot for a special trial, everypony approved, and so on. She was more lost in her own thoughts than paying attention to that—Already, a thread of doubt was beginning to seep into her mind.

She knew that she was right; that she was a pony and had been all her life. But the idea of a conspiracy planned and executed by changelings, seemed less likely by the second. They had no reason to lie to her; she was helpless and couldn't tell anypony anything. If changelings had taken over Ponyville, why would they go through such an elaborate ruse just to fool her?

Princess Celestia might have received Spike's letter, and her notes had made it there, too. Twilight wanted to believe this was true, and yet it went against what she knew—that there were changelings running Ponyville now. But the only real proof she had was the fact that something bad had happened to her, there was at least one changeling in Ponyville, and members of Equestria's military forces had acted oddly.

It could have been an opportunistic rogue changeling that took her place for all she knew. Not a concerted effort by an entire army, but a random lone wolf taking advantage of a random event—a simple mistake she'd made, perhaps.

And yet, the screeching in her head wouldn't go away. Something was wrong, very wrong, and it was terrifying, and she didn't understand why. Maybe it was coming from within—maybe it was an alarm telling her that she had miscalculated, that she had hallucinated, that she was, perhaps, utterly insane and locked away in a mental hospital, babbling about schizophrenic delusions while the doctors tried to fix her.

It was gagging her, choking her, strangling her with its wrongness, but she couldn't understand what it was that was so wrong. Or why it was so familiar—she had seen this wrongness before, but it hadn't had the same uncanny valley effect that it was now.

Then they entered the main street of Ponyville, which was full of ponies who stopped what they were doing to watch her go by with her escort. And when she saw them, Twilight suddenly understood what was wrong, and it was so amazingly simple that her body locked up briefly in bewilderment and she nearly tripped over her own hooves.

There were no colours in her little entourage.

Changelings consumed emotion, so they were incapable of sensing each others' empathetic magic the way they could detect the emotions of other life forms. They hoarded feelings, quite literally, and did not show them to each other. And these guardsponies did not exude the colours. They were like empty shells, utterly incapable of emotional expression.

It brought about an intense rush of glee when she figured it out. Her hypothesis had been facially incorrect, but the ultimate outcome was the same: there were changelings in Ponyville, posing as regular ponies. They were posing as Royal Guards or Wonderbolts, not just walking around openly.

All along, Twilight realized, she had assumed that whatever spell had been cast on her had been done with the intent of bringing a new Twilight into Ponyville, to pretend to be her. But there were so many holes in this theory; namely, why they hadn't simply replaced her in the dead of night, choosing instead to do it in such a public manner that would only worsen the paranoia.

Now she understood—The guards, she realized, were actually changelings. All of them had to be changelings. Maybe even Leere was a changeling. They had not just invaded the town by any route possible, but had exploited the fact that having guards around made ponies feel better. They promised to mitigate the paranoia, the fear, the terror... but in reality, Twilight now understood, the goal had been to use her very public transformation as an excuse for what were ostensibly Royal Guards to come into Ponyville and take over.

Looking back on the moments she'd spent staring at Spitfire and her gang of Night Guards, Twilight realized that not once had she sensed any emotion from them at all. She hadn't even noticed the void because the empathetic colours were invasive and unwanted, and interacting with somepony without their presence still felt like it was the normal state of things. But there should have been emotion.

The relief was so powerful that she had to fight the urge to start laughing madly right then and there. It was undeniable proof that she was right, and that there were changelings hiding in Ponyville, and they were trying to keep her quiet, and that everything she had dreamed up, her little conspiracy theory, was indeed correct.

But a moment later, when she saw the pegasus-drawn carriage waiting in the street, she realized something else: being changelings, they certainly did not intend to take her to Princess Celestia. Leaving with them would surely lead to her dying a painful, unpleasant death one way or another. If she'd been taken by Spitfire the night Trixie brought her back, she knew she would have been killed, and this was no different—they were going to take her somewhere and either torture her or execute her.

She concluded, then, that she had to escape within the next ten or fifteen seconds, or else there was a good chance she'd be dead within two minutes. And the only way out was by magic—how easy it would be to escape, if only she had her magic, but she did not. There was still the cold numbness in her horn that came with having a limiter on it.

“Wait a minute...” She shook her head a few times.

The coldness in her horn was definitely there, which meant that she was still wearing the silver ring from her bathroom or some other cheap magic limiter designed for recreational use. Serious limiters didn't have the cooling effect; it was just a gimmick found in the commercial ones to make the experience more thrilling, since most unicorns expected an uncomfortable coldness when their magic was blocked.

For some reason, they hadn't bothered to put a real limiter on her. Maybe they'd thought Twilight's mail-order toy was the real thing. It didn't matter, really; the only important thing was the fact that she could get through this limiter even with her magic as demented as it was. Unloading the energy needed to punch through it in such a manner would leave many of the changelings around her injured, but she hardly even considered it beyond that point—either she gave them some contact burns or they'd kill her.

The more important fact was that using her magic like that would also ensure that she wouldn't be able to stop her horn from leaking magic ever again, and it would most likely explode a day or two later. Without her magic to complement her immune system, Twilight would have little protection against germs. She would survive, at most, a week by herself, and then she would succumb to illness, if the sheer agony didn't kill her first.

She would die, one way or another.

But her friends were in danger; all of Equestria was in danger. She herself was in more immediate danger than a disease could ever threaten her with. And for the first time since the ordeal began, Twilight had a definite, clear enemy to which she could assign blame for the immediate danger. That meant a way to escape the immediate danger, and that was what mattered.

Twilight reached deep into her magic and started pulling as much energy as she could into a single, very rapidly growing spell. She knew already what spells she would use to break through the limiter—they couldn't be anything different, not with so many ponies around.

Atop her head she could feel a charge building, the small area of her horn between the ring and her skull growing hot with unspent energy, and for once she was almost glad she didn't have a mane anymore, because it would have been scorched or even set on fire by the heat. A sickly green glow shone from that small space.

Blue glows formed on the disguised changelings' horns, too, but none of them had a chance to use their magic because another one, the closest one, tried to physically seize Twilight and stop her from building up the spell any further by slamming its hoof against her horn. The pain was almost unbearable, and she could feel her horn straining under the force of the blow, but Twilight held onto the spell anyway.

The hoof came down a second time and she turned her head just in time to spare her already searing horn from more abuse. It struck her face instead, probably breaking her nose for the third time in a week if the pain and the crackling were any indication. But it didn't matter very much, because for a moment, Twilight had so much magic crammed into one tiny spot in her body that she could feel nothing else besides the incredible pressure it was generating. She hardly felt another blow, even though this one was on her broken leg.

The moment the limiter finally gave out was something she could both feel and hear: it made a defeated hissing noise, and at the same time the pressure behind her horn began to decrease rapidly. The cold was progressively replaced by an intense heat as compressed magic perfused her horn, leaking through the cracks, until it burst out of the tip as a fountain of shimmering energy.

This energy—not truly a spell, but rather a full tenth of her magic imbibed with the simple command to keep other magic out—wrapped itself tightly around her like a bodysuit, protecting her from the second spell that emerged not a fraction of a second later. It was difficult to maintain the first and cast another at the same time, but Twilight just kept digging into the pent-up magical discharge that had been waiting behind the limiter for close to a day.

Unlike her previous usage of the changeling detection spell, which had been carefully calculated and controlled, the large-scale version didn't flow from her horn this time. Rather, it exploded out of it in a torrent, the rushing green flames shooting higher than the buildings around her before fanning out and splashing back down to onto the ground. The air around her, compressed almost to nothing by the sheer volume of magic her horn was expelling, burst into flame, and the changeling that had seized hold of her—already pushed away by the shield—was violently swept aside.

By then, Twilight was so saturated with the sheer thrill of using that much magic at once that she hardly even thought of the changelings. She ignored the pain, too. What should have been intense agony shooting through her horn's root was reduced to a distant annoyance in the haze. Never in her life had she used so much magic at once.

For a brief moment, she felt omnipotent, endless, and eternal; able to rise into the sky and see a thousand miles in every direction in a single moment, and she wanted it to never, ever go away, because there was nothing here that hurt. There was no regenerative identity, no stippling of lavender amidst black, not even the faintest concept of a name; that she was anything but power. She'd passed the point at which she needed to consciously control the storm. She had merged with it, been taken into it, become it, risen into the sky with eyes and ears and empathy and all else.

In the haze, she knew herself—She knew every single second of her past and present, and why she was in the situation she was. It was a stream of momentary understanding; magical comprehension on a level only ever attained by a few ponies. But none of it was committed to memory as it passed through her mind—it was such clarity that it left her as soon as it touched her.

And then Twilight reached the end. She couldn't keep holding that kind of magic, and it collapsed in on itself. The huge bubble she'd created burst inward.

Her magic started to rush violently back into her horn at a hundred times the speed it had come out, bending the light where the energy entered the tip. Twilight herself was lifted right off her hooves by the force of the backlash and reared back up. When the last of it funneled in, it did so with a slurping noise that was then followed by an immense pressure behind Twilight's skull. It was so heavy, so unbearable, that she felt her eyes would be pushed out through her skull.

She could hear that ominous whistling noise for a few seconds, but it abruptly jumped up about half an octave and stopped. There was silence. Some green sparks dribbled down onto her face, which made her forehead itch.

Then her horn let off a single, extraordinarily violent pulse of energy, accompanied by the loudest boom she had ever heard in her entire life; a thousand times louder than one of Rainbow Dash's sonic rainbooms. Windows up and down the block shattered instantly, and most of the ponies still out in the street instinctively clapped their hooves over their ears.

Twilight herself swayed from side to side, struggling against the explosive jumble of colours her disrupted empathy sense was emitting. In one ear she could hear nothing except a sharp ringing; in the other, the distressed cries of the ponies behind the overturned carts and inside the blown-out stores were lost in the intense tinnitus as well. She could barely even hear her own moans of mingled confusion and pain.

With one hoof pressed over her ear, she staggered aimlessly forward, but her clumsy legs tripped over each other and she fell in the mud. Everything around her felt distorted and distant, and she couldn't seem to focus on any one thing long enough to take it in properly. Her head spun around and around dizzyingly, while her drained body desperately wanted to go to sleep and regenerate.

The worst part of all was her horn, which felt like it had just had nails driven through every single inch of it. Twilight looked up at it, crossing her eyes as she did, and found a green burning on the end of it. Raindrops sizzled whenever they came in contact with the magic. When she tried to shut off whatever was leaking, she was rewarded with an intense spike of pain straight into her skull and down her spine.

It was, Twilight realized through the haze, leaking magic. It wasn't just discharging excess buildup or dribbling a few sparks—her horn was leaking magic uncontrollably into the air. The severity of this new horror was unknown to her as of that moment, but she had a fleeting glimpse in her imagination of a horn blown to pieces, never to use magic again.

For some reason, she felt only numb acceptance instead of abject terror—perhaps it was because her brain was already occupied trying to plan her survival, or perhaps she had just been through so much that it just didn't matter anymore. Twilight crawled back to her hooves instead and glanced around to get her bearings.

The ground was marred by a circular black ring that went all the way around her; a testament to how out-of-control her initial spell had been. She caught the sickening odor of burnt flesh and chitin before she actually saw the changeling on the edge of this ring. Though she stared dumbly at it, trying to understand what she was looking at, she couldn't find in herself the awareness necessary to process the sight fully.

She turned, her three legs trembling under her body, and saw, in a blur, the other three changelings in a heap in the center of the road not far from her, ripping the now ill-fitting golden armor and uniforms from their bodies. Like her, they seemed to have suffered some sort of trauma from the blast: one had green blood on its face, and all three seemed very disoriented, their movements uncertain and confused. As she watched, a fourth changeling wearing a Night Guard's uniform tumbled out of the wagon and fell on its face.

Twilight's first instinct was to cast a sleeping spell on them, but her horn merely spluttered out a few sparks and sent another horrible jolt down into her skull. Reeling, she turned and limped up the street, head turning wildly from side to side as she tried to figure out how she could possibly get out of this situation alive. She didn't make it very far before she was overcome by a powerful, unnameable feeling that something dangerous was about to jump on her from behind.

Again she was possessed by an instinctive reaction; this time to spin around and shield herself with the most powerful shield spell she knew. A faint silver shield made of magic formed in front of her, connected to her horn by a long, shimmering string of the same colour. It was fantastically painful to cast it, but it proved to be a somewhat worthy choice because a flying changeling—the one in the lunar uniform—slammed face-first into the shield, having been only two meters from her when she turned.

To Twilight's horror, her severely weakened magic didn't have anywhere near the strength to hold up against that kind of momentum anymore. The changeling just punched right through and crashed into her, knocking her right off her hooves. She landed on her back with the monstrous creature on top of her, its forelegs wrapped around her middle and its body compressing her broken leg against her chest until it bent the wrong way again.

“Get off! Get off! Please! You're hurting me!” she begged, but she couldn't even hear herself, and she doubted the changeling could hear her, either. Its mouth was moving, like a snarl, but she could only hear faint mumbling in her single working ear.

Trapped and in unbearable pain, she lashed out wildly with as much magic as she could muster. It wasn't a real spell, just a burst of unfocused energy, and she didn't even bother to aim it as she'd had her eyes squeezed shut since they'd landed. But it did what it had been made to do: Twilight felt the changeling reel back, its grip slackening, and it slumped over. Something sickeningly warm dripped onto her face and chest as it began to twitch.

Twilight kept her eyes shut until she'd shoved the seizing thing off herself and rolled over. Holding her now destroyed leg against her chest, she rose to her three hooves with some effort, and found herself facing the other three changelings, all of which were now free of their clunky armor and were closing in on her.

Searing hot green plasma—castoff from a powerful magical spell—spattered against Twilight's side and dissipated, leaving a set of what had to be at least first- or second-degree burns where it touched. In the span of a second and a half, the whole right side of her stomach erupted into agonizing pain. The scream that came out of her mouth was all but inaudible to her, but it tore her throat raw anyway as she stumbled back and collapsed onto her haunches.

Her hoof immediately went to the wound—which, to her horror, had something awful slipping out of it; something that probably should not ever have been outside of her body for any reason. She carefully pushed whatever it was back into the still smoking incision, whimpering, and held it there. Another incarnation of the same spell silenced a good third of the empathetic colours on her left, leaving behind only an empty echo.

Twilight heard and felt something approaching her very fast from behind and teetered to the right to avoid getting hit by it. It went over her head instead, though, and she felt it with what remained of her empathy sense: it was big and self-righteous and so angry on her behalf—and then she watched a rainbow-hued pegasus slam heavily into a changeling with her hooves outstretched, and the two of them rolled into the mud and fog and heavy rain.

But the fact that Rainbow Dash was beating up a changeling—for her, too—was driven right out of Twilight's mind again when one of the other two changelings, now turned halfway towards Dash, lit up a lit up a brilliant green spell atop its horn.

She saw this as if in slow motion, as if it had been slowed to half the speed it should have been going, and she made a choice and acted on it. Her spell, while weaker and probably more painful by far to cast, was much simpler than whatever the changeling was charging up. It took far less time for Twilight to channel her crude, unfocused magic and release it, which proved to be a winning move for her.

A whirling green disc with crude teeth gouged out of the sides clove the changeling's head into two unevenly sized pieces and dissipated half a meter later. The changeling's body simply collapsed into the mud without so much as a twitch or a jerk. It just lay there, dead, and she stared blankly at it until a flash of lightning reminded her that she herself, as well as Rainbow Dash, could meet the same end at any moment.

Twilight scanned the street for Dash and the other two changelings. She knew Dash was doing something, because there were bursts of light coming out of a nearby alleyway—but Twilight couldn't actually see what was going on. She felt quite stupid, hardly able to keep up with what was going on around her, but she knew that she had to help Dash.

“Dash, Dash, I'm coming to help you!” she shouted as she struggled to get back to her hooves. To her surprise, she could hear it more clearly than before. Though the hearing in one ear was still gone, her other one seemed to be recovering slightly.

It was, strangely, no more difficult to get up with her new injuries than it had been all the other times she'd lain in the dirt and cried. The real difference was in her actual mobility: until just moments before, she hadn't had to cope being cut open in addition to everything else. Even the most insignificant movement of her torso produced a sensation like hot knives were being driven deep into her belly.

She tried to walk, to take a few tiny steps—and it quickly became clear that she wasn't going to get very far. Removing her hoof from her side left the wound open and let whatever that was oh Celestia I'm going to be sick if I have to look at it again slide out and hang down my side like a no no I can't compare it to anything or I'll be ill and oh no I think it's bleeding—and she just couldn't coordinate herself well enough to walk on two legs.

Resting on her haunches instead, she resolved to come up with a method of going to her friend's aid that didn't involve actually moving her body. The first and only viable thing that came to mind was teleportation—which was not going to work because she couldn't use proper magic anymore, but she didn't have the presence of mind to care anymore. Rather than transport her, the failed teleportation spell made the world bend and turn inside-out and generally melt an awful visual acid trip. She aborted it, not wanting to find out horrible things what would happen to her if she got it to work.

A huge jolt shot through her horn, and the flame atop it burned brighter still.

Royal Guards—or more changelings disguised as them, rather—were now moving around down the street, Twilight observed through the stupefying haze. Surely the guards, the changelings, would recognize her from the night before, even if they weren't directly in on the plan to execute her. Nothing good would come of having any sort of contact with them, for either her or Dash. She had to get to Dash and help her.

It's not like I'd be much help, seeing as I'm crippled and going to die soon, she thought, and immediately pushed the negativity out of her head. No, Twilight, no—that's the beginning of panicky thinking, and panicky thinking leads to panic attacks...

With a deep, heavy sigh, she tried to struggle back up onto her hooves. She eventually let go of her stomach and the pain intensified and oh Celestia don't look at it—but she was able to walk now. If she held herself the right way, she reasoned, perhaps she could walk without all the rest of her insides falling out.

It was raining harder than ever as she stumbled into the alleyway where Dash and the changelings had disappeared into. The water droplets were large enough to hurt; unnaturally large, in fact, and the rain heavy enough to obscure both ends of the street and the other end of the alleyway. Twilight wondered if, perhaps, all the excess magic she'd put through the clouds had caused them to mutate and work overtime.

But when she came back to her senses and looked around, there was no Dash there, nor were there any changelings. There was blood—both green and red—and feathers and half a chitinous wing, but neither Twilight's adversaries nor her champion were around. They had moved on. Around then, Twilight began to realize just how short the entire event had been: perhaps a minute at most since she'd broken through the limiter, although it had seemed like forever.

She made it about halfway down the alley, and then she collapsed onto her side, breathing heavily. Her body just couldn't take any more—she'd reached the end of her line; physically couldn't go any further, friends in need or not. Worst of all, she had a rapidly growing headache and an awful feeling that she was going to throw up soon, and she could do nothing about any of it.

“Twilight.”

She turned her head sluggishly in the direction of the feminine voice, but stopped to stare curiously at how the water around her was turning green. Her stomach was churning.

“Stay away,” she finally warned the figure in the rain. “Stay away from me... please... I don't want any trouble.”

“I'm going to come over to you, Twilight. I'm a friend. I won't try to hurt you.”

Twilight lifted her head to look. Princess Celestia stood not a meter away, beside the green trail Twilight had left as she stumbled into the alleyway. Even in the rain, the alicorn princess seemed to glow, to shine brightly—too brightly for Twilight's tastes.

“Oh,” she said, voice blank. “Oh, hello.”

“Hello, Twilight,” Celestia said as she came closer. Her voice was seemed far away and muted, almost lost in the distance. “You're hurt badly.”

Twilight said nothing.

“Twilight,” Celestia said again. “You need to go to a doctor.”

Silence. Celestia moved forward, then stopped when Twilight's horn let off a few sparks into the puddle by her head.

“I'm going to take you to a doctor, Twilight. Your friends have been worried. We've all been very worried about you. I want to help you.”

“I think you're a hallucination...” admitted Twilight. Then, because she felt that was rude, she added, “Sorry, Princess. It's the most logical explanation for me seeing you right now... I'm likely dying, you see... and it's common for ponies to have hallucinatory experiences during the process... If you were a changeling, you'd already have killed me by now... Ow, that hurts.”

She winced and dry-heaved a little as her hallucination cast an unknown spell on her. Some kind of magical paste formed over the wound in her side, holding it shut. Then the Celestia-like figure said something. Twilight turned her head slightly.

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” she asked. “I'm having trouble hearing.”

“I said I'm no changeling,” said the hallucination of Celestia as she cast another spell whose effects Twilight couldn't see. “I'm also no hallucination. I'm Princess Celestia. The real one. I'm here to help you, Twilight.”

“Oh. Hmm... I really need to go help Rainbow Dash... She's in need. A friend in need...”

“Rainbow Dash is alright,” Celestia told her. “Right now, we're going to make sure you're alright. That's what's important, Twilight.”

Twilight felt relief and something else growing inside her, another powerful and complex emotion, but she was simply too exhausted to comprehend it. Instead she said, “Thank you, Pricna... Princess... I apologize for the earlier accusation that you weren't actually there... I'm not feeling very well.”

“Understandable.”

“…and anyway, it's hard to think clearly when you're dying. I think I should be reacting more strongly than this, too, but I'm just so tired—Oh, I'm slurring my words together... That's bad... Can you still understand me...?”

Celestia, having finished her spell, picked up the babbling unicorn with magic. “Yes, I can still understand you, Twilight. You're actually shouting at the top of your lungs. You aren't going to die, but you're badly hurt and you need to see a doctor. We're going to fly now, Twilight. Keep talking and don't go to sleep. You can shout as much as you need to.”

“Yes, Princess Celestia. I—Oh no, I'm gonna be sick—I'm gonna be s—”

The world turned into a jumble of unidentifiable shapes and colours as Celestia spread her enormous white alicorn wings and took off, holding Twilight close to her in a bubble of magic. Twilight violently dry-heaved as soon as this happened, but quickly began talking through the empty spasms, feeling strangely compelled to speak every thought that went through her mind.

“I'm sorry for using your name as an expletive!” she rasped. “I'm sorry for shouting, too! I feel awful, Princess! I've been on the verge of despair of the last couple of days! I don't want to have my horn cut off and I don't want to die! I want to learn some more friendship lessons and grow old and get silver streaks in my mane before I die or stop doing magic! My head feels like it's full of cotton! I can't think! I'm—I'm afraid! I'm afraid...”

They landed again. Twilight blearily made out some ponies nearby. They made indistinct noises that she couldn't properly hear, but they seemed upset, and that made Twilight remember that a lot of ponies wanted to hurt her—'We'll have to cut it off', they had said a long time ago.

“No, don't cut it off!” she sobbed. She struggled feebly, with limbs that were sluggish and confused—but even if she'd gotten away, she wouldn't have been able to stand on her own. All she had left was her voice: “I'm the Element of Magic! I need my horn to do magic! If you cut off my horn, I won't be able to be the Element of Magic, Princess! Don't you still need me? I feel so sick! I'm going to die! I'm going to die—I want to learn more friendship lessons, I wanna learn about friendship—I don't want to lose my horn—”

“Shh, Twilight. Calm down. You aren't going to die, nor are you going to lose your horn.” Somehow, Celestia managed to be just as loud as Twilight while also keeping the usual gentle quality in her voice. “I won't let them take your horn away and I won't let you die.”

“You won't?”

“I won't.”

“Oh, thank you, Princess Celestia!” Twilight mumbled. “A-are we done flying yet? I'm very sleepy. Yes, we must be done flying, as we're on the ground and there are no insurmountable obstanc—obselesc—obstacles—in the way. May I go to sleep now? My head feels like it's full of cotton—”

“No,” said Celestia, her tone sharp. “No, you may not go to sleep, Twilight. I will be very angry with you if you go to sleep right now. You cannot go to sleep until I say you can. Do you understand me? Twilight, answer.”

Twilight nodded her head stupidly. “Yes, Princess Celestia. No sleeping. I understand. I will not go to sleep until you say I can. I promise.”

“Thank you, Twilight.”

“Mmh. You're welcome, Princess.”

Notes:
Each of Solitary Locust's chapters has dealt somewhat with a different idea: rejection, fear, guilt, loss, friendship, judgment, trust... and this one is about death. I would like to take a moment to note that this is only the second time in my published stories that I have ever depicted death, and the first time I ever showed it seriously. Make of that what you will, I guess.
Editors:
Abcron
Selbi
Kaidan
Skeets
Kalash93
Happy
Garbo802
Regidar
Smiles
-TGM-
Somebadauthor
Ephraim Blue
Diarch the Almost Neurotypical
As usual, I can't remember all the people I gave the chapter to. I definitely emailed it to some people, but as of the moment that I'm writing this note, I don't really have time to go back and collect all of them. I'll do it later. However, it would help me immensely if those of you that I sent a draft to at some point would hit me up so I can add your name to that list. You shouldn't be forgotten!
Also, the image halfway through the story was drawn by MisterMech as a response to a random request I made in a blog without the expectation of a serious response. Therefore, MisterMech is a superior being who is godlike and deserves your eternal love. Go look him up on Deviantart and give him commission requests and compliments and stuff! He's one of the most amazing artists in the entire fandom, hands down--I'm not even exaggerating.
Questions I hope you'll take a second to answer after reading the chapter:
1) Twilight killed three changelings! What's going to happen when she's able to really think about that fact?
1b) Assuming she survives, that is!
2) What's "Celestia" up to? Is it the real Celestia, or is it really a changeling?
3) What do you think of Twilight's conspiracy theories about the Royal Guard?
Thanks for reading!