How much do you trust what you can see? What you can touch? What you experience? How sure can you be that all you have lived through, all you have loved, is not a dream that will fade at daybreak? Twilight must end the spell.
How much do you trust what you can see? What you can touch? What you experience? How sure can you be that all you have lived through, all you have loved, is not a dream that will fade at daybreak?
Twilight blinked. For just a moment, she had forgotten what she was doing.
When she was a little filly, Twilight had been fascinated with her parents' grandfather clock. It was old, crafted by hoof by her father's grandmother, though it showed little signs of age upon its reflective wooden surfaces, and it was beautiful, a stately presence that stood in their living room by the smaller bookshelf and filled the house with a rhythmic tick, tick, tick like the beat of a heart, but that wasn't what had fascinated Twilight. The side panels had glass set in them, windows that showed the gears and cogs and levers of the machinery working away inside, and she had been able to sit in her father's easy chair for hours and stare into the clockwork, trying to puzzle out how all the pieces interacted and drove the hands and the chimes from just the small sliver she could see. The face of the clock blocked any view of the mechanics driving it, so looking in from the front while the door was open was no help, and one of the few times Twilight could remember ever being scolded by her father came after she had tried to climb inside the cabinet itself to try to get a better look without the big gear on the right side obscuring her view, so the exact nature of the grandfather clock's interior remained a mystery to her. It wasn't until many years later that she actually saw the interior of a clock -- one of the many affectations of her eccentric history professor had been a fob watch, its chain a swaying metronome against his barrel as he paced methodically through his lectures, and Twilight had once caught him blowing dust out of it between classes -- and she realized how foolish she had been to think she could figure everything out herself with an incomplete picture.
She had sometimes daydreamed of being able to shrink down, mouse-sized, gnat-sized, and climb amongst the gears and sit upon their teeth as they revolved, able to see where each spring and cog was and what function it performed. Sitting at her desk -- her new desk, made of the same crystalline substance as her new home -- had brought about the feeling like she was dangling her hind legs over the edge of a colossal gear: one that had just lurched forward a step with the passing of a second.
There was an open book before her, sitting in a corona of dim lamplight. She must have just lost her place in what she was reading, but it felt like she had instead lost her place in the world, like her mind had climbed an extra step in a flight of stairs and expected solid purchase only to fall through air. The reflective walls of the castle, each surface holding a copy of the glowing lamp, were suddenly foreign and hostile in the dark, and Twilight thought fleetingly about going home. But this was her home now; there was no more Golden Oaks Library, and if she went there she would find only wreckage and scorched earth.
"Twilight," came a murmur from beyond the desk, beneath the covers, the usually light voice thick with sleep, "come to bed." A brief hint of pink mane shifted in the darkness.
Twilight pursed her lips. She closed the open book and dimmed the lamp, finding the way to her bed by starlight. Whatever she had been reading, it could wait until daylight. She settled under the covers and felt a warm hoof encircle her, its owner pressing up against her back.
The last thing Twilight thought of before she faded into sleep was that she really couldn't remember what she had been reading at all.
There was something off about the smell of the coffee this morning.
Granted, there had been something a little off about all the coffee that came out of the kettle Twilight had salvaged from the demolished library. The kettle was charred black on one side and no amount of cleaning, no amount of magic, and no amount of magical cleaning would fix it. Its handle had melted to a thin trickle, which Twilight had snapped off, but this wasn't a problem as she had her magic to lift when it was too warm and Spike, who was mostly immune to the effects of intense heat, never bothered with holding it by the handle anyway. The lid had somehow managed to stay in place after Tirek destroyed Golden Oaks, and aside from needing a little extra force to jam it into place it still fit. It looked battered and beaten, but it still worked; it was still something that functioned, and when Twilight found it among the ashes and smouldering branches, that one fact was what made her unable to cast it aside with everything else that had been lost. It looked completely out of place with the rest of the voluminous crystal kitchen, with space enough to cook for and seat nearly half of Ponyville, but it was one of the few things she had left from the old library, and so she made a point of using it every morning even if it smelled a little like burning toast when it got warm and gave the coffee a vague undercurrent of wood.
But not this morning. Now it smelled like... well, now it smelled like it used to. It just smelled like coffee, and Twilight knew without pouring and tasting it that the coffee inside would taste as it had before, too.
Maybe whatever residue that was left inside burned off, she thought, but that too sounded like a weak explanation. It was just... off.
She buried her thoughts and theories about just what had changed with her old kettle. There wasn't enough hours in the day to obsess about tiny details; there were enough big details already. "Coffee?" she asked Fluttershy, who was already at the table in her robe, even though Twilight knew what she would say.
"No, thank you," Fluttershy said with a smile, closing her eyes and shaking her head, her mane that framed her face swaying. Fluttershy drank tea, always in the afternoons and only occasionally: the complete opposite to Twilight's daily morning coffee, nightly evening coffee, and steady chain of mostly-empty cold cups and forgotten pots when she was deep in research (another habit Fluttershy would never be plagued by--she drank her tea while it was still ridiculously hot). Yet Twilight always asked, and Fluttershy always politely refused. It was their thing. One of their things.
Only just recently had Fluttershy started spending the night at the castle. Twilight had stayed at her cottage enough that there was a second toothbrush and comb in Fluttershy's bathroom, but Fluttershy had been reluctant to take time away. Twilight understood, or thought she had at first; it was all the animals that shared a home with Fluttershy, the menagerie of creatures passing through or recovering from illness or that just liked Fluttershy's company (and could tolerate Angel Bunny). They needed food, they needed reassurance, they needed to be checked on that everything was alright. Yet the more time Twilight spent in Fluttershy's house, the more it became obvious to her that her animal collective was, on a day-to-day basis, quite capable of taking care of itself, and it also became obvious that the one who needed Fluttershy to stay in her cottage, to make sure everything was safe and sound, was Fluttershy herself. Twilight had never pushed her on this, had barely mentioned it except for one nearly-wordless conversation where it quickly became clear that yes, Fluttershy knew her worries and anxiety were a problem, and yes, she was working it out, little by little. It was the castle, oddly enough, that gave Twilight a chance to make a safe environment for her marefriend. Their first night together there, after all the chaos and shock and newness had worn off, had been spent on the open platform up on the roof, Twilight stargazing, Fluttershy throwing a cautious eye down to her cottage at the edge of the Everfree Forest that she could now see from this new vantage point, much higher and much farther away from the center of town than the library had been, both sitting on a blanket nursing warm mugs of cocoa, snuggled close in the chill evening air.
Twilight sat opposite Fluttershy, and the kitchen suddenly felt more warm and intimate than the distant crystal walls would suggest. It was just the two of them there, Twilight with her coffee and toast and Fluttershy with her grapefruit half, yet they filled the room up with comfortable silence.
-/-
Twilight stood in the wide arched doorway that separated the castle's interior from familiar Ponyville, Fluttershy facing her and hovering, both metaphorically and literally: she wanted to both stay and go, and as a result her wings gave lazy flaps and her hooves barely brushed the ground.
"It's okay," Twilight said, "you go home and check on everyone."
"I'll tell them all you said hello," Fluttershy said, giving a smile and a quick glance over her shoulder.
"Alright." Twilight grinned to herself, then added, "Love you," feeling the familiar thrill work its way through her stomach.
Fluttershy landed for just a moment to nuzzle the side of Twilight's face. "Love you too," she whispered into her cheek.
"You sure you don't want to borrow a scarf, or anything?" Twilight asked as Fluttershy rose into the air, for she had felt cold against her pelt.
"No, I'm okay," she replied. "Bye, Twilight."
"Bye."
Fluttershy would be okay, Twilight thought as she watched her fly over Ponyville. Fluttershy was always cold, but it never seemed to bother her. Twilight had initially thought lower body temperature, or at least the perception of such, was a pegasus trait, but her brief study into the matter (the result of which was a very confused mailmare and Rainbow Dash making sure Twilight wasn't sneaking up on her to touch her by surprise for several days) found that it was something unique to Fluttershy. Natural variance. But for some reason, that simple explanation had never sat well with Twilight.
No, it was something else that wasn't sitting well. It was something like how the coffee had been wrong.
Fluttershy was always cold. Always.
Even after coming inside during the winter, rugged up in a knitted jumper and scarf and earmuffs.
Even after drinking a mug of scalding tea.
Even after lying in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin.
Except last night, when the pony next to her in her bed had been warm.
Twilight felt another lurch like she had last night, like the entire universe was moving beneath her hooves, and heard a deafening sound chime inside her head. It wasn't Fluttershy who had been there last night. Fluttershy, who she had just seen leave, who was here in the morning, had not been there last night. It was impossible, it didn't make sense, but it hadn't been Fluttershy in bed with her last night.
When Twilight was learning magic from Princess Celestia, there had been one spell she became especially fascinated with: the Replication Spell. She had demonstrated it outside in the gardens on a frog sitting on a lilypad, completely unaware of what was about to happen to it, and young Twilight watched in awe as a second frog peeled itself away from the first, both staring at each other as they wondered how another frog just like themselves had suddenly ended up in front of them. She had then been full of questions, like does the copy behave the same as the original, how does the spell circumvent the Law of Matter and Energy Conservation, what would happen if the spell was cast on something with its own magic, and dozens more she could no longer remember, and Princess Celestia had laughed and done her best to answer the barrage in the brief time the spell lasted, and when it ended Twilight had again fell silent to watch the two frogs merge and join and become one again like the meshing of teeth when run through a zipper. She had practiced the Replication Spell over and over in her room on her own, not with frogs but with an empty notebook (living things, she discovered very quickly, took a lot of concentration and focus to Replicate for even the briefest window of time), each time marveling at the division and the reintegration. It was the half-second that existed between the moment when there was one thing and when there were two, that hazy flash where both and neither numbers were true at the same time. It was, more than any other magic she had wielded on her own up to that point in her life, the clearest sign of the impossible made possible.
Right now it felt like she had been split by the Replication Spell; not her body, but her mind, branching as neatly as train tracks at a junction. Her memory told her a story about her and Fluttershy, that ended with watching her fly away a moment before. But it also told her another story, about her and Pinkie.
And Twilight had no idea which one was true. Both. Neither.
She darted around the castle, her magic whisking her from room to room in a flash of light and sparks. There had to be some proof, something, somewhere, that showed her which one was right.
In the days leading up to last Hearth's Warming Eve, Pinkie had grown increasingly secretive and agitated whenever Twilight was around; Twilight guessed it had something to do with Pinkie getting her a gift, despite her insistence otherwise (Pinkie was a terrible liar), and so she didn't pry further, not even at the train station as she was leaving for Canterlot and her childhood home when Pinkie shoved a wrapped box into her hooves and made sure, several times, that Twilight wouldn't open it until actual proper Hearth's Warming Eve, and that she would make sure to look at everything inside. At first, Twilight thought she was missing a joke when she opened the box to find a polished stone in roughly the same color and shape as her cutie mark, but then she saw the writing on what she had taken to be rather plain filler inside the box, and realized Pinkie had included an epic-length letter with her present. When she read it though, it told of the arduous journey Pinkie had gone through to find the exact right present for Twilight, the details of which would be a whole separate story unto itself; the point it finally made, after Twilight had read through the letter hearing every word in Pinkie's voice and giggling occasionally to herself, was that Pinkie had been unable to find the right thing to get Twilight because she had realized just recently that her feelings had changed to her, that she didn't just like her but like liked her, and Twilight had examined the stone paperweight and regarded the lengthy letter with a warm feeling spreading through her chest, and when she came back to Ponyville Pinkie had been waiting for her at the station to ask if she had liked her present, and Twilight had hugged her in the snow and said, yes, she had.
There was the paperweight on her desk. She could remember finding it in the wreckage of Golden Oaks, blackened on one side with ash that came off with the rub of a cloth, and how her heart had skipped a beat when she saw it peeking out from under the remains of the front door. But there was also a picture on her desk, a picture of her and her family and Fluttershy, posing in front of the grandfather clock. That had been at Hearth's Warming, too. She hadn't even asked her mother to send her a replacement copy for the one that had burned, she had just known, and it had arrived one day in the post.
In the cupboards of the kitchen she found Pinkie's other set of mixing bowls and spoons and beaters and baking paraphernalia, her main stock still at Sugar Cube Corner. It was the one thing she was fastidious and meticulous about, cleaning everything and putting it all away in the exact right place, the method of which never really made total sense to Twilight. It was chaos when Pinkie cooked, even something as simple as a stack of pancakes, but she reset the kitchen to its original configuration every time she was done. Yet in the fruit bowl was half a grapefruit, Fluttershy having eaten the other half this morning. Grapefruit was one of the few things she and Spike agreed on in terms of food: they both hated it. Twilight had tried, when she and Fluttershy had started seeing each other, to give the sour fruit a second chance, but Spike had mocked her so relentlessly that even Fluttershy started getting in on the joke, asking Twilight every so often how she was enjoying her grapefruits, until she finally had cracked and admitted she couldn't stand them and couldn't see how Fluttershy could either, and Fluttershy had just smiled, having known that all along, and told Twilight she had been a little silly for trying to do something that so obviously wasn't her. Fluttershy would still sometimes mention how great grapefruit was, and Twilight would make a pained face. It was one of their things.
In the supplementary library, books on animal husbandry sat next to how-to guides on ventriloquism and compendiums of practical jokes. On the observatory deck, Fluttershy's scarf hung over Twilight's telescope while Pinkie's accordion sat by the stairs (she was always leaving that in the strangest of places). On the other side of the bed, an empty plate with a few crumbs of chocolate cake remaining sat on top of a dog-eared historical romance.
Twilight stared at the plate and the book, her head feeling far, far away. Like it was floating underwater, or drifting out among the stars. She knew she had lent the novel to Fluttershy, her own personal copy from her parents' house that she had lost count of the number of times she had read through it. The younger her had appreciated the history more than the romance (though there was equal amounts of both), but now she could see the love story between the two protagonists as something more than the b-plot. She had mentioned the book to Fluttershy during Hearth's Warming when she had seen it sitting in the bookshelf in her old bedroom, and Fluttershy had still wanted to read it even after Twilight's detailed summary. Twilight remembered Fluttershy tucking a bookmark between the pages and turning out the light as she watched from her desk below. But she also remembered Pinkie sitting up in bed and asking her if she wanted any cake (through a mouthful of cake); Twilight had laughed and said no and wondered if there were any other ponies in all of Equestria that could wolf down something that heavy with chocolate and fall asleep moments later and concluded no, Pinkie was one-of-a-kind.
And the plate and the book were touching. That was a violation of causality in some way that all the other pieces of parallel evidence was not. One sat upon the other. One was, and the other was, at the same time, in a way that couldn't be possible. Couldn't be possible. Couldn't be...
Twilight had time to realize her vision was fading before everything before her eyes went black.
"It was the strangest dream," she heard herself say. "I had this whole history with Fluttershy, that wasn't real. It felt real, though. I can still remember all the details, all the things we did, all the places we went to together, that sort of thing. But I also had this whole relationship with Pinkie Pie, with just as many memories, and I was trying to find some proof of which one actually happened."
"Which one did actually happen?" Applejack asked with a smirk.
"I don't know," Twilight said, scratching behind an ear and frowning. "They both did."
Applejack bucked a tree, the apples raining down into the barrels gathered below. "Yer lucky I ain't a jealous pony, sugarcube."
Twilight's face went red as it dawned on her just what she had been saying and just who she had been saying it to. "Well... what I meant was... it was only a..." She stumbled over her words long enough to realize Applejack was playing with her. Her sense of humor was straightforward and forthright as the rest of her, and it sometimes took Twilight by surprise if she was distracted.
Twilight grinned, and Applejack grinned back at her and kicked the apples out of the next tree.
Settling next to a full barrel of apples, Twilight became aware of a warmth in her that had nothing to do with the mid-morning sunshine. She loved when Applejack just got her. Twilight considered words a forte of hers, but she was reconsidering this self-evaluation based on how tongue-tied and outright stupid she could sound sometimes around the farm pony, but it didn't matter. Every romance Twilight had ever read seemed to feature to a fault some kind of misunderstanding that had to be rectified in the book's climax that could have been avoided with just a simple explanation; she had hypothesized explanations were not all that simple in the real world, but it turns out they were. Or perhaps they just were to Applejack, for which she was eternally grateful. Because Applejack got her.
Had she had misunderstandings with Fluttershy, in her dream? Twilight couldn't remember. She must have with Pinkie, she concluded, they were so different they couldn't help but talk past each other all the time. But she was different from Applejack, too, if you looked at the pair of them in the right light. The scenario of princess and apple farmer might not be all that out of place in a romance novel. But none of those differences that would be fodder for conflict on the page seemed like they mattered. Applejack was just... Applejack. Because this was real life, and that was fiction.
But the dreams felt real, too, her mind insisted.
How does one tell a dream from reality? Could you dream something so real and so complete that you couldn't tell what you were experiencing was not real? It was an old philosophical question, the logical conclusion being that all a pony could be sure of is that she and she alone existed, and the rest of the world may just be some elaborate fantasy, but that wasn't an especially practical way of living even if you did happen to be trapped in some kind of unyielding dream.
Twilight looked at the blades of grass on the ground before her, scrunching her hoof a little to disturb a beetle that scurried to disappear back into the field. She heard the cawing of crows over the thump and patter of Applejack working the orchard, and in the distant distance, giggling from Apple Bloom and her two inseparable friends. Shadows from light clouds overhead drifted across Sweet Apple Acres. She could taste apple juice and oatmeal in her mouth, remnants of this morning's breakfast.
If this was a dream, it was an astoundingly detailed one.
But this was real. Had to be real. Because... because...
Twilight furrowed her brow, thinking of the ancient philosophers who had puzzled this question out at the birth of philosophy. What proof was there? Her memories, which she had also had in her dreams, full histories that did not seem to fragment in the light of day like so many dreams? Her senses, which had been just as alive as she had slept? Her emotions? Could she deny that she felt the same sort of pang for the faded ghosts of Pinkie and Fluttershy, just as she would if she looked up at Applejack? How would she feel if she went to see the real Pinkie (if there was such a thing as a real Pinkie Pie)? Would all the false memories just evaporate as reality overwrote them, or--
"Twilight?"
She flinched at her name and glanced up like she had been caught doing something she shouldn't. For a brief second she felt--no, knew--her deepest fears had been confirmed, that the life she was experiencing was just a thin sheen over an endless gulf of nothingness, a dream from which she would eventually wake and blink out of existence, because as she looked up and saw a black shadow where Applejack should have been, her heart leaped into her throat and her breath caught behind it.
And then in the following second, she realized Applejack was blocking her view of the sun, and casting a shadow over her face.
"You okay?" Applejack asked.
Twilight shook her head, like she could shake off the thoughts she had just been pursuing, and stood. "I'm okay," she said. "Just thinking."
"Looked like you were goin' real deep, there."
She smiled. "I was, yeah. I'm back, though."
Applejack tipped her hat away from her face and glanced in the direction of the farmhouse. "I'm done out here for now. You wanna come inside and end the spell?" she asked.
"Sure, that sounds..."
Twilight paused in mid-step. She had been about to follow Applejack, but something was wrong. Something was off. The universe was about the tear, and in the rip Twilight knew she would be able to see something. It wasn't formless nothing underneath reality. It was gears, cogs, springs, larger and more beyond understanding than black space could ever be.
The whole world lurched forward.
"What did you say?" Twilight asked.
"I asked if you wanted to get out of the sun for a little bit."
"No," she said, screwing her eyes shut and putting a hoof to her temple, "what were the exact words you said?"
"Uh... Do you want to come inside and sit a spell? I think."
"No." Twilight shook her head. "No, you didn't say sit, you said end. End the spell."
"I didn't--"
"What spell? What spell?"
"I don't know anything about any spell, Twilight, just--"
"No!"
Twilight could feel her heart racing and her cheeks heating and the crackle in her horn like an oncoming storm. She was aware of all these things with a calm detachment, like there was a part of her a few paces back charting her rise to anger. Superego Twilight, separate from normal Twilight. Like there were two of her.
She turned her head to look away, out over Ponyville at the town hall, her castle, the fields in the distance. She had been here before. Felt like this before. Had this fight before. It had never happened, but it had already happened. She felt a jarring burst of déjà vu, and superego Twilight reminded her with her cool scholar's tone that déjà vu was an illusion, a mistake in the mind where a new memory was processed as an old one. An illusion, but it felt real. She had done all this before.
"I don't know what the problem is, Twilight," she heard from behind her.
"No," she sighed, stubbornly still looking out over the town, "and that's the problem."
"Huh?"
"I say things over and over and you never listen to them! You say uh-huh or yes Twilight and you nod your head, but everything goes in one ear and out the other, and if you just paid attention for a second, Rainbow, you might be able to figure out what it is I'm mad about once in a while!"
Rainbow didn't wait for Twilight to look back at her. Twilight's view of the flickering lights was suddenly blocked by her marefriend's angry face.
"You're saying I'm dumb, right?"
"No!" Twilight stamped a hoof. It had no effect on the surface of the cloud. "I'm just--"
"Yes you are!" Rainbow darted towards Twilight so quickly it forced her to take a step back. "You're saying I'm not smart enough to follow the clues that tell me what I've messed up, like you're that guy in those old mystery books, Pony Hearty--"
"Poniarty."
Rainbow jabbed a hoof at her. "You're doing it again! Everypony gets it! You're smart! You win at smart."
Twilight's brow furrowed. "Is that what this is about? Does everything have to be a..."
But she trailed off, because Rainbow was finishing her sentence for her, mocking her by mimicking her exact cadence: "Have to be a competition?"
Twilight huffed a breath. "If you're going to be childish, I'm done with this discussion."
"Oh, were we discussing? I thought this was you yelling at me."
Before Twilight could respond, Rainbow shot off into the air towards her house.
"Fine by me if we're done," she called back, "I get to stretch out my wings in bed."
"Fine!" Twilight yelled, aware how childish she herself would sound.
"Fine!" Rainbow disappeared through a high window.
Twilight glanced up at the cloud house, then sunk down on the edge of the cloud and looked out over the edge. How did this always happen? It was perhaps a week that went by without her and Rainbow arguing over something. Over nothing, more like it. It would always start small and then escalate, a chain reaction becoming unstable. It was like they were the two components in a volatile chemical mixture. Twilight imagined telling Dash that. She heard her say not to apply that egghead stuff to a pony as awesome as her, saw the faint smile on her lips, felt her muzzle brush against her cheek.
She missed Dash already.
It was never long before they apologized. Sometimes she wouldn't even have time to get to a separate room before she's feel Rainbow's hoof on her shoulder. Everything was always instantly forgiven, every low of a fight balanced by a heightened rush of affection that followed in the days after. Rainbow's parents were the same way, she had observed over Hearth's Warming.
Twilight wondered how Rainbow would react to being told that. She hated being compared to her parents, despite being so much like them.
The lights of Ponyville flickered in the night. Twilight wondered how many belonged to ponies who were happy, who were sad, how many who were together, how many who were alone. All the stores would be closed by now, ruling out the chance to go buy a last-minute extravagant I'm-sorry gesture and fly it through Dash's window. But, she remembered, but, there was something at the castle that might be just as good.
Rainbow had become especially serious about training for her future as a Wonderbolt just as she and Twilight had become an item, and after much reluctance, skepticism, and hoof-dragging was following the food plan Twilight had established for her. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary, but it did prohibit a lot of junk Rainbow liked to eat from time to time, and if there was any faster way to back Rainbow Dash into a corner than telling her she couldn't do something she wanted to be free to do, Twilight had yet to discover it. So, they had reached a compromise: in lieu of the occasional mid-afternoon lunch of two burgers and a mountain of hay fries, she and Dash had a slice of blueberry pie each at the end of every week. It was something they stayed in to do, something they both made time for, a private ritual shared between the two of them.
Two slices of pie were sitting in Twilight's fridge for tomorrow. She could go get them and give them to Rainbow, right now. Both of them.
A rushing sound in her ears made Twilight think Dash was flying back to her already, and she craned her head around and blinked into blinding light. Where there had been night, now there was day. Where she had been up in the clouds, she was down on the ground. She was back in the orchard with Applejack. Or perhaps she had never left.
The sounds she heard were no longer of gears turning, teeth meshing. Now it was the creak of beds of ice, the pop of crushed glass.
"Twilight? Are you okay?"
She heard Applejack. She heard Rainbow Dash. Two voices, overlapping, echoing into forever like mirrors faced at each other.
"Twilight, are you okay? Twilight, are you okay? Twilight, are you okay..."
She was here. She wasn't here. This had happened. This had never happened. There was one frog. There were two frogs.
She was on a soft couch in a dark room she didn't recognize, with no memory of how she came to be there. She had been in the orchard with Applejack and in the clouds with Rainbow Dash, and now she was... wherever this was. There was no in-between. No chain of memories explaining how she came to be at this place she didn't recognize. But did it matter? How could she know if they were real or not?
How could Twilight know if she was real or not?
A noise drew her attention. A door opening. There was a door to this place she was in. A silhouette of a pony stood in the doorway, and for just a second Twilight saw what was about to happen so clearly, a logical deduction of what would happened based on everything that had happened, and she felt the thin fabric of reality fray a little more as there was no way she should be able to know that.
And then Rarity turned the light on.
The memories pounded into Twilight like air shot form a bellows, setting a fire to blaze. Rarity whispering to her as they stood beside Princess Celestia wearing beautiful gowns, a sidemouthed missive meant only for her that was still perfectly audible through the hubbub of the Grand Galloping Gala. Rarity coming to bed late, her mane tied back, her glasses still perched on her muzzle, her face bearing an expression like she had just battled every beast locked away in Tartarus, and was relishing the victory. Rarity in the light of the morning sun saying it wasn't many ponies who saw her like this. Rarity.
"Twilight, dear," she said, "have you been sitting here in the dark?"
Twilight's response was to burst into tears.
Rarity was at her side in a heartbeat and Twilight buried her face against her shoulder. Crying was catharsis, a poison leaving her body, and Rarity's gentle embrace and soft reassurances were soothing medicine. Did the wrongs of the world, real or imagined, matter if there was comfort like this? She wept for what could have been hours, days, lifetimes, because time had lost all meaning. She was outside of time, and something was breaking. Perhaps it was the glass over the face of the clock of the world. Perhaps it was her heart.
"Darling," Rarity said as she stroked Twilight's hair, "sweetheart."
"Mm?" Twilight managed, an inarticulate grunt through the tears.
"Twilight, dearest," Rarity said with infinite compassion, "isn't it time you ended the spell?"
"Yes," Twilight whispered. "Yes, it is."
Rarity guided her to her modelling area with its array of mirrors, and Twilight saw her own reflection. The copies behind the glass wore Starswirl's cloak and hat; not the costume she had put on one Nightmare Night but the real garments owned by the real Starswirl, faded and frayed with age, scorched and scarred by magics. Her eyes were dark, not from tears but lack of sleep.
"Rarity?" Twilight said. "I'm tired." Her eyes felt raw, her head filled with lead.
"I know, dear," Rarity said, "but you have to wake up now."
"Wake up? How do I wake up..." Twilight was ready to sleep on her hooves.
"You have to end the spell to wake up. You have to wake up to end the spell."
Twilight touched the glass of the mirror gingerly with one hoof. Cracks spread across the surface. She could see different reflections of herself in the shards. Here she was helping Fluttershy bandage Owlowiscious' sprained wing, there she kissed sugar dusting off the tip of Pinkie's muzzle. She read beside Applejack, flew with Rainbow, danced with Rarity. The cracks grew, making an impossible number of sparkling copies.
"It's not real," Twilight whispered. "None of it was ever real."
She closed her eyes, the infinite possibilities still dancing before her vision like a kaleidoscope.
Twilight blinked. She remembered everything she had been doing.
She remembered the tension of excitement at the exhibit housing rare and previously-unseen personal items of Starswirl the Bearded, undampened by how even she could tell her friends (especially Spike) were humoring her. She remembered the momentary nervous stab as Princess Celestia took her aside to show her an unmarked dull box in the museum's storage area, and the fierce swell of pride as she explained it contained Starswirl's collected scraps and notes of half-completed spells, waiting for the right pony to examine them and perhaps uncover something useful, something yet to be discovered. She remembered Celestia cautioning her, that she, Twilight, knew first-hoof how dangerous incomplete spells could be, and Twilight remembered saying she would be careful but thinking of the potential well of knowledge that might lie within that box.
Most of the notes had been dead ends. Some fragments Twilight recognized as ideas that would later be completed and codified by other unicorns later in history, and while it did add to Starswirl's legacy of being remarkably ahead of his time in terms of magical thinking, these were mysteries already solved. The spells that showed the most promise were the ones with rhyming segments accompanying them, a spell-shaping trend long out of fashion way before a brilliant young unicorn was even old enough to have been called "the Bearded". Rhyming and chanting and things of that nature had been seen as unnecessary mysticism that obfuscated the true underpinnings of magic, but there were too many spells with couplets or verses for it to have just been eccentricity on Starswirl's part to include.
Also, as Princess Celestia had observed correctly, Twilight had seen it work once before.
The first spell, which read as if it would aid in seeing in the dark, produced a localized but unfocused greenish light source that dissipated after a minute. Twilight, cataloging the effects, wrote down functional -- possible to refine? The second, as far as she could tell after thoroughly testing, seemed to have no effect. The verse itself was so marred with quill scratches and corrections that Twilight was barely able to make it through the "finished" product. This she deemed inert. The third, a sharp couplet, gave her a perfect view of the back of her head through only her right eye, which vanished after she blinked. This was functional, but of little practical application.
She went on and on through the night testing the proto-spells, feeling like she was uncovering some great buried monument, scraping away centuries of dirt layer by layer. And then she came to the spell that called for a mirror.
Props and ritual were other extraneous parts of magic discarded in the modern era, and apparently Starswirl would have agreed with the sentiment if not for this one spell. It was, as far as Twilight could glean by quickly rifling through the pages and pages of notes, the only spell that required something other than spoken words and magical force. The caster was to obtain a free-standing mirror and circle around it three times counterclockwise, then position themselves where they could look into it but not see their reflection, then to speak the spell:
Alone forever, nevermore The window forms the open door Step through where the world is thin I am without, I find within.
And that is what she had done, and that is what she had said.
And then...
Just what had that been? Had Twilight seen visions? Predictions? Alternate timelines? Secret desires? Or was there no truth at all in what she had experienced? As far as she knew, she hadn't been harboring any hidden attraction to her friends -- she loved them all, but she wasn't in love with them. It had never even crossed her mind.
But that was difficult to be sure of. The memories from the... dream? vision? experience, she settled on, were still active in her mind, fighting for dominance over each other and over the truth of the real world. She knew she had never considered any of her friends as romantic partners, but she also knew what it felt like for Rarity to press her lips against her own, how comforting it was when Applejack held her, what sounds Rainbow Dash made when she--
Twilight swallowed. She could feel her cheeks turning red.
Did she know these things? If she were to approach Fluttershy and ask her on a date, how similar would her reaction be to what Twilight remembered happening? Even if she somehow recreated the exact circumstances and allowed for minute variances of chance, was there any guarantee she had any insight into how the real thing would go? It was all just educated guesswork. It had to be. Twilight knew her friends, their personalities and their quirks, and so the spell conjured false relationships from that. But she had never seen them be in a relationship, not really, so any data she had to form a hypothesis from was soft at best. She couldn't call any of what she had experienced useful; it was nothing more than an elaborate hunch.
But it felt real. She knew it wasn't, but that didn't make it any less so. The memories were a part of her, and she was real.
Twilight glanced out the window at the night sky. When the sun came up, and it was day, and she met with her friends, how would she see them? How much would be the real ponies she knew, and how much would be the figments she had loved in turn?
"I had the weirdest dream last night," Rainbow Dash said.
Twilight listened, but she wasn't listening. She kept trying to smile and nod and agree in what felt like the right places in the conversations she hadn't been completely involved in, but she felt like a fake. An impostor. The puppeteer guiding marionette Twilight through her day. And any moment, she'd slip up and break character and all her friends would know. Just what they would know wasn't exactly clear, but Twilight was surprised they hadn't noticed anything wrong by now. Or perhaps they had, and they were just being polite while she went quietly mad.
"I was in my house, but it was like, made of ice cream? It wasn't really my house, either, just where I lived in the dream."
She would feel normal for a little while, but then she would see half an expression or catch hint of some faint scent or mishear a word and be struck by a memory that never happened. It was like watching her friends from behind one-way glass, she monitoring them silently in the dark.
"I had to swim through the walls to keep it from melting, or it'd drip all over Canterlot and I'd be arrested."
She couldn't tell them. Could she? How would she tell them? Excuse me girls, but I seem to have developed a series of one-way faux-relationships with all of you that happened completely in my own mind, so if I'm behaving a little unusual around you then that's why. It's nothing to worry about, unless of course I can't separate the memories of what actually happened from what I think happened, in which case I may be crazy. Pass the syrup, please?
"Why would you be arrested?" Pinkie asked. "That sounds super-teriffic. Superiffic!"
It wasn't really her fault that any of this had happened. She could tell her friends. They would be understanding, wouldn't they? It wasn't like this was the first time some bit of magic had gone wrong and done something unexpected. They could hardly hold her responsible.
Rainbow shrugged. "I dunno. Dream logic. Dreams don't have to make sense."
But what if it wasn't completely the fault of the spell? Twilight still wasn't completely sure what it did, exactly. Was it symbolic, or did it point to some hidden desire even she was unaware of? Or was it all garbage, nothing more than a idle what-if brought to life? Did the romantic overtones come from the magic, or herself?
"I thought dreams said something about the pony dreaming them," Fluttershy said. "Not that you're wrong, Rainbow. They don't always make sense."
What if somepony else used that spell and they experienced something completely different? Something mundane? Something straightforward? How could she even find another test subject that wasn't herself? The spell wasn't complex, but it did require some understanding of how to harness spoken magic, and a tremendous amount of force behind it.
"Yeah, that's what I heard too," Applejack said, "that dreams are subconscious whatevers, stuff you ain't ready to handle yet when you're awake."
She could always try the spell again, she supposed, even with the risk involved. But...
"What d' you think?"
...What if she had tried the spell again, and this was it? How could she tell? How could she ever tell?
"I said, what do you think, Twilight?"
Could she ever be sure that she was experiencing what she was experiencing, that it might not turn out to be--
"Twilight? Are you okay?"
Twilight blinked. "Yes," she said, and cleared her throat, "I'm fine. Just zoned out for a second there."
"Daydreams?" Rarity asked with a wry smile.
"Something like that." Twilight returned the smile.
She felt present at Sugarcube Corner in a way she had not since stepping inside, like the bakery was an anchor for her thoughts. Bedrock to rebuilt sanity. It was like remembering to breathe.
"Anyway," she continued, "while some dreams can reveal things about their dreamers, they're usually infrequent and require some kind of external method of recording, like a dream journal, to be analyzed in any great detail. The majority of dreams are fragments of memories assembled in a haphazard way by the sleeping mind. Mental noise, in other words."
"So..." Rainbow said, "does that make me right?"
"For most dreams. I'd say swimming through an ice cream house counts as just noise. Speaking of ice cream," Twilight said, coming to a realization as she spoke, "I'm still hungry. Do you girls want anything else to eat?"
"Ice cream?" Pinkie suggested.
"Not quite what I was thinking. Like pie, or something."
"For breakfast, Twilight?" Rarity asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Any time of the day is a good time for pie."
"Sure, I'm in," Applejack said.
"Me too," Fluttershy added.
"I could go for pie," Rainbow said, "as long as it's not blueberry."
"Blueberry?" Twilight said, as her mind threatened to double, buckle like heated wax. "What's wrong with blueberry?"
"Nothing's wrong with it, I'm allergic. Like, really allergic, my whole mouth gets a rash." She showed off her tongue to drive the point home. "It's gross."
When she was a little filly, Twilight would take her father's reading glasses to pretend she was grown up, as very smart ponies had glasses and naturally she would have them when she got older too. She would sit in her father's easy chair and read a book she had read easily hundreds of times before but secretly pretend to be deep in research for something very important and very complicated, and when she would be called for dinner, she would take the glasses off and be surprised every time when the world around her came back into focus. She had been adjusting to the lenses without knowing it, and taking them away made the room snap to attention. Every time she would think: This is what the world really looks like. I'd almost forgotten.
Rainbow saying she had allergies to blueberries, obliterating any possibility that for several weeks they had shared ritual slices of blueberry pie, made Twilight's mind snap to attention. She remembered the way the world really was, after almost having forgotten.
"Alright," she said with a smile that was only for her, "no blueberry."
