Variables
Twilight Sparkle woke with a start.
Panting, she glanced frantically around her darkened bedroom, moonlight slanting in from her window, feebly fighting back the shadows. Drawing her forehooves close to herself, she gulped hard, wiping at the cold sweat on her brow with a soft magical touch.
The room was deathly still. She rustled the covers slightly just to hear the noise.
“Spike?”
The hoarse whisper sounded like a gunshot.
“Spike?” she croaked again. The silence was smothering her.
Slowly, carefully she slid out of her bed, the sheets slithering and slipping past her with dry whispers.
Her back hind leg came to rest on the floor with a quiet clop. She winced, the offensive sound echoing throughout the library. Taking a deep breath, she jerked her other three legs out of her bed, the staccato noise shattering the still air. She froze, eyes shut tight, hardly daring to breathe.
Opening one eye, and then the other, she exhaled shakily. Legs trembling, she made her way around her bed toward the wicker basket that her dragon assistant slept in. Her eyes had yet to adjust to the dark, She stretched a forehoof toward the blanket that covered it.
“Sp-spike?” she breathed.
With a flick of her hoof, she discarded the blanket.
Empty. The basket was empty. Shuddering, she pressed down on the soft lining of the hamper. She could feel the depression in the sheet where he had been laying, the fabric still warm from his body heat, even the pillow had-
Blood.
With a gasp, she recoiled from the basket, eyes wide and staring at the dark splotch on the pillow. It was almost dead center, right around where his nose or mouth would be.
Mouth working soundlessly, Twilight tried to control her rising heartbeat. Panic gripped at her chest and her breathing became shallow and labored. Heart racing and head pounding, she finally pierced the dark and quiet with her calls.
“Spike? Spike! Spike, where are y-you?” The dark stain stared up at her, boring into her forehead like an evil eye. Hyperventilating, Twilight shook her head violently, her headache growing worse and worse, her stomach heaving. There was something humming at the base of her horn, like the buzzing of a tuning fork, rising and falling with her shuddering breaths. “Wh-wha...no...Spike! Spike, please, where are you? Spike...Spike, please, plea-nnnngh!”
She collapsed over the basket, her head splitting with pain, tears pouring from her eyes. Her ears were filled with a horrible ringing sound, and she felt something warm and wet trickle down her muzzle. The taste of copper touched her tongue, and the dark splotch on Spike’s pillow was suddenly two, then three, then five. Gritting her teeth, she raised her bloodstained face to the moonlight.
Gentle as the wind, soft white flakes were drifting in through her window.
Even through the pain, her brow furrowed in confusion.
“S-snow? It...i-it can’t be snow, it can’t...it can’t be…c-can’t...”
The flakes floated toward her, closer and closer, and another wave of pain seared through her head. She opened her mouth to cry out when a breeze pushed the motes ever closer.
Her mouth hung open.
Fire. The smell of smoke drifted in through the library window, choking and hazy, tinged with the horrible acrid scent of burning flesh-
Twilight screamed as the ash touched her tongue.
══════════════════════════════════════
Twilight Sparkle woke with a start.
Shadows. Moonlight. Silence.
Jerking forward, she sat up quickly, exposing her upper body to the cool air. She forced down the lump in her throat. A feeling of unease washed over her like nausea, dredging up images from...what? A dream? There was fire. Something was burning, flesh, blood-
Twilight gasped, tearing the sheets off her and clawing her way forward, leaning over the edge of her bed breathlessly.
A tiny purple dragon lay sleeping soundly, drool pooling out of his snoring mouth, seeping into the pillow and turning the white to a muted gray. Twilight shuddered as she remembered a darker stain.
She exhaled shakily, the details now fuzzy in her mind. Was it a dream? What had happened, exactly? Even the images were leaving her now, slipping away like greasy smoke. She remembered feelings. Fear, paranoia. Pain. She shook her head, trying to make sense of it all.
It was then she noticed the moonlight streaming through her window was not alone. An amber light shone from below the landing, standing out from the soft light like oil on water. Peering over the edge of her bed space, she found it’s source. The candle on her desk was lit.
Twilight swallowed hard again. A whisper in her head urged her to reconsider, but she swung her hind legs out of the bed, careful not to wake up Spike, and gingerly trotted down the stairs to the library proper.
The candle flame jumped and danced in the darkness, sending twitching shadows to lurch at the edge of her vision. As she drew closer something else came into focus, a dark spot on the mahogany desk, like an ink blot, or a stain on a pillow. The weak candle flame was casting strange shadows on the thing, whatever it was had strange contours and raised sections, it seemed to absorb the warm light like a black hole. A tinkle of bells chimed, and her horn glowed softly, illuminating the object properly.
Her brow furrowed. The device before her was unfamiliar, but she recognized different parts of different machines. There were two knobs, set into a dark wood body, like those of a radio. Out of the side of thing, a black disc jutted, lined with grooves that ran around the entire circle, disappearing into the devices wooden case. A needle hung above the disc, and it took Twilight an embarrassing amount of time to realise she was looking at some sort of record player. Biting her lip, she reached with her magic toward one of the knobs and turned it with a small click.
Twilight flinched as a red light flared up on the surface of the device, a burning eye boring into her skull. The record set into the side of the machine started spinning with a quiet hum.
With a trembling hoof, she pushed the needle down onto the disc.
A loud squawk cut the still air. Twilight jumped, her heart leaping into her throat as she tried to suppress a shriek. There was a heavy clunking sound, and finally the popping static gave way to hissing voices.
“-s why we hoped you would consider our offer, Miss Sparkle.”
Her brow furrowed. Surely they didn’t mean-
“Your offer?” Her own voice emanated from the speaker, “Listen, Mister...er, what was your name, again?”
“Particle.” The stallion dissected every syllable of the word.
A mare’s voice chimed in: “Wave.”
She spoke in a similar fashion, short and mechanical, stating her name the way one would propose a business deal or the weather. Facts.
When it returned, her voice in the machine sounded as confused as Twilight did currently. “Um. Yes, thank you. Now, look, this is a public building, but it is also my home, which means that you can’t just barge in here, holding up microphones to my face and spouting some mumbo jumbo about chance and reality-”
“What is this, Ms. Sparkle?”
Her voice sputtered, “Wha- Well, it’s j-just a glass cup, why are yo-”
The crash was so loud and defined that Twilight glanced down nervously to check for glass shards skittering across the wood floors. She didn’t jump this time, though; Twilight felt with unease the maddening tickle of déjà vu in the back of her skull. Her other self yelped loudly, and Twilight heard the cold drone of the stallion pick up again.
“Observe, Miss Sparkle. Note the shards, the spread pattern, the volume of the sound. Do you see it? Study it, Miss Sparkle, as we understand it is what you do best.”
“N-now listen here, Mister Particle, I won’t have you-”
“Now. Again, note the patterns,” Wave intoned.
Another shatter.
“Gah! F-for Celestia’s sake, would you stop d-”
“Do you see, Miss Sparkle? The sound was 3 decibels higher, the fragments are displaced from the original. It was dropped from the same height, made from the same material and was crafted with the same pattern as the first one, down to the molecule. And yet it changed. Why is that?”
“You can’t possibly know that…”
“We do. We do because we made it so. Now answer our question Miss Sparkle, why did it cha-”
“I don’t have to answer anythi-”
“We will not ask again, Miss Sparkle, this is vital to-”
“I don’t know! I don’t know why it changed!” Twilight’s voice screamed. For some reason Twilight found herself mouthing along with her.
“Possibilities,” Particle hissed.
There was silence in the recording, save for the hisses and pops of the grainy audio. A shudder ran through Twilight and she got the feeling that her other self - whenever this had occurred - did the same.
“Possibilities,” Particle continued, “are what keep this tangled existence together. They are the stitches in the fabric of space and time. At any moment, at any instance in time and space, an infinite amount of different things could occur. But what determines what will ultimately happen? Nothing. It’s chance, chaotically random. Constants and variables, Miss Sparkle. Will the coin you flip land heads or tails? Or will it land on it’s side? Will the next place you visit lead you to your lifelong friends, or will your train crash on the way there? Will the transformation spell you’ve been studying for the upcoming Breezie Migration work flawlessly, or will the spell tangle with a null leyline and-”
“H-how did you kno-”
“Possibilities,” Wave spoke up, “Miss Sparkle, are endlessly chaotic, and that means that someone needs to...steward them. To push and nudge them in the right direction. To make sure that the constants prevail.”
“What...what are you talking about?! You’re insane, both of you-”
“Miss Sparkle, exactly two days, 37 minutes and 55 seconds ago, you cast a spell. A spell that rewrote the destinies of your friends and almost destroyed this town. What happened?”
There was a pause, and Twilight could hear her other self’s shallow breathing. Or was it her own? She couldn’t tell.
“I...I couldn’t fix it. I-It took the powers of all three princesses to undo what I did. T-they fixed the spell and t-that was that.”
The silence that filled the gap this time was different. It carried with it a wave of dread and made her fur stand on end and her mouth fill with sand. She forced down the lump in her throat, an icy claw gripping her chest. This silence was wrong. Something was about to happen, she knew it, she remembered it, but what?
Wave spoke, but her voice was quieter, barely audible over the grainy audio.
“What do you think? This one?”
“No,” Particle replied, “I don’t think so.”
A sigh.
“Possibilities, Miss Sparkle,” Particle said, his voice heavy, “Are endless and incomprehensible. Constants and variables. Like the flip of a coin, or the roll of the dice.” A gentle rustling, like someone rummaging through saddlebags.
A cold, metallic click.
Twilight froze.
“Or the spin,” Particle said softly, “Of a chamber.”
There was fear in Twilight’s voice now, genuine fear, the fear the minnow feels when gazing into the maw of the shark.
“Wh-what...wait, wait please, just hold o-”
When the voice came, it sounded like the two ponies spoke as one.
“I am sorry Twilight Sparkle. Noli timere, tu plures.”
Twilight’s shriek rang out before-
CLUNK
Twilight almost jumped out of her skin, panting hard, her breath hitched in her throat. It took the scratchy rasping of the disc for her to realise that the recording had just stopped.
A cool breeze tickled the back of her neck and made her fur stand on end.
That couldn’t be right. There couldn’t be a breeze unless-
She gasped.
Unless her window was open.
She was about to whirl around when the cold steel pinched her neck.
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Fluttershy woke with a start.
Immediately she gagged, an acrid stench filling her nostrils. She struggled to breathe, something rough and heavy pressing down on her back, smothering her, she kicked her back legs uselessly, trying to throw the thing off of her. Hyperventilating, she whimpered and swallowed hard. She tasted metal on her tongue. Blinking hard, she got her eyes to focus.
A delicate corpse lay in front of her.
She couln’t stifle the shriek that escaped her. The Breezie had been crushed, smashed into the ground by a chunk of heavy wood, pasty viscera the colour of oatmeal smeared over the floor of her cottage. She had seen bugs killed before, it had never bothered her. But this was different; the Breezie had a face. Above the slimy mass of twitching limbs and gossamer wings was a slender blue face with bright green eyes, staring wordlessly at her. The impact and caved part of the skull in, causing one of the gorgeous pupils to leak slightly over the rim of the eyelid.
Bile rose in her throat. Gasping and flailing, Fluttershy heaved the thing off of her back. Scrambling to her hooves, she barely made it three paces away before she was violently sick. Closing her eyes did nothing to dispel those beautiful, jade, leaking eyes.
Pulling her head up weakly, she finally took stock of her surroundings.
Fluttershy’s homely cottage looked like a hurricane had blown through it. Cages, tables and chair were strewn across the floor, a choking dust filled what was left of her home. A gaping hole loomed where her entire front wall had been, hazy sunlight filtering in through the cloud and giving the entire thing an ethereal appearance.
As the shock and adrenaline started to wear off, she tried to recall what had happened before this.
“I've been studying an old spell book from the Castle of the Two Sisters. There's a spell that I think could help us! This is probably gonna feel a little funny at first, but you're gonna have to trust me.”
The thought floated to the surface of her consciousness. But who had said it? One of her friends...spell books...studying…
Suddenly it came to her. The Migration, the spell, the explosion, all because of-
“Fluttershy?”
With a small shriek Fluttershy fell on her haunches and scrambled backwards. A dark shape materialised out of the dust. Her eyes widened as she tried to comprehend what she was seeing.
The opiliones, or daddy longlegs, is a group of arachnids found all over Equestria. These creatures are defined by their fused abdomen and thorax as well as their exceptionally long legs, accompanied by a strange, spindly gait….
The excerpt from Spiders to Scorpions: An Arachnid Guide for the Common Pony stamped itself into Fluttershy’s mind as she watched Twilight Sparkle enter her home.
Twilight gazed down at her curiously, four dark, pointed legs protruding from her abdomen and shoulder blades. Twilight’s back left limb hung down limply, and Fluttershy almost retched again; it was facing the wrong way. The rest of her body was dotted with clusters of festering perforations, bulging through her lavender coat like infected boils. Her head was bent at a sickening angle, and when she opened her mouth to speak, a pair of bristled limbs brushed the inside of her teeth.
“There you are, Fluttershy. I was worried about you.”
Twilight’s face was passive. She blinked slowly, and Fluttershy swore something slithered behind her eye.
“I am very sorry, Fluttershy.” The hairs of the appendages in her mouth vibrated with every word.
Fluttershy stared up at her, her mouth working noiselessly.
“I really, truly didn’t mean for that to happen. I didn’t believe them when they told me. I do now.”
Swallowing hard, Fluttershy managed to form words. “T-Twilight...w-what happened? Just...j-just hold on, I’ll go get Princess Celes-”
Twilight shook her crooked head, and a sharp cracking sound made Fluttershy wince.
“No. I don’t need her help. I need yours, Fluttershy,” Twilight said.
“M-m-me? H-how c-can I h-help?”
Twilight blinked again. With the crunch and snap of grinding bones, she stalked over on her spiders legs toward Fluttershy. Whimpering, the pegasus tried to back away, but fell over onto her back. In an instant Twilight was upon her. The feelers stretched out from the back of Twilight’s throat as she filled Fluttershy’s nostrils with the acrid stench of rotting flesh.
“Possibilities,” Twilight chittered.
“W-what?!” Fluttershy gasped.
“Possibilities! Don’t you get it, Fluttershy! This. Is. Wrong! All of this! THIS WASN’T SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN!” Twilight screeched, her voice warbling.
Tears poured from Fluttershy’s eyes and she struggled to get out from underneath Twilight, pleading with her. “T-Twilight p-please! You’re s-scaring me! I’m s-sorry, whatever I d-did, I’m sor-”
“No! No, of course not Fluttershy, this isn’t your fault.” Twilight’s forehoof bent and contorted, jerkily making its way to stroke Fluttershy’s mane.
“No, it’s not your fault. But I’m afraid you’re still an anomaly in the pattern.”
“W-w-what do you m-mean?”
Twilight smiled sadly down at her friend.
“I’m going to kill you now Fluttershy.”
Fluttershy’s eyes widened. Terror gripped at her chest, and she couldn’t breathe properly. Slowly, surely, Twilight’s sharp limbs angled down, down, down...their dark tips gleaming softly, pointed at Fluttershy’s exposed chest, sinking further and further. Head spinning, she started to whisper hoarsely.
“No...n-no...Twilight please, p-please stop, TWILIGHT PLEASE! STOP! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry whatever I did I’m sorry I’m sorry just please don’t do this please please please-”
The blades pierced her skin, descending with agonizing slowness into her chest. Twilight met Fluttershy’s frantic gaze with a soft sad look.
“A-aghh! Oh Celestia no no no no no, Twilight, please, I’m begging you p-please, Celestia help me I don’t wanna die please, T-Twilight why?! WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?!” Fluttershy shrieked, her voice breaking from the strain.
Twilight’s eyes grew wide.
The limbs stopped.
Slowly, they pulled back up, drawing the skin up with them as they retracted, drops of blood rolling down their tips to stain her yellow fur. Fluttershy panted, chest heaving, tears streaking her face, she looked up at Twilight’s surprised expression.
“Why?” Twilight murmured.
She smiled a sweet smile.
She leaned forward slowly, their noses mere inches apart.
With a squelching sound, Twilight’s left eye convulsed. The brilliant purple iris shuddered, and then the soft white of her eye tore open like wet paper, and a shiny black tendril slithered out, viciously tapered at the tip. A rush of watery fluid accompanied it, sloshing out of the ruined eyeball and splattering against Fluttershy’s coat, smelling sickly sweet and stinging her nose. The tendril wormed it’s way down, brushing against her neck, feeling the rapid hammering of her pulse.
It began to push.
Fluttershy’s screaming devolved into gurgles as a dark stain slid around her neck. Twilight leaned down to whisper into her ear.
“Constants and variables.”