Pinkie Pie invites Twilight over to Sugarcube Corner and reveals a dark surprise.
Pinkie bounces into the throne room of Twilight's new castle, invites her over to Sugarcube Corner, and reveals some dark secrets that make Twilight reevaluate everything she ever thought she knew about Equestria, its princesses, and its ponies.
Friendship Court kept regular hours: that was at the very top of Twilight's list. Every weekday morning from nine till eleven, then from two to four in the afternoon, and during the evening from seven till nine, she sat on her throne in her new castle and made herself available to help solve any and all friendship-related problems her fellow Equestrians might bring to her.
Appropriately enough, her friends pitched in as well, but since Twilight understood that they had their own lives, their own interests, and their own jobs, all she really asked of them was one two-hour session a week. That meant that most of the time, it was just her nodding to Spike and him announcing, "Friendship Court is now in session!" to an empty chamber before he settled into his assistant-throne beside her and selected one of the comics books he kept stacked there.
She usually took advantage of the quiet to catch up on her reading, too, but cases did come through now and again. Then she would use all the lessons she'd learned since arriving in Ponyville, bring in a friend to consult if one of them happened to be there or available, ask questions and talk to the parties involved in the dispute, and together, they would all find a way back to the harmony that was the birthright of every pony everywhere.
Still, this past week had been a slow one. Which was good, she kept telling herself. If no ponies were having friendship problems, then the world was working the way it should. So when the crystalline grandfather clock in the foyer chimed eleven on Thursday morning, Twilight looked up from volume thirty-seven of the Magical Compendium and reached over to nudge Spike, his wide eyes glued to whatever adventure the Power Ponies were galloping through. "I'm going to get some lunch," she told him.
Not looking up from the comic, he waved a claw. "Have fun."
"Fun?" A familiar voice burst through the room. "Did somepony say, 'fun'?"
Twilight almost didn't flinch anymore when Pinkie did this sort of thing. "Hi, Pinkie," she said, turning to see her friend bouncing on the cushion of the balloon-decorated throne directly across from hers. "If you're here for the morning session, it's pretty much done."
"That's OK." Pinkie kept bouncing, but her mane didn't seem quite as springy as usual, her words coming out with a plaintive tone Twilight very rarely heard from her. "I had some stuff I needed to think about this morning, but I didn't have anypony to help me think about it."
For half a second, Twilight wasn't sure how to respond to the idea of Pinkie thinking, but she pulled herself together quickly. "If there's anything I can do, Pinkie, all you have to do is ask."
"I knew it!" Pinkie leaped from her throne, confetti somehow scattering through the air around her. "'Cause you're the stuff I needed to think about, and the first and only thought I could squeeze outta my brain was, 'Hey! I should go ask Twilight if she thinks I should show her what I'm pretty sure I need to show her even if I'm pretty sure neither one of us is gonna like it very much when I show it to her!'"
It took Twilight another half-second to untangle Pinkie's sentence, but when she did, she couldn't keep her ears from folding. "You...you have something to show me that you don't think I'll like?"
"Wow!" A smile blossomed across Pinkie's face like a field of daisies at dawn. "That's just what I was gonna say! Gummy was right: I shoulda come to see you about this, like, eight or ten moons ago!"
"Oh, Pinkie!" Twilight pumped her wings and soared over the central dais to her friend's side. "I'm so sorry! I had no idea you'd been having any problems! And something that's been going on for so long?"
"Actually..." Pinkie's mane positively wilted, cascading around her shoulders like pink, over-cooked spaghetti. "It's been going on a lot longer than that." Her eyes shimmered, but then she was leaping forward, wrapping her front hooves around Twilight's neck, and pressing her suddenly damp face into Twilight's chest. "I'm so glad you got to be a princess! 'Cause now you're not just smart, but you're also maybe strong enough to—" Her voice cut off like somepony had flicked a switch, and she jumped back, all Pinkie Pie again. "So c'mon! I absolutely need to show you!"
"Whoa," Spike muttered behind her, and Twilight glanced over her shoulder to see him staring at them from his throne, the comic book drooping in his claws.
Twilight forced her ears up and gave him a smile that she hoped didn't look as phony as it felt. "Spike? You're in charge till I get back."
He blinked, sprang to his feet, and snapped out a salute. "You got it, Twilight!"
With a nod, she turned to Pinkie, but Pinkie was already bounding toward the throne room door. "I know you can help me, Twilight! I know it!"
Picking up her pace, she caught up with Pinkie just outside the castle's front door, the autumn morning air practically crackling as she breathed it in. It made her think of the Running of the Leaves two months ago and the way her new alicorn body had let her canter to an easy third-place finish just behind an out-of-breath Rainbow Dash and Applejack. So many changes she'd seen this past year...
At least Pinkie was back to being her regular self, hopping and skipping more than walking or trotting and calling out to everypony they passed: "Lily! Great to see your mom looking so much better when I stopped by yesterday! Hi, Matilda! Give Cranky a 'whootle-whootle-whoot' for me! Hey, Chickpea! You know if you oil those roller skate wheels, they'll go a whole lot faster? 'Cause they will!"
With smiles and waves, Twilight returned all the 'good morning's that came her way, but as much as she would've loved to pretend that she and Pinkie were just strolling through town toward Sugarcube Corner, she couldn't keep her stomach from tightening when she remembered the anguish she'd seen on Pinkie's face and the pain she'd heard in her voice. She refused to speculate about what might be wrong, though, and tightening her jaw, she vowed silently to do whatever she could to fix it.
At least the bakery didn't look different, but then Twilight couldn't imagine a situation where the big, cupcake-shaped building would ever appear ominous. The bell above the front door tinkled when Pinkie shouldered her way through, and behind the counter, Mr. Cake gave a grin and a wink. "Well, now, Pinkie! If I'd known you were going to bring the princess by, I would've cleaned the place up some!"
Immaculate wasn't a strong enough word for the interior of Sugarcube Corner, but Twilight knew this was Mr. Cake's way of joking around. Like the way he called her 'Princess' even after all the times she'd told him to call her 'Twilight.' Forcing a stern look onto her face, she summoned a quill and scroll from thin air. "Is this something I need to bring to the attention of the health inspector, Mr. Cake?"
He held up a hoof. "I swear to you, Princess: those lumps of green goo under the counter haven't moved since yesterday."
Twilight giggled, but the way Pinkie was just standing beside her and blinking made the giggle evaporate. "Well," Twilight finished, "keep an eye on them. Pinkie and I are just going to—" She touched Pinkie's shoulder as gently as she could. "Pinkie? Where are we going again?"
Pinkie started back almost as if Twilight had slapped her awake. "Upstairs!" she more yelped than said, then with some more blinking, she shook her head. "Upstairs," she repeated less explosively. "It...it shouldn't take too long."
Following her to the stairway, Twilight found the hair at the base of her mane rising with each step. Because Pinkie wasn't hopping anymore: in fact, her hoofs seemed to be dragging more and more the closer they got to the top. The trip down the little hallway to the door of Pinkie's room got slower and slower, Pinkie's head drooping lower and lower, until Twilight finally bent down to the nearly stationary Pinkie and murmured, "Would it be easier if you just told me about whatever this is, Pinkie, instead of showing me?"
"No," Pinkie said so quietly, Twilight had to bend further to hear her. "We hafta do it this way. Even if...even if you're gonna hate me forever after."
"What?" Twilight had to struggle not to shout. "Pinkie, I would never—!"
"Don't." Her whole body flexing, Pinkie stood, flowed sideways, and pressed a hoof to Twilight's lips. "Wait till you see." She jumped to her door, pushed it open, and slid through.
It took Twilight some effort to keep her wings from springing open in alarm. Hurrying forward, she reached the doorway just in time to see Pinkie march right up to the far wall of her bedroom and reach her front hoofs out to an empty spot to the right of a rainbow poster hanging there. Something clicked, and Twilight couldn't stop her wings flaring when that part of the wall folded open like a door to reveal a darkened corridor on the other side.
Even though it was an exterior wall.
"Pinkie?" she asked, the air humming around her horn with a sort of magic she'd never felt before.
"We can't stop now." Pinkie's mane deflated, and her face when she looked back made Twilight think of a dinner plate shattered across a floor. "Once the door's open, we hafta go through, me and whoever's with me. Those're the rules." She was shaking, Twilight could see now. "I...I'm so, so sorry about this, Twilight."
Setting her jaw again, Twilight moved across the room to Pinkie's side. "Whatever this is, Pinkie, we'll face it together."
A tiny smile flashed over Pinkie's snout. "It's just a door, Twilight. You've prob'bly seen one before. And a hallway. And some stairs going down after that. And then—" All trace of her smile vanished, and she started into the corridor. "Well, you'll see."
Their hoofsteps echoed slightly from the walls, Twilight fairly sure that this was the first time she'd ever walked in silence beside Pinkie Pie. The hallway itself was completely square, the surfaces some sort of dark, polished metal. It caught the light from Pinkie's room behind them, but instead of reflecting, the light more oozed out in a dim glow, the whole place shadowy and cold, a staticky smell in the air like a thunderstorm was brewing.
They came to the stairs Pinkie had mentioned after a few dozen steps, and Pinkie slouched down them. "Wherever I live," she said, her voice almost lost in the silence, "one wall of my room, if I touch it, there's the door, the hall, and the stairs. It'd be kinda neat if it wasn't so...so—"
They reached the bottom, then, and passed through a square doorway into a room that made every hair in Twilight's mane prickle. Seamless white walls, floor, and ceiling; light from overhead bright and antiseptic; racks of sharp, gleaming metal implements; a steel table at the far end with clamps at the head and foot; the stink of blood and death and magic hitting Twilight like a barrel of ice water: "—so horrible," Pinkie finished in a whisper beside her.
"Pinkie?" Twilight couldn't've kept the quiver out of her voice if she'd tried, and she didn't want to try, all the carefully arranged knives and spikes and corkscrews and whatnot demanding a quiver. "What...what is this place?"
"My name's not really Pinkie." The voice beside her had become hollow somehow; frozen in place, Twilight couldn't make herself turn to look at the speaker. "It's Panacea. I'm not really a pony, and this is the place where for more than a hundred hundred years, I've made ponies suffer and die as painfully as I could so that the rest of Equestria gets to stay happy and safe."
"What?" Twilight let herself shout it this time, tore her hoofs from the floor, and spun on Pinkie. But staring at her friend standing there with her mane flat along her neck and shoulders, her face completely blank and focused on the metal table, Twilight couldn't think of anything to say except: "But I've met your sister."
A hummingbird flap of a smile whisked across Pinkie's muzzle. "To exist in this world, I need something to ground me, and there's nothing more grounding than rock farmers." A far-away look came into her eyes. "When Maud was born, she was my younger sister. Now she's my older sister. When she has foals, she'll become my mother and then eventually my grandmother." She gave a tiny sigh. "Just like all her ancestors."
"Pinkie, that...that's—!"
"Sadly true," came a voice behind her that Twilight knew she wasn't hearing. But when she spun in that direction, she saw another door had opened in the wall to the right of the stairway, and out of that doorway—
Princess Celestia, her usual smile nowhere to be seen, stepped through, Princess Luna drifting in behind her as quietly as a cloud across the face of the moon. Cadance followed, her head down and her eyes closed, and then Discord of all things, as angry a look on his face as Twilight had ever seen there.
"Panacea," Princess Celestia said, her warm sunniness muted in this cold, sterile place, "we hadn't yet agreed on when we would tell Twilight about you."
Another ghost of a smile twitched Pinkie's lips. "She's a princess now. She had to know."
"Hmmph!" Discord glanced sideways at the table and the instruments arrayed around it, and a shiver wavered through him from his horns to the tip of his tail. "Well, I'm not a princess, so I plan on spending as little time as possible in this gruesome place." His head wheeled around, his neck stretching to swing his grinning face to within a hair's breadth of Twilight's snout. "I just wanted to say 'Welcome to the conspiracy, Twilight Sparkle.'" He popped like a giant soap bubble, and a scent like mustard covered the awful blood stink in the air for a few seconds.
Twilight's brain stuttered and clicked. "You can't— It isn't— How can—?"
"Very well." Princess Celestia sounded tired, but then— "Attend me, Twilight Sparkle!" she said so forcefully that all Twilight's student instincts burst to the fore, snapping her attention to her teacher. "When Luna and I first became alicorns, Equestria was a place beset by monsters on all sides. Not only were ponies regularly killed and eaten, but they starved to death, contracted innumerable diseases, and died in childbirth. The world seemed to hate us more than it did the rest of its inhabitants combined, and Luna and I were determined to put a stop to it."
Just hearing the princess in lecture mode stroked Twilight's thoughts and let them start flowing the way they usually did. "Panacea. It...it means 'cure-all.'"
"It does indeed." Praise from the princess loosened the clamps throughout Twilight's body even further. "And with Starswirl's help, Luna and I fashioned a spell that would be exactly that: a cure to keep all ponies safe from the ills to which they were constantly falling victim."
"No," that hollow, not-quite-Pinkie voice said beside Twilight. "Not all ponies. All ponies except a few. And those ponies hafta suffer all the bad stuff that would've happened to everypony else."
"Yes, well..." Princess Celestia cleared her throat. "The magic demanded a heavy price, but it was one we felt worth paying."
"'We'?" Now that Twilight was thinking again, she couldn't stop her mind from drawing conclusions based on the information she was receiving: terrible, terrible conclusions. "But...you weren't the ones paying the price, were you?" It was impossible, but if what Pinkie had said was true, and if what the princess had said was true— Twilight couldn't keep from gasping. "Are you telling me that Pinkie or Panacea or whatever her name is has been torturing and killing ponies for more than a thousand years, and you've just been standing there letting it happen?"
Princess Celestia's ears folded. "Twilight, you must understand."
"Understand?" All the clamps were tightening back up inside Twilight. "You pick a pony at random to kill! What else do I need to know?"
"Not at random," Pinkie said quietly. "When the spell summoned me into being, it gave me my special senses. So I always know which ponies would be good and which ponies wouldn't."
Whirling in gathering outrage, Twilight opened her mouth to shout at the monster beside her, but seeing the little pink earth pony slumped nearly to the floor, she couldn't do it. Whatever else this Panacea was, she was also Pinkie, and leaping to her side, Twilight folded her into a hug. "It's all right," she said. "You're not the monster here."
"Enough!" Luna shouted, and when Twilight turned to glare at her, she was stomping one front hoof and leveling the other at Twilight. "Summoning Panacea was not a decision we made lightly or capriciously, Twilight Sparkle! You who did not live through those blood-soaked and horrendous days a millennium-and-a-half ago dare not judge those of us who sought any and all means to end them! But blood must spill to appease the deep, dark magics of the world, and Panacea allows us not merely to exist but also to thrive with the minimum amount of destruction meted out amongst our populace!"
That almost got Twilight shouting. "'Amongst our populace'? What about 'amongst us'? I mean, isn't it the job of a princess to protect her ponies?"
Luna flinched, but Celestia didn't. "When our ponies were still reeling from the barely rebuffed first onslaughts of Discord and Tirek and a hundred other names not recorded in even the most complete history of Equestria, which of us would you have sacrificed, Twilight Sparkle? The pony who brought stability to the day, or the pony who brought safety to the night?"
Still quivering, Twilight stopped herself from speaking, forced her mind to travel along this ghastly train of thought. "And after Luna's banishment, there was only you." Swallowing, she took a breath and blew out as much of her anger as she could. "I'm sorry, Luna. I didn't mean to say—"
"Do not apologize." Luna's gaze stayed fixed on the white ceramic floor. "For in truth, when I allowed the Nightmare to possess me those ten centuries ago, despair over Panacea drove my madness." She looked up, her face somehow shadowed in the pitiless light. "I would have destroyed every pony in Equestria if it would have freed us from this blight."
Beneath Twilight's wing, Pinkie shivered, and Twilight instinctively tightened her embrace. "There has to be a way," she said, her thoughts racing now. "There has to be!"
"Yes, yes, yes," Pinkie whimpered beside her. "Please, Twilight! You can find a way to stop me! I know you can!"
Princess Celestia was nodding. "If you could, Twilight, all of Equestria will be forever in your debt." The tiniest bit of a smile fitted across her face. "More in your debt than it already is, I mean."
"But..." Cadance's voice made Twilight turn with a blink: she'd forgotten her sister-in-law was even there. "Didn't you say that we'd run out of time?" Cadance was looking at Princess Celestia. "That we needed Panacea to go to work right now?"
Twilight caught her breath as Princess Celestia's ears folded. "I fear that to be the case. We've been coasting for several years on the strength of Panacea's last subjects—"
"Applejack's parents." Pinkie shivered again against Twilight, and it was all Twilight could do not to leap away from her. "They were so good, Twilight. So good."
"Indeed." The eternal flow of the princess's mane seemed to slow. "But with the changeling attack, the resurfacing of the Alicorn Amulet, and the returns of Discord, Sombra, and Tirek, we obviously need to replenish the spell, or we can expect things to get much worse."
"Worse?" Twilight swallowed. "Than Tirek?" She still woke some nights sweating from dreams where their fight went on and on and on, where they destroyed the whole world between them, where she hadn't been trusting enough to let go of everything in order to defeat him. Turning to Pinkie, she said, "Take me, then."
"No, no, no!" Pinkie whimpered this time. "You're the only one who can fix my spell! You'd be good, Twilight—really, really good—but if I took you as my subject, I mean, you're my only chance to stop!"
Not wanting to, Twilight still glanced at the others. Neither Luna nor Cadance would meet her gaze, but in Princess Celestia's eyes, Twilight saw something sad and old and weary. "A princess's job," Celestia said quietly, "is to protect her ponies. Or at least as many of her ponies as she can..."
It felt like there was a pinecone lodged in Twilight's throat. "All right," she said around it. She took her wing from Pinkie Pie's back and looked down at the misery etching her friend's face. "But I'm going with you when you pick your next subject."
Out in the streets of Ponyville again, Pinkie hopping along beside her, Twilight set the back of her brain to work on the problem. And a nasty problem it was, too.
Back in the chamber, she'd gotten Celestia and Luna to show her the structure they'd used all those hundreds of years ago to conjure Panacea. It had made most of her want to fall down quivering in horror, yes, but a part of Twilight had just sucked in the details. The spell had almost no elegance to it, very stark and utilitarian, and that, she felt, was its greatest weakness. Magic didn't respond well to clubs and cudgels, and the way this spell kicked and punched its way through the latticework of existence just proved that old adage.
Unfortunately, that probably meant that picking the thing to pieces and replacing the bad parts wasn't an option. She would need to rewrite it entirely, she was almost certain, and that would take time, time they apparently didn't exactly have...
It took some effort not to shout Run! at the happy, smiling ponies wishing her and Pinkie a 'good afternoon' as they passed through town. The thought that one of them, one of the very ponies Pinkie was calling by name and greeting with a laugh and a smile, would soon be strapped to Panacea's table and tortured to death—
"Twilight?" They were crossing the park when Pinkie whispered to her with just a hint of Panacea's hollowness. "This'd be way easier on both of us if you let me do it myself."
"No." Her spine tight as a bowstring, Twilight stopped by the park's little pond, took a shaky breath, and watched the ponies eating their lunches in the shade of the trees, the foals too young to be at school running and rolling in the grass. "I don't like anything about this, Pinkie, but you've been doing it by yourself for way too long. You're my friend, and I'm not going to walk away from that. So while I'm working on reshaping this spell, I'll be right here with you." She shuddered, the metal table and all those various knives flashing in her memory. "No matter what."
The sudden stillness made her glance over, Pinkie completely motionless. "Thank you," she murmured, and even though it was still Panacea's voice, there was a warmth there that Twilight hadn't heard before.
"Also, I—" Twilight drew a shaky breath. "I don't want this to be easy, not at all. I want to look whoever you pick in the eye, call them by name, and make sure they know that there's one pony in the world at least who will never forget them."
"I never forget them," came that whisper again. "Any of them. I could tell you every name and cutie mark and life story."
"Don't," Twilight said and immediately winced. "I mean, it's great that you do, Pinkie, but this whole thing, it just...I don't—"
"You'll stop it." Pinkie put a hoof on Twilight's shoulder. "You'll make it so every pony is safe from the monsters, and no ponies hafta die for it. 'Cause that's what you do: make things better."
The roller coaster of emotions Twilight had been riding all day took another spin. She lunged forward, hugged Pinkie, and muttered, "Thank you."
A hoof patted her back, then it froze, Pinkie's warmth against her whisking away like a cold front blowing in. Starting back, Twilight saw Pinkie staring past her, her eyes wide and her mouth pinched into a little 'o' shape. "There," she said.
Another chill washed across Twilight, and she glanced over her shoulder, two laughing voices perking her ears. Moving to sit on one of the park benches a quarter of the way around the pond were Lyra and Bon Bon, two milkshakes floating in the glow of Lyra's horn.
Twilight's mouth went dry. "Both of them?" she managed to ask.
"Just Bon Bon," Panacea answered, and this time, there was nothing of Pinkie about her at all.
The temperature seemed to drop even further around Twilight as she watched the two climb onto the bench, their bright eyes focused only on each other. Her mind twitched, and she suddenly saw herself sitting there with Rarity, then with Fluttershy, then with Applejack, then with Rainbow Dash, then with Pinkie, an aurora of knives surrounding her. "We'll take her when they finish their drinks," Pinkie said with Panacea's voice.
The ice everywhere threatened to overwhelm her completely, but the two friends chatting away made a spark crackle up inside her chest. "No," Twilight said.
"Twilight?"
Whether it was Pinkie or Panacea asking didn't matter; Twilight pushed her answer out again through gritted teeth: "No!" And before she could change her mind, she activated her horn, popped herself and Pinkie Pie through the spaces between space to Pinkie's room upstairs at Sugarcube Corner.
"Twilight?"
This time, it was definitely Pinkie asking, but Twilight couldn't look at her. "Open the door, Pinkie," she said, her attention focused on the wall beside the rainbow poster.
"But—"
"I know." Her neck felt rusty, but she forced her head to turn, forced herself to meet Pinkie's wide eyes. "When you open the door, you have to go through, you and whoever you're with. Well, it's just you and me, Panacea, so I'm going to be your subject." The word almost caught in her throat, but she was sure she would've choked just as much on the word 'victim.'
"But—"
Flaring her wings, she let the magic waver to life around her horn. "Have you ever done an alicorn?"
Pinkie was sitting back on her haunches, her front legs tucked against her shivering chest. "No," she said after a moment. "I...I can't even imagine what it'd be like."
"Then let's find out." Twilight shook her head against the memory of those knives. "If I understand what you and Princess Celestia were saying, you don't kill your subjects right away. The spell's all about making them suffer first, right?"
After another moment, Pinkie nodded.
"All right." Gesturing toward the wall, Twilight pulled some ideas from the back of her brain, still humming away on the problem of the Panacea spell. "We'll have you torture me for, say, an hour, and see how much fuel that provides to feed the— What did Luna call them? 'The deep, dark magics of the world'?" She forced a smile. "You can compare how much you get from me to how much you'd normally get from a pony during that same time period, and if my current hypothesis is right, it'll be substantially more."
Those big blue eyes had somehow gotten even bigger. "And then I'd let you go? Is...is that what you're saying?"
Twilight skimmed through the spell structure in her mind. "Unless I'm missing it, there's nothing in your conjuration that specifically says you have to keep your subject imprisoned the whole time. So if my hour on the table gives us, say, a week without the gates of Tartarus bursting open, I can spend the time rewriting the spell, then come back next week for another session if I need to and so on like that."
"Eeeee!" Pinkie's mane sprang into its usual bubble-gum tangle for maybe the first time since Twilight had first seen her this morning. "That'll work! That'll work! I can feel it!" She threw her front legs around Twilight and squeezed her. "I've always kept 'em locked up 'cause, I mean, I had to so I could keep working on 'em! But I can let you go after 'cause you'll prob'bly heal up faster and ev'rything!"
Just as Twilight was moving to return her hug, though, Pinkie went cold and still, pushing away with Panacea's hollow expression spreading over her. "Except it means I'll hafta work on you, Twilight. And I...I don't know if I can...if I can—"
"We don't have a choice." Once again, Twilight gestured to the wall. "The only ponies going through that door till I figure this out are you and me. So let's go."
For a dozen heartbeats, Pinkie just sat. But at last she stood, dragged herself to the wall, reached out, and pulled open the impossible door. Twilight moved along the corridor beyond beside her in silence again, then down the stairs and into—
The room sat exactly as she'd remembered it, clean and bright and horrible to her every sense. "What—" She had to stop and clear her throat. "What do I do?"
"Up on the table." It was Panacea's voice again, that whispery wisp of sound. "My subjects are usually unconscious when I do this, though I always wait for them to come around before I begin...."
Looking at that sharp, shiny table with the racks of sharp, shiny objects on the walls around it, Twilight's knees started shaking. With a snort, she leaped upward, flapped her wings, and threw herself at the thing with a twist so she landed on her back. Not stopping to think, she stretched her front legs up to the top clasps, focused through her horn, and snapped the restraints closed around her fetlocks; raising her head, she looked down along her chest, straightened her hind legs, and concentrated on locking them into place as well. "All right," she said, and her voice broke, a sour taste at the back of her throat. She swallowed against it and went on: "Whenever you're ready."
Silence filled the room, and Twilight glanced over, fear of what she might see tightening her already spasming muscles.
But it was just Pinkie sitting there, her eyes dark even in the pure white light flooding from the ceiling, her mane hanging down to cast her face in shadow. Slowly, then, she rose onto her hind legs and stood, her front legs dangling down like they were maybe a little too long and maybe didn't have the same bones in them that a pony's legs would.
Twilight swallowed. Because this wasn't Pinkie, she realized. This was Panacea, the thing the princesses had summoned more than fifteen hundred years ago, the spell that had kept Equestria safe since then. Trying her utmost to concentrate on the word 'safe,' she watched Panacea sway on her hind legs over to the nearest rack, knives of various lengths and thicknesses gleaming there. As sinuously as a snake, Panacea's right front leg slithered through the air, its hoof touching a point below several of the blades, and—
Magic blazed over Twilight in a soundless explosion and made her wince against the shackles she'd lashed herself into. And the knives on the wall, they shimmered, flowed like quicksilver to surrounded Panacea's hoof, and became a sort of glove, each knife bristling out like Spike's claws. Only longer and sharper and pointier.
Panacea's head swiveled toward Twilight. "One hour," that voice rustled in Twilight's ears, and like a scarecrow caught in a windstorm, Panacea lurched forward, her knives flashing.
It was the screaming that Twilight remembered afterwards: her own screaming, wordless and wrenching, echoing from the steel and ceramic around her. Sliding slowly into consciousness now, her body cushioned on what she thought might be pink clouds, she found that she could barely swallow, her throat scraped raw and jagged like she'd caught a head cold.
The smells, too, made her nose twitch even though the shuddering breath she was taking came to her entirely free of the awful stinks that had assaulted her earlier: urine, feces, vomit, blood, again all her own and all filling her lungs each time she had to suck in more air to continue screaming.
And of course the way every agonizing stroke of Panacea's blades had seemed to somehow dig directly into her reservoir of magic, the way her skin had shredded under the repeated blasts of the energy those knives had coaxed forth, the way her augmented alicorn physique had raced into overdrive to repair the damage only for those healed places again to be expertly slit open and peeled back, causing new heights of—
No. No. She couldn't remember that. She refused to remember that. She would never forget the screaming and the stink and the fountaining explosions of magic emptying her repeatedly to nothing but skin and bones. But the pain itself, the horrible, grinding, slicing, jabbing—
"Here." Several drops of something cool and sweet and damp touched her lips, and Twilight almost lunged forward, trying to get more of it onto her parched tongue. "Careful, Twilight! Just a little at a time!"
Pinkie's voice. And blinking, she saw that the soft, downy pinkness surrounding her came from Pinkie's blankets, Pinkie's sheets, Pinkie's comforter. Pinkie herself sat on the floor beside the bed, a box of apple juice between her front hoofs, the straw pointed in Twilight's direction.
The sight of Pinkie made Twilight's whole body recoil, and if she hadn't been exhausted and lying flat on her back, she was fairly certain she would've raced screaming from the room. Well, probably not screaming, she thought, wrestling her reactions down and figuratively stomping on them. Not with her throat like this.
She nodded, not quite ready to try talking, reached for the box, but stopped at the sight of her forelegs, dozens of parallel ridges running along the fetlocks and pasterns. As she stared, though, the scars smoothed, receded, vanished, the soreness in her throat fading with each swallow. Taking the juice box, she sipped a quarter mouthful, licked her lips, and asked, "One hour?"
"Oh, Twilight!" Pinkie was vibrating where she sat. "It was incredible! I've never felt anything like it! I mean, an hour with you bought us a whole moon! I'm abso-tively sure of it!"
"A moon?" More than she'd thought, certainly, but to make sure, she asked, "D'you mean from now till the end of this moon? Or a full four weeks?"
"At least four weeks! You were amazing!" Pinkie reached for Twilight's hoofs—
And Twilight couldn't stop her instinctual reaction, couldn't keep from jerking away, couldn't stop seeing the knives that had seemed to sprout from every inch of Panacea to slice into her own purple flesh.
Pinkie jerked back as well, her face flinching like Twilight had struck her.
"No!" Twilight cried out. "Pinkie, I'm sorry!" Setting the juice box down on Pinkie's bedside table, she slowly and deliberately wrapped her hoofs around Pinkie's, just as deliberately ignoring the clenching in her stomach and the pounding in her chest. "I'm still a little shaky is all." She forced herself to focus on the positive, found a smile coming pretty easily to her lips. "But it worked, didn't it? Equestria's OK for another four weeks!"
The smile that pulled at Pinkie's snout had more than a little of Panacea's wistfulness in it, and the way her cold hoofs trembled spoke volumes to Twilight. "But...are we OK?" Pinkie asked.
"We are," Twilight said, and it was close enough to the truth that she almost didn't feel a twinge saying it. With a shift of her shoulders, she let go of Pinkie's hoofs, pushed the blankets aside, and gingerly lowered herself onto the floor. Flexing her knees gave her a brief flashback of her knees bending in ways that they shouldn't, but again she pushed it down.
"Wow..." Pinkie's eyes gleamed, but when she went on, it was with Panacea's whisper: "How can you be standing after that?"
In fact, Twilight wanted nothing more than to lie back down. But when she'd set the juice box on the nightstand, she'd caught a glimpse of Pinkie's alarm clock. "It's ten till two," she said, ruffling her wings into place along her back. "I've got to get back to the castle for the afternoon session of Friendship Court."
Another slow blink from Pinkie, and her mane puffed up like pink meringue. "Then I'm going, too! 'Cause it's like you said: it's you and me till we get this all fixed!"
Able to hide her wince this time, Twilight nodded, and having Pinkie along for the walk home and for Court actually did prove helpful. Twilight had been feeling better and better since waking up, but she was still grateful that Pinkie was there for her to lean on the last few blocks. During Court, Pinkie and Spike stretched a gigantic string sculpture along the throne room's walls, its geometric swirls and patterns oddly soothing whenever Twilight glanced up from the books she'd asked Spike to pile around her.
The laughing comments of her two friends soothed her as well and made it much easier to push down the jags of panic that jabbed her chest whenever Pinkie spun or leaped or somersaulted from one part of the room to another. Because Twilight couldn't afford panic; Equestria couldn't afford it. Yes, Pinkie had done things to her that Twilight knew would be kicking her awake every night for the next four weeks, but her highly disciplined mind was already busily building walls around the shivering memories of those things so that they wouldn't impinge upon her conscious thoughts.
It wasn't the best way to handle this sort of trauma—she knew that, too—but she couldn't deny that it could be an effective stop-gap measure. Whatever it took to keep her from dissolving into a puddle of shrieking tears at the sight of Pinkie Pie, Twilight decided that she would do, erecting mental partitions across her entire psyche if necessary.
Which she had to do since Pinkie came back for the evening session after hopping out to fetch a mouth-watering baba ghanoush for the three of them for supper. And true to her word, she came back for every session over the next four weeks, morning, afternoon, and evening. "It's fun!" she told Rainbow Dash at the end of the third week when Dash asked what Pinkie was doing. "Helping other ponies is the best feeling in the world!"
Twilight understood the sentiment entirely, and the more she inched her way around the apparent parameters of Panacea's spell, the more she saw how important the parties and the laughter and the joy were to Pinkie. That she should be connected to the ponies she tortured and killed seemed to be vital somehow, though even after researching every aspect of spellcraft she could think of, Twilight couldn't figure out why. Maybe since Panacea's basic objective was to wring suffering from her subjects, the spell gained strength if Panacea herself suffered? That would mean that being close to her subjects would definitely help in the task of keeping the dark magics satiated and at bay...
So many dead ends, though! She'd sent requests through Spike for more information from Celestia and Luna, but the answers they'd provided pushed her down fruitless paths just as often as they gave her an insight. Reading Starswirl's notebooks again helped her see his touch in the magic that crackled around Pinkie Pie, but the sloppiness of the whole thing just made her itchy.
Even worse, the deeper she got into the mechanics of the spell's construction, the more concerned she became about what effect trying to fix or improve the spell might have on Pinkie. After all, she was the spell, the manifestation of its power in the material world, and anything Twilight did to alter the spell was almost certainly going to change Pinkie in some way.
Crumpled scroll followed crumpled scroll over the whole four weeks, the silent ticking of that invisible clock keeping Twilight from sleeping at all that last week. Pinkie had been getting quieter and quieter on her throne, too, and on the Thursday exactly four weeks after Twilight had first heard the name Panacea, she nodded to Pinkie at the eleven o'clock chime, pushed herself up from among her stacks of books, and said to Spike, "Pinkie and I'll be back for the afternoon session."
Spike's tail scraped back and forth on the flagstones. "Is...is something wrong, Twilight? You don't look so good."
She gave him as much of a smile as she could piece together. "I'm just a little disappointed I haven't gotten further along on this research project."
His wrinkled brow told her the answer didn't satisfy him. Stepping over to him, she bent down to poke the side of his head with her snout. "You're in charge till I get back."
Instead of his usual jaunty salute, he touched several gentle claws to her mane. "You got it, Twilight," he more whispered than said, and Twilight turned away before the tightness in her stomach and throat could make her blurt out things she really didn't want to say.
Through town, then, the crisp, not-quite-winter air just serving to give her the shivers, she walked alongside Pinkie and refused to let her knees fold her to the ground. The cupcake shape of Sugarcube Corner reminded her of a toadstool more than anything else, and she just nodded and smiled at Mr. Cake's attempted banter before hurrying with Pinkie Pie to the stairwell and up.
She'd been so sure! An entire lunar cycle was plenty of time for an intelligent student of magic to parse out a spell! But she'd wasted it, wasted all 28 days! And now she had to pay.
Unless—
Her mind flashed back to that day in the park, to Pinkie's gasp and Panacea's voice naming Bon Bon as the pony who—
"No!" Stomping the floor outside Pinkie's room, Twilight wanted to smack herself right across the face. But instead she followed Pinkie inside, walked with her through the impossible door, along the impossible hall, down the impossible stairs and into that horrible, impossible room, more and more of her mind whimpering with each step.
"One hour," Panacea whispered behind her, and Twilight was forcing her reluctant legs to start toward the table when—
"No!" came a shout from the stairway, and snapping her head around, Twilight saw Princess Celestia come leaping into the room. "Your questions these past weeks, Twilight Sparkle, have disturbed me no end, but now that I've finally put the pieces together and realized what you mean to do, I forbid it! You'll not lay a hoof upon her, Panacea!" And her horn began flaring up.
"Princess!" Twilight stumbled backwards, spread her wings, threw herself in front of Pinkie Pie. "Wait! I've already been through it once, and it's the only way! The only way!"
"Already—?" Even in the noontime brightness of Celestia's horn, Twilight could see her ancient teacher's eyes go wide. "How...how can this be? Panacea slays her victims!"
"Subjects," Pinkie muttered.
Twilight gave her a sideways glare, then turned her attention back to Celestia. "Not immediately," she said. "And I'm a bit tougher than the average pony." Slipping into her lecturing tone—a tone she'd learned at the hoofs of the pony in front of her—she proceeded to detail the results of her and Panacea's last session.
Celestia's eyes got wider and wider. "Four weeks?" she asked. "In exchange for a mere hour under the knives?"
The mention of the knives sent a chill ratcheting through Twilight, but she managed to nod. "We'll buy another moon here this afternoon, and another in four weeks if I haven't figured a way around the spell's base parameters by then." The back of her brain itched and squirmed, the slightest edge of a theory starting to poke its way into her consciousness, but she'd had the same nagging feeling for weeks now. "The answer's here: I just haven't found all the pieces yet." She looked up at the princess. "But we need to keep the dark magics quiet. We need the time the next hour will pay for." She swallowed. "I need to strap myself to that table."
"No." Princess Celestia's wings flared, her primary feathers nearly reaching from one wall to the other. "Return to your castle, Twilight Sparkle. I will spend this hour under Panacea's knives."
Panacea gasped behind her, but Twilight barely noticed. "No!" she shouted.
The princess's eyes narrowed. "You have done more than your part, Twilight. But if anypony is to face this torture from now on, it will be me."
"Oh, that's not what I'm saying 'no' to." Twilight held up a hoof. "I mean, I don't object to you taking my place on the table, Princess. It's just that, if you do—" She prodded at the partially formed theory in the back of her brain and hated the conclusion her studies all now seemed to be pointing her toward. "Then I think I need to stay and watch."
Both Pinkie and the princess went completely silent, but Pinkie was shaking her head. "What I do's a big, big secret, Twilight, and nopony but my subject can watch me work. That's built into the spell."
"I know." As much as Twilight hated it, this part of the answer was pretty obvious. "Except I've been your subject as well, haven't I? So I should be able to watch just fine."
"But—" Celestia had one front hoof drawn up to her chest, her eyes wide. "Why would you want to do such a thing?"
Pinkie's face showed just as much confusion. Twilight looked back and forth between the two and tried to find the words. "The Panacea spell is all about creating pain and suffering in order to feed the angry maw of the dark magic at the center of the world. But it's not just her subject's pain and suffering: it's Panacea's, too, when she's forced to torture and kill a pony she knows and cares about. It's the combination that gives the spell its power."
Princess Celestia looked like she'd been kicked in the stomach. "That...that's ghastly!"
Twilight forced herself to speak calmly. "Everything about this spell is ghastly. Like I said, that's what gives it its power: the more horror it generates, the better things go for the rest of Equestria."
"That's true," Panacea murmured, her listless mane and blank expression showing that she was once again slipping into control of Pinkie. "And that's why this last time was so strong, isn't it? Not just 'cause you're an alicorn, but also 'cause you're one of my very bestest friends." Panacea's grin stretched over her snout like a tangle of spiderwebs. "'Cause friendship is magic!"
"Then—" Celestia's snow-white hide somehow went pale.
"Yes." Examining her theory, Twilight felt that same thrill she always did when she'd finally cracked an especially thorny problem. "As the Princess of Friendship, if I force myself to watch the pony I love and respect more than any other in the world give herself to the knives of a pony who's one of my dearest friends—" She wanted a quill and parchment to do the calculations, but she still didn't have enough information and it really didn't matter in the long run. "The force we three create should be beyond the scope of anything this spell has ever generated."
The silence that settled over the room this time made Twilight think of a blanket of thistles. And when Princess Celestia said, "Very well," the barbs of those thistles tore every ounce of good feeling from Twilight's heart.
Celestia turned and started toward the table, and it took all Twilight's strength not to leap forward, get in her way, try to stop her. "Panacea?" she asked.
"Yes, Twilight?" came that breathy rumble from beside her.
"I don't suppose you have another set of restraints?" Watching Princess Celestia lay back on that metal surface and seeing the shiver that ran through her mentor when her warmth met that cold, cold steel, Twilight had to sit, her knees turning to jelly inside her. "Because when you start, I...I don't know if I'll be able to just sit here...."
"You have to," Panacea said, but Twilight couldn't look at her, couldn't look away from Celestia stretching her forelegs, her horn sparking to close the clamps around her fetlocks. "'Cause once I start, I don't stop. Not for anything."
"Yes, yes, yes." She'd spent at least two weeks in a futile search for cracks she could exploit in the conditional sections of the spell, so Twilight knew that Panacea was fully empowered to turn her knives against anypony who attempted to interrupt her duties. "I just—"
Two more clanks echoed through the room, Princess Celestia somehow squeezing herself onto Panacea's table and fastening the final straps into place. "Panacea," the princess said, and Twilight almost cried out when Celestia's voice broke. "I...I'm ready."
How the room got colder, Twilight had no idea, but when Panacea swayed up onto her hind legs, the magic that swirled everywhere made Twilight think the air itself had frozen. Then Panacea was touching her wall of knives, they were flashing and flowing to attach themselves to her hoofs, and—
The first stripe of blood welling from Princess Celestia's chest smacked Twilight hard, a molten copper and ozone stink that wrapped around her horn, too, the sheer wrongness of the magical release nearly knocking her over sideways. The sound as well, the swift clip-clip-clip of the blades digging into that pristine flesh—
And then the screaming began.
Twilight refused to remember that, though, pressing her face, crusty and sticky with dried tears, mucus, and sweat, into Celestia's heaving sides, the princess collapsed on Pinkie's bed after the second longest and most horrible hour Twilight had ever spent. Celestia's cuts were already sealing, her body knitting itself together much faster than Twilight's had, and the cyclone of magical energy that had at times threatened to tear out Twilight's mind and soul had settled to a slight rustling at the edges of her senses.
"Five years," a choking voice said, and Twilight pulled away enough to see Pinkie also curled up against Celestia, her face looking as wrecked as Twilight felt. "The power we summoned up, it should feed those grouchy guts who wanna kill all us ponies for five whole years. Maybe even six."
"Yes!" A fierce joy flooded through Twilight. She'd been right! Not about rebuilding the spell: it was such a mess, she was coming to think that might not even be possible. But by matching the spell power for power, friendship against death, she'd altered the balance, changed the playing field at least, and given her time to think of another approach. Dragging herself forward, she sprawled over Celestia's trembling foreleg and aimed her muzzle at the princess's ear. "Celestia! Did you hear? You've given us five years to find a more permanent answer!"
That Celestia's eyes were still clenched shut seemed odd to Twilight. She was breathing, though, and her lips were moving. Stretching, Twilight raised her head and heard, "My fault. My cowardice. Their deaths. All of it, all my fault..."
"What?" Twilight's skin prickled. "No! No, Celestia, you can't think that! You can't!"
"Can't?" Celestia's eyes snapped open, and the red fire that danced in them almost made Twilight leap away. "How can I not?" she shrieked. "All these years, all these centuries, I've sent ponies to their deaths at Panacea's blades when all it would've taken was an hour of agony on my part to save them!" A keening cry escaped her lips, and she slammed her head back into the wall behind Pinkie's bed. "I killed them all!"
"No!" Twilight jumped onto Celestia's chest and dug her front hoofs into the pastel jumble of her mane. "You didn't know! You couldn't have known! You and Luna, your special talents aren't magic, and Starswirl never understood the power of friendship! You three did what you could in terrible circumstances, and it's only right here and right now that we can see all the levels of the spell! That we can maybe figure out a way around it!"
Celestia was still panting, her eyes still closed, but at least she wasn't pounding her head against the wall. "My fault," she whispered again, though. "All my fault."
A different tack, then. "We can't wallow in it," Twilight said, trying to make her voice firm when all she wanted to do was wrap a hug around Celestia's neck and not let go till they both stopped whimpering. "Those who died, they're the real heroes of Equestria, and we need to remember them." She looked back at Pinkie, leaning against the wall and blinking her tear-crusty eyelids at Twilight. "Panacea knows all their names. We can set up a memorial to them now that—" She couldn't help swallowing against the lump rising in her throat. "Now that nopony will ever have to die again to power this spell."
Twilight was sure she heard a creak when Celestia opened her eyes this time, and she put on the gentlest smile that she could manage. A princess protects her ponies, after all, she thought, looking at Celestia's still unstable expression, and out loud she said, "You did what you felt was best at the time."
Her whole body quivering beneath Twilight, Celestia shook her head. "I can never forgive myself," she murmured. "If I'd been brave enough to give myself to Panacea at the beginning, we would've—"
"No." Twilight pressed a hoof softly against Celestia's lips. "We can't change the past: I've proven that at least once. All we can do is learn from our mistakes, vow to do better, and move on." Her throat threatened to close, but she pushed the words out anyway. "Can you do that much, Celestia? For me? Please?"
For an instant, Celestia froze, and Twilight found herself freezing, too. But then Celestia drew in a breath so big, Twilight, still sprawled across her chest, felt like she was riding a rising balloon. "I can try," she said, then she blew the breath out.
"Good enough." With a flex of her wings, Twilight sailed to the floor beside Pinkie's bed. "Now, we have five years. That gives us time to revise this spell, or if we can't, we'll see if we can't find out where this 'deep, dark magic' lives and pay it a little visit." She looked over her shoulder, both Celestia and Pinkie watching her, their manes starting to perk up. "We'll give it a choice: either it changes its ways and ends up friends with us like Discord, or it can keep acting the way it is now and end up like Tirek." She rubbed her face, itchy with dried tears and phlegm. "But first, I vote we get cleaned up a little."
"Ooo!" Pinkie sprang out from behind Celestia and landed on the carpet. "I'll bet Gummy's got the bathtub all full and soapy! He usually does!"
Celestia gave a gurgle that could've been a laugh and more tumbled than climbed out of bed, her legs wobbly but holding her upright, Twilight was glad to see. "Thank you, Pinkie," she said. "That sounds like exactly what we need."
