The Way Things Are, the Way They Must Be.
It had happened again. They’d promised me they could help, but it hadn’t made any difference.
I could still see the interior of Twilight’s lab, the machines along the walls blinking like fireflies in the night. There was Twilight and my mother, watching from beyond the chalk circle on the floor. Even mon canari was in attendance, smiling like she had all the confidence in the world. She knew I could do this.
“Alright, Dove,” Twilight said as she lowered her safety goggles, and motioned for the others to do the same. “Why don’t we give a little light spell a try?”
“Oui.” I felt the familiar tingle of energy tracing along my horn. I’d heard unicorns compare it to a trickle of cool water along the bone, soothing and ticklish. I always thought it felt cold and slimy, thick like the gleaming trail left by a slug. I hated it, but for mon canari and for my mother, I would do anything. I let it pool at the tip of my horn and I thought of brightness, of warmth, of everything good and wholesome about a light in the night.
“Readings are normal so far.” I could see Twilight smiling, her teeth reflecting the pale glow of my horn. “Let’s try something a little more complex.”
“How about a fireworks spell?” My mother pulled herself up a bit, even puffing out her chest. “I taught it to my Dove when she was a filly. Do you remember your fireworks spell?”
I did indeed remember my fireworks spell. It was almost identical to the light spell, just a matter of picturing the displays of color and light, and winding the spell together so it could leave the horn before bursting. It was the closest I’d ever come to a spell I’d ever liked; all presentation, no technique. Best of all, it was completely harmless.
“Oui, mère,” I said.
Again, I felt the magic pooling in my horn, slithering up the spiral. I began to wind it together, picturing the colors. White doves, small ones for a small lab. I wound it tighter and tighter until I felt sure it would hold together the meter or so it needed to. As soon as I was certain everything was perfect, I let it go.
And that’s when it squirmed.
“Oooohhhh!” they said as one, watching the spell burst into sparks.
Even as they made sounds of awe, I could feel my gut twisting in knots. I knew this feeling, the feeling just before something went wrong. I wanted to scream, to warn them away, but a part of me wanted to hope that maybe this time would be different. Maybe this time it would just be a spell. So I watched the doves burst into a constellation of lights, watched them drift through the air and settle about the room.
Watched as each light began to burn.
“Look out!” Twilight skittered back, the others following, but there was nowhere to go. Around the room, rolls of discarded graph paper caught fire like kindling. Flames raced around the room like burning serpents, crawling inside the whirring machines and making them belch clouds of noxious smoke. The bite of burning plastic stung my eyes and still I watched as Twilight and my mother frantically conjured buckets of water. I watched as mon canari tried to beat out the flames with her beautiful wings.
I watched as the serpents began to consume them, too.
“No!” Again I grabbed for my magic, desperate for anything to help. I thought of water, lots of water, anything to put out the flames, the heat. I aimed my horn and as I let the spell fly, I felt it squirm again. I felt the water spray from my horn, felt it splash against my face, bubbling and hot. It was boiling. I’d conjured boiling water to extinguish her.
I would never forget her scream as long as I lived.
The ceiling was plain, white, and blank. Tile after tile, repeating until they met the blank white walls. I remembered the first time my mother had taken me to a hospital, after I’d broken my horn. The walls had been trimmed with pictures of prancing fillies, playing and laughing, an attempt to distract those within from their scrapes and bruises. There were no fillies prancing along these walls. Just stark, clinical, reality.
They wouldn’t tell me what happened to Starburst, to mon canari. They wouldn’t lie and tell me she was alright, and that told me everything I needed to know. I’d burned her worse than the fire had. I’d burned her so badly they didn’t have the heart to tell me. All they would say was how sorry they were, how they had never guessed. How things would be better next time. How they would fix this.
But they wouldn’t fix it. There was only one way to fix it.
I’d met Whirlwind once. A beautiful pegasus, even without her wing. Would I still be beautiful without my horn? With a great scar gouged to the bone? They could do it here. They had saws for such things, bone saws. Maybe, if I was lucky, I could find one. I could put an end to this once and for all. Cut to the root. Cut myself free.
All I had to do was walk.
I tried, Celestia help me I tried to walk. I tried to get up and roll over, but every motion made my bandages slip, sending fresh waves of agony through my skin. The serpents had almost gotten me too, lapping at my coat before Twilight teleported us out. I’d probably look like a worm, or one of those hairless rats. It was such a shame that horns did not burn as well. I could have roasted to ash, and there it would be, pinned forever to my head, following me to the grave.
I tried one more time, but I tipped to the side and the shift drowned me in agony. The world went dark. I’m not sure how long I was out, but when I opened my eyes, it was the same inky darkness all around. The same repeating ceiling overhead.
“Je te hais.” They didn’t have mirrors in the room, for obvious reasons, but I could see myself all the same, floating in my mind’s eye. “Je te hais!”
“Now now now, that isn’t healthy.”
I hadn’t seen the door to my room open, and yet its light spilled across me. It was blinding to look into, but I could see a mare silhouetted within the frame. She was tall, taller than any mare I’d seen. She seemed taller even than the frame itself, as impossible as it was. The only thing I could see of her was her eyes, slitted like a snake’s and a deep lilac.
“W-who are you?” I said, frozen in my bed. I wanted to back up, to move away from this mare, but the bandages warned me not to try. Just looking at her, I felt afraid. “Nurse? Nurse!”
“There are no nurses here, child.” She continued to stand in the door, her shadow reaching towards my bed even as she stood still as stone. “Nor is this a hospital.”
“What do you mean?” In spite of my bandages, I tried to get away, only they didn’t hurt or sear. I looked down at my hooves, only to be greeted by my own pale fur. “What?”
“We are in a dream. A dream far beyond the reach of your dear Luna, so do not even try.” The mare waved a hoof and the walls of the hospital flew away, leaving me alone in my bed, the covers my only protection. Even with light from all around, the mare remained nothing more than a shadow, her inky outline cut from night. There was only one mare it could be.
“N-nightmare…” I whispered.
So this was it. I was finally doomed by my crimes. It had taken setting my friends alight, but the end was finally here. I wish I could say I accepted it, that I knew it was justified, but in my heart I was still afraid. For all that I had done, to face judgement now, like this, was terrifying. It was too soon. Too sudden.
“Don’t wet yourself,” Nightmare said as she sauntered casually up to my bed and sat on the end. Now, not only could I see her eyes, but her teeth, grinning wickedly at me. “We have much to discuss, and that just wouldn’t be comfortable.”
“This, this is about my horn, isn’t?” I said. What else could it be?
“Yes. Though perhaps not how you think,” Nightmare said as she sighed, her eyes wandering around the void. “Would you like something more comfortable? We may be talking for a while.”
“Non, merci.” I wasn’t sure what to think. I had been expecting jaws and chains, not small talk. Still, I wasn’t convinced that wouldn’t still be the case. Simply being close to her felt like being close to a dark window at night. Even when she looked away, it felt like I was being watched by something else. “What do you want?”
“Did I not just say? To talk.” She rolled her eyes, and settled herself across the base of my bed, making me scoot back in unease. “About your horn, and that little curse that’s been following you around.”
“You-- you know about it?” For the first time in as long as I could remember, I felt the dim glimmer of hope, sour though it was to come from such a source. “What do you know?”
“That no matter what you do,” she said, “it turns foul. That you need not even attempt a spell for doom to issue forth from your horn. That as long as you can remember, you’ve been a harbinger of harm to those you love.” Each of her words cut like a knife, all the sharper for being true. “That you have no idea why this is.”
“Why?” I said. Why had I been cursed? I wasn’t a bad pony. I tried my best. I even tried to be a magician without magic. I tried to break my horn off for good. I didn’t want to hurt anypony. I never wanted to hurt anypony. “What did I do to deserve this?”
“In a word? Nothing.” I looked up at her, and saw sympathy in her eyes. “This isn’t a punishment, or a penance. It is destiny.”
“What?” I asked. Destiny? How could this be my destiny? To suffer, to hurt those I love?
“We, all of us, have a place in this world. Some of us are cobblers, some of us are nightmares, but we are all part of the greater plan.” She smiled, but it wasn’t the grin of a sadist toying with her prey. It was the smile of a mother for a foal who’d skinned her knee. “Even you and I have a place in all things.”
“We do?” I asked. What did she mean we? What was she getting at?
“Yes, it may not be a glamorous or pleasant place, but if destiny asked what we wished for ourselves, it wouldn’t be destiny, would it?” She stood up from my bed and walked around to the side. This time, I didn’t scoot away, even as she extended a hoof. “Come, I want to show you something.”
I don’t know why I took her hoof. A part of me expected it to sprout teeth and devour me. Instead, as I touched the surface of her darkness, I felt cool. Like the first breeze of evening on a clear night. Quiet and chill. As I did, the void began to take on a form. There were great, fuzzy towers of purple and gold. There were blobs of color that became ponies, strolling the streets of what was soon Canterlot. I knew this place, with its great open gardens, and central podium. It was the court of the sun.
“Look over there,” she said. “What do you see?” She pointed her hoof, and I followed her direction to a golden statue that glittered in the sun. The sight took my breath away.
“Is that…?” I instantly felt stupid for asking. No other pony had wings so magnificent. There, before me, was Starburst, rendered in gold that did justice to her coat. She stood tall as a house and twice that in sheer presence as her mighty wings embraced the sky. In the direct sunlight, she was too glorious to behold, my eyes squinting against the glare.
“She’s beautiful,” I said.
“Many heros are, if not in person, then at least in retrospect. But that is not what I wanted you to see.” She shifted her hoof lower, and I followed it down, to Star’s hooves. “What’s that?”
It was another figure, black as night. In the middle of day, its polished onyx drank in the light, until it seemed a slice of the abyss. So black was its surface, that it took me a moment to find its form and realize it was a pony. Soon I could make out the hooves, and the body, and from there I realized that its lavender gems were eyes, and the short splash of marble it’s--
“No.” It was my mane. Those were my eyes, slitted and narrow. It was me. Star was standing triumphant over a nightmare of me. “No, that’s impossible!”
“To every hero, a villain.” Nightmare sighed and shook her head, those sad eyes following me as I backed away. “That is the way of things.”
“No, no! I would never hurt her!” I said. But I already had, hadn’t I? I had doused her in boiling water after setting her on fire. Wasn’t that what villains did? “I-- I--”
“Clearly you didn’t hurt her.” Nightmare smirked softly, beginning to trot towards me as a wall pressed into my back. “Otherwise I’m sure they’d have sprung for a touching memorial with her laid out in dignified repose. Certainly not something so triumphant.”
“But-- no! I would never fight her, I would never be…” I looked at Nightmare, and the pieces began to fall into place. “No! No! I won’t!”
I would never be her host. Never!
“Is this truly so terrible?” Nightmare swept her hooves around, encompassing the sunlit courtyard. “The laughter of foals? The whispered nothings of sweethearts? Even the sky is sunny as can be.”
“What does that have to do with anything? You would destroy all this! Destroy Star and everything good in the world!” I said. I turned to run, the sad clucks of Nightmare’s tongue following me as a fled. The streets passed by in a blur, my legs carrying me faster than they ever had before. All I could think of was getting away.
Instead, moments later, I stumbled back into the courtyard, back into the Nightmare.
“Welcome back,” she said.
“No! I’ll never succumb to you!” I turned again, looking for another exit, but all Nightmare did was sigh.
“You don’t understand.” I heard a noise, and in one leap she stood in front of me, a hoof on my shoulder holding me in place. “I am not here to possess you, or force you. I simply want to show you a world where you take on my mantle, and then a world where you do not.”
“You-- what?” This close, it was hard to be afraid. She should be eating me, ripping me apart, and instead all she did was stare at me with those sad eyes.
“Here, turn around.” She pointed, and I reluctantly did so, only to find myself staring at the same court of the sun. Except Star’s statue was gone.
“What, where did--” I found myself shushed with a hoof.
“You said you would never succumb, didn’t you?” she asked. “Well, here is that world. No Nightmare Dove, no villain for Starburst to defeat. No memorial of her heroism, for there is no heroism to commit.” She raised an eyebrow and suddenly I felt like I had the first time mom had caught me sneaking a cookie. “Can you accept that?”
“Oui, I think.” I glanced around the court, taking a closer look. Again, there were foals, and couples, and the clear sunshine above. It looked for all the world like it was the same, and yet something made me feel off. If I hadn’t spent as much time with Star as I did, I wouldn’t have noticed. “Where are the guards?”
“What need has a peaceful land for guards?” Nightmare asked as she shrugged, but she wore a small smile, again one might hold for a clever filly. “There’s no Nightmare in this world, after all. In fact, there’s no evil at all in this world.”
I glanced around, but something in my mind made me wary. Why was she showing me this? I asked as much.
“Because there’s something you need to understand about the nature of things,” she said. “About candles in the daylight.”
Before I could ask her what she meant, she started walking away, a hoof beckoning me to follow. After a moment, I did, eyes wandering over the clean, sunlight streets, and smiling ponies we passed. It did seem normal enough, but the lack of guards still send a chill up my spine every time I noticed it. It just felt sideways.
“Here,” she said, stopping before a house that seemed the same as every other. “Go in.”
I almost asked her why, but when I turned to her, she just shook her head and pointed again. Instead, I turned toward the house. It was a smallish thing, wedged in between the ivory towers that defined Canterlot. Nothing truly struck me about it, except maybe a few Norheygian decorations on the shutters and door. Slowly, I trotted up to the door and knocked.
Nopony responded.
I knocked again and turned back to Nightmare. She just shrugged and tipped her head towards the door, so I knocked once more. Suddenly, there was the sound of something clattering from within the house, and what had to be a muffled curse. The sound of the voice make the fur on the back of my neck stand on end.
“What is it?” the occupant said, pulling open the door.
Standing there was Starburst. Just, not any Starburst I’d ever known, not mon canari. I’d recognized the statue in the square, but this was like a whole other pony. Her mane had run long, wrapped up in an untidy ponytail. There were bags under her bloodshot eyes and a stoop to her shoulders no guard would ever carry. Had her colors changed by the smallest tinge, I would have said it wasn’t Star standing before me.
“Dove?” she asked softly, her eyes wide with shock.
“Mon Canari? Whatever happened to you?” I realized my mistake as soon as I’d spoken. Life had happened to her, simply put. Of course, she averted her eyes when I spoke, and she ground a hoof into the floor just hard enough to scuff the finish.
“It’s been a hard week.” She continued to refuse to meet my eyes, stepping back a little bit in invitation. “Would you, uh, like to come in?”
“I would, yes,” I said.
In truth, I wanted nothing less, but a part of me had to know. As she pulled open the door, it revealed everything I’d feared and worse. Empty cider bottles lay strewn about old grease-stained furniture. Broken toys lay littered among them, as many broken from age as from careless hoofsteps. As she led me in, she cleared a few news papers of the cleanest sofa, and offered it to me, all while keeping her eyes glued to the floor.
“Sorry, wasn’t expecting company.” She made an awkward, shuffling motion towards the kitchen. “Would you like something to eat?”
“Non, merci.” I felt uncomfortable sitting on the couch, but I couldn’t bear to refuse the gesture. Already, it felt like I’d kicked a puppy, and was standing with my hoof raised to finish the job. “It’s been a while.”
“Yeah, don’t really keep in touch anymore. Everypony’s kind of moved on.” She made towards the kitchen anyway, then suddenly went down as a bottle managed to slip under her hoof. With a shout she tried to balance on her free legs, but her other foreleg folded completely, and she hit the ground with a thud. I almost got up to help her, but she waved me off as she staggered up, a limp in her legs becoming painfully apparent.
“Celestia dammit I told him to clean these up! Fletcher! What’s the matter with you?” The sound of her voice hurt my ears. I’d heard Star angry, afraid, frustrated, but never like this. Never this tired and raw.
There were hoofsteps from another door, and Fletcher poked his head out, an arrowhead in his teeth. “What?”
“You-- you’re making arrows?!” Her voice reached a new, shrill crescendo of rage. “Arrows! I work two jobs and here you are making arrows?”
“Some of us have to relax once in a while,” Fletcher growled, stepping up to Star, his head easily looming over her.
“And some of us don’t get to because of our deadbeat husbands!” She swiped a hoof and smacked him across the mouth, knocking the arrowhead away and cutting his lip open in the process. For an instant, the world narrowed to that crimson spray of blood, those few droplets glittering even on the perpetual umbra of their living room's drawn blinds. Fletcher’s muffled curse broke the spell, and upstairs a foal began to cry.
I ran. I couldn’t watch this anymore. It didn’t matter that Nightmare was outside. She was pleasant compared to this.
As I shoved aside the door, there was Nightmare, waiting for me, but everything else was gone. There was just the blank, white void again. Even the door I’d left from had vanished from existence. Bon voyage to it.
“That was a lie.” I felt my voice shake an quaver. Nothing in there was true or possible. It couldn’t be. “Star would never be like that!”
“And all bad ponies are just born that way, I assume?” Nightmare sat there, eyeing me like a naive filly. “Come now, you’ve worked the show circuit. You’ve sat backstage, and seen ponies riding out a dying career. You’ve seen that the death of a dream does to a pony. The way it slowly gnaws out all the good in them.” She looked me in the eye, and I couldn’t look away. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I couldn’t. I’d seen ponies chasing a dead dream. Empty, hollow and angry. Going through the motions just because they’ve got nothing left to do. You could always see it in their eyes. The realization that all they had ever been, all they would be, was nothing. It had been the look in Star’s eyes, the look she’d been hiding in the floor.
“I thought so.” She was still looking at me, those alien eyes hard but sad. “The truth is that ponies need an enemy, just as a candle needs the night. What use has the day for candles? What use has a safe Equestria for heroes? For Starburst?”
“No, she would find another way,” I said I refused to believe that Star, the brilliant, beautiful, hard working pony I knew would ever sink like that. ”She’s better than that.”
“Better than her dreams? Do you really think she’d be happy being a princess? Certainly, what you saw back there was a worst case scenario, but even if she’d been in a palace, married to a prince under rigid, frozen propriety, would she be any happier?” Nightmare asked as she stood and walked closer, until our eyes were barely a hoof apart. “Could she ever be happy as anything other than a hero?”
“There are other villains, better villains.” I could only whisper now. Staring into those eyes was like looking into needles, but I couldn’t turn away.
“I’m not a bad pony.” I said.
“Neither am I.” For an instant, her eyes flashed with mischief, no doubt at my expression. “Surprised?” She pressed a hoof to my lips, silencing whatever I might say. “I know what you’re thinking, but this is what I’ve been trying to show you. I play my part not out of malice, or sadism, but because it is my place.” She stepped away, and the world suddenly split in two, half of the void white, the other black.
“Equestria was meant to be a place of balance, evil opposed to the good. Each gives purpose to the other, and challenges it. Contrasted, they take on meaning. Alone…” The black half disappeared, leaving only the white emptiness. “They become meaningless. Before, this was the light. Now, it’s just nothing. And right now, this is what’s happening to Equestria.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When Twilight first came to Ponyville, she saved the world nearly four times in a single year and became an alicorn to boot. Now, ponies are considering cutting back the royal guard, and the most dangerous foe Twilight’s fought was the opening ribbon for a new library wing.” Nightmare gestured to the endless white void, then to herself, so seemingly insignificant before it all. “Evil is dying, Dove. And soon we will have nothing but the tepid, meaningless void.”
“So, you want me to be evil, for ponies?” I asked. It made a terrible sort of sense, if I was being honest. Starburst, for all her efforts, wasn’t half the hero her mother was. And most of that was simply because there wasn’t that much danger left in the land.
“Yes. It is your destiny!” Nightmare pulled me close, almost a hug, and swept her hoof across the invisible horizon. “Your soul has always known this, always struggled in vain to turn you towards your true purpose. That is why your spells turn against the world. Because it was what they were meant to do!”
I could hear Star’s scream again in my ears, as my water boiled her alive.
I tried to push her away. “No! No, I can’t fight them!”
“Don’t you see?” Nightmare spun me around, gazing into my eyes again as her hooves held my head. “You’re already fighting them! Go ahead, break your horn if you like, you’ll find another way. So long as you live, you’ll be a danger to them, and so long as you fight it, they’ll stand beside you, dead in harm’s way.”
“What?” Her words hit me like ice water.
“You know it’s true,” she said. “They’ll never give up on you so long as you live. A week from now you’ll be back in that lab, every one of them there to show you that you’re not a danger to them, just for you to roast them all again. Or flay them, or whatever your destiny deems best.” I tried to back away, but no matter how many steps I took, she always stayed the same distance from me. “The only escape is to turn from them yourself.”
“No! They’re my friends!” I finally closed my eyes, unable to bear it any longer. And even through the darkness, I could see her gaze. “I can’t!”
“Are they your friends? Because all I’ve heard you care about is yourself!” Suddenly, her words cracked like a whip. “Would you really drag them into death over and over just to keep them close? Would you refuse the obvious answer just because you wish things would be okay?” Her voice dropped lower, the edge slipping away. “Because it’s not going to be. It’s never going to be.”
“Why! Why did it have to be me?” I screamed. I cried. I screamed and cried until I couldn’t anymore. “Why?”
“Because destiny doesn’t care.”
She said the words simply, the way one would explain that rocks sink and pets die. I looked up at her, to see her crying as well, tears gleaming in her eyes.
“Do you think I never wanted friends?” She asked. “To live a normal life? Do you really think I take glee in what I do? That all these botched, megalomaniac plans are supposed to succeed?” I heard her step closer, and I felt her hoof lifting my chin.
“The truth is this. We are damned. Damned for the good of all ponies, but damned all the same. It is our place to oppose them, challenge them, and in so doing make them better. We don’t have to kill them, or even hurt them if you do it right, but they need us there in the opposite corner, or they’ll never get up and fight. They’ll never get up and win.”
I opened my eyes and there she was, kneeling before me, tears in her own. “I’m sorry it had to be you, but know that there’s no pony better. You’re a showmare. This is the chance to put on the show of a lifetime. The show that will save the world.” She stood up, and offered her hoof. “The show that will teach your canary to fly.”
As I looked out from the hospital window, I felt cool. Before me, the town of Ponyville slumbered, lazy, complacent. In the reflection, I could see eyes, lavender and slitted. My eyes. I looked past them, and blinked away the tears, and put on my best wicked smile. It was time to start the show.
“For you, mon canari.”