Twilight pulled her head from her book, the very movement providing an explanation for her mental state; the title, too, was marked The Elements of Literary Construction—the provision of the fact a clear example, in Twilight's mind, of subtle plot establishment.
“Everything,” she said, lowering her head onto her hooves to provide a physical clue as to her mood, “everything I do—”
She simply trailed off and sighed, reflecting the end of her train of logic—and then she tensed up, realising that she, in her relaxation, had done it again; she had done something working into a greater narrative, relaxed so that the story would move on. That was what the book had called it: the narrative.
It made everything make sense. Everything.
“C’mon, Twilight,” she began, before she realised that her talking to herself represented growing madness; where she would have said ‘keep it together’, she simply stopped and stood, and walked down the stairs, deciding to do something without purpose. She froze half-way, knowing that her search for pointlessness had a point and therefore was part of the narrative, and so she stood there for a few minutes with her eyes and mouth wide open as she tried to solve the problem through sheer willpower.
“Uh, Twi?” Spike peeked up through the gap between the second floor and the stairs on which Twilight lay frozen, “You alright, Twi?”
She turned her head slowly towards him, and as she noticed that her expression would make her out to be a maniac and be a further submission to the plot she knew she was the protagonist of, she—with disconcerting quickness—turned her face into serenity incarnate. “You’re a prompt.”
Spike raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“If you hadn’t come here,” she said, stomping down the stairs step by step as she arched her back slightly before it became obvious to her that the pose made her look predatory—the narrative was out to get her, she was sure, and so she forced herself to walk like a normal pony even as she continued to speak. “If you hadn’t come here, I would’ve stood here forever, and that wouldn’t be a very good narrative, would it? So you’re a prompt!”
“You’re sounding really silly right now. You know that, right?”
“Is that so?” she said, looking at the ceiling to avoid staring at him as she might be expected to, a second before she turned back when she decided that perhaps the narrative wanted her to subvert cultural norms and make her look insane. “What were you doing before you got here?”
Spike put his claws up to his chin and thought for a bit. “Well,” he said, “I wasn’t really doing anything importan—”
“See? If you were an actual character, you’d have some sort of indication that you were hiding something when you said that! You’re not important in this narrative as a character, you’re just here to get me to move!” It was then that she realised that her escalating voice was, too, a reflection of the narrative, perhaps telling a story on her insanity; so she lowered her voice, and kept her normal pose for about a second before she thought that perhaps what the narrative wanted was to make herself seem sane and she was playing right into its clutches, and spent some time alternating between the two positions as Spike looked on with a fair measure of incredulity.
“Well,” he chuckled nervously, “You sure are moving now, Twi.”
She suddenly stopped and stood still. “Humor.”
“Humor?”
Twilight jumped off the top of the stairs, landing rather roughly on her hooves in front of Spike; the latter, in shock, jumped backwards and landed on his posterior. “That’s right. Humor. You made a joke.”
Spike pushed himself backwards a little as Twilight inched closer; she had a rather disconcerting grin on her face. “Y—yeah, I made a joke. Did something really bad happen? Is something wrong?” His demeanour had a considerable amount of fear in it.
“No, no, no!” Twilight said, immediately standing straight and smiling in a tempered, not-at-all-insane way. “You just proved my hypothesis. You just sit around and make jokes and set up punchlines and fulfil a minor but important function, sometimes to have a little adventure of your own but never as much as us! You’re just a side character!”
Spike, who had already been rather terrified by Twilight’s show of insanity, began to tear up a bit. “I’m just a—I’m just a side character? That’s all I am to you?”
Twilight stopped, then, and took a look at herself, and then to Spike’s tearful eyes. “I’m a monster,” she said, and stepped back quickly and turned around—for just a second, before she had another revelation. “No, no! That’s just what the narrative wants me to do! It wants me to get mad at you and realize what a jerk I’ve been and then say sorry and cuddle and then forget—”
Spike, pushing himself onto his feet and dusting himself off, wiping the tears from his eyes, “Twilight, what in Celestia’s name are you talking about?”
“Well,” she said, whipping back around—and then she realised that the only reason she had turned around in the first place was to facilitate a dramatic turn that she did not personally plan, and she realised that she had stopped saying something because it would be inconvenient for the narrative, and she hadn't the slightest clue as to what she could possibly do that wasn't some reflection of the narrative.
So she just broke down and screamed a wordless cry of primal, existential rage, and shoved her head into her hooves. Then she just as suddenly pulled them out, and her face looked as though she was mildly shocked for no reason in particular—the exact configuration she had forced it into.
Spike backed off, careful to look for any possible obstructions—genre-savviness, Twilight recognised, a hallmark of metafictional comedy, perhaps what the twisted narrative was forcing her into now—as he stepped back. “Maybe you should go see Fluttershy or something. She might—”
Twilight interrupted with a vengeance. “Fluttershy? No, no! Fluttershy’s just gonna make me feel better! She’s gonna try and calm me down! Guess what, Spike? Guess what?”
“What?”
“Answering a rhetorical question with another question! A prime example of comedic relief!” she said, very consciously keeping her voice low-pitched and face happy as she strode towards the door like Rarity might; certainly nothing she would normally do, she assured herself, clearly breaking from the narrative except for the possibility that the narrative might. “I’m gonna go to Pinkie Pie. She’ll know what to do about this.”
The baby dragon had done quite a fine job of not being a baby; he was quite well back to his old self by the time Twilight had finished her sentence, and spoke with air-quotes. “What if that’s what ‘the narrative’ wants you to do because it'd be funny seeing you take advice from Pinkie Pie?”
Twilight froze at the possibility before she thought that her freezing might have been contrived as a sort of comedic relief and so she simply ignored Spike as she pulled the door open, got out and slammed it as hard as possible; a few books fell off their shelves, and though Twilight may once have called it a coincidence of the transference of force, she would have then called it for what she was sure it was: a contrivance for comedic effect.
Spike let out a deep breath, shaking his head as he let himself take a seat on the floor.
“I swear,” he said, shaking his head once more and finally standing up, executing what Twilight would have called an ‘establishment of mundanity, constructed to make her seem paranoid’. “Sometimes I wonder what goes through that pony’s head.”
He began putting the books back on the shelves.
Some day, he'd have to talk to Princess Celestia about counselling options.
Twilight ran through Ponyville, measuring every step carefully; at first, she thought that bumping into other ponies—‘background ponies’—would be what the narrative wanted her to do, to symbolise her sense of urgency, but then she had the thought that perhaps the narrative wanted her to think that way, and so she very purposefully bumped and knocked over a mint-green pony on her way through, running past her fallen form.
She knocked over a filly, three more mares and a stallion before she reached Sugarcube Corner, in fact, but they weren’t important enough for her to remember. What most certainly was important was Pinkie; if anyone would be free from the narrative, it ought to be her.
Pinkie waved as she bounded into the candy-shop. “Welcome to Sugarc—”
“Pinkie,” she said, noting the way she had stopped speaking as soon as she’d been interrupted, “I know you know about what I know.”
“But what do you know about what I know about you know?” She giggled for no reason in particular; Twilight noted that her giggling was establishing a character trait, and her eyes narrowed.
“This isn’t a laughing matter, Pinkie Pie!”
Pinkie Pie’s eyes opened wide and her face became very quickly a mask of solemnity.
“What happened? Did you set the tree on fire? Did you turn yourself into a spider and fill the town with spider babies? Did you make some dream-reading jewellery and find out that Fluttershy wants Luna to—” Her solemn face turned steadily more terrified at the possibilities as she put her two hooves up against her mouth to stifle herself; Twilight winced at the tricolon, a clear feature of constructed speech.
Normally, she would have asked what Fluttershy wanted Luna to em-dash, but she knew then, analysing her prior interactions, that she would interrupt her own sentence and then start the one she had now begun; she liked efficiency, and so said what she needed to. “Don’t play games with me, Pinkie. I know what you’re doing—”
And then she realised that part of her character was her like of efficiency, and so she began to interlace her sentences simply to be epistemically inefficient. “—what you does are Fluttershy showing want your Luna personality do through to your her exaggeration?”
Twilight glowed a little inside from the feat of semantic ambiguity she had pulled off; one of Pinkie Pie’s eyebrows raised as she looked closer. “Twi? Are you feeling alright?” She looked deep into her eyes for about a second before drawing back and gasping. “Are you a changeling? I’ve got to tell Princess Celestia!” She made as if to canter out the door; Twilight’s magic enveloped Pinkie’s tail in a purple glow as she attempted to bound out the door, making her yelp, spin around in the air and fall splayed onto the ground.
Twilight stepped over her, looking down menacingly; then she realised that the spin had been engineered by the narrative to allow her to look down and instead grabbed Pinkie by the hoof, pulled her over onto her front and proceeded to push her face into Pinkie’s, bending down and bumping muzzles. “Nice try, Pinkie, but I want answers.”
She rubbed her head and shook it, her face bursting into an enormous grin. “Sure! I love helping my friends out! This one time, Rarity asked me ‘what’s in your head’ and I told her and then she kind of cried for a while and that was sad so I threw her a party to make it all better!”
“Vaguely terrifying comment, surely revealed later to be innocuous. I know your game, Pinkie. Your non sequiturs and your reality magic—you know what’s happening, don’t you? You know about the narrative.”
“What’s—” She deepened her voice, eyes wide. “The naaaa-rative?”
“It’s everything, Pinkie. Don’t you see? Every single thing we do pushes us along, makes us do what we do. I read Elements of Literary Construction. You know what’s going on. Everything we say’s written by something, everything we do has a reason. We’re not thinking for ourselves, Pinkie.”
Pinkie nodded sadly. “I know what you mean, Twilight.”
Twilight considered her response. “I’m going to say ‘really’, and you’re going to say ‘nope’, and I’m going to get frustrated with you, right?”
“Nope!”
“Nope?”
“Yep.”
“Wait, yep-nope or yep-nope-nope?—aha. I see. You’re going to talk like you know what I’m saying and then you’re going to get really close to understanding it but it’ll turn out that you didn’t really know. I’ve seen it. It’s part of your personality, Pinkie. You’re nothing more than a set of words stuck onto a list. Cheerful, bubbly—but I know you’re more than that. I’ve seen you defy the narrative. Tell me the truth, Pinkie.”
“I really don’t know what you’re talking about, Twilight! I mean—”
Twilight interrupted her by pushing the top of her muzzle up against her face, her hooves pushing down and granulating around hers. “Do you think I’m playing, Pinkie? If you don’t ”
Pinkie looked wide-eyed at her for a second before the tears began to flow. Even though Twilight knew that she only did so because the narrative would demand it, extrapolating from her tiny pool of traits, she could not help but feel the pain of a regret that she could not push away, although that too was clearly a manipulation of the narrative.
“Look,” she said, her tone somewhat softer as she tried to atone—doubtlessly, she was sure even as she did it, to please the narrative, which clearly wanted a flawed protagonist, “I just want to know. When you talk to nowhere—who are you talking to?”
She seemed to consider the question, and the tears seemed to fade almost immediately. Twilight noted the mood swing with a touch of distaste. She seemed to have forgotten Twilight’s violence; convenient, she noted. It wouldn’t have been very much of a story if the mare had decided not to speak to her. “Life.”
Twilight raised an eyebrow before pushing it down again as hard as she could, trying not to give the narrative the satisfaction of involuntary movement. “Life?”
“Yeah! Y’know when you feel like somepony’s watching you but you don’t really know what and sometimes you feel like you can’t really control yourself and sometimes you do things that you can’t really explain? Sometimes I get this feeling that I should, y’know, talk to it!”
“I’ve never had that feeling before.” Perhaps because it wouldn’t be convenient for the narrative to write. She had a sudden stroke of understanding. “So, the narrative tells you to do things, but it lets you know that you’ve been told?”
“What are you talking about, Twi? I mean, are you saying that we’re nothing but a bunch of thoughts in somepony’s head? That’s just silly.”
And it struck her; Pinkie wasn’t free from the narrative.
Pinkie was another tool; maybe an experiment, maybe some sort of twisted joke the narrative had played.
And the narrative let her see her, let her understand.
No, that wasn’t right. The narrative hadn’t just let her understand; she understood nothing.
The narrative wrote her understanding.
She recoiled from the being and clutched at her chest with a hoof as she stood upon two legs, knowing the pointlessness and the insignificance and the construction of the gesture; she glanced at nowhere in particular, realised that every single thought she had ever made was never hers; she knew that the realisation itself was constructed, built, and that the only reason that it disturbed her and disturbed her that way was by the narrative’s twisted grace.
“Twilight? Are you... okay?”
She moved her limbs as if they were marionettes on strings and got onto all four of her hooves; even the feeling of disassociation, she knew, had been written, had been scripted. There was nothing she could do that wasn’t.
The terror came as a sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach, in her limbs, in every single part of her body that she knew she could move; a deep sort of powerlessness that she knew she only felt because she knew.
Knowledge she knew she had only had because she was being written to have it.
“Princess Celestia,” she choked out to herself. “Have to get to Princess Celestia. Goddess of the land. Savior of ponykind. Bearer of the sun.” She didn’t say ‘tool of the narrative’; despite everything, she still had hope.
And she felt the doubt that she knew that the narrative had planted, and knew where the hope came from as well; and she knew that her urge to know was part of the narrative, and she knew her acceptance towards the course that she would take towards it was part of it as well. Pinkie hadn’t made a sound since Twilight spoke, instead cowering on the floor; maybe, Twilight thought, the narrative had grown tired of writing of her, but she knew that the narrative had only brought her to her attention because it wanted her to know that Pinkie still existed. But did she, when she didn't see her?
She wondered what Pinkie’s thoughts were like when nopony wrote them. Perhaps she was, in some twisted way, free: maybe she was enslaved, instead of the narrative, to the beliefs of whatever audience their narrative had. Perhaps the audience controlled her as much as the narrative.
Or perhaps it was nothing but nonexistence, some thought at the back of some writer's head.
Her horn began to shine with a purple glow as she continued to move to what she knew was a script, and she looked down at Pinkie as she raised her head and disappeared in an enormous flash, the sight of Pinkie's silhouette against the pink wall the last sight in Twilight's mind.
She hoped that in those empty moments she was happy.
Twilight Sparkle looked up and for quite a long moment she was rather convinced that she might be dead.
Perhaps in her death she would meet her creator; then she wondered whether any of the stories she had written had their characters jump from the paper as she killed them off, and shuddered. At least the narrative hadn’t made her a zompony.
Her vision cleared a bit and she felt an immeasurably strong sense of relief as she saw the unmistakable roof of the Royal Throne Room.
“Twilight, my dear, faithful student. What a pleasant surprise.”
She shook her head a bit, whipping her hair back and forth in the process. Conveniently for the narrative, the concentration she focused into the teleport had left her too exhausted to think too much.
At the very least, her limbs were under her control. She used them to bow as low as she could to the one pony that might have an answer. “Princess Celestia.”
She waved her hoof towards the guards; they looked at each other, and then at the tired, frazzled, somewhat dangerous-looking protagonist. Being of no consequence to the story whatsoever, they followed orders as was their role.
Twilight would once have paid them no thought, but now she pitied them completely; she supposed that she should be grateful, at least, to have been given a small insight by the narrative into the world.
And then she remembered that the narrative had scripted that feeling for her, and that the narrative had similarly let her have that moment of ironic realisation, and that the narrative had let her recover from her mental exhaustion just to torment her with apocalypses upon revelations. If not for the Princess in the room, she might have screamed; instead, she simply stood silently, looking for all the world to be a slightly frazzled, wide-eyed, perfectly normal pony.
Celestia broke the silence. “While I do appreciate your wish to see me, I must admit it discomforts me a little that you have been staring at me for a few minutes, completely silent.” She still had that usual smile on her face; Twilight knew that the implication of her smile in this situation was a subtle indication of her restrained yet emotional personality.
Then she remembered that she was thinking of the Princess—the bearer of the sun although only by the powers given by narrative, ruler of Equestria only because the narrative put the power into her hands and tried to remember her place. “Princess, I’ve recently run into a—I’ve recently made a discovery. A very disturbing discovery.”
“Is that so, Twilight?” Celestia reclined a bit into her throne, slightly tense. Twilight could tell that she only was tense to set up a semi-humorous relaxation, but she felt rather flattered that Princess Celestia was taking her warnings seriously for once, even if only to set up a joke. “I trust your judgement, Twilight, if it is of such importance that you must speak to me in person.”
She explained everything, and saw Celestia only growing tenser.
Of course her analysis of Celestia’s tensity didn’t come true—it was probably amusing to the audience. She tried not to feel the doubt that perhaps the narrative was beginning to make her wrong purely for the effect, that she would begin to think things incorrectly, that she might even become stupid, lose her most important asset, lose her defining trait—she couldn’t believe she was defining herself by some arbitrary list of traits that the narrative itself had written into her head—just because of the narrative—
She cut the chain of logic off, forcibly, before it could go any further—but then she realised that the only reason that she might do that would be to make the narrative more streamlined, make it break away from the recursive pattern and make the narrative easier to follow, easier to craft.
And the narrative had, par for the course, granted her the twisted realisation, probably simply to mock her, and probably was making her force herself to calm down—she probably would calm down regardless of whatever effort she made, although the effort itself was from the narrative—just to move the story onwards.
She couldn’t help but squeak slightly, shuddering.
Blissfully—conveniently, Twilight remembered—the Princess appeared to have taken quite some time to formulate a response. “When you write a story, Twilight, when you write—do you write about every fly on every wall? Every grain on every bit of wood?”
Twilight, even through her haze of returned contemplation, could feel a slight tinge of red on her cheeks as she recalled her last story. “I describe the position of every baryon, Princess.”
Celestia seemed to repress a sigh. “Every single one?”
“Well, even though the Clophug interpretation argues—”
She had lapsed.
For the span of two sentences, she had forgotten entirely about herself to say something that she knew would sound silly—not to Princess Celestia, who she knew had gotten somewhat used to her personality, but any audience. She was the subject of a joke about her personality.
And Celestia didn’t set it up, and neither did she.
The Princess—the goddess in whose name she swore—wasn’t free.
And the narrative made her know it.
“Twilight? Are you alright?”
She shuddered, refusing to look up. She would rather remember her as a princess than look at her know and know her to be a tool. “It’s happening again. Don’t you see? I—we forgot everything about the narrative for a moment. I took an analogy literally, and you set up a joke without intending it to be.”
She did not stop, stomping her hoof down. “Are you going to continue to make the point you were going to? Where the gaps in detail are? Are you going to make the point so that whatever audience this narrative has can be satisfied? Are you going to be a tool, just like Pinkie? Just like me?”
If Twilight had been looking up, she would have seen a rather subtle shift in Celestia’s posture.
“I agree with you, Twilight.”
Twilight, under normal circumstances, might have spoken as if she had been called mad and interrupted herself to express surprise. Instead, she turned her head wearily back up towards Celestia so that she could see her face as they spoke—although she was certain that the feeling of social propriety was felt only because it would be more convenient for the narrative in some way—and stared deep into her eyes.
“You don’t think I’m crazy?” She was fairly sure that it was because the narrative had grown tired of drawing out her torment, and she at once decided that because the thought had come into her head that it was true.
“Twilight Sparkle, my faithful student, what is something that any good story must, in some measure, have?”
“I’m going to say secondary derivatives of the concept only to be confronted by the root concept. That’s how comedies work, right?”
She could almost hear Celestia suppressing a sigh. Some kind of expressive filler, probably to preface a line of dialogue and prevent the sensation of talking heads. “Sense.”
Twilight nodded. She might have repeated Celestia’s words, but that would have been another little device of the narrative she wasn’t being inclined by the narrative to comply with.
She shook her head a little.
“Ask yourself this—if the writers of this ‘narrative’ wanted amusement from your suffering, why doesn’t it simply torture you endlessly?”
“Because repetition diminishes.”
“But everything that has happened to you has been logical, correct? Every thought the consequent of a relevant antecedent. What if the narrative simply wants to be logical?”
Twilight walked slowly towards her, hooves hitting on the red carpet as she came closer. “It only seems logical to us because we’re in a world where the antecedent leads to the consequent. The narrative is mocking us. It knows it. Every word I’m saying is part of the narrative. Every thought I think.”
“Does it matter?” Celestia rose from her throne, stepping down to walk towards Twilight. “If, in the end, you act as you should, does it matter that you act only on the will of another? You say that you are a part of the narrative—”
Princess Celestia stooped down to bring herself down to eye level with Twilight. “—what if the narrative is merely a part of you?”
Twilight stared back a bit. “A part of me?”
Celestia rose to her full height once more. “If I simply ceased to exist before you, would you say that it would be strange? Would you not say that an author who wrote such a thing would be incompetent, or absurd?”
“If I agree with you, I’m agreeing with the narrative. Maybe in whatever world the narrative is written, sudden existence failure would be considered the pinnacle of literature.” She felt a strange sort of tugging on her heart as she said the words; possibly, she had spewed some reference to popular culture, or some non-sequitur meant to inspire discussion.
“But what can we judge other than from ourselves? Why must the reality, whatever it may be, change the way you act or think? If in the end there is no escape, what is there to do but live?”
Twilight laughed somewhat bitterly. “It looks like the narrative’s too cynical for me to agree, Princess. Maybe it wants me to have some big bucking epiphany before something changes and we can live happily ever after. Maybe I’m just supposed to keep acting like this ‘til I end up in some box and people throw bits at me out of pity so the audience feels sorry for me. Maybe you’re being written by a different writer. Maybe whatever’s writing this narrative is a self-depre— ”
“Twilight,” she said, and shook her head deeply. “If the narrative’s trying to convince you, why aren't you convinced?”
She shook her head. “You said it, Princess. Maybe they just want to write a good story with some good sense. Maybe you’ll beat me upside the head and I’ll become alright again?” She felt herself being flooded with ideas; perhaps the narrative had seen fit to dump its plans on her, and she accepted them with glee she knew was engineered. “You know how I know none of this is real?”
Celestia put her hoof up against her face, apparently surrendered by then. “How?”
“You’re a goddess, Celestia. Apparently you’re supposed to be the pony that created the whole world. You could change anything. But you haven’t, because that’s not good storytelling. That’s deus ex machina.” She went up to Celestia, pulled her hoof up and poked her in the ribs—hard. “See, now it’d be funny if you actually just incinerated me, or threw me into the dungeons, because that’d prove that we’re in a funny story! Now you’ve got a reason!” Her manic rant had a complete calm about it; Twilight knew that she was only being rebellious for the sake of it, by now, and took a certain comfort in it, delighting in the very fact that her comfort wasn’t hers, that her acceptance wasn’t hers, that nothing was hers.
The princess simply stared at her.
Twilight grinned wider than she ever had in her life. “Are you gonna throw me into the nuthouse, huh? Make this a comedy again? Make the audience laugh! Throw me into the nuthouse, maybe throw some slapstick electroshock in there!”
In the thousands of years Celestia had spent ruling her world, she had seen her share of insane ponies; fortunately, none of them had been an incarnation of one of the world’s fundamental forces. Certainly not until then, when the most powerful unicorn in existence had just—for lack of any word better expressing the term—lost it.
“Twilight.”
“What?”
Celestia, the ruler of Equestria, the god-princess of an entire race, raised her right forehoof and smacked Twilight across the face with the fury of a sun filtered by a pair of UV-resistant glasses. The lavender pony flew across the floor, sliding a few painful centimetres before coming to a halt.
Celestia went over to Twilight’s standing form. “I’m sorry that I must do this.”
“Physical violence, huh? I’m sure that works on tel—” Smack.
“What? Wrote yourself into a corner, author avatar? What’s your real name? Merry Sew, Princess of the—” Smack.
“You know, a concussion won’t solve my problems. A concussion is a serious neurological—” Smack.
“I’m sure the onomatopoeia for these is ‘whack’. I bet I’m wrong just to make things funni—” Whack.
Celestia had never lowered herself to physical force, before; she didn’t enjoy the experience. It was a few minutes before Celestia had stopped; it took some while for Twilight to notice that she was no longer being brutalised.
“What?” Twilight wheezed out, not even sinking so low as to touch her cheeks and soothe the hurt flesh. “Slapstick gag getting—” she coughed a bit, “—old, Princess?” As much as she seemed to be unphased, she still felt the pain all over her body, and almost regretted not fighting back.
“You’ve lost all connection with reality, Twilight.” She meant her words.
Twilight laughed at nothing in particular. “I guess I have.”
Celestia’s horn lit up; she could feel the magic resonating with her horn, and tried to resist. She knew she had the power, and knew that she could, but as she tried to resist the bruises around her body acted up, spots of burning fire all over.
“Oh, so that’s why you hit me! Concentration! So what’re you gonna do? Brainwash me? This is gonna be a brainwashing plo—”
Twilight Sparkle disappeared in a burst of white light.
She appeared almost immediately after, lying on her bed.
She felt her cheek and winced. The bruises were definitely still there.
She still remembered the narrative, everything. Celestia hadn’t tampered with that. She knew everything, and she knew why she knew it; her train of thought was almost uninterrupted. She ran a probe on her own body, her mind; nothing. She still felt a little bit of what she had felt, but without Celestia to take it out on she felt as if her momentum had been thoroughly negated.
Spike came running up the stairs. “There you are, Twi! I’ve got a le—”
His sentence was interrupted with the belching of a letter bound by the royal seal; Spike began to read it.
My dearest, most faithful student Twilight,
‘My dearest, most faithful student’. She was still her student.
I had to injure you physically to ensure that you would not be able to resist my teleportation spell and potentially cause reaction damage. I hope that you understand.
“Whoa. You got beat up by Princess Celestia?” He looked a bit closer at Twilight. “Ooh. That’s nasty.”
“Just keep reading, Spike.”
The compulsive urges you may have may never go, and you may always doubt. I am powerful, but I am not omnipotent; I cannot change the way you think, and I cannot change the way you feel. That power is within you.
Spike grumbled. “So much for counselling. Did you seriously get into a fight with the Prin—”
Twilight flung a lamp at Spike; he ducked rather deftly. “Alright, I’ll read the letter! Jeez.”
Nopony can tell you what to feel, but I suggest that you take some time to calm down. Although it might seem hopeless, to feel as though you are nothing but a creation, I can assure you that in my thousands of years I have felt every manner of despair, every sort of pain.
I have always pulled through.
Always remember: friendship is magic.
Twilight mumbled a bit. “I guess the story’s over, isn’t it?”
Spike raised an eyebrow. “Huh?”
She laid back and didn’t bother to analyse the gesture’s meaning; her entire demeanour was resignatory. “The narrative’s up. There’s no more plot to cover. Going back wouldn’t accomplish anything. It’d just make the narrative repetitive, so I can't just do that.”
“So, uh—”
“Yeah, Spike?”
“What now?”
Twilight laughed to herself a bit. “I should schedule some animal-feeding with Fluttershy tomorrow. If there even is a tomorrow. I don’t think me helping Fluttershy feed her animals would be a great story to tell.”
She paused for a bit.
“Unless we made out doing it.”
Spike seemed to contemplate the idea before shaking his head. “Don’t you need some company, though?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
They sat around for a while, both very quiet.
Spike broke the silence with the subtlety of Spike. “So, did you really get beat up by Princess Celestia?”
“Yeah.” She shook her head a bit, smiling faintly. “I wonder if it’ll hurt as much as it does now when the narrative stops.”
It did.
