Borrowed Dreams
"Spike!"
The diminutive dragon poked his head into Twilight's 'reading room' - or at least one of many so named rooms in the castle.
"What's up, Twilight?" he asked.
Princess Twilight Sparkle stood in the center of the room, looking around, and then fixed her gaze on him. "Did you reshelve this room recently?"
"You told me not to," Spike said.
Twilight frowned. "That doesn't answer my question, Spike."
"I wouldn't do it if you told me not to do it, Twilight," he shot back. "I haven't touched it."
Twilight seethed. "There are four hundred and sixty seven books in this room. There are supposed to be four hundred and sixty eight."
"What's missing?" Spike asked.
Twilight thought back to when she'd last seen the book. She didn't take it out often; only when she felt nostalgic or depressed. Lately she'd been in a decent mood most of the time, so it was not a surprise that she hadn't seen it for a while, but books just didn't get up and walk on their own - not without the appropriate enchantment bestowed upon them by a skilled practitioner.
Twilight spun slowly in the center of the room as she forced her thoughts back to the last time she'd been in the room. Eyes shut, she smiled mirthlessly. Ironically, it'd be so much easier to visualize this if I had the book, she realized. Then she remembered Spike was waiting for her explanation.
To his surprise, Twilight looked embarrassed; her ears folded back, she blushed mildly, and she looked away. "That's not important," she said.
"Wha? Well, it is if you want me to locate it," he told her.
"...you have to promise not to tell anypony else," she said to him.
Spike looked puzzled. "Okay," he said.
Twilight grabbed him in her magic and brought him face-to-face with her. "Pinkie promise," she insisted.
"Yipes! Uhm, okay," he stammered. "How does that go again...? Cross my heart and hope to fly..."
Twilight set him back down on the ground as he finished the oath. Then looked at him, as he waited expectantly for her response.
"It's a photo album," she said, as if that would explain everything.
Spike raised an eyebrow. "You're tied up in knots over some old pictures?" he said.
"It's not that," she shook her head. "It's a special album." How would she explain this? "It's a guilty pleasure. I haven't told anypony else about this. You have to promise not to-"
"Assume I promise to either do or not do everything you want me to," Spike said, trying to hurry the conversation along. "What's so important about this album? Was it recovered from the Golden Oak?"
"Well, yes, but that's not it," Twilight said, sitting down to begin her explanation.
Elsewhere, in a dingy apartment on a dark side-street, a figure reached into her bag and extracted the volume in question.
Its cover was decorated with a simple embossed design; it looked to be a very ordinary tome. There was nothing that betrayed the power held within its pages.
The cover was flipped open to reveal the first page of pictures. They were skipped, pages turned to browse through the life and times of a particular purple pony immortalized within.
The figure stopped and flipped back one page, freezing in place when she spied a particular image. There was a long moment's pause, and then a slender finger tentatively reached out and made contact with the photograph.
After the briefest instant of disorientation, she found herself standing inside the doorway of a home. "Yes, yes. We'll get right on that!" she was saying, ushering a pony out through the door. "Well, goodnight!" She then hastily slammed the door shut, leaving herself in darkness.
"Huh. Rude much?" came a voice from behind her as she turned around.
"Sorry, Spike," she found herself apologizing. "But I have to convince the Princess that Nightmare Moon is coming, and I'm not going to get anything done with a bunch of craaazy ponies tryn'a make friends all the time. Now. Where's the light?"
Suddenly, the darkness evaporated and a cacophony of cheers, party horns, and other noisemakers assaulted her senses.
"SURPRISE!" dozens of ponies cheered.
"Hi! I'm Pinkie Pie!" said an impossibly pink pony, thrusting her face forward well beyond the limits of personal space. "And I threw this party just for you! Were you surprised? Were ya? Were ya?" She bounded into the air and landed behind the figure. "Huh? Huh? Huh?"
"Very surprised," the figure said. "Libraries are supposed to be quiet."
The pink one ranted on and on as the figure went through the room, beelining to the food & beverage table set up at one end. She was so distracted by Pinkie's rambling that she just grabbed the first bottle she saw and poured a healthy two hooves' worth of whatever it was into a cup, intending to down it whole.
"...And now you have lots and lots of friends! Isn't that fantastic?" Pinkie concluded.
The figure turned and suddenly felt her stomach do somersaults. A quintet of ponies stood before her, and she knew something bad was coming. Before she could give it another thought, her body demanded relief, and she leapt into the air, barking a high-pitched, keening scream, flailing all her legs about in agony.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a mint-colored unicorn pop up from the crowd, grin, and levitate up a camera. Don't you dare take a picture of me at the worst possible mom- she thought, before the flash went off.
The finger left the surface of the picture as if the owner had received an electrical shock. But in truth, the shock was more psychological.
Sunset Shimmer stared at the photo beneath her hand, of Twilight Sparkle the unicorn pony, recoiling from accidentally chugging half a bottle of hot sauce.
"Holy crap," she whispered. "This thing really works."
"It's not here, Twilight," Spike said, climbing out of yet another bookcase.
"It has to be somewhere," Twilight shot back, stamping a hoof on the ground in frustration. "Look again!"
Spike turned to look over his shoulder at her. "Are you sure you didn't take it to another room?"
"No! I'm certain," Twilight said. Because this is the quietest room in the castle where I can hide away from ponies without being found, she didn't add. When she wanted to reminisce in her memories, she wanted to be left alone and in private. She'd never have taken the album out of that room.
"I'm not sure I want to know this," Spike said, reaching the floor and turning to face the Princess, "but when did you, uhm, use it last?"
"I don't remember," she sniped at him. "What, do you think I made a list of every time I took it out?"
He cocked an eyebrow at her. "Do you really want me to answer that?"
Hey, that's not a bad idea, Twilight mused, then forced herself to think back to the last time she remembered being in possession of the album. "Give me a minute to think. There was the week after we moved in here... no, then after that was... there was more after... erm, let's just forget about that time... and then..." Twilight's pupils shrank to pinpricks. "Oh, no..." she whispered.
"What?" Spike inquired, but Twilight was already thinking back to the time a visitor emerged from the magic mirror.
Sunset gave 'her' brother a loving embrace and bid him farewell, watching him board the coach with his new bride, and then suddenly being surrounded by her friends. A split second later, the bouquet came soaring out of the side of the coach, and a marshmallow-white unicorn leapt up out of the crowd to lunge for it, and a flashbulb went off.
Sunset Shimmer the high-school student blinked away the spots from her eyes as the memory of Twilight's presence at the Royal Wedding was replaced by the walls of her apartment. She was too enraptured to stop now.
She flipped another page and put her palm to yet another picture.
"A little while ago," she found herself saying, "my teacher and mentor Princess Celestia sent me to live in Ponyville. She sent me to study friendship - which is something I didn't really care much about."
Sunset turned to see five familiar ponies waving from beyond a castle archway, urging her on.
"But now, on a day like today... I can honestly say I wouldn't be standing here today if it weren't for the friendships I'd made with all of you." She waved the ponies forward with a golden-shod purple hoof.
"Each one of you taught me something about friendship. And for that, I will always be grateful." She turned back to face outward on the balcony, recognizing that there were thousands of ponies hanging on her every word.
"Today, I consider myself one of the luckiest ponies in Equestria. Thank you, friends. Thank you everypony!"
Sunset was rocked backwards from the emotional force - even though she tried to tell herself she was surprised by the hundreds of flashbulbs that had suddenly gone off after 'she' finished speaking.
I feel like dirt for taking this without permission, she admitted to herself, looking over the photo album and its pages. But I miss Equestria so much. And if this gives me a chance to 'visit'...
She turned finally to a blank page in the book, and her heart leapt into her throat. Everything up to this moment had just been a test, to prove that the enchantment was more than a myth, and that it would work in this magically sterile (by comparison) world. This was the true reason for sneaking into Twilight's personal reading room during her last, brief visit 'home', and absconding with this book. She had a life in this world now, and felt she had no place in Equestria any longer, but she couldn't let it go.
She leaned over the back of the chair to her purse, opened it, and searched around until she found a special keepsake tucked away in a discreet corner. It contained some of the things she had brought with her when she first came here from Equestria so many moons ago - her most treasured possessions. She'd abandoned her home, her belongings, and her very life - but she hadn't the strength to part with everything.
With trembling fingers, she extracted a photograph from the plastic packet. Equestrian photo paper was brittle compared to the human world, and between the picture's age and its importance, she was terrified it would crumble to dust from being handled.
Ever so gently she laid the photograph on the empty page, pressing it into place using the plastic folding picture carrier (from the human world) it and three others resided in until moments ago. When she lifted her hand and the photo carrier from the page, the picture lay there against the semi-adhesive page, like all the others on the previous pages in the book.
Using her free hand, which she had to will to stop shaking, Sunset reached out and touched the image.
Sunset found herself at the front of a room of ponies. Some were young like her, one or two were older - adult - ponies. Before her was a large box sitting on a stool.
"Good morning," she heard herself say. Unlike all the other memories, the voice this time was her own, albeit younger. She could see her own crimson and golden mane cascading around the sides of her face, and feel her horn protruding from her head.
"As you all know, today is Princess Celestia's official birthday," she said. "In celebration, I am going to show you a skill I learned this past week all on my own. Fire magic."
There were murmurs from the other schoolfoals, and, though Sunset didn't notice it until this trip through the memory, troubled looks from the two teachers standing to the side of the room. She deftly and skillfully removed the lid of the box with her levitation, setting it aside with practiced ease, revealing within a cake that was easily bigger than her, topped with pink, teal, and white icing, and a number of candles.
Her classmates were awed by the cake, she noted smugly. She lifted out the knife and set it on the teachers' desk, then turned her focus to the candles, and let her magic fly.
At first the wicks of the candles only glowed orange slightly, but then, in an instant, all of them erupted in tiny flames. Sunset's face grew a wide smile and she was filled with joy.
Then, something unexpected happened. It would take her years of practice to understand what she'd done wrong, but her filly self could only stare on in horror as the flames grew larger and higher until the entire cake was one large ball of flame, the cardboard box crumbling and tendrils of red, yellow, and orange licking against the ceiling tiles, all while her classmates screamed and shrieked.
She tried frantically to reverse the effect, but it was far too late and the magical energy had become much too strong for her to control. She briefly considered throwing herself over the cake to smother the flames, but thought better of it at the last second.
Still, that put her right beside the inferno when one of the teachers returned from the hallway, having retrieved a fire extinguisher, and let it loose at the conflagration.
When everything was settled down, the box and its contents had been obliterated, the stool and the ceiling had been scorched, and the children who weren't terrified were bellowing with laughter. The teacher had sent a foam-covered Sunset into the hall, mostly to shield her from the humiliation of the other kids' jeers and jokes.
It was there she sat, fuming and shameful, when she heard hoofsteps clicking down the hallway. She didn't look up, instead focusing on the pool of white foam dripping from her mane and horn onto the polished marble floor before her.
"Ahem," a voice said, and her ears pricked up. Her head almost involuntarily shot upwards as she recognized the speaker.
"P-princess," Sunset whispered, looking into the face of the brilliantly white alicorn. Tears filled the younger pony's eyes.
"What is the matter?" Celestia said curiously.
"I-I'm sorry," Sunset said, choking back sobs. "I was tr-trying to honor you, and I f-failed..."
"I know all about what went on inside," Celestia said, nodding to the classroom door. "And I disagree."
Sunset sniffled and looked up again. "H-huh?"
"I know no one as young as you brave enough to try fire magic on their own, Sunset Shimmer," Celestia said. "It's hardly a surprise that, without formal training, you had trouble keeping control."
Sunset blinked the tears away, her mind screaming at her that the namesake of Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns knew her name.
"Besides," Celestia said with a mild laugh, "this is the most excitement I've had on my 'birthday' in quite a time."
"Huh?" Sunset answered bewilderedly, but she wouldn't get the joke for years.
Celestia used a hoof to wipe away some of the foam from the filly's face, then evaporated it from her golden-shod hoof with her magic. "I think with some appropriate tutoring, you could become quite a powerful unicorn."
Sunset just sat there listening, unsure of what was being said. Celestia helped clarify it a moment later.
"Do you agree, Sunset Shimmer?"
"What?" Sunset blurted out, in the back of her mind realizing how improper she was being, speaking so bluntly to royalty.
Celestia smiled a patient smile. "Will you be my personal student?"
Sunset blinked and almost fainted.
Sunset released her hand from the photo, the last few moments etched in her mind's eye; walking alongside the Princess with a large, white wing around her shoulders, and directed into the school's office, where an aide cleaned her up and then took her photograph standing proudly beside the alicorn.
Tears were in her eyes, and she wiped them away with her fingertips. Oh, Princess, I'm so sorry I betrayed you, she lamented.
A buzzing sound slowly worked its way into her consciousness. With a start, she realized it was the magical journal in her bag, vibrating with a message.
Great, she said to herself, sniffling as she reached for the bag. She's figured it out. A younger - but not too much younger - Sunset Shimmer would have ignored it, but this Sunset had learned to own up to her actions, ever since she found herself sobbing in a crater in front of the school, with six girls standing above her, offering their hands to her.
Sunset opened the book.
Dear Sunset Shimmer,
I presume you have my photo album. I should have expec I'm disappointed, but I also understand why you took it. I only wish you'd asked. Some of my favorite memories are in there.
I have only one thing to say: Please take good care of it.
Sunset blinked. "Wha?" she murmured to herself.
Okay, two things: Don't show anyponybody else how it works. That world isn't ready for magic. That, and... I'm creeped out enough by just one person living my 'photos' out. I'm not comfortable letting anybody else in that world experience life in Equestria.
Like I said, I can understand why it might be of interest to you. Please use it responsibly.
Your friend,
Princess Twilight Sparkle
Sunset smiled, wiping away more tears, and sighed, looking to the ceiling and mouthing the words, "Thank you, Twilight."
Then, she noticed a postscript.
P.S. If you need more photos, we can try to arrange something the next time the portal lines up.
I think I know somepony who might have some pictures and fond memories of you.
Smiling, and wiping away even more tears, Sunset nodded. "I bet you do," she said.