Chapter 10
Darkest Before Dawn
by Sessalisk
Chapter Ten
It was a week and a half into her summer vacation, and Twilight sat by the mailbox, waiting for the mailpony to arrive. Any minute now...
She wasn’t waiting for her marks, which she’d gotten the week prior. Except for a mediocre mark in Ms. Marie’s class, she’d done about as well as she had at her old school.
She was waiting for a response from the Princess.
Half an hour later, a grey pegasus fluttered down from the sky, carrying a heavy-looking blue bag. Twilight stepped from hoof to hoof, holding her breath in anticipation. The pegasus barely had time to take the letters out of her bag before Twilight pulled them away.
“Thank you!” she blurted out as she galloped into the house.
Sorting through the stack, Twilight put any letters addressed to her parents on the coffee table.
Aha!
She used her magic to tear open the envelope, carefully unfolded the letter, and read.
Hello again, Twilight. I hope you are having a good summer. I am sorry to say that the palace is adequately staffed at the moment, and we don’t need any help. If any junior positions open up, I will be sure to contact you immediately.
- Princess Celestia
“Why!” cried Twilight. “Why me?”
She briefly considered running some sort of double-deception between her parents and the Princess. She would tell one that she was being called away to work at the palace for the summer, and tell the other that her parents were going to be on a second honeymoon in Las Pegasus for two weeks, and that she needed a place to stay during that time. She remembered what had happened during her winter vacation and thought of how hurt her father would be when, not if, he found out. There was no way she would be able to pull it off. Princess Celestia would insist on having a meeting with her parents about it, for one.
No. She was going to have to go on this camping trip, come wolves or high water, and she sighed inwardly at the prospect.
Every summer, Twilight’s parents got a few of weeks of vacation time. Last year it had been her mother’s turn to pick what they’d be doing, and she had taken a very laid back approach, relaxing at home and attending the Summer Sun celebration.
Twilight’s father, on the other hoof, always picked the same thing every time: camping.
On the first trip Twilight could remember, she’d stumbled into a bee’s nest and had gotten stung just about everywhere but her eyeballs. Nothing so dramatic had happened on their next trip, but there were a lot of little things that added up to make a generally unhappy experience. After a few days, all the bedding took on a sort of damp feeling, her back and sides got sore from sleeping on the ground, and she always, always, got indigestion from her father’s “outdoor” cooking.
Whenever she said these things, though, she felt like she was whining. Being inconvenient. It would have been nice if some condition arose, maybe some sort of emergency at the palace, or a new allergy, that made her have to stay home.
Now that she was older and wiser, however, she knew what she should do.
There had been one big change once she had gotten back from school. Her parents had decided that she was old and responsible enough to receive an allowance, and although they were careful not to say it, Twilight also knew that the extra money they had saved up over the year also allowed them to afford this.
Over the next few days, Twilight drew diagrams and scrounged up as many mosquito screens and as much bug netting as she possibly could. It took her the rest of the week to sew them all together in any semblance of clothing.
The white bug netting looked vaguely lacy or gauzy and could almost pass as the material for something fancy, so she sewed the whole ensemble out of it. She saved the stiff metal screens for the area around where her hooves would go, knowing that they would be subject to a lot of wear and tear. In the back, there was a big zipper that she could use to climb in. The end result was lumpy, too roomy in some areas and far too tight in others, but it fit. Roughly.
“You look like you’re going to a wasp funeral,” Mom said as Twilight donned the bug-net suit for the first time.
“Better safe than sorry!”
Twilight’s mother gave her a quizzical look.
“No bugs can get me through this.”
“Why is the whole thing made out of bug netting, though?” Mom asked. “Why not just the head?”
Twilight thought about that for a moment. “Oh.” She levitated a pair of scissors from a drawer. “Good point.”
“It doesn’t affect the functionality of the suit,” her mother said quickly, and Twilight paused with the scissors midair. “It was just an observation.”
“Hm. Yeah. I guess I’ll know better for the next one I make at least.” If only she had realised before she’d gone and made a whole suit.
The next step would be trickier. It had cost her the rest of her allowance, but she managed to buy enough food to last for an entire camping trip. Keeping it from rotting for the next two weeks would be the problem that Twilight knew exactly how to deal with.
“Mom! Mom!” Twilight shouted, as she galloped through the front door. “Mister Lightstraw just froze all this stuff for me!” In front of her floated at least fifty pounds of assorted foodstuffs. She had milk, bread, butter, tomatoes, cucumbers, whole apples, peanut butter and even a watermelon.
Her mother sat at the dining room table, and she glanced up from a pile of forms. “Uh... That was really nice of him?”
“Yeah!” Twilight said, pumping a hoof in the air. “Can you please sublimate all the water out of it for me, too?”
Twilight’s mother looked at the absolutely massive pile of frozen food hovering in the air. She blinked owlishly for a moment, her mouth forming the beginnings of a word that was never said.
There was a long, uncomfortable silence.
“It’s for a-”
Papers scattered in the air as Twilight’s mother leapt from her chair to the table, onto the floor. “Yes!” She was like a filly being told that she was excused from her chores until she had finished her ice cream and that yes, she could have a puppy. “I was with you at ‘sublimate’!”
“Yay!”
“To what temperature were these frozen?” Mom asked as she pulled down the watermelon. She tapped it with a hoof, making a brittle clinking sound.
“Hmm... I’m not sure. I just asked him to freeze them as cold as he could.”
“Okay.” Twilight’s mother wheeled the family blackboard into the kitchen. “We have to do this quick then. No time for precision.”
Twilight followed her mother into the kitchen and laid all the frozen food lightly down onto the counter. “Should I get the pump thingy?”
Mom rubbed her chin. “Have you learned how to cast a shield spell in school?”
“Not yet. That’s third year, I think.”
“Darn,” she said. “Please fetch me the bell jar then.”
Twilight didn’t need much more prompting than that. She took off upstairs and dug around in her parents’ large closet. It was mainly taken up by her mother’s assorted gadgetry and other cool stuff: years of astronomy newsletters, some scary looking electrical clamps, little gas burner gadgets, a resonant transformer circuit... Needless to say, Twilight jumped at any opportunity to explore.
She returned downstairs in short measure, with the glass, a vacuum pump and a rubber hose. Her mother was scribbling furiously at the chalkboard, but turned around at Twilight’s approach, still scratching out calculations. “Mom,” said Twilight. “Why do you have a metronome?”
“I’m secretly a compulsive hoarder.”
That made a surprising amount of sense.
“It was a joke!” Mom said in response to the expression that had blossomed on Twilight’s face. “It lets me work better with temporal resolution.” She set up the simple hose and pump contraption and sealed the unwrapped brick of butter inside the bell jar. “Stopwatches are good for a single event, but if you want to measure a series of intervals, metronomes are better.”
“Ah.” Twilight looked at the pump and then back at her mother. She had a pleading expression on her face: the best puppy-dog eyes she could manage.
“Go ahead,” Mom said with a grin. “Just make sure to save one for me.”
Twilight let out a whoop of glee, and began jumping up and down on the pump. “This is going to be so cool!”
The little dial on the side of the base began to move slowly towards the left, and Twilight kept pumping. The pressure hit zero and her mother tapped her glowing horn against the base of the jar.
Mom pulled a large sheet pan and pot from one of the cupboards, holding the pan in the vapor and letting the moisture collect and drip down into the pot. She let out a booming and mad-sounding laugh as she glared down at the butter. “Who is your god now!”
Twilight rolled her eyes. When the pumping seemed to stop doing anything, her mother held up a hoof for her to cease jumping.
Slowly and cautiously, Twilight undid the little latches around the base of the bell jar, and there was a slight hissing sound as air rushed inwards. She levitated the butter onto the table and stared at it curiously. “It looks all dry and crumbly now.” Twilight poked it with a hoof, surprised to find it felt brittle too.
“Better find an airtight container to put it in,” her mother replied. “You don’t want it to soak up atmospheric moisture.”
“Good point,” said Twilight. She pulled an empty pickle jar from the cabinet and sealed the butter inside, feeling pleased.
Twilight and her mother spent the better part of an afternoon sublimating the water out of the food she’d bought, but they ran into problems with the enormous watermelon. It was far too big to fit in the bell jar. In hindsight, she should have cut and cubed the fruit before asking for the neighbour to freeze it.
“I think that’s high enough,” Mom said as she squinted up into the sky.
Twilight’s head was tilted back as far as it would go. It was quite easy to sense the watermelon with her magic; she was holding it after all, but with her eyes alone, she could barely make out a green dot. Peering at it and mentally lining up its trajectory with the sidewalk, she let the cocoon of magic around the watermelon evaporate. “Duck and cover!”
Both unicorns dashed into the house and slammed the door, flattening themselves to the ground. Within seconds, there was a deafening crack from outside and something smashed through one of their front windows, steaming ever-so-slightly as it hit the carpet.
Twilight gave the pinkish lump a sideways look. “Oops.”
Her mother looked at the broken window and the glass shards littering their living room floor. “Some colts threw a ball through the window,” she said. “We have already received reparation for the damage.”
“Huh?”
“You must never tell your father of this.”
“Okay...” Twilight flattened her ears. “Am... I in trouble?”
“I don’t think that would be fair,” her mother said. “I am far more culpable than you.” She got up slowly, creeping towards the hoof-sized lump of watermelon. Twilight’s mother gazed down at it critically. “And I don’t think these are cold enough to sublimate anymore either.”
Twilight got out of the way as her mother opened the front door and walked out into the sunshine. She followed her mother, feeling slightly ashamed.
Oh goodness.
The street was splattered in pink, dotted with little bits of green watermelon skin and white rind. The conclusion that Twilight might have drawn if she didn’t know any better, was that somepony had gruesomely massacred a family of slushies.
In the center of all the melon-related carnage was a small crack in the pavement. Luckily, nothing else seemed to be damaged, but the roofs of some of the nearby houses had little chunks of semi-frozen watermelon thawing on them.
Mom let out a sigh of relief. “I thought it was going to be worse,” she said, looking down at the mushy mess in the middle of the street. “Well, we’d better get this cleaned up.”
Twilight just nodded. It had finally sunk in that she wasn’t in any kind of trouble; in fact, Mom seemed to be the one shouldering most of the blame. Twilight wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Silently, she trotted back into the house and returned with a dustpan and a large garbage bag.
“I should have asked earlier,” said Twilight’s mother, “but what did you need the sublimated food for anyway?” She scraped the pink goop off the sidewalk using the white plastic dustpan and dumped it into the garbage bag.
Twilight stretched out her magic to remove a chunk of watermelon from a roof across the street - it was much further than her mother could reach - and let it drift in towards the rubbish. “It’s for the camping trip. You know how Dad gets with the cooking and the... well.”
Her mother nodded. When it came to most issues, the two of them often saw eye-to-eye. “I understand where you’re coming from.” There was a pause as Mom seemed to consider something. “Still... Pretend you had spent a long time working on a present for your father. Imagine that somehow, he knew about this in advance.”
“Uh huh?”
“How would you feel if he decided to buy a brand new version of your present from a store so that he wouldn’t have to use yours?”
“Not good, I guess... But then...” Twilight had a cheeky grin on her face. “If the thing that he buys really is better than what I made, I don’t think I could hold it against him. I might even try to make something better than what the store has.”
Mom ruffled Twilight’s mane with a hoof. “Fair enough.” The plastic dustpan scraped loudly against the pavement as she attempted to clear away some particularly stubborn watermelon pulp. “You should still talk to your father. I know you don’t want to hurt his feelings, but he’s a reasonable sort of fellow.” She had a playful sort of smile. “I see him around from time to time, and that’s the feeling I get, anyway.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow, but she kept her mind on her magic and didn’t let the chunk of watermelon she was carrying fall to the cement. “But you see him every day!”
“It was understatement for humorous effect.”
“Ohh...”
The street was cleaned, the window was (temporarily) patched and the sun was setting by the time her father got home. These past couple weeks it had been a little strange to have her mother home all the time and her father working, rather than the other way around.
“What happened to the window?” he said, staring at the black garbage bag taped to the window frame.
“A baseball threw some colts through the window.” Twilight blinked. No, that wasn’t right. “I mean. Some colts threw a baseball.”
Dad looked at her a little strangely, but he didn’t comment further. “What really happened to the window?” he said to Twilight’s mother.
The white unicorn was burning a hole through a large textbook with her eyes. “That was correct. They compensated for the damage, but the hardware store was closed by the time I got there.”
“You made another potato launcher, didn’t you?”
“No!” Mom looked insulted. “If I did, we’d be missing a whole window, not just that one pane of glass.”
Dad stroked his chin with a hoof. “You managed to get ahold of some pure sodium and... No... Hm...”
Twilight tiptoed up the staircase, poking her head out from between the balusters at the top so that she could watch. The last thing she needed was to get called in as a third party witness.
Her father examined the patched window from several angles, then sniffed around the living room carpet like a bloodhound on a trail. “Now that’s either freshly mown grass,” he said, “or watermelon.”
Twilight’s mother twitched slightly, her book completely forgotten. “Uh...”
“Aha!” he said. “You made a watermelon launcher.” His face fell. “... without me.”
Mom seemed to have some great internal struggle. “I... had Twilight drop a large frozen watermelon onto the street... from about a mile up. We were going to sublimate all the water from it.”
“Well that’s a little disappointing,” said Dad. “I’d like to say something pithy about this being the reason we can’t have nice things, but then I think we both know that the real reason is that we would spend all our money on large canisters of nitroglycerin and end up weeping in the smoking crater of our house.”
Twilight’s mother consulted a calendar on the wall and did some speedy calculations with a quill and some paper. “I owe you twenty-two bits and fifty three cents, then?”
“Call it an even twenty-two.”
“What’s that for?” Twilight said, still peeking through the gaps in the balusters.
“Just a bit of a bet we had going,” said Mom.
Dad grinned. “I bet your mother thirty bits that she couldn’t go a month without destroying something for the sake of science - minus a bit for every day acourse.”
“What happened when it went negative?” asked Twilight.
“I’d owe her money. But let’s be honest with ourselves. That was never going to happen.”
Mom cuffed him lightly on the ear. “Hush, you.”
Later that night, Dad went to tuck Twilight in for bed. He hadn’t done this in ages, and to be honest, she thought she was a little old for that sort of thing.
“So, the camping trip is coming up next week,” he said to Twilight, almost conversationally. He pulled the blanket over her withers, leaving her neck and head poking out. “Making any big preparations?”
“Mom sent you, didn’t she?” Twilight eyed him suspiciously.
“Ya got me.”
“I made a bug suit,” Twilight admitted. “It’s to keep the bees and stuff away.”
“Ah, so that’s what you were doing with all the mosquito netting!” He seemed pleased, as if he’d found out the answer to a great mystery.
“And uh...” This part was harder. “I don’t know if you know this already... but...” She searched for a way to spare her father’s feelings. “I think that some- uh... most... of the outdoorsy food you make... is...” Twilight took a deep breath. “Not very good.” There. She’d said it. The worst part was over.
“It always tasted fine to me.” The corners of his mouth were upturned, but his brows were furrowed and his eyes didn’t look like they were smiling with the rest of his face. “I guess the whole ‘you are your own worst critic’ thing can work both ways.”
“Well normally your cooking is fantastic,” Twilight said. “Except for that feisty Friday fiesta cake thing you made that one time...”
Dad put a hoof over his face. “I’ll be regretting that one ‘till I’m on my death bed, I imagine.”
“To be fair, Dad,” said Twilight, “most cakes don’t have living animals in them.”
“I thought it would be like that song,” he said. “You know, the one where all those birds flew out of a king’s pie?”
“I’m just glad that the fireworks inside went off after they got out, and before we had a chance to eat it,” Twilight said evenly. “And uh...” she said, trying to get back on topic. “I also got Mom to help me prepare a bunch of food for the trip.” She tried to smile. “It’s just that eating twigs and bark for two weeks makes me feel kind of icky afterwards.”
“Noted,” he said. “For what it’s worth, Twi, I’m proud of you for telling me rather than carrying on an elaborate ruse for the next two and a half weeks.”
“I was considering it,” she confessed. “Mom talked me out of it.”
Dad grinned. “And then she helped you send frozen watermelon flying across half the neighbourhood.” He blew out the candles as he turned to leave. “Good night, Twi.”
“Night, Dad.”
Twilight didn’t exactly look forward to the camping trip as the week came to a close, but she didn’t exactly dread it as much as she had been, either. She was prepared as she could be, and best of all, Dad was okay with it.
When Monday morning finally arrived, Twilight reluctantly packed all her bags and carried them down the stairs with her. She would be having her last breakfast at home for the next couple of weeks, and she might as well make the most of it.
Mom and Dad had packed things like the tent and the cooking supplies, and their bags were much bigger than Twilight’s. She appraised her parent’s saddlebags and backpacks with a wary eye. Including hers, all their bags probably weighed over two hundred pounds. The last time they’d gone camping, Twilight remembered how she’d struggled horribly with her load. She hadn’t been able to put on her bulging saddlebags without help, and even then it had been much lighter than what she carried now.
Experimentally, she reached out for the stack of bags piled next to the door. There was hardly any resistance as she drew their things into the air. All their gear floated lazily overhead; it couldn’t have weighed more than a tenth of the horrible black rock she had to carry during the final exams. She held the bags there for a moment, then self-consciously piled them back exactly as she found them.
Nifty.
“You’ve definitely been practicing,” said Mom’s voice from behind her.
Twilight spun around. “Oh!” She had no idea that anypony had been watching. “Yeah. They get us to carry a lot of stuff at school,” she said. “Um... If you want, I guess I could carry both your bags for you too.”
Twilight’s mother looked taken aback. “It’s considerate of you to offer, Twilight, but if the other parents saw us using you as a pack mule they would probably contact the foal protective services.”
In the kitchen, Twilight heard the sound of a cupboard closing as her father put away the last of the dishes. “Ready to go, ladies?” he said with a grin.
Twilight nodded, as ready as she’d ever be.
“Stallions first,” said Mom. Sunlight streamed in through the doorway as it swung open, making it a little difficult to see the shimmering purple aura of her magic.
Twilight squinted in the relative gloom of the house and saw the dark shapes of her parents’ cargo rising into the air, fastening themselves to their backs. Dimly, she noticed her own saddlebags and backpack floating beside her. “I can do it myself this time,” she insisted. The bags fell to the ground and then bounced right back up again, glowing magenta.
“Aren’t you going to wear them?” asked Dad as he stepped out into the sunshine.
“Nope.”
They had been on the road for hours and it would take at least another hour’s march to the southeast before they even reached the edge of the woods. Canterlot had been left behind, and they watched as the paved roads transitioned into cobblestones, the cobblestones into dirt.
The sun crept across the eastern horizon, and it was shining directly overhead when Dad finally suggested they stop. Twilight gratefully plopped her bags onto the ground. Their pace was relaxed, and her thirty-pound bag was nowhere near as heavy as anything she’d ever had to carry at school, but she was starting to feel a low throb at the base of her horn - like the beginning of a headache. It was nothing compared to the searing pains she would occasionally have at the end of Ms. Marie’s classes, but it was disagreeable, and she knew that ache well enough to know that it was threatening to become even worse as the day progressed.
Her parents undid their bags just as eagerly as Twilight had; they didn’t look tired so much as they looked saddlesore. Dad unpacked a blanket and spread it out on the grass beside the dirt road. Bowls, cutlery and containers flew out of his backpack, and Twilight watched as he laid everything out neatly, pouring lemonade and ladling out bowls of macaroni salad in the blink of an eye.
He ate a mouthful of salad absently, then used his magic to pluck a bit of grass from the ground. “This’s crabgrass,” he said conversationally. “You can just eat it, or you can take the seeds-” He rifled through the bundle for a moment to pull out a particularly seed-laden stalk. “Aha! You can take the seeds and grind them up to make porridge.”
Twilight watched as he dumped the grass into his macaroni salad and devoured it with visible enjoyment. She and her mother ate their lunch silently as he pointed out just about every edible plant on the roadside - which was essentially all of them. Twilight took this all in with both interest and skepticism.
Just because it wouldn’t kill you if you ate it, she thought, it doesn’t mean you should eat it in the first place. Still, it was nice to know that if she ever got stranded in a grassy meadow, at least everything around her would be made of food.
When they were done with their lunch, they packed their things and hit the road again. Twilight’s father continued to chatter on about edible wild plants as they travelled. He went on about their medicinal properties as diuretics, analgesics and emetics. She couldn’t recall the last time he had ever made such a point of dropping so much information at once. It was interesting, but a little too much to take in.
They lost much of the early afternoon to travel. The noonday sun shone overhead as they left the dirt road behind them, heading off through the grass in a direction only Dad seemed to know. He talked about plants the whole time, and even Twilight had to admit that it was rather impressive that her father had enough to say about them to eat up several hours’ worth of conversation. Absently, she wondered if perhaps he should have been a herbalist rather than a celestologer.
The occasional breeze brought with it the loamy, green scent of the forest. Off in the distance, she could even spot the tallest of the trees.
“... and even though it’s not from Equestria, there’s lots of marrubium vulgare growing around in drier areas-”
“Hold up a bit,” said Twilight, dropping her pack. “I need to put on my bug suit.” Mom watched her with an amused expression.
“Already?” Dad cocked his head to the side. “Isn’t that a bit of overkill, Twi?”
Twilight opened her backpack and pulled out her gauzy suit of netting. She unzipped the back and climbed in. “Better safe than sorry, right?” she replied, using her magic to zip up the garment.
Realisation dawned on his face. “Ah,” he said. “Yeah... I’ll scout out for bee’s nests extra carefully this time.”
“I’m still going to wear it,” said Twilight. “Just in case.”
He chuckled. “Okay then.”
As they walked on, the forest seemed to swallow them. It had started off with a few scraggly trees, but the trees quickly became walls of green and brown. The light took on a filtered, hazy quality, and the air filled with the sounds of insect life and distant birdsong.
Twilight was grateful for all the little holes in the fabric of her outfit; without all the extra ventilation, she might have suffocated in there. Underneath the netting, she could smell all the interesting scents of the forest, filtered through the veil of her suit and overlaid with its own plasticky odour. Although it was a little hard to make out through her suit, the earth smelled different here, leafier and wetter than the dirt from Canterlot or even the sunbaked dirt from the field leading up to the woods. The plants had their own individual and subtle scents, but she could not differentiate them well over the much stronger smell of nylon.
Her father seemed to be following his nose as well. He would occasionally raise his head in the air, flare his nostrils and swivel his ears. Twilight kept her hoofsteps as quiet as possible - she knew he was searching for water. Her mother on the other hoof, kept breaking out into surreptitious grins.
Twilight heard her mother humming. She recognized the tune as coming from a song about wilderness exploration.
Dad raised a hoof to his mouth, indicating that he wanted everypony to be quiet. He perked up his ears to catch some a sound. “I can hear a stream.”
Twilight listened as hard as she could, but everything was a little muffled on the inside of her suit. Through the netting she saw her mother’s ears twitch, listening in the same direction as her father.
“Pshhhhshhhh...” whispered Mom. “Splish-splash burble...” She had a cheeky look on her face as Dad turned to her with a slightly annoyed expression. “I’m just kidding,” she said. “I heard it too.”
“Nah,” said Twilight as she followed her parents deeper in the forest. “I heard, ‘I am the mighty Pooka and I will drag you into the river!”
Dad whickered. “Well I heard, ‘I am the mighty Pooka and I wish to devour young unicorn fillies named Twilight Sparkle!’”
“You both got it wrong,” said Mom. “I hear, ‘I am the mighty Pooka and I will force you to watch as a clueless pony takes the inverse of a multivalued function and tries to use it in a proof! Over and over.’”
Everypony was silent for a moment as they digested that.
Twilight made a face. “Okay you win.”
“How is that worse than drowning or getting eaten?” said Dad. “Really.”
“You’re weird, Dad.”
Mom nodded in agreement.
He blinked several times. “I’m not the one wearing a suit made out of mosquito nets!”
“Still,” said Mom.
The three of them followed the sound of water to a small stream where they set up camp. Twilight’s parents worked in tandem to set up the large family tent, while Twilight did her best to help, fetching anything they needed and clearing rocks and twigs out of the way.
It must have been mid-afternoon by the time they had their tent and gear all laid out. Twilight had difficulty estimating the approximate time of day since she had neither a clock or a way to tell how long her shadow was in the dim forest light. Her father went off on his own to find dinner (undoubtedly something awful involving bark or lichen), and her mother relaxed in the shade, reading a book.
Twilight stood next to the stream and stared into the water. Beneath the surface she could see brown fish the length of her hoof. They darted from place to place, and even though the water moved, they seemed to be able to hover in any fixed spot just above the stream bed. She brushed one gently with her magic and the fish flicked its tail wildly, zipping far away and hiding behind a rock.
Twilight frowned. She knew that some ponies had a knack for working with animals, but she couldn’t see why anypony would want to in the first place. Whenever she galloped up to say hello, they would usually run away, and even if any decided to stick around, animals seldom had any conversational skills worth mentioning.
She almost wanted to go into for a swim, but her time at school had taught her just how troublesome it was to get clothing wet. A soggy uniform was itchy, and it took far too long to dry. It was a little tempting to just take her bug suit off, but then that would undermine the whole purpose of having one in the first place. She settled for staring grumpily at the stream bed, kicking up rocks with her magic and making faces at the fish.
There was something magical about being here, something that had nothing to do with actual magic. The trees seemed to go on forever, in a deep, green darkness and the all the smells were so complex and new compared to what she was used to in Canterlot. She also knew that in three or four hours, the wonder would fade and she would be in the woods with her parents for the next two weeks, with all the discomfort, boredom and inconvenience that it entailed. The thing was, Twilight thought, nature was pretty and nature was interesting, but it was best at a good distance and in small doses.
She wandered around the campsite for the rest of the day, exploring the surrounding woods. South of the campsite, Twilight saw the brushy tail of a fox as it disappeared into a tangle of vegetation. She called out to it, but the fox sprinted away on its own business, not giving her a second glance.
In the late afternoon, Twilight’s mother laid out a firepit. Remembering a fire spell she’d read in a book, Twilight scrunched up her eyes and tried to coax a flame to catch. She ignored the painful throbbing at the base of her skull and felt a warm whoosh of air as the kindling crackled to life. Even though there was a medical kit inside the tent, nopony had packed asalac tablets...
Dad came back in the evening, reeking of pine pitch and carrying a large basket of forage. “White pine, willow, dandelions and fiddleheads!” he said with a big smile. Without further preamble, he unpacked the frying pan and began cooking thin strips of pine bark until they were as crispy as potato chips. Meanwhile, Twilight’s mother prepared the curled fern fronds by peeling off their skin and putting them in a pot with some stream water.
Darkness closed in around them as the night time progressed, and the three of them gradually, unconsciously, drew closer to the light of the fire. Out of politeness, Twilight ate one of her father’s bark chips and a tiny spoonful of the prepared greens, but she wasn’t really all that hungry. An unspoken agreement prevented anypony from mentioning the peanut butter sandwich she’d made while her parents were cooking. She gave a small sigh as she left the fireside and retired early to the tent - Dad was putting on a pot of something or another, most likely some awful tea made from wild plants, and she was going to have to give that a pass.
The fanciest and most expensive tents were enchanted. Twilight knew that they had some sort of spell mechanism that affected the curvature of space, allowing the insides of the tent to be much bigger than the outsides. They were also more of a novelty than anything. The outdoor supply store had one of these on display, and Twilight had only made the mistake of stepping inside once. The moment she had been fully in the tent, she’d fallen to the floor in a crumpled heap, squeezing her eyes shut and moaning. She had spent fifteen minutes in there, rocking back and forth, willing the vertigo to stop. When her father had finally found her, he couldn’t see why she was making such a fuss - he could feel it too, but it only made him a little dizzy. A pegasus or earth pony might not have felt it at all, but to her it had been a little bit like falling in every direction at once. She had not been able to tell where she was or where she stood.
While their current tent didn’t have space-warping properties (nor did it cause Twilight to experience any sort of existential terror), it was still much larger than was strictly necessary. Eight full-grown ponies could have stood tail-to-nose from one end of the tent to the other. When she tossed aside her bulky bug suit, there was still plenty of room left over to sprawl out on her bedroll and sleeping bag with a book. Twilight’s head throbbed. The light from her horn glowed dim and sickly and she found herself reading the same paragraph over and over. As the jackhammering stabs of pain worsened, she wondered if maybe some invisible creature had pried open the top of her head and was now sloshing around her skull’s contents with a metal spoon. She’d been relying on her spells to carry her through this camping trip all day, and now it was taking its toll.
Ten minutes later, she dropped the light spell and gave up on reading at all. She couldn’t concentrate, and the words were starting to shift and blur. With a muffled groan, Twilight buried her head under a pillow and closed her eyes.
She heard the approaching hoofsteps and the unzipping of the tent door, but she just ignored them. “Twi?” said her father’s voice.
“Yeah?” she said, sounding surlier than she’d intended. She pressed the pillow harder over her head.
“You alright, Sweetie?” His voice was loud and grating to her ears.
Twilight bit down on her sleeping bag. “Mrrphh...” Please just leave me alone...
The pillow fell away from her face as he lifted her up awkwardly with his front hooves. A steaming tin cup floated in the air, glowing faintly amber. His brows furrowed with concern. “I made you some-”
Irritation rose in Twilight’s chest like a tide of biting insects. Deep inside, a nasty voice told her that he deserved to feel bad. That it was his fault that she was here and hurting like this in the first place. “I don’t need you to be here!” she snapped, pulling away from him. “I don’t want to be here, and I don’t want any of your awful tea!” The injured expression on his face made her regret her words instantly.
“It’s just boiled willow bark,” he said very gently. “It’s got acetylsalicylic acid and all... I thought it might help with your headache.”
Twilight’s confusion must have been plain on her face, because he followed that by answering the very question she had been thinking.
“You’ve been using your magic like it’s going out of style.” He smiled a little, but it seemed to be more for her benefit than out of lightheartedness. “I thought you might be feeling it by now.”
“... I’m sorry.”
“S’alright.”
Twilight could see the lie in his eyes.
He put the cup down by Twilight’s bedroll. “Night, Twi. I hope your head feels a bit better in the morning.” He zipped the tent door shut as he left.
The next day, Twilight did her best to be helpful. She tagged along with her father as he gathered wild plants for lunch, trying to be as enthusiastic as possible. For breakfast he’d ground the bark chips into a powder, mixed them with water, ordinary flour, and wrapped it on a stick to bake. The result was an unholy combination of sawdust and bannock, but Twilight ate a generous portion without complaint.
When she actually suggested that they go on a nature hike, the stare he gave her would only be appropriate for somepony who’d announced that she’d be quitting school to join a cult.
“You don’t need to keep apologising,” he said finally.
“Huh?” She hadn’t said sorry or anything like it since the night before.
“Everypony says things they don’t mean sometimes.” Dad exhaled softly. “But just because you didn’t mean to say it, it doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Dad, I-”
He didn’t let her finish. “Hold on there, kiddo,” he said. “Just because I like something, it’s not fair of me to expect that you have to like it too. I do want for us all to have fun, but you shouldn’t have to pretend to enjoy things you don’t.” There was a pause while it seemed like he was gathering his thoughts. “And I suppose it’d only be fair if it goes the other way around as well... If I’m completely honest here, you look like you’re going to a hornet’s funeral.”
Twilight was torn between wanting to object at his comment about her fashion sense and wanting to hug him. “I’m still sorry.”
“I know,” he said. “Words and actions can’t be put back. But you can move past them and try to do a better job next time.” This time his laugh was genuine. “Go and do something you’d like. Go for a swim, read a book, play chess with your mother, maybe even pick some berries... uh... but don’t eat any unless you show me first.” He smiled and gestured to the wide expanse of trees all around them. “We have the freedom of the outdoors and whatever you do next is up to you.”
“I think...” said Twilight. “... Is that tree still around? The one you found yesterday?”
Dad nodded.
“Can I make firewood?”
“Well... If you really want to.” Dad looked rather amused. “But wouldn’t you rather do something fun?”
“Being constructive can be fun, right?”
“That’s definitely a good attitude to have, but...”
“Well lead the way!”
When they’d got there, the fallen tree proved itself to be thicker than Twilight was tall, and from the looks of it, at least eighty feet in height. Other than the break at the base, the only things that seemed like they might be damaged were the smaller trees which had gotten in the way during its fall. A cloying evergreen scent hung in the air, coming mostly from where the bark had been stripped away at the far end of the trunk.
“Pretty big, huh?” said Dad. “I smelled the sap when I was coming this way yesterday and it can’t’ve been here for too long.”
A few sparks flew from Twilight’s horn.
“Your mother would have a conniption fit if I gave you the hatchet and walked off, but-”
The massive tree righted itself in the air and snapped cleanly down the middle with a resounding crack. There was a shower of wood splinters that barely missed the two of them. Twilight did her best to steel herself against the sharp spikes of pain lancing through her head.
“That’s alright,” she said.
Her father blinked several times.
“Are you okay?” Twilight asked, feeling the faint echoes of magical strain. The fabric of her bugsuit would have protected her from all the flying wood slivers, but her father might not have been as fortunate.
He rubbed his eyes with the back of a hoof and craned his head back to stare at the floating tree halves. “... Perhaps?”
The two of them worked together, breaking the tree into smaller pieces and saving the fibrous inner bark.
Dad swung the hatchet and split apart a medium-sized chunk of wood. “You snap an eighty-foot tree like it’s a matchstick.” He said this in a teasing tone of voice, but there was curiosity in it as well. “But you can’t break these little logs?”
“I dunno,” said Twilight. “It’s just harder.” She wondered if it was because the tearing action she used on the smaller pieces was more complicated than the straightforward break she used on the bigger ones. “Maybe it’s a little bit like a twig...” She pulled at two halves of a log, trying to split them down the grain. A sharp twinge of pain shot through her horn. “You know...” she said with a slight wince. “When the little twig bits are shorter than they are wide, they get really hard to keep breaking.”
“Are you sure you don’t just need to take a rest?”
“Nah.” Twilight knew she could handle this.
The fallen pine had cleared away a lot of the canopy. Sunlight streamed down into the clearing unimpeded, and by the time the sun was casting long and funny shadows, they had enough firewood to last them a month. Twilight carried the bulk of the wood back to the campsite herself, ignoring the building pressure in her cranium. If they had taken equal loads, it might have taken seven or eight trips, but this way it only took one.
The only downside was that between the poor vision offered by her bugsuit and the concentration she had to allot to levitating the wood, she couldn’t really pay attention to where she was going. “Yuck.” Twilight wiped off the bottom of her left forehoof onto some nearby moss. She’d stepped in a pile of weird tubular animal droppings.
“At least there aren’t any elephants around here,” said her father. “That would’ve been messier.”
“Ew.” Twilight tried to keep a carefuller eye on the ground as they made their way to the campsite, elephants or no. Nature was so overrated.
Mom was already stoking the fire when they got back.
“Did you find anything good?” Dad said to her.
Her saddlebags flew off and she poured mushrooms, berries and greens onto a waterproof tarp. “Just this,” she said, sounding quite pleased.
Dad gaped at the things she’d gathered. “I hope you didn’t eat any of that stuff yet...” He pointed to one of the white mushrooms on the tarp. “Uh. I think that might be destroying angel.”
Mom peered at it cautiously. “It looked like a meadow mushroom to me.” She stroked her chin with a hoof. “We could take it to a mycologist to check.”
“The nearest one’s only a three hour gallop away.”
“Hm... Better put this one aside then.” She gestured at some roundish mushrooms. “How about these? They’re puffballs, right?”
“... Did you find them next to the last mushrooms?” He did not look surprised when she nodded. “Those’re probably young destroying angels...”
“Why are they called destroying angels?” asked Twilight.
He scratched his head. “Well... if you wanted to, you could fit a lot of the spores on the head of a pin. And if you eat them, uh, they destroy you?”
“Isn’t that true of a lot of mushrooms?” Mom pointed out.
He had a goofy smile on his face. “These are the only ones that study theology.”
Out of all the stuff Twilight’s mother had collected, the only thing that looked even remotely edible was a small bunch of thistles. They were so prickly that only a goat or a donkey might want to eat them, and it would have to be a pretty depressed one at that. The thistles were thrown out along with the mushrooms and poison sumac, so Twilight sacrificed a portion of her preserved apples for dinner. Even her father had to concede, after some hesitance.
“This is cheating,” he said as he nibbled gingerly on a dried apple slice.
Twilight snorted. “And bringing flour and condiments isn’t?” She sipped on a cup of the boiled willow bark and massaged a temple.
“Watch it, Missy,” he said. “Or next time all I’m gonna have with me is a jackknife and some wilderness smarts.”
Twilight shuddered at the thought.
The rest of the week was passed in boredom, mostly hanging in or around the tent with a small collection of books. Twilight’s parents went on hikes and swims and searched for food, but none of those things really appealed to her. It rained hard on the fourth day and although Twilight’s father had been perfectly fine with getting muddy and soaked to the bone, she and her mother huddled in the tent for a couple of days until the weather let up. In one corner, Mom played checkers with herself, not at all due to a lack of willingness on Twilight’s part. Twilight knew that on one side her mother would make her moves based on probabilities and decision problems. On the other side she played intuitively, not using more than a moment of pre-planning. It was quite fascinating, and although the logical side usually lost, Twilight’s mother assured her that it wasn’t because of the inferiority of math.
“It’s not that the minds of ponies are unpredictable and unbeatable - in checkers at least,” her mother said. “There are a finite number of moves. It’s just that my methods are flawed. I’m only calculating two or three moves in advance, and it’s easy to take advantage of that blindness when I play from the other side.”
Twilight still had her campsite duties, but she carried them out from the shelter of the tent, only peeking her head out to see what she was doing. It gave her a sort of pride to know that she could be helpful without getting physical, even if it plagued her with migraines and double vision.
No sense getting wet and muddy if she could use her magic to wash dishes without ever having to go outside.
When the rain finally let up, the sunlight and summer heat steamed all the water out of everything in the course of an afternoon. Despite the muddiness, Twilight even found it in herself to go outside again.
She continued to explore the area around the campsite, making note of all the animal tracks in the mire. There were little medallion-sized paw prints that might have been from rabbits or foxes, and big ones the size of her head, with long claw marks. Twilight wondered if perhaps there might be coyotes or wolves about. Big carnivores were definitely fierce-looking, but she knew that they wouldn’t try to hurt her as long as they were afforded the same courtesy.
Later that night, she told her father about the tracks. “I think a big wolf must be nearby,” she said. “I saw some pawprints by the river.” Twilight levitated several marshmallows over the campfire. A sharp pain snaked through her horn and she winced.
“Just use a stick, Twi.” In an infuriating display of hypocrisy, Dad used his magic to spear her marshmallows on a pronged twig, then passed it to her. “If you meet the wolf, make sure-”
“I know!” said Twilight, having been drilled on the finer points of animal safety no less than a dozen times. She took a swig of willow bark tea, but her headache refused to die down. The marshmallow twig hovered over the fire with her magic, more to spite her father’s advice than anything. “Don’t attack him, don’t hurt him, he doesn’t actually want to eat me. I know!”
Dad didn’t say anything to that. At first, Mom looked surprised at the outburst, but her expression soon turned to reproach. “Twilight,” she said. “Your father just wants to make sure you’re safe. There’s no need to raise your voice.”
“Fine.” Twilight threw her uneaten marshmallows into the fire along with the twig. She rubbed her forehead with a hoof, trying to stem her headache. “I was about to go to bed anyway.”
Her parents exchanged a look but let her go.
By the end of the week it was like it had never rained. The sun even seemed to be making up for all the lost time. Staying inside the tent during the daytime hours was akin to being cooked alive, the humidity threatening to choke anypony who wasn’t at least half frog.
Her suit was another problem. Twilight longed for nothing more than to take it off and jump into the cool, clear stream water. In the heat of the sun, the mosquitoes were practically nonexistent, but there were still biting flies, ticks, wasps, bees and all sorts of other nasties; plus, if she ever stumbled into a patch of shade, the mosquitoes would be on her in full force. Both her mother and her father were covered in itchy-looking weals and she had no wish to share that fate.
Eventually, she gave in and just jumped into the stream for a swim, but she quickly found that swimming in her suit was irredeemably uncomfortable. After paddling to the other side, she was glad that it at least dried quickly.
Hmm... Twilight hadn’t seen this side of the stream in her initial forays around the campsite. She walked through the woods curiously, making sure that she could hear the water at all times in case she got lost. There was a squelch as she stepped in another pile of animal droppings. Twilight sighed. “The great outdoors,” she grumbled as she rinsed off her hoof in the stream. There were just so many little seeds... and a lot of them had gotten caught in the holes of the stiff netting. Ick. “More like the great outhouse.”
She wandered around aimlessly, keeping a careful watch on where she was stepping. There was an entire thicket of raspberry bushes about fifty feet west of the stream. Most of the berries had been roughly stripped away, but Twilight could see many ripe ones deep within the thicket that had been left alone. How do earth ponies manage? she wondered as she pulled the raspberries from the inside of the bush. Each magical gesture sent a small stab of pain through her horn, but at least she wasn’t an earth pony. They’d either have to get horribly scratched up by thorns or somehow bulldoze right through to the middle.
She had about five pounds of ripe raspberries when she got back to the campsite. Getting across the stream with them had been a rather tricky endeavor until she’d realised that there was no reason that she and the berries needed to cross at the same time.
“You brought these with you and reconstituted them, didn’t you?” said Dad.
She shook her head, feeling strangely worn out from the short excursion. “There’s a bunch of raspberry bushes across the river.”
Her father smacked himself in the forehead with a dirt-encrusted hoof, then self-consciously wiped the dirt away with the back of his foreleg. “Figures I’d keep heading east when all the good stuff’s to the west.”
The fresh berries were a much-needed change of pace. Dad had exhausted most of the nearby food sources, and he occasionally complained about how the rain and mud made it difficult for him to travel very far from the campsite. The last few days, all he’d been able to bring back was grass and dandelions. Twilight hadn’t wanted to eat any of these silly ‘wilderness foods’ at all, but she found that rationing her food supplies were going to be more difficult than she thought. It had been both alarming and dismaying to peer into her knapsack and see over half of her food stores gone.
The one thing there never seemed to be a shortage of, though, was bark. There weren’t any lichens near this campsite, unlike their last camping trip (which Twilight could only be thankful for - lichen was unpalatably bitter), but there hadn’t been much of anything else either. Twilight had learned how to make the willow bark tea herself, and always took a cup in the morning and another at night.
It took the edge off the pain, but as the days wore on, she found it doing less and less.
On the tenth night, Twilight finally got into her copy of I, Krasue. She had been meaning to read it all year, but her school library didn’t have a copy and the public library kept it in the adult section. She’d had to persuade her mother to take the book out for her.
As she read through I, Krasue, she became more and more aware of why this was in the adult section. An owl hooted, low and soft, and Twilight shivered. She pulled her sleeping bag around her head, even though the night air was still stifling, and she lay there, not wanting to read on but having no choice.
And so, she read, they found her the next day, a crusted black gash ripped from belly to groin. All that was hers, it was what was owed.
Twilight felt a little ill, and wanted to tear her eyes away, but there was no way she could get to sleep now. She kept imagining she heard the squelching of trailing viscera, smelled the hot reek of offal, saw the dragging shadows of the intestine tail... Twilight pressed on until dawn’s light poured in through the translucent fabric of the tent, until her eyelids fluttered shut and she passed out from sheer exhaustion.
She woke drenched in sweat from the sweltering noonday heat. The sleep she’d gotten had been fitful, filled with the images of horrible disembodied heads. Her parents hadn’t woken her, but she still hadn’t gotten nearly enough rest. Her head ached abominably. Feeling like she’d been run over by an elephant in an oven, Twilight dragged herself to the stream and dunked herself in. She didn’t even bother to put on her suit.
It was the closest thing she’d had to a bath in a while.
Sun and stars... she missed baths.
Twilight paddled around a bit, letting the icy stream water leach the heat from her bones and rinse away all the sweat. Swimming without the cumbersome bug suit was surprisingly enjoyable. Her legs kicked freely through the water, unhindered by fabric or any extra weight. Feeling cool and (mostly) refreshed, she crawled out onto the west bank, opposite from the campsite, and shook off her sodden coat. The fact that she seemed to already have a magic headache, even though she hadn’t used any yet, was a little distressing. She told herself it was probably just dehydration and lack of sleep, but at the same time, she vowed to go easy on the spells for the rest of the day.
The air was alive with strange smells and sounds, which made it easy to ignore the dull and constant throbbing in her head. It had been like she had cottonballs stuffed up her nose, wax in her ears, and she’d finally pulled them out. She’d gotten so used to wearing the bug suit outside that she’d forgotten what it was like to not wear it. Twilight was set upon by an overwhelming urge to explore, the memories of the book momentarily forgotten. Everything was so different and bright. Every rock and twig would be new to her. She set out on the raspberry trail and decided to see if any berries had ripened in the meantime.
Every once in a while, Twilight would pause to sniff at the plants and leaves. If she’d been some wild pony, she might be able to put words to all the scents, but they were all just complicated and strange to her. Sometimes she would pick up a faint animal smell, but unless it was distinctively foxy or rodent-like, she could not tell what kind.
The raspberry thicket had clearly been picked clean again. Twilight used her magic to part the prickly stems so she could get at the berries on the inside. Thorns... She suddenly recalled that krasues were unable to cross fences made from thorny branches and broke off a few to bring back to the campsite. Twilight rubbed her forehead, wishing she’d remembered to take a cup of willow bark tea that morning.
She also wished that she’d brought a basket, the lack of one making it rather difficult to minimize her magic use. Twilight trotted along to the other side of the raspberry thicket and nearly tripped over a small bundle of chestnut fur. It made a bleating sound.
Twilight blinked a couple of times, and flattened her ears. Oh no no no...
It was a bear cub.
She backed away as quietly as she could, turning her head from side to side to watch out for the cub’s mother. As she took another careful step backwards, she felt herself bump into something solid. Twilight swivelled her head to look behind her and her heart just about stopped.
It was a wall of dark brown. Huge paws, tipped with six inch claws, and as the brown mountain rose to her hind legs, she stood over five feet tall. The bear roared.
Twilight meant to run, but something stopped her. Something deep inside that froze her muscles and jerked her head right up into the sky. Twilight’s horn began to blaze, tearing magic from places she didn’t even know she had. It poured out more violently than she’d ever felt. A scream ripped from her throat, tearing her throat raw.
It was her training that kept her magic in control, and it was her training that damned her. Before she could stop herself, Twilight felt the magic streaming from her horn in an explosion of light, bleaching the trees and sky to a retina-searing whiteness. The bear looked up at Twilight and shielded her own eyes with a paw. The magic had a pathway and it flowed, draining her until she could feel the blood dripping from her ears and a stabbing pain deep within her skull. She fell to the ground, empty, sobbing and retching.
She couldn’t stand, and it took all that she had to pull herself into the raspberry bush, away from the bear. The bush’s thorns must have been slicing her up and she was covered in her own filth, but the only thing she could feel was the agony in her skull. All of her energy had been wasted on that gloriously useless light spell.
Nearby, the cub bleated piteously, pawing at its eyes, while its mother thrashed around blindly, roaring and swiping. A single blow from one of those dinner-plate paws would have torn her open and broken all of her bones.
“Twilight!” Her mother’s voice cut through even the bear’s roar.
She tried to call out to her mother, but her damaged throat refused to make any sounds other than a rattling croak.
Her mother must have heard the bear, though, because she burst into the clearing, sopping wet and covered in small, bleeding cuts.
Pulling herself forward and pushing as much as she could with her rear hooves, Twilight dragged herself out of the bushes and rasped a single syllable, “Help...”
Twilight saw her mother’s eyes flash white. The bear flew backwards through the air, knocked straight into a tree. The bear got up slowly and charged towards her, but her horn flared again. Twilight’s mother picked the she-bear up like a rag doll, dangling her in the air as she struggled impotently against the magic.
“Mrs. Bear, you may be five times my size, but snapping a neck only requires a minimal amount of force. It would be much easier than lifting you.” There was death in her eyes. Twilight had never seen her mother like this. “You will leave my daughter alone.”
The bear stopped squirming and just grit her teeth in an unspoken threat. Next to the bushes, the little cub bleated for its mother.
Mom looked down at the young bear and her expression softened. The cub glowed and floated over to the bear sow. “Go,” she said quietly.
The bear and cub lowered gently to the ground. Twilight watched her mother and the bear exchange one long, knowing look, before both bears turned and lumbered away.
“It’s okay,” Twilight’s mother told her, looking weary and drained. She lifted her daughter’s prone form onto her back. “Rest now. Everything’s going to be alright.”
Twilight didn’t need to be told twice. She slipped mercifully into the darkness.
As Twilight woke, she realised her head could only feel like this if a rhino had jumped on it till the grey matter dribbled out her ears. Dimly, she was aware that she was moving.
Twilight blinked herself awake. She tried to look around, but the effort of simply lifting her neck exhausted her. There was blue fur and cobblestones below, and it soon dawned on her that she was strapped to her father’s back.
Twilight tried to say, “What’s going on?” and, “Where am I?” but her throat was too sore to make any coherent sounds. Even her jaw felt like it was tired.
“She’s awake!” she heard her mother say. Twilight paid attention to the side where she’d heard her voice and saw her trot up and, briefly, come into view. Mom was burdened with an enormous amount of gear, more than twice as much as she’d carried on the way down to the campsite. It looked like, at any moment, her legs might give way and the bags would crush her. “We’re heading back to Canterlot now, Sweetie.”
Twilight glanced around, using only the movement of her eyes. They were travelling on cobblestones, which meant they had been on the road for a long time already. “Why?” she tried to say, but all that came out was a rasping noise.
Her father levitated a canteen from his hip to where she lay on his back. Twilight tried to reach out for it with her own magic, but a hot iron poker pressed into the place where her skull met her horn and she let out a yell so hoarse it was almost a hiss.
He froze, and Twilight felt his muscles lock up. The canteen fell a couple of feet before Twilight’s mother caught it with a spell. “What’s wrong?” He spoke like he was afraid that he might break something other than just the silence.
Twilight’s mother frowned. “Try not to use your magic, Twilight.” Her brow creased with worry. “You burned out very hard yesterday.” She brought the canteen to Twilight’s mouth and gave it a slight tilt.
Water trickled past Twilight’s sandpaper tongue and she swallowed gratefully before rasping out, “Yesterday?”
“Your mother brought you back to the campsite,” said Dad. “We cleaned you up and washed out all the scrapes and I hoped it might be like the time you tried to magic the sun-” Twilight cringed inwardly at the first real acknowledgement of the incident. “-and that you just needed rest...” His voice trailed off and he didn’t say anything else.
Twilight’s mother took a deep breath before she spoke. “Your cuts weren’t healing.”
So that’s why she still felt so awful. Had she used up her magic for good? Was she just a weak earth pony with a horn now? “It hurts,” was all she said.
“I know, Honey...” Her mother’s voice was sympathetic, but there was a tightness to it as well. “Just close your eyes and count perfect squares. We’ll be there soon.”
Every step her father took seemed to slosh around the fluid inside her head, bringing fresh waves of pain. More worrisome than that, either the pain made it hard to concentrate or something had... something had happened. Twilight didn’t want to think about it too much, but for some reason, she was finding it extremely difficult to count past three hundred and twenty-four. It was less than an hour before they got to the nearest hospital, but it felt much longer.
The receptionist seemed a little unwilling to admit a unicorn with only a few minor cuts and scrapes. Until they’d explained the full situation to her, he’d probably assumed Twilight’s parents were the kind who brought their kids to the emergency room every time they skinned a fetlock. Even then, it took almost forever to actually see a doctor. While they waited, her parents untied her from her father’s back and laid her down on a couple of empty seats. The waiting room was already half-full, seated with unicorns and even a couple of pegasi and earth ponies. Twilight did her best not to stare at anypony, but it was difficult. In the far corner of the room, a one-eared unicorn cradled (what looked like) his severed ear, and in another, an earth pony was desperately trying not to look at his own hooves, hooves that had somehow been transformed into talons.
Twilight was finally ushered into the doctor’s office by her father, but he wasn’t allowed to stay. A few minutes later, a dun mare approached, levitating a folder of Twilight’s medical records and carefully reading through all two sheets of paper. Despite her black tail and unusual coat colour, the doctor had an ordinary (if rather violently) pink mane. The cut of her lab coat was just short enough to reveal her cutie mark: a snake on a stick rather than anything medical like a stethoscope or a scalpel.
Twilight knew that it was prejudice, but she couldn’t help it - anypony with a serpent for a cutie mark just made her uneasy.
“Hello,” the doctor said in a speaking-to-children voice. “I’m Doctor Cinnamon.” Her eyes darted down to Twilight’s medical records and back up again. “Your name is Twilight Sparkle, right?”
Twilight gave the tiniest of nods, not wanting to strain her throat or provoke her headache.
“Do you know why your mommy and daddy can’t be here right now?”
“Doctor-patient-confidentiality?” It took just about everything Twilight had to choke out those words, but the expression on the doctor’s face was worth it.
“Not quite,” the mare replied, once she’d regained her composure. “The nurse said you had a number of injuries and that none of them were healing.” The doctor had regressed into a more casual and less patronising tone, which Twilight appreciated. “He said that you suffered a severe magical burnout.”
Twilight nodded again, weakly.
“What we need to know is, and don’t be afraid to tell the truth - this is a safe space - if maybe your parents decided you had done something wrong. Did they maybe think that it was best that you had your magic taken away and...”
If Twilight had any energy at all, she might have leapt out of the patient bed in a fit of righteous indignation. “No!” she rasped. Then much more softly, “... Ow.” Why did everypony think she had abusive parents?
“I’m sorry,” said the doctor. “I’m not trying to accuse them of anything, but that’s usually why it happens... We need to know these things so we can give you the best possible treatment.” The mare looked like she was trying to stay composed and professional, but Twilight caught what looked like anger or maybe sadness in her eyes.
The mare’s horn flashed and a tingly green light ran over Twilight from nose to tail. It itched, but Twilight didn’t have the energy to flick or fidget anyway.
The mare blinked a couple of times before meeting Twilight in the eye, clearly no longer in her somber mood. “That’s incredible! You somehow managed to use up all of your magic.”
Twilight steeled herself for the amount of talking that she’d have to do next. “Am I... an earth pony now?”
Doctor Cinnamon chuckled. “Oh no. It’ll just take a while to come back, longer than usual most likely, but you’ll be fine. I’d give it a week or two.”
Two weeks! “But...”
“You’ll heal just fine,” said the doctor. “They’ve already got scabs on them, see?” She pointed at a scrape on Twilight’s foreleg that by all rights, should be completely gone by now. “It’ll take longer than usual, and I’ll prescribe you some medicine just in case, but you should be alright. Just make sure to keep your cuts clean, so no rolling around in mud or pig muck.”
Not like I was going to do that anyway...
“For your throat, you can gargle with saltwater, once in the morning and once in the evening.” The doctor turned to her with a serious expression. “You need bedrest for a day or two, and, no magic until your cuts have healed. At least a week, I’d say.”
Doctor Cinnamon scribbled out an unreadable prescription on a pad of paper and called in Twilight’s parents, explaining the situation to them.
Afterwards, they took her home.
All things considered, the camping trip had been cut short, she had a month of summer left, and nopony, absolutely nopony, could tell her to go outside and play like this. Comparatively, a week of not using magic wasn’t so bad.
She looked at I, Krasue, the book that had, perhaps, caused all this trouble in the first place. Well, it might be horrifying and gruesome, but there was an end in there somewhere and Twilight would do her best to reach it.
She had all the time in the world.
(A big thank you goes to plen-omie, Mystic, Crowind and Sereg who have been helping me edit.)
Author’s Note: Because several people have asked, asalac is an abbreviation of acetyl salacylic acid, aka aspirin. Aspirin is a trademarked name, however, which is why it is not showing up in this version of Equestria. Also, this will be the last chapter of the story. If you have any lingering questions or anything like that, a FAQ can be found here.
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Ah, man, I was really hoping it wouldn't come to this, and when I saw the chapter I thought it hadn't.
Well, I enjoyed the story while it lasted.
The last chapter?!
Aw man, I was super-enjoying this.
No really, this was one of my top 3 favorite stories.
Ooh pretty pictures!
An interesting turn of events, and good to see Twilight go uber-tier again
Is there going to be a sequel or continuation to this story? Because I love it.
The story didn't end! It just stopped!
*sigh*
Oh well, twas fun while it lasted. Bravo, seriously, one of the best fanfics I've ever read
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO i am crying now just so you know plz dont let it end this was my favorite fan fiction of all time plz continue plz
i mean i dont see whats wrong with it i mean shining armor is dropped off at the royal guard academy before twilight gets her cutie mark and princess cadence is her faol sitter before she gets her cutie mark so i dont see the problem and if so say buck it and continue weather its canon or not you have too continue this is the only story with twilight as a school student
Disappointed this story won't continue, I urge you to reconsider. Interesting that you chose not to use/capitalize Aspirin, take it your not from US/UK(among others) where Bayer lost the trademark?
I like your story better than canon. What is I, Krasue a stand in for?
LAST?! WHY!? Come on!
I read the FAQ
You can't stop because of that finale, first of all because fanfiction doesn't have to be aligned to cannon, second because you where doing an amazing job at writing this. Even though i feel bad with the sad and grim stuff you can put in there i loved it. The only thing i dislike in your ideas is adapting pony age instead of just going with human age, but that's just an opinion.
And third, that finale sucked. Let's throw new family, past history and princesses, end it all with a simple love spell and cast a whole race that was just now presented into the wastelands we just now invented.
You do realize that fanon is called fanon because it isn't canon, right? Your story wasn't canon to begin with. If you're done writing you're done writing, but don't name the show that inspired this as the show that killed it.
I loved this dtory, by the way, and I still do. Adorable.
really disappointing ending.
<--pinkie pie does not approve
This story is too good to end here.
As I have suggested previously; ignore Armour and Cadence. Slap on an Alternate Universe tag and continue as-is. I can't possibly be the only one to suggest this.
Please continue writing this, it is one of the best, and if we cared about canon so much we wouldn't be reading fanfiction.
If you are not writting any more, why is the story marked incomplete?
This has been my favorite story since the first chapter; I really hope you change your mind and decide to continue it despite the finale.
Agreeing with everyone else. No reason to stop the story because of finale. This is too enjoyable to do so :(
What a stupid reason to drop a story.
Seriously, just slap an Alternate Universe tag on it, ignore whatever it is you don't like or don't want in your story and soldier on. Your story was never canon anyway.
Really, there isn't all that much of a canon in the show in the first place.
I’m sad to hear that you will not be continuing with this wonderful story, but I can understand why you have decided to bow out. I don’t agree with the reasoning, but I respect your decision. This has been one of the smartest, wittiest, funniest, well thought out, and entertaining FIM fanfics I have read, and it has been immensely enjoyable to read and will forever have a place in my heart. So I thank you for putting the pen to the paper and sharing what has been one of my favorite stories.
I hope at least that you will continue to write. Even if this story has to end, there is no reason why you can’t start another. Perhaps an adventure story involving Twilight, her classmates, or something else?
482160>>484186
kk. Just for you guys I wrote chapter 11. Here it is.
It's not canon guys@ It's AU!
485684
So, is there more? It is neither marked as complete nor cancelled.
485534 Don't worry. There is no way I am gonna let Sessalisk stop writing. I get far too much pleasure out of reading it all, and I am really rather selfish.
485815
See that you don't let him. The end is just the beginning, and the beginning is just the end...or wait...something like that. But in all seriousness. I hope to see other stories from Sessalisk even if this one ends.
well is there any chance you may continue this story in the future or are you truly completely done with this story if so im so sad
481652
It's a reference to Isaac Asimov's novel I, Robot.
kinda disappointing if you are really ending it like this but w/e it is in the end your choice.
485684
LOL what?
Thanks, I should have known but i assumed it was some obscure German thing.
It would probably be more fitting to set the story's status to “Canceled” rather than “Complete”.
Last chapter???
Severe depression mode: activate
487632
So chapter 11 where everyone drowns in Celestia's semen isn't enough? :O
Looks like I need to write chapter 12 where Luna does carameldansen on the moon for thirty pages.
Wow, I didn't think it was possible, but I almost wish I had taken the advice of my friend and not read this chapter. Don't get me wrong, it was absolutely amazing, just like the rest of the chapters, but the author's note at the end just about killed me.
[Curse-filled rage-induced spur-of-the-moment rant ACTIVATE!]
FUCK the season 2 finale! FUCK canon! You're writing a fucking FANfiction, and you can do whatever the hell you want with it! If you were originally planning to do all four years of Twilight's schooling, and cancel all of it just because Twilight has a brother in one fucking episode, you're not only screwing yourself, but all of your fans as well. I am so damn tired of authors cancelling fics or making huge modifications just because of single episodes of the show. It's ridiculous! I don't understand how somebody could throw out a huge and successful project like this just because of the show's canon changing months after you started this story. That's it, I can't think of anything else to say. I'm pissed.
[end rant]
488027
kk. Chapter 11 for you too.
It's extremely disheartening to hear that you won't be continuing the story, especially when it's clear that you had so much planned.
I hope you reconsider your decision.
It sucks that you're stopping, but at the very least it's slice of life, so it doesn't mean the story isn't finished.
Does this mean you're done writing stories about ponies altogether?
It's not so much an ending as a sudden stop.
It feels like the story cut off in the middle.
May your entrails be devoured my carnivorous beasts, your skin be consumed by rot and decay, and your remains be desecrated by rats.
You have a responsibility to finish this. Stopping and calling it done is the coward's way of solving problems. If you start something like this, you owe it to your readers to finish it. That's the way it is.
EDIT: I apologize for my cursing. I was unhappy, disappointed, and angry.
485684
Chapter 11 makes my heart go doki doki.
I hope you're not done writing entirely, at least!
should have stoped by the question if she ever where gona have magic again...<.< but that would also make a big impact on the story... some how i say it is selestias fould be letting twilight use all energy in to that spell... she needs to control it.. not to a controlled releas...
488542 489321
See: 485815
489266
See Chapter 11. I can't write a story when everyone's dead except for Luna!
That's just stupid!
When I read the first chapter of this story my thought was: "This is good, wonder how long it will be."
Then when I read chapter 9 and found out that you had around four times this much planned I actually squealed in anticipation for the rest.
So reading the authors note about you wanting to stop writing it because of the cardboard character that was shining armor would be a real downer, and the most frustrating thing is that there's probably nothing we, as an audience, can say or do to make you change your mind.
I am still going to give it a try though:
Because of the amount you've already written, aswell as the truly staggering amount you must have had planned, I want to ask you to -please- do not stop writing this fantastic story.
Heck, by now I'm not even sure I'd call it fanfiction anymore, the amount of character you've given to everypony in here makes it stand out.
They could make a whole season about Twilight's parents using this story as basis.
Twilight's mother could very well be a "secretly compulsive hoarder." and in the same vein I am an "Obsessive reader." And I want to know more about your plans and adventures for Twilight and everyone around her during her younger years.
So, while I cannot demand you continue writing, I sincerely hope that you will, It would be such a waste to let all of this go.
And now I find myself without anything more to say, so I guess I'll end with two things:
1. I hope you'll reconsider.
and 2:
"Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and griefs which we endure help us in our marching onward." ~Henry Ford
I feel this goes for both Twilight and yourself.
I too, am sorely disappointed by this story's... cessation.
It seems a strange coincidence that I was considering looking up the story to make sure I hadn't missed an update when it appeared in EQD's evening compilation. And, it seems, I shall not see it there again.
A shame, really.
I would prefer to see canon forsaken in favor of a continuation, here. Despite having more than enough strength without it, a little bit of minor retconning would be able bring the story largely back in line with the series proper, if the author sees it as a essential.
However, what I say here is unlikely to have an effect on the author's choices. As an avid reader from its inception, it truly seems a shame to see a story with such a solid foundation, not to mention a 4.8 star rating on EQD, be left so... unfulfilled.
If you do, by chance, change your mind, I would enjoy reading further in your series, Sessalisk.
If not, I hope to see another piece of similar quality (exluding "Chapter 11") from you in the future.
And, if nothing else, I wish to thank you for what you've given us thus far.
-Fluffeh
It can't end like this! I need more!!!! This was a wonderous fic i look forward to seeing more of your work
EqD doesn't have this mirror listed, BTW. You might want to have them fix that.
I'm sure you're sick of hearing this, but I do wish you'd slap on an Alternate Universe tag and just continue on your way. Stopping just because something doesn't jive with new canon information seems a tad silly.
Alternatively, if you're stopping because you're getting sick of writing this, and using the season finale as an excuse, then I do wish you'd be upfront about it and mark this as "On Hiatus" or "Cancelled".
Alternatively alternatively, if you're stopping because of some other reason, I'm going to assume you're not comfortable with sharing, and I won't pry further.
Regardless, I wish you luck in your future endeavors.