This Time for Good

by iisaw

First published 21st of December, 2019

Just before her crowning moment, Twilight Sparkle's life is derailed by a message from the future.

Just before her crowning moment, Twilight Sparkle's life is derailed by a message from Star Swirl with excerpts from his journal that he swears he's never written... at least, not yet.

Commissioned by Archangel of the Silent.

WARNING: Contains Shenanigans!

1 Curiosity and Cats

Princess Twilight Sparkle was in a bit of a tizzy when Spike walked into the library of the Castle of Friendship carrying a bundle of papers in his arms. Twilight rapidly scribbled notes in the margins of papers that were already festooned with notes. She sorted several documents into piles, paused, and the re-sorted them into different piles. She added little torn scraps of colored paper as bookmarks to stacks that already sported so many like scraps that they resembled piñatas more than paperwork.

All the while, her exact and careful organizing was underlain by the nearly subconscious drumbeat of a thought: It has to be perfect. It has to be perfect. It has to be perfect.

To anyone else, the tizzy would have been nearly unnoticeable, but Spike spotted the rapid, jerky movement of Twilight's eyes as she scanned the mountain of paperwork spread out across the largest table in the library, and knew exactly what was happening. He also knew the cure.

"Twilight? I know you're busy with the preparations for the coronation and all that, but I think you should look at this right now," he said, holding out the paperwork he was carrying.

"Mm?" Twilight startled ever so slightly, and the cycle of competing conflicts and logistical problems she had been chasing in circles for the last half-hour vanished as she turned her attention to what Spike was offering her. The envelope on the top of the pile was clearly embossed with the cutie mark of Star Swirl the Bearded.

"Oh, thank you, Spike!" she said as she levitated the bundle out of his arms. She glanced back at the table and sighed.

"You can use one of the little tables. Y'know, the ones by the comfy chairs? I'll go and make you some coco to sip while you read."

Twilight knew exactly what he was doing. "I do need to take a break, don't I?"

The little dragon grinned at her. "Yep! And while you're reading your fan-mail from old beardy, I'll look through some of that pile and see if I can't find a dozen or so things that aren't as important as you think they are."

Twilight felt a slight frisson at his words, but took a deep breath and calmed herself. Delegation, she told herself. And trust. I know I can depend on Spike, I just have to believe it!

"Don't forget to make a mug for yourself," she told him with a fond grin.

"Do I ever?" he replied with a smug smile, and headed off for the castle's kitchen.

Twilight settled into a big wingback chair that seemed more snug than it had only a few months ago, and broke the wax seal on the envelope. The letter began with little greeting and no pleasantries.

Twilight,

Along with this letter, I am sending you several sections that have been torn out of my journal. I must assume that they are from some future date, as I have absolutely no memory of having written them, and no knowledge of the events described.

Time spells are inconvenient and irritating at best, and though the journal claims otherwise, I cannot imagine what would have, or will have motivated me to meddle with them again, even in such a small matter as to send a bundle of paper back to my present self, as I appear to have done.

I am vexed beyond measure, and as a certain significant location specified in the text is conveniently near to Ponyville, I am sending you this problem to sort out. I sincerely hope that I need not be pestered with further involvement in this nonsense, but I leave that up to you to decide once you have looked into the matter.

-SS

Twilight sighed and set the letter down on the small table at her side. She unwrapped the bundle and saw that it was, indeed, several bound signatures that looked as if they had been roughly torn out of a book. The writing on the top page began mid-sentence, and made little sense. Without context, the rest of the entry wasn't much better. As best as she could determine, it had something to do with missing supplies or equipment for an alchemical experiment. Nothing that would merit time-shenanigans.

Twilight flipped the page. There was no date on the next entry, which was unsurprising. The journals of Star Swirl's she had read in the Royal Archives as a young student rarely had dates attached to entries, and were all written in the same terse style and appalling penwork she now found before her.

Despite my best efforts to isolate myself, my so-called patron seems to have no trouble in locating me. This morning I found a case full of rare reagents on my workbench along with another set of instructions! My wards and shields are still intact, my warning spells untriggered. If this mysterious figure is so magically powerful and subtle, why cannot they manage their own project?

It is true that some of the reagents are nearly priceless, and will benefit my research greatly, but I almost would rather do without, rather than work with time magic again. Still, what is asked of me seems innocuous enough though foolishly complex, and the rewards have been ample…

But I have misgivings.

Twilight skimmed through another couple of entries that seemed to be only about everyday activities, before she found another one mentioning time magic.

My benefactor/taskmaster has sent another message, and this one leaves no doubt as to their growing impatience. I suppose I will have to set up their mechanism for them without further delay. I have chosen a cavern in the Everfree as a suitable spot. A bat, raccoon, or whatever such vermin as may inhabit the place accidentally displaced in time should make no inconvenient ripples in causality, I think. It should be safe enough.

Below the entry was a roughly sketched map showing the location of the cavern in the limestone bluffs not far from Zecora's home in the forest. Three more entries followed, the first two almost entirely composed of Star Swirl carping about the amount of time the mystery project was taking away from his own work. The third was more interesting.

I completed the mechanism, and after one last check to verify that it contained no offensive spells or anything but pure temporal magic, I set it running. Exactly as I suspected, it sent itself back in time using a ridiculously convoluted and wastefully complex matrix.

I left the cavern and waited for well over the period the device would take to propagate itself forward on a causality wavefront. I detected no changes in the timeline, and there was certainly no explosion due to temporal collison.

I was never able to penetrate the opaque nature of the automatic spell matrices I was given to include in the thing, but I assume they created some compensatory ability to leap-frog over its brief duplicatory existence these past few days.

In any case, my patron left no instructions to verify anything after the device was set running, and so I will return to my own work and hope that they never call on me again.

There were a couple more entries about the alchemical experiment Star Swirl himself was working on, most of which were an extended complaint about a flaw in his crystal alembic, and that was all.

Twilight put down the mangled journal and frowned. There was a mug of lukewarm coco on the table next to her. She reheated it with a bit of magic and sipped at it as she considered what she had read. Sometime in the future, Star Swirl had built a time machine for an unknown person, and then sent back an infuriatingly vague portion of his own journal to…do what? Why not just a note? Had some other pony sent back the journal? What did it all mean, and was there any threat to Equestria involved? Why had Star Swirl done something so risky in the first place? Twilight shook her head. Too many questions. She needed more information.

"Spike? Would you mind holding down the fort while I go check on something?"

Spike looked up from the table and the stacks of papers which were beginning to thin out a bit. "No problem! When will you be back?"

"A few hours at most. I'm just going to see if this thing—" She tapped the journal pages with a hoof tip. "—is where Star Swirl says it is… or should be, anyway."

"Okay," Spike said, returning his attention to the paperwork. "But don't forget that Minuette and Moondancer are coming down on the evening train. You said you'd meet them at the station."

"I should have plenty of time," she replied.

= = =

Zecora poured Twilight a cup of herbal tea and one for herself. "I know the place of which you speak, but not the cave you claim to seek."

Twilight shrugged. "It might not be there now. Maybe the entrance is hidden… or maybe this whole thing is somepony's idea of a weird prank. I'd still like to go out there and take a look."

Zecora nodded and smiled. "Then drink your tea, and let us go. I understand; you have to know!"

They left the tree house and strolled through the peaceful half-light of the woods together. "You are going to come to my coronation, aren't you? I'll send an air chariot just for you, if you like."

Zecora shook her head emphatically. "Through the air to swoop and glide? I would be too terrified!"

Twilight laughed outright at that. "Zecora! You live in the Everfree Forest! Only one pony in a thousand would be brave enough to set hoof in here, and you're scared to fly?" She held up a hoof to stave off another protest. "How about a private railway carriage, then?"

"A public one will quite suffice! To go with friends is very nice," the zebra replied with a grin.

They arrived at the bluffs only minutes later, but the forest changed character quite a bit in that short distance. The usual background sounds of the woods faded away and birdsongs disappeared entirely. The trees thinned out near the rocks, but their shadows stretched out toward them, even though that seemed impossible from the angle of the sun. The additional sunlight had spurred the heavy growth of vines and shrubs across the rise, but they were twisted and discolored in an unnatural way that Twilight couldn't pinpoint. They just seemed subtly wrong somehow.

"There might be a cave mouth hidden behind this vegetation," Twilight speculated. "I'm going to scan the area."

Zecora stood and watched as Twilight swept her magic across the overgrown slope. It was only a moment before she found something. "Ah-ha! Yep, there's an opening just there." She pointed with her horn. "Star Swirl was right."

She turned to Zecora. "Will the… uhmn… the forest mind if I clear away the brush here?" She eyed the malformed greenery with suspicion.

Zecora shook her head. "Be sure to use a gentle touch. A little lift; it won't take much."

Twilight found that Zecora was right. The plants were mostly vines draped across the cave entrance and, with care, she was able to lift them high enough to see the entrance without uprooting them. Another spell grew sturdy hooks of rock where she hung the thick strands so that she could concentrate on other magic.

Her horn brightened and a globe of light formed at the tip of her horn. It detached itself and floated forward into the cavern. The globe revealed a tunnel that went back a long ways before opening up into a larger, darker space.

"Hmn… I don't feel any active magic," Twilight said, half to herself. "Oh! What's this?"

She stepped under the draped vines to peer into the dim light of the cave. Her bubble of light bumped against a large metal object like a curious bumblebee against a window pane. The object was built out of intricate bronze and steel panels and looked fairly new, or at least well cared-for.

Twilight backed up and stood to one side of the mouth of the cavern, motioning Zecora to do the same. "I'm going to give that thing a little magical nudge. If there's a big boom or something, I'll toss a heavy shield spell across the entrance. We should be okay here."

Her zebra friend didn't reply, only lifting one eyebrow slightly as she backed further away from the cave.

Twilight's horn flared briefly and the interior of the cave lit up with a bright lavender glow. To the vast surprise of both mares, the light faded away, and absolutely nothing else happened.

"Huh. Seems to be totally inert. That pulse would have resonated with any basic system, so…" Twilight stood in thought for a moment and then shook her head. "It's a fun mystery, but I don't have time for it right now. I'm going to seal up the entrance and come back when I have a free day or two."

She stepped just inside the mouth of the cave and carefully examined the rock walls and ceiling. "Yes, I can transpose in a plug of granite a few lengths thick here. That should—"

She took one last, unfortunate half-step forward and a pressure plate clicked under her hoof. A purely mechanical mechanism beneath the plate triggered, and two sealed jars smashed together, unleashing a pulse of alchemical energy that activated the spell circle hidden beneath the ground in front of the cavern mouth.

From Twilight's perspective, the tunnel was suddenly down, and she fell forward into the cavern. She threw her wings open and flapped to a stop just before gravity corrected itself and dumped her on the floor of the tunnel. She spun quickly, but the tunnel now ended abruptly behind her in a smooth rock surface.

The tunnel lit up as her horn blazed and she ran through several analytical and defensive spells. It seemed that there was no more active magic in play, but a quick teleportation probe revealed nothing but dense stone where the outside world ought to have been.

Twilight scowled and pushed strength into her probe. Incredibly, it revealed nothing but solid rock for thousands of leagues around her. Except for the dark cavern that stretched into the blackness behind her, of course.

"Tambelon take it!" Twilight cursed. "I guess I'll have to do this now." She turned again and walked into the darkness.

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

Thanks to Archangel of the Silent for commissioning this work as well as helping to edit it!

2 Cell Mates

The first thing Twilight did was examine the bronze and steel contraption she had seen from outside the cave. It was not a true mechanism, but more of a magical grounding system. Any active magic that tried to act on it would be channeled away and dispersed into the earth.

Twilight did some rough calculations in her head and determined that it would be significantly less effective that most shield spells an average unicorn guard could raise. A few good blasts of direct power would overload it and burn out the wires that were designed to channel away incoming magic.

So, Twilight thought, just a decoy? Something to lure in a curious unicorn? She couldn't imagine what other purpose it might serve, though as bait, it had certainly worked on her.

She tamped down the self-recriminations that sprang to mind and circled the object. Behind it, a tunnel sloped down into darkness. "Anycreature home?" she called out as she lit her horn and sent a detection pulse down into the darkness.

There was no answer and no information from her spell, so she sighed and started walking. The walls looked like ordinary limestone, the passage as if it had been worn by the natural erosion of flowing water. The floor of the tunnel was not as smooth as the walls, and bore the marks of the passage of many creatures. Or possibly one creature many times, Twilight corrected herself.

After a few minutes, Twilight thought she saw a lessening of the darkness ahead and cancelled her light spell. Sure enough, there was a dim glow from the walls: a reflection of some brighter source reflected many times.

Twilight advanced more slowly and cautiously until she was fairly certain only one turn of the passageway separated her from the source of the light. It seemed to be natural sunlight, but surely that was too much to hope for.

"Hello! Is anypony there?"

Aside from a garbled echo from the tunnel behind her, there was no reply. But there was some sound from up ahead—a low "white" noise like that made by distant wind or waves.

Twilight cast a tight shield spell around herself and trotted forward, calling out a greeting again. Within a quarter furlong, she came to a steep slope that rose up into the center of a large open space. She dashed up the ramp and skidded to a halt, scanning the area as quickly as she could for any signs of danger.

The huge cavern was… fairly pleasant, surprisingly. The ground beneath Twilight's hooves was earthy and moist, and there were several scattered patches of severely-cropped grass growing there. That white noise she had heard was a crystal-clear brook running through the center of the space, falling from a fissure in the distant wall and flowing over a clean gravel bed until it disappeared into one of the many openings that pierced the opposite wall.

Perhaps the most important observation (from Twilight's point of view) was the broad patch of clear blue sky some distance overhead. A trap with such an easy out? she thought. Or maybe what's up there is the point of all this? She dropped her shield and reviewed several other spell matrices. Maybe I'll cast an invisibility spell in case there are any hostile creatures up there, and then—

"Huh," came a throaty voice from off to her side somewhere. "I guess there's a reason it wanted me back here."

Twilight spun to face the speaker and found a large, warm-gray pegasus mare emerging from one of the many tunnels in the cavern's walls. She approached with a confident stride, as if she were quite accustomed to the uneven ground beneath her hooves. Her reddish mane and tail were both cropped short, but not severely so. She was powerfully built, but not in the usual lean and wiry way of a speed flyer. Her body was heavy with well-developed muscle and her cutie mark was a dagger buried point-down in a pile of golden coins. Now that's interesting, Twilight thought. Conflict and money. A sport fighter of some sort? With that build, she'd probably be a good one.

The pegasus stopped several body-lengths away and cocked her head. "Got any food in those saddlebags, uni?"

"No, sorry," Twilight replied. "My name's Twi—"

"You don't mind if I check for myself, do you?" the mare replied, and began to advance once more. The way she moved in a slight crouch, her shoulders and haunches rippling with each step, immediately brought the impression of a predator to Twilight's mind.

Time to nip this in the bud, and as long as politeness is off the table… Twilight lifted the burly pegasus off her hooves and then set her down again a few lengths further away from her. She gave one little pulse of constriction before releasing her, as a courteous reminder that there was more than one sort of strength.

"Whoof!" The mare gasped in a lungful of air to replace the one that had been squeezed out of her.

"As I was saying..." Twilight continued in a bright and friendly tone, as if the little test of dominance hadn't even happened. "...my name is Twilight Sparkle. And your name is…?"

"Uh… I'm Windfall."

"Pleased to meet you, Windfall! Could you please tell me where exactly we are?"

The big mare shrugged and looked away in the general direction of not Twilight. "Celestia-forsaken magic cave, right? I assume you just got nabbed, same as me."

"I'm afraid so. I assume from your tone of voice, that the patch of sky above us isn't a way out?"

"Nope," the mare said shortly. "Not for me, and for sure not for you, even if it wasn't magically jiggered somehow." Windfall looked back at Twilight and suddenly realized that there were wings half-concealed beneath her saddlebags. "Holy flaming skynuggets, you're an alicorn!"

Twilight had never been a pony to consciously depend on her rank or position, but after all the years of fighting for Equestria in an increasingly public way, she was just a little bit miffed when she wasn't even recognized. "Yes. Perhaps I should have introduced myself as Princess Twilight Sparkle, but the situation seemed a bit informal for that."

"So there's two of you now? Aren't you a bit short for a princess?"

"Uh… five of us now, actually." Twilight corrected her, losing her grip on sarcasm in surprise. "Cadance and I became alicorns quite a while ago. And then there's Luna... Where have you been the last several years that you haven't heard about us?"

"No kidding?" Windfall gave her a flat stare. "Well, I never cared much for the doings of royalty," she said with a definite sneer in her voice on the last word. "Been overseas a lot, fighting for… well, a few different employers. The zebs pay damned good for air cover."

A mercenary, thought Twilight with distaste. Why couldn't I be trapped here with a scholar of magic or a historian? "Well, that doesn't matter. What we need to concentrate on is getting out of here. What stops you from flying out?"

"Dunno," Windfall replied unhelpfully. "I flap like mad, and it feels like I'm climbing, but I never get closer to the rim than a couple of wingspans. Must be some kind of magic crap. Isn't that your specialty, Your Elevatedess?"

"Just Twilight," Twilight said, trying to suppress her irritation. "I won't even make you bow in my presence." She lifted her saddlebags off her back, pushing an unnecessary amount of energy into her levitation field to make it sparkle and glow excessively. "Anypony else in here with us?"

Windfall didn't reply at once, and then said in a softer tone of voice than previously, "No."

"Alright then. I hope you don't mind if I check this out for myself." Twilight threw open her wings with a showy whumph of displaced air and leaped upward.

It was pretty much as Windfall had described. Twilight climbed quickly, and then slowed to a stop, even though her wingbeats were constant and powerful. It did feel like she was still ascending. The airflow over her wings, the complex feedback of inertia within her body, and even the subtle signals from her inner ear… all contradicted the absolutely motionless cave around her.

She fixed her attention on the empty, cloudless sky above her and calculated a short teleport; just far enough to put her above the rim and into open air. She triggered the spell, there was a brief instant of interstitial nothingness, and she reappeared… in exactly the same spot she'd left.

Okay, she thought. Whoever put together this little trap was pretty clever. Is it altered spacetime, or just my perceptions? Either way, it seems like I'm not going to be able to brute-force my way out of this. Time to put some brain-power on the problem. Let's see what info I can get out of the muscle-head.

Twilight canted her wings and glided down to the cavern floor, where Windfall was industriously ransacking her saddle bags.

"Hey!"

Windfall looked up at her and dropped the empty bags from her mouth. "What? I'm freaking starving, Princess! I haven't had much to eat but wild grass for months, and precious little of that!"

Twilight folded her wings away and frowned at the mess the pegasus had made of her supplies. "I told you I didn't have any food."

"Well, now I know for sure how honest you are." Windfall snorted and walked over to the stream to drink.

Twilight grumbled to herself as she shook the dirt off her papers and tools and stowed them back in the bags. "Okay then, you've been here for months, so you must have explored the place. Where do all these tunnels lead to?

The big pegasus laughed. "Depends on what time of day it is."

"I'm serious," Twilight said, trying to keep her voice level. "I need to get out of here as soon as possible, and I assume you want the same thing."

"You got that right, Princess!" Windfall said, making the word sound like an insult. "And I'm not kidding. Those tunnels move around. Every few hours the whole layout changes. Different directions, different connections. There are other places like this—" She waved a wing at the open cavern. "—but smaller. Some have just grass, some have more decent food, and there's even an apple tree… somewhere. Freakin' hard to get to, or I would have stripped it bare by now."

Twilight nodded. "Good. That's good information."

"What? It's good that this damned place is screwing around with me?"

Twilight had to consciously restrain herself from going into lecture mode. The mare of action she was dealing with would have just as little patience for a well-constructed, step-by-step analysis as Rainbow Dash. Or less. Yeah, probably less, Twilight thought. Simple and direct: "There's a reason behind this. Nopony goes to this much trouble just to 'mess with' other ponies." Except maybe Discord, but he's as subtle as a pie to the face.

"If you say so," the pegasus said shrugging her heavy shoulders. "So what's the reason?"

"That's what I'm going to figure out. I was lured here, so… wait! You were captured, too. What made you come out here in the first place?"

Windfall's eyes narrowed and she looked away for a moment, as if she were considering lying to Twilight. After a moment, she sighed and said, "The lost treasure of Trotankamun. Yeah, I know it sounds like skynuggets, but Millie… that's Millibar, my squad mate… she found this map. Supposed to lead to a tomb full of gold and jewels. Her and Pounder and me went to check it out, and… damnit!" The mare bucked at the nearest wall in anger, smashing limestone and scattering fragments of rock across the ground.

"Don't worry," Twilight tried to reassure her. "I'll get us out of this. You'll see."

Windfall scowled at her. "Well, don't try digging," she said in a near snarl. She held up one badly chipped and worn forehoof. "As soon as you go to sleep or pass out, all your work is filled back in!"

Twilight hated to see the pegasus so agitated. Even considering that Windfall was a strange (and slightly unpleasant) pony she'd just met, it was obvious she'd suffered a lot from her captivity. Twilight, having undergone way too much of that sort of thing herself, empathized with her a great deal. "This is a magical trap, right? Well, I'm one of the most magical ponies in Equestria, and a magical scholar as well. You couldn't ask for a better friend to help you escape from this place."

The scowl on the big mare's face softened, though she didn't actually smile. "Well… thanks, I guess. I hope you can do it." She sighed and looked down at the stubble of grass on the floor of the cavern. "I just wish you'd brought bags full of food, rather than paper."

Twilight considered that for a moment and then tried an object-specific teleport. As she had feared, due to the constraints of the trap they were in, she could no longer produce a piping hot apple pie on demand. But there might possibly be something she could do to alleviate Windfall's short-term hunger.

"Step off the grass, would you please?"

Windfall looked puzzled, but did as she was asked.

Twilight lit her horn and concentrated. The growth spell worked as she had expected, and the short, patchy stubble on the cavern floor sprang up into long, thick blades. "It's still just grass, I'm afraid, but at least—"

Windfall immediately had her head buried to the ears in the lush patch between her hooves and was obviously not listening to Twilight's words. Even if she had been listening, she might not have been able to hear them over the runch, runch, runch of the enormous mouthfuls she was ripping out of the turf.

She raised her head after a minute or two, massive brushes of grass blades sticking out of either side of her green-smeared muzzle like a cheerleader's pom-poms. "Know psumphin', Prinphess?" she said, losing wads of half-chewed grass as she spoke. "I phink you an' me are gonna phe pals!"

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

3 Meanwhile, Back in Ponyville

"Discord!"

"Yes, Fluttershy?" The draconiquis looked up from the wastebasket he was reading to find his tiny pegusus friend glaring at him. She was adorable when she was angry. She was adorable at just about any other time he could think of as well, but her anger (such as it was) gave her adorableness an extra tang, somehow.

"I am so disappointed in you!" She stomped her hoof with an adorable little whumf on the soft rug that lay before her sofa.

"Is this about the goose? Because the whole thing was his idea."

"You know exactly what I'm talking about!"

The thing was, Discord didn't know, and that utterly delighted him. A secret that he had told to nopony was that one of the reasons he loved Fluttershy so much was that she was constantly able to surprise him. Him! The Lord of Chaos and King of (admittedly sometimes unpleasant) Surprises! He felt a shiver of wonderful anticipation.

"No really! I don't know what you're talking about. Please… tell me."

Fluttershy sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, then she took another deep breath and opened her eyes. "This thing with Twilight. It's upset everypony, and there are hundreds of guards out trying to—"

"Wait! You know about that?" Again, the delightful surprise!

Fluttershy rolled her eyes. "Who else is powerful enough to make something like this happen? It's not funny!"

Discord blinked in puzzlement. "I was trying to help! It wasn't supposed to be funny… exactly. Though the look on Twilight's face when she realizes—"

"Please." Fluttershy took a step forward and placed a gentle hoof on Discord's shoulder. "Could you just undo it? For me?"

Funny things happened to Discord when Fluttershy batted her eyelashes at him like that. Not funny ha-ha, but funny warm and squiggly. He briefly considered pulling out the squiggly bits inside of him to take a closer look at them to try to figure out what, exactly, was going on, but that would have delayed him in saying, "Of course, Fluttershy! I'm so sorry! I'll go fix it right now!"

With a snap of his claw he appeared in "Grogar's" cave, startling the three villains who were (entirely uncoincidentally) conspiring against him.

"Sorry, sorry!" Discord called out to them. "It's all off! You can all go back to Tartarus now. Don't worry, you'll get paid for the full week!"

Before any of them could react, he had snapped his paw and they all vanished. The corroded old bell that Cozy Glow had been holding behind her back dropped to the floor of the cave with a clank. Discord stared at it for a second. "Huh. So many surprises today!"

With another snap, he vanished and the cave collapsed in on itself.

Fluttershy gave out an adorable little eep when Discord reappeared in her cottage. He reached into the aether and folded up the eep and carefully stored it away so that he could enjoy it again later. "There! All fixed!"

"Oh, good! Thank you so much!" Fluttershy gave him a soft, warm hug, nuzzling his side in a ridiculously adorable way. The squiggles inside Discord overflowed into the 7th dimension, making quite a mess.

Fluttershy eased off her hug and looked up at him admiringly. "I know you usually mean well, but... maybe run these things by me first in the future?"

Discord nodded enthusiastically.

"So… where is Twilight now?" Fluttershy asked.

Discord grinned at her. "I have no idea!"

Fluttershy frowned. (Adorably.)

It took more than an hour for them to get things sorted out, and Discord loved every second of it.

= = =

=

4 Chalk Marks, No Rain

"Uh… Do you really think that's going to help, Princess?"

Twilight briefly glanced over at her shoulder at Windfall, who was wearing a severely skeptical expression and then went back to chalking symbols next to the tunnel entrances around the cavern. "You said these move around, right? If I can keep track of them, maybe I can establish a pattern. I'll be labeling the tunnels themselves as I explore them and keeping an index in my fieldbook."

"Yeahhhh…" Windfall said. "About that… It ain't gonna work. We scratched marks on the walls and they healed up as soon as we took our eyes off them."

"Well, chalk marks are additive, not subtractive, so maybe the maintenance magic won't… Wait." Twilight paused and turned to face Windfall. "You said, 'we.' We? As in you and…?"

Windfall eyes widened and she sputtered what sounded like a foriegn word before answering. "I did? Huh. This place is driving me crazy. Next thing you know, I'll be seeing the Tooth Breezy."

Twilight stared at her for a long time and then turned back to her work. She knew Windfall was lying, but not why or about what exactly. She kept one ear cocked back at the mercenary pony as she drew her symbols. "Wouldn't it be nice if we could reliably find our way to the room with the apple tree?"

Windfall shrugged. "Sure, but with your magic, at least we're not going to starve."

"Ah… About that…" Twilight kept working, but also listened carefully for Windfall's reaction. "Aging magic—the stuff I used on the grass—it takes almost as much energy as a pony gets from food grown that way, so yes, we will starve if we depend on it alone." She didn't mention that her Earth Pony magic would encourage the grass to grow in a different, if slower, way.

Windfall replied with another couple of words in a foriegn language.

"Is that Zwahinney? I speak a little bit, but I don't recognise that phrase."

"Yeah, no surprise there. I bet you don't even know those words in Equuish, Princess!"

Twilight thought for a moment. She had learned a word when Zecora had accidentally slopped some very hot potion on her foreleg one day. A word that Zecora had refused to define for her. A word that wasn't in the official Zwahinny-Equuish dictionary.

"I know kumanina."

Windfall gaped at her for a split second and then laughed. "D'you kiss your mother with that mouth, Princess?"

"Right now, I'd rather eat apples with it. Are you coming?" Twilight turned away and walked into the nearest tunnel.

Still chuckling, Windfall followed her. "You're lucky I have a spot open on my social calendar, Yer Highness."

Twilight chalked another symbol and an arrow a few yards into the tunnel, then continued walking. In a few minutes, they came to a three-way intersection, and she made more marks on the walls of all three tunnels. Otherwise, there was no significant difference between them, so she chose the right fork.

Moments later she heard a low rumbling sound and felt an instant of slight dizziness. She looked questioningly at Windfall.

"Yep, that's it, Princess. The maze just scrambled itself. You want to go back to the split and see for yourself?"

"It will be a few hours before it does that again?" The pegasus nodded at her. "Alright, let's turn around."

They returned to the three-way junction, which was now a four-way split. The tunnel they were in still had the mark Twilight had made, but the other three had completely blank walls.

"Ah! This is good news!" Twilight grinned.

"Uh... I'm beginning to suspect we don't define that word in exactly the same way. What's good about it?"

Twilight cleared her throat. "The mark in this tunnel is still here. That means that the tunnels are probably stable and it's the connections that change. Easier to keep track of than if the stable parts are the intersections. Of course I don't know if that's true of the rooms, or clearings as you call them. That's still to be determined." She turned and began retracing her route into the marked tunnel.

"Don't you want to label these other three?" Windfall asked her.

"No, I'll only be marking ones I can completely transit between shuffles for now, and I'd like to keep moving forward. Do you have a rough estimate of how many leagues of unique passageways there are?"

"You've got to be kidding me."

Twilight shrugged. "Didn't hurt to ask."

They kept moving and marking for another hour or so until they encountered a tunnel that had already been marked. Twilight did a quick mental calculation and wrote a note in her book. They moved on, and encountered another labeled passage in slightly less time. Twilight wrote in her book again.

"Well, you were right about the chalk marks sticking around, Princess. That was some good thinking. Plus… y'know, you had some chalk on you. A lot of chalk, really. Which is—kinda weird, if you ask me." Windfall shook herself and got back on track. "So, is this starting to make some sense to you?"

"Little pieces, Windfall. Each little piece helps reveal the whole image. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle without the box, you know?"

"Yeah, I'm more of a card-playing pony, but I know what you mean. Hey, look! Grapes!"

Sure enough, they had come to a little "clearing" at the end of the tunnel, and its walls were covered in grapevines. There was a small circle of unreachable sky above and no other exit.

Twilight marked the end of the passageway and joined Windfall at the vines. The grapes were perfectly ripe and delicious. After a quarter of an hour of satisfying munching, and while Windfall finished the last bunch, Twilight quietly worked her hooves into the ground near their roots and gave the vines some pony-of-the-soil encouragement. There would be more grapes the next time they returned.

"Let's get back to work," Twilight said, turning toward the chamber's exit.

"Sure thing, Prin—"

Windfall was interrupted by a sharp crack and rumble as a huge slab of stone broke off the wall and dropped across the exit. Twilight jumped and gave a yelp of surprise, but her companion only sighed.

"This again," she said in a low, disgusted voice.

"Don't worry," Twilight told her. "I can move it." Her horn shimmered to life and the surface of the slab sparkled a bit. But nothing else happened. "Or not." She approached the rock and pecked it with the front edge of her hoof. "Iron. Crystalized with just the right impurities to make it a natural anti-thaumic material."

"You mean your ju-ju ain't gonna work on it," Windfall said. "Not surprised, honestly."

"You expected something like this?"

"Yeah. Sorta." Windfall said. "The maze messes with you in other ways than just switching the tunnels around."

Twilight cocked her head and frowned. "Would you like to go into detail about that?"

"Look, it's different every time, okay? There's no way I can predict what's going to happen."

"You could have warned me that something was going to happen."

Windfall snorted and looked away. "Well, now you know."

Twilight swallowed her frustration and took a deep breath. "Okay, so this is… purposeful? What were the other challenges like? What did it take to deal with them?"

Windfall shrugged but remained silent.

Twilight teleported from one side of the chamber to the other. Then she tried to teleport into the tunnel beyond the rockfall, but reappeared at her origin point. "Okaaay… no blind teleports, and I can't use magic on it directly. I could boost rocks at it until it fractures, but that's an incredibly stupid idea that can wait until I'm desperate enough to be stupid."

Windfall gave her an evaluating look and then strolled over to the fallen slab. "If Ground Pounder was here, he could just shove this out of the way." She turned her gaze to Twilight and gave her an obvious once-over that made her a bit uncomfortable. "You're big for a unicorn, but I don't think even you and I together could shift this thing."

"What if you had an earth pony?"

"Yeah, maybe. Maybe if I had a winch, too, but—"

"But I'm not a unicorn," Twilight interrupted her, moving over to stand by the edge of the stone. "Alicorns are blends of all three tribes. I think you'll find that I'm a lot stronger than I look."

Windfall considered that for a moment and then shrugged and made an after-you motion at the slab of stone. "Pick your spot, Princess."

Twilight set her shoulder under a protrusion of the slab and Windfall squeezed in next to her. "On three!" She counted down and they both shoved with all their strength. Once they got it moving, it was easy to tilt it so that it would fall away from the wall and clear the exit. They jumped back out of the way as the slab hit the floor with a whump.

Twilight shook dust off of her wings and looked up to find Windfall staring at her. "What?" she asked. She expected that Windfall would make some expression of amazement at her earth pony strength, but the pegasus surprised her.

"Figures," she said with a snort.

"Um… what figures?" asked Twilight. "If you don't mind me asking about something that might be critical to our survival, I mean."

Windfall sighed. She looked away from Twilight. She took a breath to say something but let it out again without speaking. She half-heartedly kicked some loose rubble with her fore hoof.

Twilight waited.

"It took both of us," Windfall finally said. Twilight was surprised to detect a note of anger in the mare's voice. "That wasn't an accident. I'm betting that's gonna be SOP with these challenges from now on. This place has some sort of plan."

"Makes sense," Twilight replied, nodding. She stepped closer to the fallen slab and poked at it with a hoof, pretending to examine it. Why is she lying to me? she thought. I'm sure that she knows what's going to happen, but she's pretending to guess.

Twilight looked up at the opening above her. "Do you ever see clouds up there? It's hard to tell without them, but it looks like a different time of day."

"No. No clouds," Windfall said. "But night comes. Stars, no moon."

Despite her terse, clipped reply, Twilight could tell from her tone that she wasn't lying and that she felt more comfortable with that sort of question. "Good. Based on the stars I should be able to determine a few things. I'm sorry I didn't pack a timepiece or telescope, though." She shrugged and turned back to Windfall. "Shall we go back to mapping?"

"Sure thing, Princess," Windfall said, in a voice of forced casualness.

= = =

Around three hours later, they found themselves back in the main clearing. Another shuffle had occurred, but nothing that might might have been considered a challenge. Twilight walked over to where the brook flowed out of the chamber and made chalked a symbol above it.

"What's that for?" Windfall asked her.

"I noticed that the channel is deep enough to swim through. It might connect to one of those other waterways we crossed, or it might go elsewhere."

Windfall's eyes went wide. "You're not planning on trying that are you?"

Twilight shook her head. "Not now. Maybe I can work out some other way of including the water channels in my map without having to traverse them." She looked up at the sky. It was growing dark and she noticed for the first time that the lichen that spotted the walls was slightly bioluminescent.

She got out her notebook and flipped back through the pages. "Nowhere near enough data yet to do more than make guesses. It'll take days to even make a good start at a theory." She sighed and looked up, waiting for the first stars to appear. "I hope my friends and the Princesses aren't over-reacting to my disappearance."

= = =

Most of the bluff in the Everfree was gone, carved away by magic and earth pony muscle. Royal Guardponies controlled the perimeter and fought off any of the forest denizens too stupid to be frightened away by the unprecedented level of activity. So far, no sign of a cavern or any magical artifacts had been found.

Star Swirl trotted up to Princess Celestia and held up a mechanism of bronze and glass. "Only a tiny bit above a normal background reading, Your Highness. The cavern wasn't moved—it was never here to begin with."

"Where does that leave us? Where could Twilight be?"

"Unfortunately, she could be almost anywhere. Without a strong magical signature, there's nothing to go on. If she had left those forged papers behind, I might have been able to glean something from them, but as it is…" The old unicorn shrugged and shook his head. "I'm sorry, Your Highness."

Celestia turned away from him. "I'll leave a detachment of guards here, just in case, but I fear we will have to trust in Twilight to be able to escape whatever has taken her."

= = =

=

5 A Few Disappointments

The night sky, such as it was, was a terrible disappointment.

Windfall didn't say anything, but she closely watched Twilight observe the stars as they appeared.

Twilight, for her part, had her notebook open with her pencil poised above it. As the sky dimmed, her pencil lowered, until she shut the book and put it away in her saddlebags without writing anything.

Windfall couldn't hold out any longer. "So…?"

Twilight frowned. "Don't those stars seem a bit… off to you?"

The pegasus didn't even glance up. She had seen those stars many times before. "I'm no expert, Princess. I spend most of my time looking down. Or at least I used to. The only thing I know about stars are that out in the desert you can see a whole bunch more than that. When the moon's up and full, or near big cities you'd see a lot less, if you saw any at all. So these are what? A medium ammount of stars? They tell you anything about where we are?"

"They're probably not stars at all."

"What?" Windfall finally looked up.

"They're all the same magnitude, and spread fairly evenly across the sky, exactly like real stars aren't." A stone rose in Twilight's levitation field and then rocketed upward. A couple of pony lengths below the rim of the opening, it rapidly decelerated, hung in the air for an unnaturally long time, and then fell back to the floor of the cavern with a dull thud. Twilight snorted. "I could probably crack that dome if I could reach it."

"Kumanina," Windfall growled, and dropped her head to her forelegs with a sigh of disgust.

"I can't disagree," Twilight said quietly. Well… only one more chance at an easy way out of this. It's a longshot, so I'm not going to mention it to Windfall in case it doesn't work. She's gloomy enough as it is. Twilight set about crafting a very particular spell matrix and in only a few minutes, she was asleep.

The paperwork in front of her was written in tiny crowded letters, and she squinted at them, trying to make sense of the important document. She lit her horn for extra light, but nothing seemed to change. She puzzled out a word or two, but then she lost the sense of the sentence and had to start over.

Wait a minute. Twilight increased the light spell significantly, but the room remaned dim. I can't seem to read and the light level won't change, which means something. She sat back on her haunches, lifted her forehooves up in front of her face, and tried to push the tip of one hoof through the frog of the other. Surprisingly, it worked.

Ah, I'm dreaming! She pulled her right hoof out of her left with a muffled pop, and looked around her.

She was in the main room of the old Golden Oaks Library. Odd. I thought this was destroyed… oh right, this is a dream. Too bad.

Something began to sparkle on the wall in front of her. It grew from a pinpoint to a symbol about as big around as her head—a silvery crescent moon. The magical glyph triggered the conscious intent without being forceful enough to awaken Twilight.

Luna! Luna! Can you hear me? I need you!

Something stirred in the darkness.

It wasn't Princess Luna.

A gigantic dark hoof descended and crushed the glowing moon sigil into nonexistence.

The walls of the library shook and the books cascaded from the shelves. Twilight scrambled to catch and replace them, but there always seemed to be more than she could manage.

Windfall looked over at Twilight as she twitched and muttered in her sleep. Her wings jerked and little glimmers of magic sparkled in the grooves of her horn. The pegasus reached out with one wing, hesitated for a moment, and then flicked the alicorn's nose with the tip of a primary feather.

Twilight awoke with a start. "Wha? I… uh…"

"You were having a nightmare, Princess."

"Oh. Right." Twilight didn't look very happy about escaping from her dream. "Thank you."

Windfall didn't reply. She put her head down again and closed her eyes.

Twilight muttered something in Zwahinney and did the same.

= = =

Luna stomped around her private rooms in frustration. She had tried every technique she could think of to reach Twilight through the Dream Realm, but hadn't caught the least hint of her presence. She thought of some of the forbidden books hidden beneath the Royal Archive. Perhaps one of them might hold the answer to—

"Do you know how many hours those poor peasant ponies put into weaving that rug?" Discord asked from far too close behind her. "You're going to wear it out!"

Luna whirled and lashed the draconequus across the face with her mane in a manner that could have been plausibly explained as accidental. "Ah! Discord, you surprised me!"

Discord gave her a half-grin. "Guilty conscious?"

Luna frowned. "Whatever should I be feeling guilty for?"

"Well, your complete and utter failure to rescue poor Twilight springs to mind."

"I have not stopped trying yet!" Luna practically snarled. "And I don't see you doing much to help!"

"Oh! You mean…" He lifted his eagle claw and pressed the thumb against one of the fingers. Luna waited expectantly, but Discord shrugged and put his claw down again. "Nopony's asked me to help."

"Surely, Fluttershy—"

"Oh no! You'd think so, wouldn't you? But she was so busy apologizing for accusing me of causing the whole mess in the first place, that I think she forgot. So maybe, if—"

"Please Discord," Luna said immediately. "I beseech you to return Twilight Sparkle to us! I, Princess of the Night, will bend my knee to you, Lord of Chaos, should you do this great deed for me, and all of Equestria!"

Discord beamed at her. "Well, that's a pleasant thought! Alrighty then!" He lifted his eagle claw again and snapped it loudly.

There was a bright flash just above him and a bowling ball dropped onto his head. It bounced off and hit the poor bedraggled carpet before rolling to a stop against a bookcase. Birds of several species flew in a tight circle around Discord's head, tweeting madly for a second before chasing each other out the chamber's window.

Discord blinked. "Well, that was unexpected."

"Please, Discord!" Luna said. "No pranks! I want Twilight back again. You may ask anything of me…"

But the draconequus wasn't listening. He levitated the bowling ball up and took a closer look at it. On one side was etched, "Stop it, Discord." He felt a little tingle of excitement run down his spine.

"Well, well, well… This is interesting!" He raised his claw and snapped it again.

A second black ball dropped from above him, but this time he dodged slightly to the side and caught it in his lion paw.

On the side of it was written, "I said, stop it!"

"Another bowling ball?" Discord snorted with disdain. "How repetitive!" He turned to Luna. "Shall we see if I can fill up this room with bowling balls?"

Luna frowned at the object still in Discord's paw. "This 'bowling' is a modern sport I am not familiar with. What necessitates the sparkling bit of cord there?"

It was Discord's turn to frown in puzzlement and he spun the ball a half turn. There was a half inch of burning fuse sticking out of the dark sphere.

It wasn't a bowling ball, after all.

Alarmed by Discord's sudden change of expression, Luna teleported away an instant before the bomb blew the top of her private tower to pieces.

Each separate fragment of Discord's shredded body laughed the whole way down to the river meadow at the base of the mountain.

= = =

In the morning, Twilight and Windfall resumed their mapping together. The work went a little slower than the previous day because Twilight also carefully wrote down which already marked tunnels they encountered, and what other tunnels they connected to.

She was also keeping an eye out for any signs of other ponies.

They came back to the big cavern a couple of times and, on the second return, Windfall suggested they stop to eat. She put her head down and started to graze without waiting for an answer from Twilight.

Twilight briefly considered using her levitation field to cut and eat the grass, but decided that putting her muzzle down was more companionable, if less sanitary.

After their meal, Twilight pushed a little earth pony magical encouragement into the sparse soil and gathered up her things. "No challenges so far today," she said, as casually as she could.

Windfall snorted. "Sometimes you go days between them. Sometimes you get three in a day. No point in trying to anticipate them."

The maze shifted again a little while later. They were in a marked tunnel at the time, and when they reached the end of it, they found a small, rocky clearing. There was no visible plant life, but a small brook ran through the middle.

"Hmn… no other exits," Twilight said, and made a mark near the tunnel. "Do most small spaces like this usually have only one way in or out?"

Windfall had shown more interest than usual in the room and had clambered over the rocks to peer into the crystal clear water of the stream. "Uh… yeah, I guess. Mostly." She seemed distracted, and when Twilight moved to join here she waved her back. "Hang on."

Twilight watched in fascination as the pegasus leaned low over the water and stretched her wings forward, making a nearly complete circle of cover over her own head. Windfall remained motionless for a couple of minutes and then violently thrust her head down into the water with a splash. Her wings snapped shut and she whipped her head up and to the side, spitting out something long and silvery onto the gravel.

"A fish?" Twilight stared at the flopping, gasping trout.

"Yep!" Windfall grinned at her. "I recognized this place. That stream is full of them! Hang on, I'll get another one!"

"What in Equestria for?" Twilight asked without thinking.

Windfall froze and looked at her like she had grown a second head.

Twilight caught up. "To eat?"

Windfall laughed. "Well, I'm not gonna shove 'em up my kuma, Princess! I'm guessing you weren't a pegasus before you got all nobilitated, right?"

"There were griffins and hippogryphs at the school. I've tasted fish before," Twilight said, blushing slightly from embarrassment. She forbore to mention that she had been born into an old noble family.

"Yeah, all nicely cooked and buried under a thick sauce I bet. Now, step back, be quiet, and let me catch my dinner."

Twilight watched the process with interest. She could have easily scooped up any number of fish in her magic, but Windfall showed every sign of enjoying herself, so she kept silent and waited.

It wasn't long before a second trout flew through the air directly toward her face. She caught it in her magic and set it down next to the first one. I get the feeling that Windfall deliberately aimed for me, Twilight thought. If that silly, dripping smile on her face is any indication. "Now what?"

"We clean 'em!" Windfall said, gleefully. "The scales on these little ones are tiny and soft, so we don't need to scrape them off. Just fillet and snack 'em up! Gotta find a halfway sharp rock first, though."

Twilight silently floated her penknife out of her bag, unfolded it, and passed it over to Windfall. "You do the first one, and then I'll give it a try."

"That's the spirit, Princess!"

It was utterly disgusting, and Twilight felt her gorge rise a couple of times while watching the process. When it was her turn, she offered silent, heartfelt thanks to the fates that she didn't have to hold the knife in her mouth.

She managed it. Hers was nowhere near the neat job Windfall had done, and wasn't finished as quickly, even with the advantage of magic, but it was a passable job.

Windfall had slurped down half of her fish before she realized that Twilight was walking away. "Hey! Where are you going?"

Twilight didn't look back. "I'm going to wash off my knife. I don't want my quills to stink of fish."

Windfall shrugged and finished her meal.

When Twilight came back she was carrying a large, flat stone she had washed in the brook. It was just exactly the right size to lay her fish fillets on, which she proceeded to do.

Windfall stared. "What in Tartarus are you doing? Don't tell me you're so prissy that you..." She trailed off as Twilight's horn glowed and the stone began to radiate heat. Within moments, the fish was sizzling.

"You… wait… you…" Windfall sputtered. "Why didn't you tell me you could do that? I ate my sun-forsaken fish raw!"

Twilight flipped her nicely cooking fillets over and gave Windfall the most innocent look she could manage. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you preferred it that way!"

Windfall shut her mouth and stared at Twilight through narrowed eyes. "Ha," she said, very, very slowly. "Ha."

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

LINK: Pegasus Fishing Technique

6 Pop Quiz

The next challenge came as Twilight and Windfall returned to the main room a little before sunset—or at least before the time the sky went dark.

Finding their way back was easier with all the tunnels leading into it marked. So far as Twilight had noted, one end of each was fixed to that one room. "And these three connect to one of those tunnels 27.8% of the time," she told her companion, tapping her notebook. "My sample size is admittedly far too small to be considered accurate, but it's better than nothing. Oh, and with this new traverse added in, that brings the average for this tunnel up to 31.1%! See, we're making progress."

"That's great, Princess," said Windfall. She said it without sarcasm, because Twilight had let her catch two more trout and had roasted them to perfection for her. Also because the prospect of sleeping on a nice bit of turf under the stars, rather than the bare rock of a random tunnel, had put her in a relatively mellow mood.

They settled in, and Twilight began reading and revising her notes on the day's explorations. Windfall stared silently at the ground in front of her muzzle.

Twilight looked up from her book and watched Windfall for a moment, then put away her notes. "So… Trotankamun's treasure, huh? What made you think your friend's map was real? The Everfree is a long way from the southwestern deserts. Odd place for a pharaoh to be buried."

Windfall gave a slight start when Twilight spoke and blinked at bit, as if trying to change mental gears. "Huh? Oh, the map? Yeah, what's the cursed forest got to do with it?"

"That's where the cave entrance is... Ah—or at least it was for me. I take it your cave was elsewhere?"

"Yeah, in the Red Rock Spires of the San Palomino, south of Somnambula a ways. You came in through the Everfree? Damn magical crap!" Windfall wasn't just annoyed; Twilight's question had started her thinking hard about… something.

Twilight gave her a couple of moments before speaking again. "So… different entrances and different lures to get us here. I wonder if they're different for everypony?"

Windfall shrugged. "As far as I know. What difference does it make once they're trapped… ah crap!" She snapped her gaze to Twilight's face, hoping that she hadn't noticed the slip. But of course, she had. "You set me up, Princess."

Twilight ignored the sneer twisting Windfall's face and her sudden tense posture. "We're trapped here together, Windfall. We need to trust each other if we're going to escape from this place."

"Yeah, well maybe we aren't gonna escape from this blighted maze! You ever consider that?" Windfall snarled at Twilight. "Maybe we're gonna die down here!"

"I'm not going to let that happen, Windfall. I promise you," Twilight said, slowly and softly. "Nopony goes to all this trouble—" She waved a wing in a sweeping gesture, indicating the whole of their surroundings. "—to build a simple deathtrap. I will figure it out, and I will—"

Windfall jumped to her hooves, eyes going wide. "Fly!"

Twilight leaped from a seated position into full forward flight. Windfall was a terrible liar and could never have falsely put the full conviction of sincerity into that suddenly shouted warning. Whatever the pegasus had seen behind her was something the merited all her effort to avoid.

Not that Twilight consciously thought about it. If she had spared even an instant to think before reacting, she would have been speared on the rock spines of the monster that leaped out of the sloping tunnel in the cavern floor.

"Up!" Windfall shouted, and rose as high as she could manage.

Twilight followed her and they hovered together as high as the limiting magic would let them. Fortunately, that let them easily stay out of the monster's reach. It hissed and its spines sliced through the air below their hooves. It looked like a giant gray mole covered in porcupine quills the size of a pony's foreleg.

"If I had to bet, I'd bet that thing can't be affected by your magic, Princess," Windfall said.

"I won't take that bet, but let me check, just in case…" She fired off a brief blast from her horn that bounced off the stone spikes and blew a small divot in the cave wall. "Didn't think so. Hmn… let me try something."

Her horn glowed and she lifted a large ball of water out of the brook running through the middle of the cavern, then floated it over to enclose the front of the monster's body where its head ought to have been. The two ponies hovered and waited to see if there was any effect, but after a minute or two Twilight released the water and let it splash onto the floor. "Doesn't seem to need to breathe. Maybe we should try to lose it in the tunnels?"

Windfall shook her head. "No, if this place wants us to deal with it, running away won't do any good. The tunnels might shift into dead ends, and then we'd be clipped for good." She studied the thing for a moment and then began circling it. "Stay there, Princess," she called out to Twilight.

The monster turned to follow her, ignoring Twilight. Windfall made a complete circuit of the room and then retreated to a position close to the wall and circled again. This time the creature remained focussed on Twilight. "Yeah, that's what I thought," Windfall said when she rejoined Twilight. "It's dumb as the rock it's made out of. Only reacts to the nearest pony. That help?"

Twilight nodded thinking hard. "Let's lead it over to that end of the chamber, and then you turn it around again. See if it can tell I'm closer when I'm behind it."

"Wilco, Your Highness," Windfall said, snapping off a clearly sarcastic salute with her right wing.

How does she do that while flying? Twilight wondered. Maybe I'll get as good with my wings in a couple of decades… When the monster was facing directly away from her, she swooped down close behind it. It didn't react until it had turned nearly another 45 degrees, and then it suddenly twisted and lunged at Twilight with frightening speed. She flapped like mad to get away from it, but still nearly got hit by one of the razor-sharp spines.

"Damn!" Windfall said. "Nothing that big ought to be that fast! That pass tell you anything?"

Twilight nodded grimly. "Yes, but you're not going to like it."

Windfall grimaced. "I've been pretty much not liking anything for the last few months, so just spit it out."

"Okay, then. It looks like there's a soft spot under its tail—or where its tail ought to be, at any rate. No anti-magic crystalline coating there, so a good penetrating blast should wreck the thing."

"And why is that a bad… Oh, I get it. You need me to be the bait, and I need to be pretty much on the ground to give you the best shot at its unprotected ass, right?"

"Crude, but correct," Twilight said. "And even if you can attract it from half the room away, it moves so fast that I'll only get a second to make my shot."

"Right. So." Windfall grimaced. "Any other ideas?"

Twilight shrugged. "We can lead it into a tunnel and I can turn the ceiling molten to try and entomb the thing. The only problem with that is that it'll take every bit of my energy and I won't have the strength to get away if it fails." She considered for another moment and added, "And if the tunnel turns out to be a dead end, as you suggested, the excess heat will roast us both alive."

"Oh, this just gets better and better!"

"I'm open to suggestions."

Windfall sighed and shook her head. "Okay, Princess, let's go with Plan A. If we screw it up, at least this will all be over."

Twilight looked askance at the pegasus, but refrained from commenting. Later, she told herself.

Windfall suggested the exact maneuvers to put the monster into the correct position and the two of them made a couple of practice runs to make sure the thing's reactions were consistent. When they couldn't think of any reason to delay any longer, they took their places and counted down out loud.

"Three… two… one… now!"

The spikey monster tracked Windfall as she circled, and it leaped forward as soon as the pegasus was within striking distance. Windfall hit the ground with all four hooves and stared, unflinching, straight into the thing's tiny beady eyes as it hurtled toward her.

It was less than a pony length away when it erupted into a spray of broken pieces of rock. The flash of the detonation was blinding. By the time Windfall had blinked away the pulsing black spots in her vision, Twilight was standing beside her, asking if she was all right.

"Y-yeah, I guess I am," she said. "Though I'm kinda surprised I didn't get cut to ribbons by the
fragments."

"Oh, I shaped the blast so it went mainly up and to the sides," Twilight told her.

Windfall stared at her for a couple of seconds. "Because, of course you can do that. Tell me, do you get a lot of call for that sort of magic in the princess business?"

Twilight gave her a sheepish grin. "Honestly? A lot more than I'd like."

"Okay, then. I'm going to sleep." The pegasus stepped around Twilight and walked over to the comfortable patch of ground she had been lying on before the attack. "Wake me up if anything else tries to kill us."

Twilight sighed and returned to her own spot. "I'm tired, too, but I haven't forgotten what we were talking about. Think about it and decide what you're going to share with me, will you?"

Windfall opened one eye and glared at her. "You're going to keep bugging me about it, aren't you?"

"Decisions made on bad or incomplete information will only make it more difficult for us to get out of here. I need to know everything I can to beat this place." Twilight curled up, tented the leading edge of one wing over her face, and said no more.

Windfall cast a glance at the other end of the clearing where the fragments of rubble were still smoking slightly. "Maybe you can…" she whispered to herself.

= = =

=

7 Spa Day

A full belly and all the exercise had resulted in a good night's sleep for Windfall. She awoke in a mellow mood which lasted only until she remembered the pre-monster attack conversation. She frowned and mentally braced herself for the interrogation that was sure to come.

She looked up and found Twilight sitting and writing in one of her notebooks. A small piece of chalk floated nearby and there were diagrams and symbols on a slab of dark rock next to her. As she watched, a damp neckerchief floated over to the stone and rubbed out a portion of writing, then the stub of chalk marked in a correction, all without the alicorn looking up from her book.

Windfall cleared her throat.

Twilight looked over at her and grinned. "Good morning, Windfall! I should be done with this in a few minutes, then we can go and try to find something nice for breakfast, okay?"

"Uh—sure." Windfall replied. She watched Twilight work for a few moments more, then walked over to the stream to take a drink and splash some water on her face. She inspected her tail-wrap and decided it was getting a bit grotty, so she took it off and scrubbed it as best as she was able in the cold water. She wrung it and twirled it around a bit to get most of the moisture out.

"May I help with that?" Twilight had finished her calculations and walked down to the stream to join her.

Although she wasn't sure what Twilight meant, Windfall shrugged and said, "Sure."

Twilight lit her horn and the wrap steamed for a moment. "There! It should be dry now."

"Neat trick!" Windfall admitted, twisting the wrap around the base of her tail. "Any chance you can conjure up a hot bath?"

Twilight grinned at her. "Sure!"

Windfall blinked. "Wait… You're not kidding?"

"Well, it will take a lot of energy to form the stone tub and heat the water, which will be difficult after the amount I burned through last night, but it's possible." Twilight frowned in thought for a moment. "But with the restrictions this place puts on my magic, soap will be problematic. Can't teleport it in, and there aren't the right materials available for transmutation, I'm afraid."

"Princess, I haven't had anything but cold water splashes in these shallow streams for months. Soap or not, I'd kill for a hot bath right now!"

"Okay, then! Let's make finding some high-energy food a priority today, and tonight, I'll make a couple of baths for us!"

Windfall shrugged and waved a hoof. "You've got the map, Princess. Or whatever it is. Which way do we go?"

"I need more data on those two tunnels nearest the brook. Let's start with those."

They soon fell into a comfortable routine, Twilight making tunnels and checking and updating her notes, and Windfall keeping watch for more unpleasant challenges from the maze.

After a few hours, they found a room with a skylight opening which was filled with lush green growth. It looked very much like a vegetable garden that had been neglected for several years.

"Woo-hoo!" Windfall shouted. "Carrots! Dig in, Princess!"

The two of them ate contentedly until they were full, and then Twilight picked more of the vegetables to pack into her saddlebags.

"We'll leave some here," Twilight said. "I'll give them a charge of magic to encourage them to grow, and hopefully, we'll have another good crop the next time we find this place."

"You seem to have good luck finding the chow, Princess! I haven't eaten this well since I got here. Not regular-like, anyhow."

Twilight nodded. "That probably isn't mere chance. With an alicorn metabolism, I eat enough for three ponies." She swept a wing out. "All the challenges are a waste if the subjects starve to death."

Windfall frowned. "You still think this is some sort of complicated test? It seemed awful willing to give us both a serious mineral shanking last night."

"Hmn…" Twilight turned away and headed out of the room. Windfall barely caught her muttered, "Maybe."

= = =

Most of the day passed without further incident, except for a moment when Twilight did a quick little dance of joy at having correctly predicted the next marked tunnel they would encounter.

But the first tunnel they entered after they'd agreed to knock off for the day held a surprise.

"Big cube of stone up ahead, Princess," Windfall called back to her.

Twilight looked up from her notebook and hurriedly stuffed it into her saddlebag. "Is it blocking the way?"

"Nope. It fills half the tunnel, but we could squeeze by."

"Shift over. Let me just…"

A little burst of lavender magic zipped by Windfall's shoulder and spattered off the surface of the cube.

"Shoot first and ask questions later, eh Princess?"

"The shot was the question and the answer is, yes, this stupid thing is also made with anti-thaumic crystal." Twilight glared at Windfall's silly grin. "I'm going to do it everytime we run into one of these things, because the one time I don't—"

"No, no!" Windfall laughed. "I'm right there with you, honest! So what do you think it is?"

"Well, it's fused to the wall, so it's probably not going to chase us. Let's take a closer look."

Twilight got to the cube first and when she got a good look at the front of it, she froze in shock.

Windfall approached a little more cautiously, after noting the princess's reaction. She found the front surface of the cube covered with dials and sliding bars, but what was in the center of the mechanism caught her immediate attention. It was a thick slab of transparent rock crystal. Behind the window was a large bottle labeled: "Windrose's Extra-Special Lavender-Scented Shampoo."

Her reaction was a complex one, composed of ridiculous hopefulness blended with disbelief and an eerie tingle along her spine. She expressed all of this with a half-strangled, "Guh."

"Yeah," Twilight agreed, still staring at the product behind the crystal. "It's creeping me right out, too."

The two of them traded a look. "We're still gonna use it, right?" Windfall asked.

"Oh Tartarus, yes!" Twilight replied. She finally tore her eyes away from the shampoo and studied the mechanism on the face of the cube. Each dial, bar, or level was marked by a symbol. "This must be some sort of puzzle. A combination lock? Hey! I think I recognise these runes!"

Windfall followed her gaze. "Yeah, those are—"

"This looks like Draconic!" Twilight cried out in recognition. "But it's a version I'm not familiar with."

"Uh, that's because—"

Twilight laughed. "I wish I'd brought along my copy of Ashen Claw's Treatise on the Dragon Dialects! Well, maybe I'll be able to—"

Windfall jabbed a hoof out and pointed to the rune on the knob nearest to Twilight. "That one means 'danger.' And this one means 'lava.' I think I recognize almost all of these."

Twilight turned to stare at her, eyes wide in surprise. "You can read these?"

"I speak six languages," the mercenary said dryly. "Sorry for not conforming to your stereotypes, Yer Highness."

When the alicorn continued to stare at her without saying anything, Windfall added, "And anyway, these are signs the dragons use on boundary markers, not letters, so it's not surprising you don't recognize them."

"Ah." Twilight gave her a half-grin. "A complex puzzle of the sort I do for fun, and symbols only you can read. The maze is being consistent. Will you translate for me?"

"Sure thing!" Windfall said. "Like I said, that first one is 'danger.' And over here we've got…"

Twilight floated her notebook out of her bag and rapidly wrote down a translation table as Windfall went through each character.

She worked at the puzzle, turning dials and sliding bars for about a half hour, Windfall adding helpful comments about how some of the symbols changed meaning when they were placed next to others. Finally, they worked out the right configuration, and there came a loud clack from somewhere inside the cube. The clear crystal slid aside and Twilight levitated the bottle out of its niche.

"Bath time!" she announced, holding up the bottle triumphantly.

"We've still got to find our way back to the big room," Windfall reminded her.

Twilight put the shampoo in her bag and flipped back through her notebook to study a page. "This tunnel should connect with one leading to the room. If I'm right, it'll be the one right next to the stream outflow or the one that's by the big stalagmite."

It was the one by the stream.

"You seem to be getting a handle on how this place shifts around, Princess."

Twilight nodded. "Another day to confirm my calculations and we should be able to navigate fairly easily. That doesn't mean that the maze will always be connected up in a way that will be convenient for us, but we will be able to eventually get where we're headed, even if we have to wait through several shifts."

"Maybe you can find that apple tree?"

Twilight grinned and held out her notebook. A two page spread showed a hexagonal grid crowded with notes and symbols. "The center area is where we are now, and these hexes are where we've found food rooms. Notice something?"

Windfall saw it immediately. "They're spaced out in a regular pattern!"

"Yep! And that means that we will probably find other food rooms here, here, here, and here." She tapped the pages to indicate the locations. "One of them should be the apple tree."

Windfall's smile held for a moment and then faltered a bit. "Any sign of an exit?"

Twilight shrugged. "Well, the most likely spots are the points of the star… um... hexagon that is. Or right here, actually." She motioned to the ramp leading down into the original tunnel she'd entered by.

Windfall didn't say anything. She was sure that Twilight was going to ask her about the other pony and where she had gone, and dreaded it.

But Twilight simply put away her notebook and turned toward the stream. Her horn lit and the rock that formed the bank shifted and changed shape, rising into two smooth basalt tubs. Water swirled up out of the brook into them without a single drop of spatter.

"How hot do you like your bath?"

"Steaming!"

The blaze of magic from Twilight's horn threw long dancing shadows across the floor of the cavern. She caught her tongue in the corner of her mouth and squinted with concentration and effort. In only moments, wisps of hot vapor were floating above the surface of the water.

The two ponies eased themselves into the hot baths with groans of pleasure. Twilight floated the shampoo bottle over and set it down on the broad, flat edge of Windfall's tub.

The pegasus gave it a glance, from where she was submerged nearly to her eyeballs. She moved only just enough to get her muzzle above the water. "I'm just gonna soak for a while. You go ahead."

Windfall tried not to stare as Twilight washed herself, but seeing the shampoo work itself into her coat and feathers and scrub away as if guided by invisible spa attendants made her a bit envious. The spot right between her shoulder blades was always a pain to get to without help. That thought reminded her of how much she missed Ground Pounder, and she started talking to keep herself from thinking too much.

"Hey, Princess!"

"Mm?"

"Thanks for not… harassing me, I guess."

"About the other ponies?"

"Yeah… I… I still don't want to…" Windfall gritted her teeth and sunk down into the water and blew out a long breath through her nose, splashing water up over the rim.

"I won't force you," Twilight replied. She floated the shampoo bottle back over to Windfall's tub and began rinsing herself off. "But maybe there are some bits you'd feel comfortable telling me?"

"I… I guess."

"Even trivial things might be important. Like—" Twilight lifted and spun the shampoo bottle. "Were any of your other challenges as silly as this one?"

Windfall snorted. "Outright puzzles? Not too many... but a magical soap dispenser? Not hardly!" She paused for a moment in thought. "None as dangerous as the one last night, either."

"But all things you had to cooperate to solve?"

"Yeah, pretty much." Windfall waited for Twilight to pounce on that admission, but the alicorn said nothing and concentrated on preening her feathers. Windfall began to lather herself up. "So… Really dangerous and kind of silly. Is that how it's gonna go from now on, d'you think?"

Twilight nudged a secondary feather into place and shrugged. "That's not a bad description of my life for the past several years, so I don't see why not."

Rubbing the shampoo into her chest fur made it bubble excessively. Windfall sniffed at it and made a face.

"Something wrong?" Twilight asked.

"Huh? Oh, no! No Princess, not at all. I'm sure as Tartarus not going to complain about the first hot bath I've had in months!"

"But there's something wrong with the smell?"

"No, it's great! I mean, fine, it's fine! I'm just used to the unscented stuff." Windfall chuckled. "Just try and sneak up on a manticore den reeking of flowers sometime! It's a practical issue in my line of work."

"Makes sense." Twilight nodded and then paused. "But this is my favorite…" She levitated the bottle over to where she could closely examine the label. "It's even a brand I often buy."

She was silent for so long, intently staring at the bottle, that Windfall began to feel uncomfortable. "Is that… Does that mean something?"

Twilight sighed and passed the bottle back to Windfall. "I'm pretty sure it does. Just the fact that we got it as a reward means that the maze, or whatever, or whoever is controlling it adapts to our circumstances. It heard us wishing for soap to go along with our baths and used that as incentive. The type might be a coincidence, but I'm inclined to believe it isn't."

"So we're being spied on."

"Almost certainly. And the maze may know details of our personal lives before we were trapped here."

"Well, that's not creepy at all!"

That got a chuckle out of Twilight, but her expression soon turned serious again. She's not a stupid mare by any stretch of the imagination, but simple logic isn't working for me, Twilight thought. How can I put it in terms that will resonate with her? She's a soldier, so…

"It's bad enough that you and... other ponies were trapped here," she began, hesitantly. "And I don't want to minimize your unfortunate situation in any way, but I'm Equestrian royalty. I was just about to take the throne before I was lured here, and that can't be accidental timing.. That means that whoever is behind this is a threat to the whole kingdom. Wouldn't your loyalty to the nation—"

She was completely unprepared for Windfall's bark of derisive laughter. "I'm loyal to a lot of things, but Equestria isn't one of them, Princess!" She didn't wait for an answer, but ducked under the surface of the bath and shook herself violently to rinse the soap off of her body. Then she leaped out and shook again until she was only somewhat damp.

Twilight watched her stalk away to her usual sleeping spot and plop down on the turf where she began to savagely preen her wings.

Well, that was a miscalculation! Twilight climbed out of her own bath and dissolved the tubs, letting the water sluice back into the stream. I hope I'm not as wrong about the nature of the challenges, or I'm probably going to get myself killed.

= = =

=

8 Playing Chicken

Twilight didn't get a chance to risk her life the next day, or the one after that. She and Windfall explored more of the tunnel system and found another food chamber that provided them with a half saddlebag full of potatoes. It wasn't the apple tree room, but neither mare felt like complaining..

There were two fairly trivial challenges, both involving getting past a barrier, that they solved easily. Then came the orb.

Twilight settled down to study it. It was about as big as a buckball and metallic with different colored longitudinal bands. They rotated separately and there were words etched into the metal that could be lined up.

Twilight frowned. "Some of these words are pretty rude."

Windfall took a close look and then burst out laughing. "Here." She held out her hoof. "Let me do it."

Twilight handed over the orb but it turned out that it was so smooth and polished that Windfall couldn't get a good grip on the bands with her hooves or mouth. "Figures," Windfall grunted, passing it back. "We gotta do it together. Okay Princess, let me teach you a cadence."

"A what? Oh, right, right… go ahead." The words to the marching song were even ruder when Twilight lined them up correctly with her magic.

Windfall laughed at her discomfort. "This one's tame compared to some of the ones I know!"

When the last word was in place, there was a click and the top of the orb flipped open. Twilight looked in. She sighed and said to Windfall, "Hold out your hoof."

Windfall did so, and Twilight tilted the orb, tipping a small cellophane-wrapped bit of hard candy into the middle of her hoof. She then shook another one out into her own hoof and set the orb aside.

"That's it," she said flatly. "That's all that's in there."

The two mares looked down at the candies for a long time and then, as if they had practiced the move, simultaneously looked up at each other with expressions of disgust.

"This is some serious dragonshit, right here," Windfall said as she dropped her candy to the ground.

Twilight cracked up. She dropped her candy, too and laughed so hard that she had to put out a wing to steady herself against the wall. "I… I… oh, ha, ha, ha!" She took a deep breath and then continued. "I wouldn't have phased it exactly like that, but you're not wrong."

Windfall grinned. The prissy princess wasn't half-bad sometimes. She raised her head and shouted, "You hear that, you demeted maniac? Your puzzles suck and your crappy candy sucks! It all sucks big, fat—" She got a bit of a kick out of Twilight's expression of shock and subsequent blush, as she let loose with a bit of creative invective, describing in excruciating detail what it was their mysterious tormentor ought to suck.

Even better, when Windfall had finished, Twilight's expression grew very serious and somber. The Princess put a hoof on her shoulder and leaned in close, as if to impart a secret. "Now, now, Windfall," she said very softly. "You mustn't taunt the demented maniac. You might hurt her feelings."

The rest of their evening was spent in roasting potatoes over magically heated rocks while telling stories to each other. They were trivial stories that avoided sensitive subjects, but ones that gave the two mares more than one occasion for delighted laughter.

Just before they fell asleep for the night, Windfall said, "Hey Princess."

"Mmm? Yes?"

"You know what I could go for right now?"

"What?"

"A nice piece of hard candy!"

Laughter echoed through the cavern.

= = =

In the morning, after they had the last bits of cold potato from the night before and some water from the stream, Twilight held up her chart of the tunnels so that they could both see it.

"There are only two spots left that could be the apple tree room. If the changes in the tunnels are random, I think we can get to it within fives shifts. Maybe as little as three, if we get lucky."

"I don't care if it takes all day if it means I get to sink my teeth into an apple again!'

"Okay then, let's—"

That's when the flame beast attacked.

It roared out of the largest tunnel exit, a writhing horror that looked like a cross between a giant crab and an octopus with knives on the end of its tentacles.

And it was on fire.

Strangely, both Windfall and Twilight blurted out the exact same obscenity in shock as the monster appeared. The mercenary was having an influence on the princess, it seemed.

"You fly right!" Windfall shouted to Twilight. "I'll go left and—"

"No," Twilight said in a voice that was only a little bit shaky. "Stay here. I'm going to try something." She tossed the map behind her and began walking toward the beast.

Windfall didn't argue with her. Debating in a combat situation was worse than useless. It was time for action. She glanced around quickly looking for something she could use as a weapon against the huge monster. Nothing but rocks.

But rocks could be very good weapons, indeed.

She made a quick evaluation and dismissed any of the small stuff that might only wound or anger the thing, as well as any that were too big for her to lift. She spotted a perfect one right by the side of the stream and rushed to pry it out of the sandy bank.

She grunted and strained, rocking the boulder loose from the sucking wet ground. A less powerful pony could never have managed it, and Windfall herself might not have, if it wasn't for her surge of adrenaline. She finally got the rock loose and flapped with all of her might to lift it into the air.

She turned and saw that Twilight was standing only inches away from the monster. The princess's mane was starting to curl and singe from the heat of the fire, and the tentacle blades were striking at her, only missing by a hairsbreadth.

Windfall knew she'd never be able to drop the rock in time to save her friend, but she kept flapping, straining upward.

"Well?" She heard Twilight shout below her. "What are you waiting for?" She wasn't entirely sure, but she thought that Twilight was talking to the monster.

Windfall reached the perfect spot and twisted her wings and body, guiding the boulder to its target. The stone struck the monster dead center, crushing its hard shell and mashing its softer parts to jelly.

Windfall dropped to the ground next to Twilight, panting heavily.

Twilight let out a long shaky breath and said quietly, "Thank you. That was a nice shot."

The mercenary grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her roughly, shouting, "What in stinking Tartarus were you thinking? It's a miracle you survived!"

"Stop, please. That hurts."

Windfall released her and stepped back, realizing that Twilight had several shallow cuts on her face, chest, and forelegs in addition to the burns.

"Sorry! But you—"

"I was never in any danger. Well, not deadly danger, anyway," Twilight said, prodding a singed patch of her fur with her hoof and wincing.

Windfall fell back on old, practiced habits. The princess would explain in her own good time. She loved explaining. "Okay, then. Let's get those cuts cleaned out. The shampoo has aloe in it, right? That'll be good for your burns."

Twilight shook and trembled as Windfall gave her first aid. The mercenary knew it wasn't fear. It was her body flushing out the adrenaline. Post-combat shakes were nothing new to her. The princess didn't seem to find it odd, either.

"Drink some water. Grab a nap if you feel like it," Windfall told her after doing what she could for her injuries.

"No, it's okay. This is all superficial, and I'll feel worse tomorrow, anyway. I want to map out the last bit of the hex pattern today if we can."

Windfall jerked a hoof toward the smoking, still-twitching remains of the monster. "Yeah, and it'll probably smell better out in the tunnels. Lead the way, Princess."

It was late in the day when Windfall got fed up with waiting. Twilight was certain of the apple tree's location but each shift of the tunnels kept them circling around and around, unable to get to it. The mares had taken a water break and were sitting on the ground at the junction of three passages.

"So are you gonna tell me or what?" Windfall half growled at Twilight.

"I choose 'what,'" Twilight replied.

"Oh, don't get cute with me, you perfumed, pampered princess! You know what I mean. Why didn't that thing fillet and roast you? You were just standing there for at least ten seconds before I nailed it with the rock. You knew it wasn't going to kill you, didn't you?"

Twilight carefully put the stopper back in her water bottle before answering. "I gave it about a 90 percent chance, yes."

"So? Spill it."

"The—" Twilight waved her hoof in a broad arc, indicating the tunnels around them. "—creator of this place—"

"The demeted maniac?" Windfall smirked.

"Yes, that one." Twilight nodded. "They don't want to kill us. They have other plans. The threat is what was needed to…"

Windfall stopped smiling and made a "go on" gesture.

Twilight grimaced. "This is going to sound stupid, but I think they're trying to force us into becoming friends."

Windfall stared at her. "So, a totally evil demented maniac, then."

Twilight couldn't help herself. She laughed. "Yep. I've met a lot of scheming villains in my time, but this one takes the cake. Totally evil."

Windfall thought back on the challenges they had faced together. And then she cast her recollection back even further. "Might not be a joke, princess. But who would want ponies to make friends only to…" She trailed off. Twilight was looking at her out of the corner of one eye, but she quickly looked away and said nothing.

Windfall scowled and put her hoof over a small rock on the tunnel floor. She pressed down with all her strength and ground it to sand under her hoof. She sat and thought for a long time. Twilight didn't say a word.

"She wasn't like you," Windfall said finally, not looking up. "She was scared, jumped at shadows. She told me the whole story right from the start. She depended on me, and I couldn't save her."

Twilight waited, but Windfall didn't continue. She didn't want to pressure the mercenary, but she had to know. Finally she asked, "A challenge killed her?"

Windfall gave a harsh bark of bitter laughter. "Some stupid monster? No, our challenges were never close to the things you and I have fought. Buttercup would have frozen up for sure."

"So…?"

"Listen up!" Windfall snarled, jerking her head around to glare angrily at Twilight. "I'm gonna tell you this exactly once and then you're never bringing it up again, understood?"

Twilight nodded.

Windfall let her head fall forward and she delivered her story in a steady, emotionless monotone.

"She was in here with a pony before me. Four months together and then the damned thing killed the other pony. Not a monster exactly. Some kind of machine made out of rock. It grabbed Buttercup's friend one day and said 'Failure!' in this weird voice, and just crushed her all up…"

Windfall stopped talking to take in a couple of deep breaths, and then started talking again. "Buttercup said it had happened before, too. A lotta times, her friend told her. She was alone for about a month and then I stumbled in here, and… and four months later the thing got her, too. 'Failure!' Fucking 'Failure!' and I tried to stop it. I hammered on it, but it…"

She paused again.

"And it's my turn next. It's always that way. The new pony comes in and the old…"

She stopped talking.

Twilight let her be. Windfall wasn't the sort of pony to appreciate a comforting hug.

Twilight slowly incorporated this new, horrifying information into her guesses about the purpose of the labyrinth. She was sure the challenges were designed to encourage if not outright force friendship. What other explanation could there be? Why hadn't the monster killed her then? Why the four month period? To make friends only to increase the awfulness of their eventual loss? "No, it doesn't make sense."

Windfall looked up, glaring, and Twilight realized she had spoken aloud. "Well, it happens, princess. I've seen it."

"I believe you," Twilight said. She pulled her map out of her saddle bags and slapped it down on the tunnel floor, stabbing a hoof at it. "But this isn't the work of some simplistic, sadistic madmare. There's a purpose behind it, and I'm going to figure it out!"

Windfall blew air through her lips in a snort of scorn. "What good is that going to do you?"

"It's going to tell me how this evil thing thinks, and that's going to let me outsmart them, and that means they're going to get a big damned surprise when we kick their malignant ass halfway to the moon!"

Windfall couldn't help chuckling. "Whoa! The pretty proper princess has got quite a potty mouth on her!"

Windfall just couldn't believe it. This Canterlot dandy could stand up to a thing out of nightmares like a seasoned soldier and still be goaded into blushing like a little filly.

= = =

=

9 Arts and Crafts

"Looks like the maniac doesn't want to play anymore," Windfall said as she and Twilight returned to the main cavern at the end of the day.

The two of them had searched every open tunnel in the area of the apple tree room, but as the maze hadn't shifted once, they had no opportunity to do anything much but trot in circles. There had been no further challenges of any sort, either.

Twilight gave a non-verbal grunt of agreement.

Windfall sighed and settled down on her sleeping spot. They'd found a nice big patch of fescue a bit earlier, so she wasn't hungry, but she wasn't sleepy either. The last thing she wanted to do was to sit and think. She wished she'd had her litungkano. A bit of music would be something nice to concentrate on and wouldn't distract the princess from… whatever it was she was working on.

Twilight Sparkle had worked a bit of transformation magic on a couple of pieces of rock to make a mortar and pestle and was apparently grinding a piece of her chalk into a fine powder.

"Hey, Princess."

"Mm?" Twilight didn't look up from her task.

"How complex can you make stuff?"

That made her look up. "Stuff?"

"Yeah, like those bathtubs you made. Can you do more intricate things?"

"My transmogrification is pretty good, but I can't make compound items all at once. I could do it eventually by creating the components and then assembling them. But then there's the issue of precision, which is limited by my ability to visualize. I might be able to build a crude clock, but a small watch or something similar is beyond my skills. Why, do you have an idea?"

Windfall chuckled. The alicorn certainly loved to explain things at length. "Just something to pass the time. All I need is a dried gourd about this big—" She held her forehooves apart to show the distance. "—a big, curved stick about the size of a short garden hoe, a bunch of littler sticks, and some fine wire. I can put it together myself, if you could mojo up the pieces for me."

"Should be doable," Twilight said thoughtfully as she set down the mortar and pestle. "There's enough cellulose in the food waste to simulate the wood and gourd. There might be enough metallic oxides in these rocks to make the wire if you need brass, but I can use some of my shoes if steel is okay."

"Steel would be best, actually."

Twilight got to work without asking Windfall exactly why she wanted the stuff. The faux sticks and gourd were easy, but getting the right length and diameter for the wire took her almost an hour. When all of the components were finished she asked, "Some sort of instrument?"

"Yeah, an East Zebrican thing," Windfall replied. She had set out several sharp rock scrapers she'd made by spalling off slivers from bigger stones with the edge of her shoe. "Probably sound pretty weird to your cultured ears, but I kinda got a taste for it."

"I look forward to hearing you play," Twilight replied, and turned back to her own project.

The two mares worked silently side-by-side for a while, and then Twilight stood and gathered up her things. "I'm going to try an experiment, Windfall, and I need to concentrate on it. Please don't interrupt me until I've finished."

"Sure thing, Princess." Windfall stopped working and watched her.

Twilight walked out to the middle of the cavern, directly under the center of the opening in the roof. She stretched out her wings and began fanning them slowly over the mortar of chalk dust. As she speeded up her flapping, the dust rose in a small white whirlwind and rose toward the imitation stars. The vortex spread out as it rose and became a fairly uniform cloud in the air above her.

She then folded her wings and lit her horn. Seven small pebbles, almost exactly the same size and spherical, rose from the ground and paced themselves in a circle around her. Her horn brightened, then it blazed. It shone so brightly that Windfall had to squint her eyes against the light.

There was a sharp crack as all seven of the stones suddenly shot straight upward. If there hadn't been some strange magic sealing the cavern they would have instantly disappeared into the sky. As it was, they hung as molten little blobs just short of the lip of the overhead opening.

Windfall was just about to ask what the strange procedure was supposed to prove when something even odder happened. The stones didn't come down. They hung there, their red glow dimming, in the middle of a completely immobile cloud of chalk dust. Twilight had somehow used her magic to freeze it all in place. Then the entire static structure sank downward until it was eye level with Twilight.

The princess produced a measuring stick, a pencil, and a notebook, and apparently began measuring the ripples and distortions in the cloud. She worked her way through the structure, shaving sections away as she advanced and letting them drift to the ground behind her. All the while she scribbled furiously in her notebook.

Windfall went back to building her litungkano. Twilight would explain it to her in good time, she was certain.

By the time Twilight had made all her notes and measurements, and Windfall had finished the body, neck, and tuning pegs of her instrument, they were both yawning.

"If this place isn't going to kill us— at least, not yet— then there's not much point in standing watch is there?" Twilight asked as she neatened her paperwork and carefully stowed it in her saddlebag.

Windfall shrugged. "I suppose not."

"But I still want to be cautious. That soft patch is big enough for both of us," Twilight said, indicating the pegasus's sleeping spot. "Why don't we sleep back to back, and I'll throw a little shield over us. Would that be okay?"

Windfall snorted. "More than once, I've slept in a muddy hole in the ground with a half-dozen dirty, sweaty soldiers, Princess! I ain't particular!"

Twilight walked over and lay down next to her. "You'll have to tell me about it sometime."

Windfall laughed out loud. "It stank and was uncomfortable as Tartarus. End of story."

"Well," Twilight said, as she wiggled a hip-hole in the soft dirt, "this should be a step up from that."

= = =

In the morning the two mares made a quick foray into the tunnels to confirm that the labyrinth hadn't shifted while they were sleeping, and then returned to the big cavern by way of the carrot chamber.

"No point in searching until it changes, right?" Windfall asked, munching on her breakfast as she walked.

"No, we won't be able to map the rest, or get to the apple tree room until it does," Twilight agreed. "It's fine with me, though. I have enough calculating to do to fill the rest of the day."

"Oh yeah, all that measuring you did last night. What's up with that anyway?"

"I want to graph the thaumic waveforms of the n-dimensional hypervolume that makes up the barrier…"

Twilight paused and looked back at Windfall, who had stopped dead in the tunnel with a big wad carrot in one cheek.

"You wanna put that in Equuish, Princess?" she said, spraying a little bit of half-chewed carrot.

Twilight had the good grace to blush just a little. "I'm trying to work out what type of magic is holding us here and exactly how strong it is."

Windfall nodded, and resumed walking. "Shoulda just said that in the first place."

"I get carried away sometimes."

"You really understand that high-level science stuff?"

Twilight chuckled. "Well, the eminent Dr. Feynmare once said that if anypony thinks they understand quantum thaumodynamics, that's proof that they don't. But I have a decent grasp of how it appears to function, and the math behind it. Enough to get a rough idea how much umph I'd need to break us out of here."

"You already tried the brute force method, though."

"Yes, but it was— unfocused, shall we say? Once, I watched a mare split a twenty ton boulder just by giving it a sharp kick in exactly the right spot. I'm hoping this place has got a hidden fault line or two."

Windfall nodded. "Sounds reasonable."

They worked side by side for several hours until Windfall broke the mutual silence. "Hey Princess, d'you think it'll be okay for me to go off into a tunnel for a little bit?"

Twilight blinked and shook herself, changing mental gears. "I'm not sure. Still no tunnel shift, and I think that means our maniac is thinking things over. But that doesn't mean they might not take the opportunity to seperate us for some reason. If you want privacy, you could go behind the big boulder over there."

Windfall chuckled and held up her finished instrument. "That's not nearly far enough away! These things sound weird enough when they're in tune. Getting one into tune is an ordeal for anypony in earshot."

Twilight gave her a smile. "Don't worry about it. I'm pretty good at focusing on a task. Too good, some ponies have told me."

Windfall looked doubtful. "If you say so…" She trotted off to the other side of the big rock.

Three minutes later, she looked up to find Twilight standing over her, wide-eyed and twitching. "Is that an instrument of music or torture?" she half-shouted.

Windfall laughed. "Told ya. It'll sound a lot better when it's tuned up, I promise."

"I learned to ignore my brother trying to murder a violin for three months, but this—" Twilight shook herself as if she were trying to dry off after a swim. "How does it make such horrible noises without dark magic?"

"Three tuning pegs per string, and they screech like banshees if all three ain't exactly right."

"Wait… what? Three? Strings only have two ends and only one needs—"

"Nope." Windfall shook her head. "Not these strings, Princess. See? They split about two thirds of the way down from the neck. Both ends of the 'legs' need to be tensioned exactly the same, and the 'body' needs to balance them both in harmony." It was kind of nice for her to be explaining something technical to the alicorn instead of the other was around for a change. "Each twist of a peg usually throws off one of the others, so you've got to go back and forth a whole bunch to get them sounding right."

"Recursive," Twilight muttered under her breath as she stared at the strange instrument in fascination.

"Yeah, that. But, being able to play two different notes on one string at the same time is worth it. You can get—"

"Get one of the strings in tune and let me measure it!"

"Uh… Sure thing, Princess," Windfall said, surprised at Twilight's sudden intensity.

Twilight didn't take her eyes off of Windfall as she worked, but her horn lit, and her notebook and measuring stick came floating around the boulder.

Once one of the strings was sounding "right" (Windfall refused to use the word "good"), she let Twilight take the measurements and then went back to tuning the rest of the strings. To her amazement, Twilight did seem to be able to ignore the ghastly screeches and buzzes that the untuned litungkano produced.

Windfall finished to her satisfaction and began playing a tune. She didn't consciously pick one, but found her hooves moving to an old Zebrican lament she'd learned in the Mareghreb highlands.

She came to the end and let the last buzzing note swirl away, uncertain that all the effort had been worth it. The music was good, even comforting in a way, but the memories it brought back…

"That was— strange, but in a good way. Exotic," Twilight told her. "Almost as if wasps had learned to sing choral music. It's like no other instrument I've ever heard."

Windfall nodded. "It's an unusual one, alright. Even a lot of the zebs don't like it. Sorta like Earth Ponies and bagpipes. They either love it or hate it."

"I think I know why it sounds so bad when it's out of tune," Twilight said, holding out her notebook open to a two page spread.

Windfall glanced at the complex diagrams that crowded the pages. "Why don't you explain it to me?"

"I thought at first the leg portion of the strings produced one note and the body part another, but that can't be it. I think the legs subtract from the harmonic length of the body, but only in one dimension! They prevent the body portion from vibrating horizontally from where they join in, but the whole string can still vibrate vertically at a different wavelength. So when it's out of tune, the disharmony is literally trying to tear the string apart!"

"Huh. Yeah, it kinda sounds like that, doesn't it?"

Windfall wasn't all that interested in why her instrument sounded and behaved the way it did, but Twilight was having so much fun explaining frequency, amplitude, and fractional harmonies to her that she let the alicorn ramble on for several minutes. And she found that, after a while, she understood the phenomenon pretty well.

"So… putting another set of legs at the top of the string wouldn't do anything, right?"

"It might, but it would be an order of magnitude more difficult to tune!"

"But that sketch you did of a third leg… where'd that notebook go?" Windfall scooped the little book up off the ground and riffled through the pages, stopping at a mass of wavy drawings. "Let's see… I think it was… no, these look different."

Twilight glanced over her shoulder. "Oh, those aren't about the litungkano strings, those are thaumic waveforms."

Windfall frowned down at the page. "They look pretty similar."

Twilight chucked and shrugged. "Everything is made of waves of some sort. Light, sound, electromagnetism, magic, even matter. Teeny-tiny waves of probability. If it wasn't, there would be no way to transform anything."

"You're pulling my leg, right?"

"Not at all! I never joke about science!"

"So what's the magic equivalent of this?" Windfall plucked the lowest string on her instrument hard enough that the echo from the cavern added interesting subtones to the sound. "Black magic?"

Twilight laughed. "No, and the term is dark magic, 'black' is considered…" She trailed off, her eyes lost focus, and her jaw dropped open ever so slightly.

Windfall frowned. "What's up, Princess? You have a stroke or something?"

Twilight ignored the mercenary, and grabbed up her notebook and pencil in her magic and began furiously scribbling away.

By then, Windfall was used to this sort of behavior from Twilight and shrugged it off. She went back to strumming the litungkano, working her way through all the old songs she could remember.

Twilight Sparkle kept working in a frantic rush of thoughts and ideas, until she produced one simple and elegant formula that absolutely terrified her.

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

The litungkano is a portmanteau of two different Kenyan instruments, neither of which have Y-shaped strings.

Some people have experimented with such strings, and the physics and sound is pretty much as I described above. Unless you're a fan of bands like Einstürzende Neubauten, you probably wouldn't enjoy listening to a Y-string guitar, but it is an amazingly unearthly sound:
Litungkano
(Not quite as buzzy and weird as the guitar strung this way, but it'll give you an idea. Filmed under the 2020 California/Blade Runner sky, which is why it's so yellow, and you can hear me wheezing through my mask.)

And, thanks to Nachtschwalbe, we now have another example of a Y-stringed instrument:
Tritare
(This one has a lot more reverb and less buzz than I remember, but it gives a good idea what an entire instrument strung this way would sound like.)

N.B. From the Wikipedia entry on the tritare: "Richardson also claims that the tritare sounds bad."

---

Thanks to Archangel of the Silent for a great editing job on this chapter.

10 Epiphany Fallout

Windfall watched Twilight pace back and forth across the uneven floor of the caven. Over the days they had spent together, the alicorn had told her about all the fights she had had against various monsters and insanely powerful villains. The pegasus, having spent most of her life in military organizations of one sort or other, was no stranger to stories that began, "No shit, there I was…" But the tales that Twilight told were different. Regardless of how exaggerated they sounded, they had the ring of truth.

What had completely convinced Windfall was when she had related one of her own war stories, and finished up by bragging about how much money her company had earned for fighting off an infestation of tatzelwurms.

"What?" Twilight cried out in surprise. "You get paid to fight monsters?"

Windfall raised an eyebrow. "You don't?"

She tried very hard not to laugh at the inarticulate, sputtering outrage that the princess unsuccessfully attempted to suppress. "Hey, you went from unpaid intern, straight to head of the company. You really can't complain, Princess. Go dip into the Royal Treasury if you think you're owed back pay."

"Well, technically, I'll own the entire kingdom except for the Crystal Empire, the Duchy of Maretonia, and the town of Bales, so I won't have much use for money. Legally, I can just trot into any shop and take whatever I want."

Windfall stared at her. "Really?"

Twilight gave her a sweet, innocent smile and said, "No, of course not."

"You—you purple palfrey!" The pegasus threw back her head and guffawed. "You had me goin' there for a second!"

But at the moment, Windfall didn't feel much like laughing. Watching the way Twilight paced and muttered to herself brought back some unpleasant memories of friends suffering from being "dropped in the shit" too many times. The pacing was better than the twitching, shivering mess she had been the night before, but it was still a clear sign of battle fatigue.

And all because of some diagrams scrawled in a notebook.

Windfall had asked, of course, but Twilight had been unwilling to say much of anything. Windfall pressed as hard as she dared, and only got a curt, "Too complicated!" out of the alicorn. After that, she left her alone. She slept poorly that night and she was fairly certain that Twilight didn't sleep at all.

Aside from a few gulps of water from the stream, Twilight didn't seem to intend to do anything all day, but pace and think. Windfall wanted to get something more substantial for breakfast, but she wasn't willing to leave Twilight alone to venture into the tunnels, so she made do with what grass was left in the cavern.

"We need to go, and we need to go, now." Twilight said, suddenly appearing at her shoulder.

"Ffhat?" Of course she'd timed it so her mouth was full.

"I can get us out of here, but we need to do it now, and I think we'll be attacked as soon as we break out. No time to debate it, because the maniac could be listening in."

Windfall spat out her mouthful of grass. "Do it."

"Follow me!" Twilight sprang into the air and flapped hard for altitude.

Windfall followed behind and slightly to one side. The captivating magic started to slow her as she approached the circle of "sky" above, just as it had done a hundred times before.

But this time was different.

Twilight's horn lit and the world became fundamentally wrong.

Windfall twisted up inside. It felt like taking a serious wound, in the instant when the shock hits but before the pain kicks in, but it went on and on. She gritted her teeth and kept flapping.

The sky came apart into chunks and dissolved before they could reach it.

Absolute blackness enveloped them. Windfall kept flying in the direction she hoped was up, and seconds later caught sight of a sparkle of light. She headed for it.

She was standing on a rough stone floor. She didn't remember landing, but her wings were neatly folded at her sides. Twilight stood next to her, and the warm ball of light that hovered above the alicorn's head was the only illumination in the darkness.

It was enough.

The two mares stood in a hemispherical room, at the edge of what appeared to be an elevated model of the labyrinth they had been trapped in. There was room to circle the model and a steel double door across from them.

Twilight began trotting around the arc of the walkway. Windfall followed.

Just before they reached the doors there was a sparkle of light in the air in front of them, and Twilight's horn flared in response. The feeling of horrible wrongness briefly washed over Windfall again.

"That was probably the maniac," Twilight said through gritted teeth, as the light of her horn died, and she headed for the door again. "Trying to teleport in."

Windfall said nothing. She was content to follow Twilight's lead, but if a strange pony or creature suddenly appeared next to her, she was going to ask questions only after it regained consciousness.

Two more teleportation attempts were made before they reached the doors, and Twilight fended them off just as easily.

The doors were designed to swing outwards, and no locking mechanism was visible. Twilight pushed them open to reveal a long tunnel that disappeared into darkness.

The mares trotted side-by-side down the tunnel. To Windfall, it seemed a good time for a briefing. "What can we expect to face, and when?" she asked.

"A ridiculously powerful magic user, which isn't a huge problem any longer," Twilight replied. "If I react quickly enough, I can stop anything they throw at us. But the defense might be worse than the attack. What I'm doing is dangerous and untested. There's a non-zero chance that I might unmake matter in local space."

"And that's bad?"

"Very, very bad. Trust me on this."

Windfall gave it a moment's thought after the first instant of existential terror had passed. "Distract them, take care of any minions, and I'll smash their skull in while they're focused on you. That usually works unless they're freakin' enormous."

"I—don't have a better plan."

"Good. So when?"

"I can stop them from teleporting, so it depends on how far away they were when we broke out, and how fast they can hoof it. This place looks purpose built, so I don't think it will be long before—"

There was a booming crash from somewhere up ahead of them, as if a large pair of steel doors had been violently thrown open, and a screeching voice tinged with madness echoed down the tunnel. "You miserable insects! What have you done?"

"Or now," Twilight said wearily as she skidded to a halt. "Now's likely."

She turned to Windfall and briefly bathed her in magic. "That's a Don't Notice Me spell. If you move slowly they might not see you until you're behind them."

Windfall moved to the side of the tunnel and hugged the wall as heavy hoofbeats galloped toward them. Twilight backed up several yards before taking a defiant stance.

The towering creature that emerged from the blackness was something neither of them expected.

It was Twilight Sparkle.

Sort of.

She was huge. She would have topped Celestia by at least a head, and had a wickedly pointed sword of a horn. Her enormous wings were half-spread and shaking with anger, and her mane and tail rippled and sparked with violent magical energy.

"You have ruined EVERYTHING!" the monster screamed.

Twilight backed away slowly. "Tell me about it. Maybe I can help," she said, forcing her voice to remain level and steady.

"You? You are just an ingredient! An insignificant—" The enormous alicorn broke off and quickly looked around. "Where is that other—"

She broke off again because Twilight had smacked her in the face with a bolt of pure magical force. It wasn't something Twilight had expected would hurt the huge alicorn, but Windfall had asked for a distraction, and Twilight was going to give it to her.

The monster responded with lightning reflexes, instantly flinging a searing blast of magic right back at Twilight.

The world went sideways again. A horrible pressure and twisting sensation washed through the ponies in the tunnel. It felt as if their internal organs belonged on the outside of their bodies and had decided to do their best to make that arrangement a reality. The feeling faded almost instantly, but the aftereffects lasted a little longer.

"W-what…" The big alicorn shook herself and gagged slightly. He mane and tail sagged and moved sluggishly. "What was that? What did you do?"

Twilight said nothing, but lit her horn again.

"You idiot! I am far stronger than you. You have no hope of—"

That was when Windfall slammed into the back of her head with all four hooves.

The pegasus tumbled through the air and hit the side wall of the tunnel just behind Twilight. She slid down to the floor in a heap and groaned.

The huge alicorn dropped like a felled tree.

Twilight scrambled forward, ripping off her own shoes as she went. The metal horseshoes twisted and glowed in her magical aura as she reshaped the steel into a branching conical spiral that she jammed down over the unconscious alicorn's horn. More of her magic flickered over the surface of the metal, creating meandering grooves and channels.

Windfall managed to push herself up on a forehoof and turn her head to watch. She'd seen suppressor rings before, but whatever Twilight was doing didn't seem to be anything like that. The lines she was etching into the metal made Windfall slightly dizzy to look at, so she stopped looking and put her head back down with a sigh. The crazy princess seemed to have the situation well in hoof.

Windfall moved her legs and wings cautiously. They all hurt, and she knew they'd be stiff and sore for a few days to come, but it seemed she hadn't broken anything. She heard hoofsteps approaching and looked up to see Twilight bending over her, and looking down with concern on her face.

"How badly are you hurt? Is anything broken?" she asked.

"Don't think so. Bruised pretty good and maybe a strain or two, but otherwise I'm okay. Gonna lie here for another minute or two if that's okay with you."

Twilight nodded and looked back over her shoulder. "She's not dead. I tied her wings and hooves together with wire. She was foolish to ignore the possibility of a physical attack, but I'm not going to make the same mistake."

Windfall snorted. "Oh yeah, her. Listen Princess, I don't mean to jerk your tail or anything, seeing as how we're both on Team Not-a-Maniac, but d'you mind explaining why the warden of this madhouse turned out to be a jumbo-sized version of you?"

"Windfall," Twilight turned back to her friend and sighed. "That is a very good question."

= = =

=

11 The Edge of Disaster

"Parallel—" said Windfall, slowly and carefully, wanting very much to be certain whether she had heard the alicorn correctly or not. "—universes."

"That's right," Twilight confirmed.

Windfall had a hard time taking in the concept. She understood both words, but placed together… She decided to take it one step at a time. "If they're parallel, that means they never meet, right?"

"Ah! A fan of geometry?"

"Trig, actually. Comes in very useful for artillery calculations. Wouldn't want to drop a rock on the wrong target."

"Oh." Twilight stared at her for a moment and then shook her head and got back on track. "You're right; the universes never meet, but cross-connections can be made. I've used one, myself!"

Twilight fully expected Windfall to pepper her with questions about travelling to another universe, but the mercenary mare was too practical in the face of an unknown (albeit hogtied) threat. "So what do these connections look like? Can we find it and shove the maniac back through it back to wherever she came from?"

"They're mirrors usually. At least that's what Starswirl always used. But they can look like anything. A door, a book, or even an overstuffed green velvet chair."

Windfall really did want to ask about that last item, but persisted. "So, can we find this connection, dump her back in, and break it so it doesn't work anymore?"

Twilight sighed. "She probably made the original, so I don't think that would be a long-term solution."

Windfall thought for a moment and then said, "Look, don't take this the wrong way, but…"

"Go on."

"I know she's you, sort of, but she's a pretty damned evil version of you—"

"I absolutely agree. Go on."

"So… If you do your magic on my horseshoes, and mojo up a nice sharp knife, I could…" Windfall winced at the horrified look on Twilight's face. "I'll make it quick and painless, I promise!"

Twilight opened her mouth to forbid Windfall from doing any such thing. But she paused and slowly closed it again. She would be the sole ruler of Equestria soon. She would undoubtedly have life and death decisions to make. She had to be ready to make those decisions based on what was best for the kingdom and not her personal feelings.

The twisted, giant version of herself had been directly responsible for the seemingly pointless deaths of many ponies at the very least, and given the methodical nature of her bizarre labyrinth, would continue destroying equine lives in pursuit of her own ends... If she wasn't stopped.

Twilight's horn lit and half of the mass of Windfall's front shoes flowed away in a swirl of twinkling lights. The cloud settled on the tunnel floor into a straight, thin blade.

"The edge is only one molecule thick," Twilight said in an unsteady voice. "Be careful."

After giving Twilight a surprised look, Windfall took up the knife in a practiced pastern grip and turned toward the huge, bound alicorn.

She was awake and watching them.

"Uh," Twilight began. "I'm sorry, but—"

The world twisted in on itself and both Twilight and Windfall staggered and cried out. It felt to them as if they were simultaneously being frozen and roasted alive while being shredded under a field harrow. But the gigantic pony was screaming, too.

The agony ended after what seemed like an eternity. Twilight staggered to her hooves and called out to the other alicorn, "Don't use magic again! Don't cast anything, or we—"

As might be expected, the maniac didn't listen.

The three of them were only briefly affected the second time, because the maniac had attempted to break through what she thought was a suppressor of some sort with shere power. If it had been any sort of normal magic-nullifying ring, she would have easily blown it off her horn in a cloud of metallic gas. As it was, she merely increased the power of the spell woven into the steel cone. Before she passed out, one of the least unpleasant sensations Windfall experienced was the feeling that her own teeth were trying to burrow upwards into her brain.

Twilight had been partially prepared to resist the side effects of her magic disrupting matrix. She instantly cast a double shield around herself on a frequency that mirrored the two unequal "legs" of additional mana that the sigils on her steel cone added onto the maniac's spells.

It was just barely enough dampening to allow her to retain consciousness. The tunnel around her went out of focus briefly and then settled back into clarity. Twilight was fairly certain that the distortion had nothing to do with her own eyes. She dropped her shields and staggered over to look at the unconscious alicorn.

The cone that generated the disruptive additions was distorted as if it had been exposed to extreme heat. Twilight realized that it wouldn't survive many more such blasts of magic, assuming that the pulses of distorted waveforms it generated didn't kill all of them or collapse the tunnel first. Twilight was astounded that the big alicorn had only knocked herself out. The monster had been in direct contact with the sabotaged mana flow; and after feeling it from a distance and through a powerful defensive shield, Twilight could hardly believe that the alicorn's attempt at escape hadn't physically torn her apart.

Twilight looked around to find Windfall out cold, but still breathing. Fortunately, when the pegasus had dropped the ultra sharp knife, it had fallen clear of her body.

"Windfall! Wake up!" She nudged the pony's shoulder with a hoof. There was no response.

If Twilight risked waiting for Windfall to wake up first, she'd risk everything. It was up to her to do what had to be done.

A wave of nausea swept over her as she lit her horn and levitated the knife.

= = =

Windfall vomited up a bit of half digested grass as she woke. Her head swam and she couldn't see anything. The darkness around her was complete. But she definitely heard something. A pony was crying somewhere nearby. She got her aching legs under her body but wisely decided not to try standing up.

She smelled blood. "Princess?" she croaked out.

The weeping quieted, but it didn't stop entirely. There was a noise as if somepony had tried to speak, but they only managed a strangled sound.

"Twilight! Are you okay? I can't see anything!"

"Don't..." The word was half a sob.

Windfall tried to stand then, but wobbled and fell back to her knees. She crawled in the direction of the crying. "Hang on, Princess. I'm coming."

When she got close, she could smell the blood. She reached out and her hoof contacted something warm and solid. A little nearer, and she got a leg around what seemed to be Twilight's hips. Windfall squeezed lightly and said, "It's okay. I'm here." It was a ludicrously awkward hug, but it was all she could manage.

"I—I couldn't do it," Twilight sobbed.

Windfall didn't need to be told what "it" was. "She's still alive?"

The pegasus felt her nod, and pulled herself up to a sitting position using Twilight's shoulder for support. "When she wakes up, are we going to—"

"She's awake now," Twilight said.

"What? Are you…" Windfall was getting a little irritated at having to guess at what had gone on while she was out. "Can you make some light?"

"I—I hope you don't hate me for this. I couldn't kill her, so I…" A faint violet light formed at the tip of Twilight's horn, and it was all Windfall needed to see what was beyond her.

The huge alicorn lay beneath a hemisphere of magic, her face contorted in an ugly snarl of rage. She was screaming something, but no sound reached the two ponies outside the bubble. Broad streaks of blood flowed down over her face from where her horn… wasn't.

The long spire, still encased in Twilight's improvised steel cone, lay outside of the shield spell in its own separate puddle of blood.

Windfall's first thought was that it was a clever and reasonable solution for a pony adverse to killing. Her second thought was that it was obvious that Twilight was on the edge of falling apart and that she'd better get her snapped out of her funk and headed for an exit as soon as possible.

"We need to get out of here, Princess. Help me up."

Twilight and Windfall used each other for support as they got to their hooves. Windfall surreptitiously scooped up the bloody knife and very, very carefully tucked it under one wing. She hoped they wouldn't need any weapons, now that the maniac was neutralized, but she wasn't going to be caught unprepared if they did.

"How long will that shield hold, Princess?"

"A day, maybe? If her Earth magic is proportionately as strong, and if she snaps that wire and starts kicking… I don't know. An hour or so?"

"Then we'd better get a move on, unless you want me to finish the job."

Twilight shook her head violently. "No… Just… No. Let's go."

The huge alicorn suddenly stopped struggling and silently screaming, and rolled over to where she could touch the floor of the tunnel with one of her bound wingtips. The maneuver rolled her hips so that her cutie mark was clearly visible for the first time.

Twilight stared. It was her mark, of course, but the five smaller white stars were gone. They weren't missing; dark smears something like burn marks had replaced them.

"C'mon, Princess! Let's get—"

"No, look!" Twilight pointed, not at the distorted cutie mark, but at where the maniac had used the tip of a primary feather to write a single word on the floor in her own blood: TIME

"Buck that, Princess! We need to—"

But Twilight walked away from the pegasus and toward the other alicon. She looked at the word for a few seconds and then said, "I'm going to alter the shield to allow sound to pass outward. If you try anything, like knocking us out with the Royal Voice, I'll seal it back up and we will leave, understood?"

The giant under the bubble nodded her bloody head. There was something wrong with her eyes. The edges of her irises shaded from the expected purple to a metallic gold near the edges.

Windfall gritted her teeth. Every bit of her long experience in perilous situations told her that immediate flight was the only safe course to take. But Twilight hadn't steered her wrong yet, and she wasn't going to leave her friend alone with the monster.

"All Equestria is in deadly peril," were the first words the giant spoke. She spit them out in a carefully enunciated staccato, as if speaking to a dim-witted foal.

"Your Equestria," Twilight replied.

"No!" The huge pony kept herself from snarling out the reply only with a huge effort of will. "Our Equestria. This Equestria!" She slapped the word she had written on the floor with a bloody wingtip, turning it into an illegible smear. "You're from my past, not a different dimension."

Twilight eyes narrowed. "I don't believe you. I would never—"

"Say that again in a thousand years! Or two thousand, or five! You have no idea what you're capable of, you infant! You mewling pupa!"

"She kicked your gigantic ass," Windfall helpfully pointed out.

The maniac turned her gaze to the pegasus. The golden borders of her irises sparkled in an eerie and menacing way, and Windfall instantly regretted saying anything.

The strand of wire binding the huge alicorn's left foreleg snapped with a loud twang as she raised her hoof in an imperious gesture. "You worthless fragment of—"

Her words were cut off and the shield went semi-opaque as Twilight's horn blazed.

"Stop it!" Twilight's voice wasn't loud, but it carried a tone of absolute authority. "I am willing to hear you out, but only if you speak calmly and refrain from insults and threats. Otherwise I will collapse this tunnel on top of you and worry about the implications later."

The bloody alicorn lowered her hoof and studied Twilight for a long moment. Then she nodded.

Twilight altered the shield again and said, "Give me the most concise summary of the situation that you can."

Behind her, Windfall muttered low under her breath, "Oh blistering wind, this ought to be good."

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

Why can't it ever be simple?

12 Story Time

There is a cycle of folktales that originated in the Maresai tribe and eventually spread to most of Equatorial Zebrica. It's a series of stories about twin sisters who are beautiful, strong, swift, and talented. They are so alike that hardly anyone can tell them apart. The only difference between the two is that Zawadi is very wise, while Makena is very foolish. The stories are, like many such tales, tools for easily teaching young zebras hard truths about the world.

In The Tale of the Hungry Griffon, the sisters are out harvesting flowers and sweet herbs. They sing and dance as they gather, and weave flower crowns for each other. Suddenly, a griffin drops from the sky and lands before them. The sisters are terrified, because this was in the Bad Old Days when griffins ate zebras, and they were sure they were about to become the griffin's next meal.

But the griffin assures them he was struck by the beauty of their singing and dancing, and only wishes to watch them from nearby.

Makena says to Zawadi, "Surely, he must be telling the truth! Look, there are tears of joy in his eyes!"

Her sister, who is not a fool, replies, "Don't look at the eyes! Watch the claws!"

And sure enough, the griffin is flexing his terrible talons, scoring the ground at the thought of ripping into tender filly flesh.

Zawadi then cleverly tricks the griffin, and he ends up being trapped and burned to death in a giant thorn bush. Modern versions of the story leave out that gruesome ending on the mistaken assumption that it might frighten sensitive young ponies, but fortunately, the most important lesson of the story survives.

= = =

Windfall retreated a short distance from the spot lit by Twilight's horn, while still listening to what the crazy older version of her friend had to say about a terrible threat to Equestria and the entire world. It made some sense. Not the specifics, of course, but Windfall had enough experience with strange creatures and magic to know that such things happened from time to time. Even the warning that only the "Magic of Friendship" could defeat that evil, was a familiar element.

"Yeah, yeah," Windfall muttered to herself as she circled around in the darkness, forgotten by the other two. "Always some magical whatsit that can kneecap the bad guys." She'd been on enough search-and-retrieve missions to know that the world just seemed to work that way.

But that the magic was created by the synergy between Twilight and her friends was a new twist. Friends that were long dead from the maniac's point of view.

Twilight (her Twilight) must have thought the story was reasonable as well, because she nodded in agreement at several points. It wasn't until Windfall had gotten to her desired vantage point that she realized that Twilight's nodding was exactly in time to the odd cadence of the huge monster's voice.

Then she stopped speaking full sentences and began repeating simple phrases. "I will have them back. I will have them back. I will recreate them. I will make them again. I will have them back."

Windfall shook her head to stop herself from nodding along. She realized that she had almost fallen under the same influence. That, and the terrifying sight she had half anticipated when she began to circle the two, convinced her to act immediately.

She took the knife from under her wing with one forehoof and silently scooped up the severed horn and iron cone with the other. Twilight's shield flickered and dimmed just before Windfall struck. The cone killed the weakened shield in a burst of wrenching nausea an instant before Windfall buried the knife in the back of the monster's skull.

The giant's body spasmed and writhed for several seconds, Twilight nodding jerkily, trying to keep time with the convulsions of the dying monster for a few heartbeats until she suddenly snapped out of whatever trance she had been in.

"What? What happened? Windfall, what did you do?"

Windfall had collapsed near the body, too dizzy and exhausted to avoid the spreading pool of blood. She reached out and shoved the head so that it lolled grotesquely over, revealing the hoof length of regrown horn that the maniac had been carefully hiding from her younger self.

"Watch the claws!" Windfall said before passing out.

= = =

Windfall awoke on a big, soft sleeping cushion. The room around her was large and extremely expensive-looking. Every bit of furniture was simple but beautifully crafted. There was a low table near the cushion, and on it rested a covered silver tray. She sat up and suppressed a groan at her aching muscles. She promised herself that she'd stretch out after she determined if there was food under the silver cover.

There was not only food, but juice and aspirin under the lid. It was while she was inhaling her third oat roll that she realized that her coat was clean and her feathers neatly preened. That observation brought a few more questions to her mind, but it didn't stop her from finishing off the food before getting up.

Twilight had been lying so quietly on a small couch in a shadowed corner, that Windfall hadn't noticed her until she began a closer inspection of the room.

The alicorn was awake, but didn't look up as her pegasus friend approached.

"Hey, Princess," Windfall asked, softly, "you okay?"

Twilight shrugged.

Windfall sighed. "I'm sorry, but I had to do it. Even with just that stub, she could have blasted us both to pieces, or—"

"That's not it," Twilight interrupted. "You did the right thing. I had no idea she could regenerate so quickly, and that might have been a fatal mistake. You saved us both. Thank you for that."

Windfall waited, but the alicorn didn't continue. "Okay," she said, instinctively feeling that Twilight would be better off for some conversation, even if she didn't feel like talking. "So, I guess we're safe now, right?"

Twilight nodded. "These are her private quarters. I carried you here and, um—cleaned you up before putting you on the sleeping cushion. I didn't want you to wake up all covered in—well—"

"Don't sweat it, Princess," Windfall replied, a bit amused by Twilight's slight embarrassment. "I appreciate it."

"Bathroom is down the hall, two doors on the left. It's pretty impressive," Twilight went on.

Windfall glanced around the room again. "Pretty swanky for a villain's lair. Have you found the way out yet?"

"Oh, yes," Twilight said, sounding not at all happy about it.

"So…?"

Twilight cut off a laugh by biting her lower lip. "We're in Canterlot," she said, without unclenching her jaw. "The supervillain lair is just an excavated area under the mountain that connects to this tower."

"Canterlot? Huh. Believe it or not, I've never been there."

"Me neither. Not this Canterlot."

Windfall was going to ask her to elaborate, when Twilight lit her horn, and part of the wall became transparent. Windfall's mouth fell open in shock.

The city spread out below them, down and down until it reached the valley floor and flowed through it like a river of gleaming marble, disappearing in the haze of distance. It was a gorgeous architectural symphony of alabaster, gold, and lapis. Towers and arches swept down the mountain like sculpted frosting on an enormous wedding cake. Parks and public squares bloomed along the streams and waterfalls that wound through the city like jewels on a chain of sapphires. Cloud structures dotted the sky, nearly as elaborate as the more solid buildings below, and flocks of airships floated between them and the city like colorful sea creatures of fanciful shapes.

"Welcome to the Canterlot of her time."

Windfall closed her mouth with a click of her teeth. "Holy shit," she said, quietly.

"Accurate summation," Twilight said through her teeth.

"We… Are we stuck here?"

"No, thank the stars," she said with a little more animation. "I can probably get us back to our own time. It will take an insane amount of power, but fortunately, as well as being insane, my future self has a very well equipped laboratory. It may take a while, though."

Windfall gave a sigh of relief. "What about the threat to Equestria? Are we going to have to worry about that? Hey, I just thought… Who's going to raise the sun and moon when we're gone?"

"She will."

"But she's—"

"Only temporarily," Twilight said. She didn't sound very happy about it.

"What? But I swear that blade went clear through her brain! How could she—"

Twilight sighed and got off the couch. "Come on, follow me." She gestured to the double doors to her right. "Why should I be the only pony to have unending nightmares?" she muttered under her breath.

Twilight led the way along a wide hallway past several side halls and other doorways until they came to a huge archway closed by two very undecorative, but solid-looking steel doors. Twilight gave them the lightest touch of her magic and they swung open silently. Beyond the doors was a vast, dim space. It was obviously a pony-made cavern, carved into the heart of the mountain.

The first thing Windfall saw was a huge glass tank that stretched from floor to ceiling. Floating in the clear blue liquid filling the tank was the alicorn that had tormented them for weeks. She was bound around with thick silvery straps of metal. Windfall recognised the cones set at the six cardinal points around the floating body as near duplicates of the steel version Twilight had improvised in the tunnel.

"You built this? How long was I out?"

"Only half a day or so. Most of this was already here." Twilight gestured with a hoof, pointing further back into the cavernous space. "Those, too."

Windfall turned her gaze to the line of smaller tanks that stretched back into the darkness. There were ponies in most of them.

And parts of ponies.

Windfall started and shied away. "Wha...What... "

"Go ahead and throw up, if you think it'll make you feel better," Twilight said flatly. "It didn't do much good for me, but it might be different for you."

"She was chopping up ponies?" Windfall's natural reaction to unpleasant surprises was anger, not illness. "That miserable—"

"No, she was growing them from different parts, as far as I can tell." Twilight gave a laugh that had more than a little bit of hysteria in it. "Making friends."

Windfall didn't swear. She didn't scream. She just stared at Twilight with white showing all the way around her irises and her teeth bared.

Twilight lit her horn and a big ledger-style book appeared beside her with a pop and flash of light. She opened the book and skimmed through it until she found the page she wanted. "The pegasus that was with you in the labyrinth before me. You said she was timid, but she was also very kind, wasn't she? I bet she loved animals."

Windfall didn't relax much, but she nodded and said, "She told me all sorts of stories about her pets."

Twilight nodded and read from the book. " 'Subject 47, Fluttershy analogue: 87% epithaumic match, 96% physical.' You're even better. A 91% epithaumic correlation with Rainbow Dash."

"I'm in there? Lemme see!"

Twilight hesitated and then tried to pull the book away from her, but Windfall was quick enough to read the last lines under the "Subject 48" heading.

"Physique overdeveloped. Discard entire body after harvesting."

Windfall let out all the air in her lungs in a rush and sat down heavily. "I… For the sun's sake, why?"

Twilight let the book slip out of her magic field and it flopped, pages down onto the floor.

"You may think my magic is powerful, or hers, but compared to the power of Harmony, we're wet firecrackers. The Magic of Friendship is born from the special connection between friends who embody the Elements of Harmony. I and five very special ponies share that bond. But they… But for her, they died a very long time ago. She needs the power of Harmony to solve her little problem, so she went about getting it in the most horrible way imaginable!"

Windfall took it all in and shook her head in confusion. "But if she could travel in time, why didn't she just go back and get the—originals, I guess?"

"Because they are my friends, not hers! She's too old, too different. They wouldn't have that special connection with her, that spark that makes it all work! That's why she eventually grabbed me. I've read all her notes, and she was onto something. Something unpleasant, but perhaps effective." Twilight paused and shook her head. "I was supposed to be the catalyst that brought it together for her bits and pieces. She was going to wipe my memory and send me back home when she was done with me." Twilight's voice grew louder and more ragged as she ranted, and she spun and slammed a hoof against the glass of the big tank. "You thought you could force-transplant friendship, isn't that right, you insane monster?"

Windfall almost fled when the floating alicorn's eyes snapped open.

The huge pony struggled against her bonds and her mouth moved, emitting a small stream of bubbles. But no sound reached the ponies outside of the tank. Considering how easily she had nearly hypnotised Twilight with words alone, it was just as well.

= = =

It took longer for Twilight to craft the time travel spell than she had anticipated for a number of reasons. Fortunately, she quickly learned that her future self had automated the celestial mechanisms of the sun and moon sometime in the second millennium of her rule, and there were no panicked ponies pounding on the doors to her private chambers with embarrassing questions about why the day was lasting too long.

Evidently, the sole ruler of the entire planet often locked herself away for long periods, and even an extended absence wasn't unusual, so there were no interruptions at all. Twilight teleported in food and drink when they needed it, and otherwise they kept to the bedroom and magical laboratory.

And the library. Twilight told herself that it was extremely unwise to look into books that had been published after she had departed her original timeline. Causality, paradox, all that stuff… Blah, blah, blah. It stopped her from snooping for about three hours, and then she gave up and dove in. It wasn't like she was going to let the future unfold in any way that could possibly turn her into the monster in the tank, anyway. She was going to alter the future of her world, and this time around she'd be better informed.

She checked on the Thing in the Tank four times a day, and made extra sure that the enchanted silver cap that kept her horn from regenerating was still firmly in place.

Her future self didn't try to speak again, but whenever Twilight entered the laboratory, the imprisoned alicorn's eyes were open and she was watching.

= = =

=

13 Downtown Equestria

As with the library, Twilight thought it unwise to venture out into the city. As with the library, her resolve didn't last. Windfall didn't have much to do while Twilight studied and calculated, so she spent a lot of time staring out of the magic window in the bedroom, her wings twitching.

"Look," Windfall said on the third day after their escape, "We can't alter the future any more than we have already, so what would be the harm of stretching our wings a little?"

Twilight pushed herself back from the big desk in the library where she had laid out all her papers, scratch sheets and drawings, and rubbed her eyes. "I don't see why not, but we need to prepare a bit before we go out."

Windfall frowned. "How? Canterlot looks like the most civilized and peaceful place imaginable."

"Well, for one thing—" Twilight cast a spell, and something like a gramophone horn appeared on the desktop. It began to spew gibberish. "That's the live sound of a crowd of ponies in Parliament Square. And no, before you ask, I don't know if Parliament still exists or not, but the plaza does."

"What language are they speaking?"

"Probably Equish, but Future Equish, so I'll have to prepare a translation spell for speech the way I did for the text in these books." She indicated the piles surrounding her. "We need a disguise spell, too. Or at least I do. Going out in public looking like a miniature version of Her Monsterous Majesty would be a bad idea."

Windfall chucked at the thought. "I bet her subjects would all be too afraid to say anything!'

"Possibly, but let's not put it to the test." Twilight thought for a few seconds. "Maybe we ought to see what the fashions and hairstyles are like now. I'd like to be as unobtrusive as possible."

"Another sneaky spell for spying?"

Twilight gave the pegasus a sour look. "I think a telescope at a window would do fine." She summoned up a little refracting scope and tripod, and sent Windfall up to the clerestory where there were several suitable windows overlooking the city. "Get it set up at a good spot and I'll join you as soon as I complete the matrix for the translation spell."

Twilight was double-checking her calculations when Windfall leaned over the railing of the upper level a few minutes later and called down to her. "Something weird is going on out there, Princess! I think you ought to take a look at this."

Twilight immediately teleported to Windfall's side. "What is it?"

"See for yourself," Windfall replied, and pointed to the telescope.

Twilight automatically ran her magic over the scope, checking that it was seated properly and that the tripod was stable, then bent over the eyepiece. "Interesting fashions," she said. "Either ponies have naturally become more colorful, or dye-jobs are common. I don't… Wait."

Windfall watched her tense up and knew that she'd noticed the same thing that had caught her own attention. Twilight swiveled the telescope a few degrees and refocused it. Then she repeated the action a second and third time, pausing just long enough to briefly examine the ponies in her field of view. Then she slowly straightened up and looked at Windfall.

"They don't have any cutie marks!"

The pegasus nodded. "Yep, and most of them are emphasizing that fact."

Twilight blinked in puzzlement. "What do you mean?"

"Take another look. Even the ponies wearing skirts and capes and stuff like that have got them cut so that their haunches are still visible. I saw one mare that was almost completely covered with a long cloak and hood, but there was a circular cutout over her thigh where her mark should've been."

Twilight bent over the eyepiece again and saw that Windfall was right. As she looked closer, she noticed something else. She stepped back and motioned Windfall to the scope. "There's a striped orange and yellow unicorn mare, blue mane, with a light blue skirt, heading toward the big building with the griffin statues on either side of the doors. Look carefully at the cutout area!"

Windfall did so, nudging the telescope slightly from time to time to keep the hurrying pony in her field of view. "Something's not right about the skin on her leg. It's sorta—wrinkly?"

"I think it's fake." Twilight said. "I think she's got a patch of faux fur wrapped around her thigh under the skirt to hide her cutie mark."

Windfall looked up from the eyepiece. "I think you're right. So she's hiding her mark, then wearing a skirt over the disguise to reveal it? I gotta tell you, Princess, that is all kinds of messed up"

Twilight tapped her chin thoughtfully for a moment. "It means that, not only do most ponies lack cutie marks, it is socially unacceptable, maybe dangerous, for those few that are exceptions to call attention to the fact."

"Messed up," Windfall repeated.

"Yes," Twilight agreed, a grim expression settling on her features. "And I want to know why. C'mon, let's get down there!"

"Okay, but—"

Twilight lit her horn and a pulse of magic washed over them both. Windfall felt a general shiver that was much more pronounced around her pelvis. She glanced back, and sure enough, her cutie mark had vanished, and her subdued coat had changed into a rather garish pattern. "The new color's kinda wild. Is it—" Another burst of magic hit her in the head, and her ears and mouth tingled fiercely for a second or two.

Twilight looked much the same except for the absence of both cutie marks and wings, and the addition of pink polka dots to her coat. "Try not to use idiomatic expressions. If you've never teleported before this might be a bit disorienting. Brace yourself."

"Don't worry about—"

The two mares disappeared in a burst of magical light.

Damn, Windfall thought as they reappeared behind one of the huge griffin statues and she staggered slightly while regaining her balance. The bookworm doesn't let her feathers get dusty when she's on a mission!

Twilight glanced around to see if anypony had seen them appear, but she had chosen the secluded target area well. She leaned forward and peered around the big granite wing toward the street. "She's coming. Let me do the talking."

Windfall gave a grunt of acknowledgement and followed Twilight as she stepped out from behind the statue and into the path of the orange and yellow striped unicorn.

"Excuse me! Could I talk with you for a moment?"

The unicorn mare gave a slight gasp at the unexpected interruption. Her examination of the two strangers definitely included quick glances at their hindquarters. She began to back away. "I… Just leave me alone. Please!"

"Don't worry," Twilight told her. "We won't hurt you. We just want to talk."

The mare looked confused by that, but sighed and rolled her eyes. "Sure. Whatever. Go ahead and stack rocks."

"What?" Windfall asked Twilight out of the corner of her mouth.

"Idioms," Twilight replied shortly. "Always tricky." Then to the mare she said. "We're new here. We've come from a long way away and we just want some information."

The mare looked at them suspiciously. "Why don't you just ask the Oracle?"

Twilight gave her a genuine smile. "That's just the sort of thing we need to know! Where can we find the Oracle?"

The mare blinked in disbelief. "You're kidding, right? This is the weirdest stacking… Are you new at this?"

"No, really," Twilight continued. "We don't know about the Oracle. We don't have one where we come from."

The mare actually laughed at that. "Turn your eyes around backwards! She's right there!"

Windfall glanced over her shoulder. there was nothing but the empty space between the back of the griffin statue and the wall of the building.

Twilight stopped smiling. "Please. We're far from home and we're lost and confused. We need somepony to help us."

The mare looked more confused than ever. "Okay, this is the weirdest scrape I've ever heard of, but I'll burn the chits to find out…" Her eyes lost focus for a second and her lips moved as if she were whispering to some pony. After a moment she shook her head and muttered, "That's impossible. Recheck and amplify!"

She stared at a spot over Twilight shoulder for another moment and then her expression changed to one of confusion and fear. "Who are you ponies? How are you doing this?"

"We just want a little information—"

The sound of the city abruptly changed. The low rumble of thousands of hooves on pavement suddenly ceased, and the white noise of hundreds of conversations vanished with it. The unicorn mare's expression of fear turned into sheer terror, and she frantically looked around her, searching for something.

Twilight and Windfall looked down the broad avenue in front of the building to see everypony in sight standing perfectly still, except for the pegasi who were hovering in place. All their heads had turned toward the spot where the three mares were standing.

"Oh—" Windfall said in a world-weary voice that carried much more meaning than her two short words, "—shit."

As if her words had been a signal, every pony in sight (and by the sound of it, many more) began rushing toward them. But there was at least one exception: The one they had been talking to had jumped behind the other griffin statue, and was trying to hide beneath one of the stone wings. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she was shivering in terror.

Windfall had her eyes on the approaching pegasi. She was quickly evaluating their approach vectors and deciding how she would deal with the first to arrive, when Twilight shoved her back behind the griffin statue and there was a bright, disorienting flash. Then they were once again standing next to the telescope in the library.

Twilight immediately went to the scope and bent over the eyepiece. Windfall had to make do with what she could see through the window. It was obvious that the ponies below her weren't behaving normally, even though they were no longer all charging headlong toward the building with the griffin statues out front. Most were searching the area in a very thorough and coordinated manner. The pegsi were flying multi-level patterns, covering every bit of the location that could be seen from the air. The rest were poking their muzzles into any space that could conceivably hide a pony.

"They've found our mare," Twilight said without looking up from the telescope. "Huh. That's odd."

"What?" Windfall's sharp eyes could just make out the bright color of the mare as she stepped out from behind the statue, but not much in detail.

"I think she triggered all this insanity somehow, but the other ponies are ignoring her."

"D'you have any idea what's going on?"

Twilight finally looked up from the eyepiece. "Not a clue," she said, almost cheerfully. "But that intensive search going on down there is a bit of good news."

Windfall frowned and then realized why. "It means they don't know where we are, and they don't know we teleported or they wouldn't be concentrating the search in just that area."

Twilight gave her a smile. "Exactly correct! You've got a lot more between your ears than just muscle, Windfall."

Windfall snorted, but was secretly pleased by the compliment.

"Would you keep an eye on the goings-on, and let me know if anything changes?" Twilight asked, as she headed for the stairs to the lower level of the library.

"Sure thing, Princess. What are you going to be doing?"

"I think I'd better look into some of the books that aren't thaumotechnical manuals. Nothing beats direct contact, but things are strange enough here that I think we should get a better academic grounding in the current culture before we try going out again."

Windfall nodded. "Sounds reasonable," she said, and turned back to the telescope.

She was amazed at the thoroughness of the search as it expanded out from the immediate area, and was absolutely astounded when it stopped. About an hour and a half after it had begun, the ponies who had been moving in precise patterns suddenly went back to seemingly normal activities, all at the exact same time.

Without looking away from the city below, Windfall called down to Twilight to let her know of this new development. "It's like somepony barked 'Dismissed!' on a parade ground! They've just gone back to shopping and walking and… huh. They've gone back to the cafes, too, but the waiters are taking away most of the cold food."

"Makes sense," Twilight called up to her. "I think I may have found an explanation, or at least a root cause. Come on down."

Windfall took one last look out of the window and then hopped over the railing and glided down to the main floor. "Whatcha got, Princess?"

There were dozens of books newly added to the piles around the big desk, but only one big one floated in Twilight's magical field. She turned it around and floated it over for Windfall to read.

The pegasus squinted at the cover. "Well, it's mostly gobbledygook to me, but the word Oracle is readable, even if the 'a' looks a little funny."

"Sorry," Twilight said, squeezing her eyes shut and pressing on the bridge of her nose with a hooftip. "I forgot you didn't get the textual translation spell. Funny thing; that's one of the very few significant words that haven't changed much from our time. Another one is hippopotamus, for some strange reason."

"Focus, Princess," Windfall said, smiling.

Twilight gave her a smile in return. "Right. So, the title is Project Oracle: System Evaluation and Expansion Proposal."

"And now I know just about as much as I did a minute ago. Can you give me a summary of what it's about?"

"It's the reason most of the books in this library are at least several hundred years old. The Oracle is a magical information storage system. When this book was written, it had nodes that ponies had to go to in order to ask questions. But one of the proposals in this book is to implant miniature versions into ponies in order to provide instant access."

"Access to what?"

"Everything!" Twilight replied. "Evidently, the sum total of all knowledge was put into the system somehow, and now any pony can call it up just by thinking about it. It made books—" Here she paused and her face took on a pained expression. "—obsolete."

"Okay," Windfall said, thoughtfully. "I'm not seeing a downside, there."

Twilight shrugged. "As far as it goes, no. But there are a lot of things in the proposals section that are just a bit creepy."

"Like?"

Twilight flipped open the book, briefly glanced at the index and then turned to a particular page. "'Proposed Emergency Override System,'" she read. "'Many ponies have lost their lives in perilous situations where an easy avenue of escape was available, but unknown to them, or when there was an immediate danger that they could have avoided but were unaware of. There have also been many cases where victims have perished because they lacked a simple skill that would have saved them, for example, a pony who cannot swim and therefore drowns in a comparatively small body of water.'

"'As the communication speed of the Oracle has reached the necessary level to smoothly integrate neuro-muscular control, a system to evaluate threats could be put in place to take over a pony's gross muscular activity and remotely evacuate them from a dangerous situation. The system could also suppress the instinctual flight impulse when panicked fleeing would be the more perilous choice. In the drowning pony example above, the victim could be controlled to swim to safety at the skill level of a professional athlete.'

"'We estimate that implementing this proposal would save dozens of lives per year that otherwise would be pointlessly and tragically lost.'"

Windfall raised an eyebrow. "Oh yeah, there's no way that could be horribly abused."

Twilight nodded. "I think that's exactly what we witnessed in the street down there."

"Okay, but what about the cutie mark thing?"

Twilight shut the book and tapped on it's cover. "Judging by the preservation spell on this, it's over three hundred years old, and it's one of the newest books I've come across in here. I'm betting that ponies gave up on physical books entirely shortly after it was published. None of the other books I've looked at mention anything about adult ponies without cutie marks."

"So it's something that started happening after this Oricle thing really took over." Windfall said. "D'you think it's connected to the threat to all Equestria that ol' Big and Creepy was going on about? What did she tell you in the tunnel? I was too busy getting a good angle on her skull to pay much attention."

Twilight sighed. "There are parts of that conversation I just don't remember, and I think she was pretty non-specific. Not a pony who is accustomed to explaining herself." Her mouth twisted in distaste. "But, I bet the lack of cutie marks is a symptom if nothing else."

"So, if there aren't current history books, we're not going to get much more info unless we hook up with the Oracle somehow." Windfall said, and then hurried to add, "Which is probably a really bad idea."

Twilight nodded. "Even if we found an old style node or terminal that still worked, as soon as we used it, the whole world would know where we are, and the reaction we got down there is a pretty good indicator that the system sees non-users as a threat."

Windfall thought about that for a second and then asked, "So Future You doesn't have one of these implant things?"

Twilight gasped and her eyes went wide in horrified shock. Then, she slowly let out her breath and relaxed. "No… No, she might have an implant. I think I would have gotten one, because instant access to all the world's knowledge is just too tempting. But I wouldn't have the override system, and I'd definitely retain the ability to turn it off."

"And running evil experiments, tormenting, and parting out ponies seems like a good time to draw the curtains to me," Windfall said.

Twilight winced. "Yes, and the disruptor cones around the tank would prevent her from transmitting anything, now." She sighed and put her head down on the desk. "How could I ever have become such a monster?"

Windfall shrugged. "After all this, you're a lot less likely to." When Twilight didn't say anything or raise her head, she added, "And aside from the evil laboratory thing, this place doesn't seem too bad."

Twilight still didn't raise her head and her voice was muffled as she replied. "A world full of purposeless ponies who can be zombified at any time by a jumped-up magical library? Oh yeah, what a paradise!"

"I… I got nothing, Princess. You wanna use your jim-jam to nab us a keg of cider and get hammered?"

Twilight chuckled and raised her head. "You think that will help?"

Windfall shrugged again. "Couldn't hurt."

Twilight stared at her for a long time, a smile spreading slowly across her face. "Why not?"

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

Fun fact for the day: The Latin word for hippopotamus is hippopotamus.

14 Solution

"Aaaaah!" Windfall sighed as she let the empty mug fall away from her mouth. "I haven't had a drink in…" She held out her wing and began counting on her primary feathers with a hoof. She ran out of primaries and began on the secondaries, then shrugged and dropped her hoof. "Long damn time, anyway. Fill me up, Princess!"

Twilight's horn lit and a stream of golden cider lifted out of the strange metal keg and headed for Windfall's mug. It twisted into a figure eight knot near the top of its arc, and then dipped into the mug without spilling a drop.

"Showoff!"

Twilight smiled. "Inanimate matter is easy. I once juggled a dozen or so live animals for Saddle Arabian dignitaries!" She leaned over and whispered to the pegasus as if imparting some sensitive information, despite them being the only ponies in the room. "The secret is to make it fun for the critters!"

Windfall didn't reply right away because she was busy draining half of her refill.

"My friends were impressed when I levitated an Ursa Minor, but I soothed her down with some music and a whole lot of fresh milk first, or I don't think I could have managed it."

Windfall nearly spit out her cider, but being a veteran in many senses of the word, managed to swallow her mouthful before blurting out, "You lifted a star bear? You've got to be kidding me! How much does one of those things weigh?"

"Less than you'd think," Twilight replied nonchalantly. "They're magical beings and semi-ethereal. Even with the tank full of milk it probably wasn't over 30 or 40 tons."

Windfall just stared at her.

"What?" Twilight stared back in puzzlement. "That's just a rough estimate. I could check the figures, if you like." A notepad and pencil floated over and settled down on the table between them.

"No math while we're getting drunk!" Windfall said, and swept the pad off of the table with a wingtip.

"Okay, okay!" Twilight held up her hooves placatingly. "But I really don't want to get drunk drunk, if you know what I mean. I did that once, and I didn't much like it."

"Wait a minute! You're supposed to become the ruler of all of Equestria and you've only been drunk once? How are you going to be able to relate to the common pony?"

Twilight laughed as if Windfall had been joking. "Yes, the first time I had my friend Applejack's cider, I definitely over indulged. I wasn't trying to become inebriated, but it tasted so good! It was nice being tipsy, but I didn't stop there, unfortunately."

"Did the Pretty Purple Princess embarrass herself?" Windfall asked with a grin.

"Many, many times," Twilight said with a sigh. "That night was just one of those times. I became a little—overly demonstrative in my affections."

"Ah," Windfall said. "You got to the 'I love you guys!' stage, then? Or was it the 'No, I mean I really, really love you guys! and then barfing' stage?"

Twilight cleared her throat nervously. "Let's just say that it's a good thing I can teleport rapidly moving fluids when drunk, so nopony had to hold my mane out of the way for me."

Windfall laughed, and then asked, "Hey, where did you teleport it to?"

"Uhmn…" Twilight frowned. "I'm not really sure. Just away. I think I aimed it toward the Everfree, but my memory of that evening is understandably hazy."

Windfall lifted her mug in a toast. "Here's to hazy memories!" She drained it and then held it out to Twilight again. "Do a double loop with a twist this time!"

"Too easy!" Twilight's horn flashed, there was a muffled thump from inside the keg, and then a pop as a precise amount of cider appeared with a flash in Windfall's mug. The liquid filled it to within a hair's breadth of the rim, but didn't slop over, or even fizz excessively. "See? I'm drunk, but I can still achieve that level of precision!"

"You've barely had one mug!" Windfall pointed out. "You can't even be tipsy yet."

Twilight gave Windfall a flat, level stare and drained half of her mug. She heroically tried to maintain her sten expression, but she finally had to grimace and stick her tongue out. "Ugh! This stuff really isn't very good, is it?"

"I wasn't gonna say anything," Windfall admitted and shrugged. "But it's not bad enough to not drink."

Twilight opened her mouth to say something, paused, and then shut her mouth and shrugged too. She refilled her mug.

"We gonna try and figure out what's wrong with this place again tomorrow?" Windfall asked after taking a more moderate sip of cider. "Tomorrow afternoon, I mean."

Twilight considered it. "I get the feeling it's too subtle and complex for us to easily discover on our own, even without the problem of the Oracle acting against us. I wish we could just ask my future self."

"Hey!" Windfall said sharply. "We're pretty much partners in all this, right?"

Twilight nodded.

"Then, I'm vetoing the idea where you let the insane hypnotist talk to you again, okay?"

Twilight chuckled. "Fine. But maybe there's another, safer way I could communicate with her."

Windfall considered it. "I dunno. Did you see how easily she snapped that steel wire around her hoof? If you released one of her legs so she could write on the inside of the glass or something, she might smash it or tear off those restraints."

Twilight nodded. "No, I was thinking of something like telling her to blink at us in Horse Code."

"You're kidding right? No? Are you sure there's not any way she could hypnotize you by blinking at you?"

"I don't—" Twilight broke off and burst into a fit of the giggles. "Actually, I have a marefriend who can hypnotize stallions just by winking at them!"

Windfall chuckled. "A real looker, huh?"

"Drop-dead gorgeous!" Twilight said emphatically, while rolling her eyes.

Windfall gave Twilight a sly smile. "Close friend, is she?"

"Oh yes! She's one of my closest… Wait! What? You mean…" Twilight gasped. "No! Not that way!"

"Funny," Windfall said casually. "But, you started blushing as soon as you mentioned her, Princess."

Twilight made several inarticulate noises before she teleported in a small hoofmirror to check to see if she was blushing. She was, but had only started after Windfall began teasing her.

"See? I think you're sweet on this marefriend of yours!"

"I—I'm not!"

Windfall went on as if she hadn't heard her denial. "Makes sense. Even now, you'd be the big spoon in most relationships. And judging by Future You, it won't be long before you're a freakin' ladle! Yeah, hardly any stallions could deal with not measuring up, so it's only logical you'd be into mares."

"What?!" Twilight leaped to her hooves and only staggered a little bit before shouting. "I'll have you know my brother is the "little spoon" in his marriage, and Cadance tells me he still rides her like a wild—" Twilight suddenly realized what she was saying, sat back heavily on her haunches, and clamped both forehooves over her mouth.

Windfall completely collapsed, spilling her cider and nearly overturning the table as she kicked her hindlegs, bellowing with laughter. "Oh, Blistering Sun! Oh, you Perfectly Polite Princess! You are so damned easy!"

A book thumped into the side of her barrel, then another and another, unti she was half buried in ancient volumes. It didn't interrupt her laughter at all.

Twilight pouted for quite a while, then her horn lit and the keg of cider disappeared with a pop.

"Whoa there!" Windfall protested. "You can't do that! It's not fair!"

Twilight gave her an evil grin. "Oh? Since when did you become a pony who fights fair?"

"It was just a little teasing! I—"

Twilight held up a hoof to forstall her. "Don't worry. I'm not cancelling Girls Night In. Now be quiet for a minute, this will take some concentration. Object-specific teleports get more difficult the more detailed the request is."

Windfall didn't understand what Twilight was talking about, and was pretty sure it wasn't the fault of the cider she had drunk. She shut her mouth and watched.

Soon, in a more violent than usual whumph of displaced air, another keg appeared on the table. A wooden keg with an apple symbol burned into one of the staves.

Windfall blinked at the keg. "So…?"

"Yes," Twilight said. "If I have to put up with your abominable sense of humor all night, at least I can make sure we drink the good stuff!"

A huge grin slowly spread across Windfall's muzzle. "You are a freakin' genius!"

"Yes," Twilight agreed primly as she popped the bung out of the small barrel and filled both of their mugs. "Yes, I am."

= = =

Somewhile later a small brass instrument on the desktop began chiming.

"Whuzzat?" Windfall asked, peering at it suspiciously.

Twilight paused in her exhaustive and somewhat slurred explanation of the intricacies of thaumic node structure and why it was unsuitable to applications involving inorganic gardening. "Huh? Oh, that's a timer. It means I should go check on Future Me." She got unsteadily to her hooves. "C'mon."

Windfall shrugged and got up. She briefly put out one wing to steady herself against the table and then followed Twilight out of the room.

The big doors to the laboratory opened slightly and Twilight peeked in. Windfall peered around her shoulder. Sure enough, even though Twilight had pushed the doors slowly and gently to avoid any noise, her future self was alert and watching her.

Twilight sighed and opened the doors far enough to be able to walk into the cavernous space. She ran her magic over the tank and the restraints, searching for any sign that the monstrous mare had done anything to them. All seemed to be the same as the other times she had performed this check.

They turned to go, but Twilight hesitated and turned back to face the tank. "Do you remember Horse Code?" she asked. "Can you—" But the huge alicorn was already blinking in reply.

Whatever message she was sending was longer than a simple yes or no.

"Twilight?" Windfall asked, walking forward until she could get a good look at her face. "You're okay, right?"

Twilight nodded emphatically but didn't take her eyes off her future self until she had finished reading the blinked message. Then she turned away and sat down heavily, and said, "Hocking's Exclusion Principle applies."

Windfall squinted at her.

"It means that... that we will change the future when we go back, but it won't matter. The results will be the same!"

"I don't get it. If you—"

"Thing… Uhm. Think of time as a river." Twilight launched into her standard lecture mode as well as she was able to in her condition. "A big… big ol' loopy river. If you cut a channel 'cross the neck of a meander, it'll change the river drastically. It'll run a new, faster course, and the old loop will become a backwater, maybe even an isolated oxbow lake. The faster current might even affect the channel for a ways downstream, but it won't change the rest of the river. The river will still empty into the ocean right where it always has!"

Windfall made a face. "Is that how time really works? Because—"

Twilight nodded and staggered just a little. "Not at all. Totally differen'!"

"Thanks, Princess." Windfall snorted. "That sure cleared that up. I think I'm gonna have to cut you off."

Twilight angrily stomped a hoof. "Look, it's all math, right? Like really, really, really complex stuff! Iz… It just works this way, okay? Little changes don't matter. Only, like—" Twilight stalled out, seeming at a loss for words.

"Really, really, really big changes?" Windfall filled in for her.

Twilight nodded again and pointed a hoof at Windfall and then at the tip of her own nose. Then she nearly fell down. Then she pretended she hadn't. "I know me. I would try to be the best princess ever! I would always do the good thing. She must have done that! But then I'm still gonna en' up all nasty and mean and I don't wanna—"

She was growing more distressed by the second and Windfall wasn't eager to end up with a drunken, sobbing princess on her hooves. "So do something big when we get back! If anything you try to do as Head Honcho Princess turns you into that—" She flung a hoof at the Thing in the Tank. "—then don't be the princess! Tell the whole rotten kingdom to pronk off and go do something else!"

Twilight froze. She stared at Windfall as if she'd been slapped. "I… I... "

Windfall sighed. Here come the waterworks, she thought.

But Twilight surprised her. Her expression of shock slowly became a pensive one. Windfall waited silently, afraid that anything she might say would only make the situation worse. After what seemed like an eternity, Twilight looked up at her and said, "You may be right. I saved the whole… thing a buncha times. Sometimes, I was princess, sometimes not. I… I… think I gotta think 'bout this some more. Inna morning. Imma go t'sleep now."

She nearly collapsed right there, but Windfall held her up and walked her back to the bedroom, and tucked her in. The pegasus failed to notice the look of horror and fury that twisted the face of the alicorn bound within the tank.

When she was alone, and the departing pony had securely closed the heavy doors to the cavernous laboratory, the ancient princess carefully tested her bonds. Her younger self had done the job well, making sure there was no possible way that she could regenerate her horn or use magic.

Not unicorn magic.

The huge alicorn flexed her wings. The straps that held them clamped to her sides were tight and secure. Those straps could have held back a hundred charging yaks, as could the ones that held her hooves immoblile. But feathers are flexible, and direct force isn't the only way to overcome a physical barrier.

She flexed her wings again, rolling her carpal bones to make a small gap between the leading edge of her wing and her barrel. Then she rolled them back, scooping a tiny bit of the oxygenated fluid that surrounded her under her feathers. It flowed back, through the folded secondaries and primaries, hardly stirring them.

But she strained again and a second pulse followed the first. It took her hours to work out the timing that would produce a constant, consistent flow over her feathers, but she finally did it. Then she concentrated on increasing that flow. The slight hydraulic pressure made her wings ache where the bone and muscle pressed against the enchanted metal bands, but she was fighting for her very existence and ignored the pain.

Tiny bubbles formed in the thick fluid as it slowly began to stir around her.

===

=

15 Time Waits for No Mare

Windfall got up and stretched.

She had gone for a brisk, if unsteady trot up and down the long, wide hallway and had drunk a big mug of water before going to sleep, so there was only a slight dull ache behind her eyes. The inside of her mouth tasted only a little like burnt capers and sauerkraut, so she judged it to be a fairly mild hangover, at least by her standards.

Poor Twilight, she thought. I'll let her sleep as long as she can manage. I'll know she's up when I hear the groans.

But, much to her disgust, she found Twilight already awake and working in the library. She was drawing some sort of diagram on a big sheet of paper and humming happily to herself.

"How's your head, Princess?" Windfall called out loudly. She winced a bit at the sound of her own voice.

Twilight looked up and smiled. "Good morning, Windfall! What about my head? I thought I brushed out my bed-mane pretty thoroughly."

The pegasus squinted at her. "You drank more than I did last night, and you're not even hungover?"

"Oh, that. Alicorn metabolism; I might have had a bit of a hangover an hour or so after going to bed, but I was asleep and didn't notice anything."

"That's… That's completely and utterly unfair!" There was a good deal of passion in her voice, but the pegasus carefully kept the volume low.

Twilight nodded as she turned back to her diagram. "Completely," she agreed pleasantly.

Windfall sighed. "So what's the plan, Princess?"

"I'm triple checking the calculations for the time spell to get us back home. As soon as I'm done here, we should go."

"Don't care about the Oracle and whatever threat to the kingdom is going on out there anymore?" Windfall gave a jerk of her head toward the clerestory window where the telescope still stood, and immediately wished she hadn't. She definitely didn't care, but her throbbing head made her feel a bit contrary.

The pencil floating in Twilight's magical grip stopped moving. "Windfall, that… All of that won't exist after we go back. It will never have existed."

"Yeah, right. So what about all those books you stuffed into your saddlebags? Won't they just disappear because they came from a future that never happened?"

"Exclusionary exceptions to causality are necessary to avoid subspacial tears from naturally occurring time loops," Twilight patiently explained. "Hockings pretty much proved that mathematically, and I experienced it directly when my friend Starlight tried to alter my past. If the universe wasn't a little flexible with regard to such things, it would have torn itself apart long ago."

Windfall felt a bit dizzy, and it wasn't because of her hangover. She doubted she would ever get over her astonishment at the alicorn's ability to suddenly terrify her with a casual word or two.

"That could happen?"

Twilight nodded. "It actually might have happened already. Maybe several times in many different universes. It might even be common, and our current, mostly stable universe only seems normal because of survivorship bias. One of the many, many good reasons not to mess around with time spells."

Windfall was quiet for a long time, watching Twilight work. Finally, she decided to go lie down on one of the couches and bury her head under a few cushions. The next thing she knew, Twilight was gently nudging her with a hoof.

"Windfall? I hate to wake you, but I think we should go now."

"Awwww," came the muffled voice of the pegasus from beneath the velvet cushions. "I'm gonna miss this creepy zombie future."

"You can stay if you like."

The cushions tumbled off Windfall as she rolled off the couch and onto her hooves. "Naw. Maybe I can get torn apart by mindless blank-flanks the next time we visit."

"Are you always grumpy and sarcastic when you're hung over?"

"Why should I be any different from any other time?"

"Good point." Twilight levitated her book-filled saddlebags onto her back and was a bit surprised to see her friend drag out a much larger set of bags from behind the couch and struggle into them.

"Uhmn… What did you pick out to take back with you?" The odd lumps in the fabric of the bags didn't look like books to her.

"Gold and gems, mostly," Windfall said casually. "I pried all of the huge star sapphires out of that big mirror in the bathroom. They ought to fetch a tidy sum back home."

"Ah," Twilight paused for a moment and tried to work out the ethics of stealing objects that wouldn't exist if they hadn't been stolen in the first place. "So, it wasn't really the books you were worried about."

Windfall shrugged and then wriggled a bit, trying to get the backstrap of her bags to settle in a more comfortable spot. "A gal's gotta look after herself, right? And this gal doesn't own an entire kingdom."

"Fair enough," Twilight said and turned toward the door leading out to the hallway. "It's not the lost treasure of Trotankamun, but it's some reward for your trouble."

They entered the hallway and walked toward the big doors of the cavernous laboratory.

"When we get back, where will we be?" Windfall asked.

"Still here in Canterlot," Twilight replied. "The cave the lab is built into is natural, so it will have existed back in our time. That's probably why she set up her equipment there if she's been fishing through her past for suitable subjects."

"Then, I've got to get back to the San Palomino somehow—"

"Don't worry about it," Twilight said. "I will arrange for you to be taken there, or I can send out ponies to find your friends and bring them to Canterlot. It might be better that way. I've targeted the spell to return us to the day after I was taken, so a few months will have passed for your friends since you disappeared."

"Can't you just send us to different times?"

Twilight shook her head. "The spell will use an incredible amount of energy. Probably drain those crystals completely, and I don't know how long they'll take to recharge. Besides, putting you back in the timestream before I appear, with the knowledge you have now, would be very dangerous. You might trigger an asynchronous anomaly that would propagate a phase-change through the…"

Twilight trailed off and grinned sheepishly. "Just pretend I rattled off a lot of clear, comprehensible, and convincing reasons why I'm doing things this way, okay?"

Windfall shuffled her wings and snorted. "Sure thing, Princess. As long as we get the flit out of this place, I'll be a happy…" She suddenly stopped walking and cocked her head. "Hey, do you hear that?"

Twilight swiveled her ears forward. "That sort of hissing sound?"

"Yeah." Windfall nodded. "Coming from…" She gestured to the big double doors that led into the laboratory cave.

Princess Twilight said a very bad word and then bolted for the doors. She grabbed them with her magic and flung them open to reveal the cavern lit by irregular flickers of actinic light from within the huge tank, which was cloudy and turbulent. The two mares could barely make out the form of the alicorn within, but it was clear that she was struggling and moving far more than she should have been able to.

Another flash of lightning from within the tank shocked Twilight out of her immobility, and she immediately formed an appropriate plan of action. "Run!" she screamed to Windfall and sprinted for the glowing crystal cluster deeper in the cave.

Windfall ran.

Twilight skidded to a halt in front of the crystals, threw her diagram down on the floor where she could reference it if she needed to, and began to form the mandala of the time spell.

Windfall stood close behind her and twisted her neck around so that she could keep watch on the tank. The sight of what was going on inside terrified her, but if she was going to be ripped apart by an enraged goddess, she at least wanted to see it coming.

It was a close thing. They almost made it.

As Twilight was forging the final link to the power crystals, she heard a thunderous crash and the rush of thick liquid from behind her. Windfall slammed into her rump and she was flung forward, smashing muzzle-first into the crystals and losing her concentration for a critical split second. She sloppily re-established the link to the crystals and triggered the spell as quickly as she could.

A searing white light that was definitely not part of the spell surrounded them as the vortex formed and sucked them in. Twilight shoulders and neck flared in agony, and she smelled burned fur and feathers before she blacked out.

= = =

"Twilight, dear? Can you hear me?"

Twilight had an odd impulse to answer, "No, I can't," but she licked her dry lips and croaked out, "Yes." She tried opening her eyes but her eyelids were gummy and it took some effort. When she managed it, the glare of light sent a jolt of pain through her head, so she immediately closed them again.

"Oh, I'm so sorry, darling! Let me pull the curtains!" There came the sound of metal rings sliding on a rod and the room dimmed.

Rarity's voice was richer and more mellow than Twilight remembered. She opened her eyes again and blinked in the low light of the hospital room. Rarity leaned over her, fine lines forming at the corners of her eyes as she smiled.

"It's so wonderful that you're awake! The doctors said you would heal quickly, but we didn't expect you to wake up for another day."

Twilight couldn't think of anything to say to that. She peered upward at her friend, studying her face carefully. What happened to her? Twilight thought. Has she been sick?

Rarity's smile faltered a bit. "Are you feeling alright, dear?"

Twilight tried moving a bit and felt surprisingly little pain. Then a question occurred to her. "Where's Windfall? There was a pegasus with me."

Rarity nodded. "She's alive and being treated. We couldn't know if she was a companion or one of the—whoever it was that attacked you, so she's being kept in a secure, guarded room. The doctors say she will recover. Not as quickly as you, of course, but eventually."

"That's good," Twilight said. "She's a friend."

Rarity's smile brightened. "Of course she is. Oh, I've missed you so much, Twilight Sparkle!" She leaned down and kissed Twilight on the cheek, and that's when the alicorn noticed the silver gray stripe in her friend's mane. "You just rest for a moment! I'm going to nip out and let the princesses and everypony else know you're awake. Don't worry, we won't mob you all at once, but they will be miffed at me if I don't tell them!"

Twilight caught a glimpse of a royal guard pony in the hallway as Rarity left the room.

She's older, Twilight thought. Much older than when I was captured. Did I miscalculate the spell, or… No, I triple checked. It must have been that last blast from the Monster.

Twilight looked around the room. It was a VIP suite of some sort. The was a silk bell-pull right next to her bed and she considered ringing for a nurse, but thought it might cause more fuss than she wanted, so instead, she cleared her throat and quietly called out for the guard mare outside her door.

The large door swung open just far enough for the guard to poke her muzzle into the room. "Did you call, Your Highness? Shall I summon a doctor?"

"No thank you," Twilight replied, "I just have a question. What is the exact date including the year, please?"

The guard was utterly professional and answered the question without hesitation. "It is the third day of May, 1037, Your Highness."

Twenty five years. Twilight had missed her target date by over twenty five years.

= = =

=

16 A Stranger in a Strange Land

Spike was so big, he could barely get through the hospital suite's doorway. He rushed to Twilight's bedside, leaned over, and hugged her. She cried a bit, and Spike pretended he didn't.

After a long while Twilight pushed him upright, keeping her forehooves on his massive arms while she looked him over.

"Well, you certainly aren't my little brother any more!" she said. Looking more carefully, she frowned and lifted her hoof to gently touch the jagged scar that ran along his jaw.

"How..."?"

"It's… It's a long story Twi," he rumbled. "I… I shouldn't be here. Celestia wanted to be the first to talk with you, but… But I wasn't going to wait, blast her!"

Twilight was shocked. She had never imagined that Spike would speak of Princess Celestia with such disrespect in his voice, or that he would ever disobey her.

"I knew you weren't dead. They gave up, but I never did," Spike continued, his thick, clawed hands clenching and unclenching in agitation. "They were angry with me when I didn't come to your funeral, and I've never visited your tomb because… no, it's not a tomb, it's that thing like one, but there's no body inside."

"Cenotaph," Twilight said quietly.

"Right," Spike nodded. "I was right, and Celestia can go—"

"Spike! It's okay! I'm back. I'm back, now!" Twilight slid her hooves down his forearms and pressed down on his hands, quieting them.

"Only you, Twilight Sparkle," came a soft voice from the doorway.

Twilight looked up to see Celestia standing there. She didn't seem to have aged a day, but she was different. She wore no crown, no peytral, and she was unshod. "I should have known. Only you could have returned after so long."

Her glorious dawn-colored mane flowed down her proudly arched neck and draped across her shoulders and back, gleaming even in the low light of the room. It shimmered as it moved with her body beneath, but that was all. It showed no sign of the magical mantle of power that it had once been.

Twilight stared at her in shock. "You… You aren't… You're not…"

"No, Twilight Sparkle, Luna and I rule Equestria no longer. You did not know of this? You received no news of the world where you were held captive?"

Twilight shook her head. "No. No, it was… It was time shenanigans," she finally said, not even attempting a more complex explanation of what she had been through. "It's only been about a month for me. But… But if you and Luna don't rule any longer, who does?"

Celestia sighed and turned to the door. "Your Highness?" she called.

A peach-colored alicorn with a striped mane of near-white hues stepped into the room. She was almost Celestia's height and a golden crown sat on her head.

Celestia cleared her throat and took on a formal tone. "Princess Twilight Sparkle, I present you to Her Royal Highness of Equestria, Princess Sunrise Aura."

= = =

Princess Sunrise was—nice. Nice, but a bit formal and aloof. Twilight supposed it was understandable. Meeting the pony that would have taken her position originally had to be uncomfortable for her. Princess Sunrise briefly let Twilight know she was welcome back in Equestria and would be honored as a princess of the realm. She didn't mention anything about any position of authority however, and left after a short while.

After that, it was a steady parade of visitors and Twilight retelling her story many times until a doctor appeared in the late afternoon and insisted that his patient be given time to rest. Twilight was secretly grateful. Despite all the drastic changes in her life since she moved to Ponyville, she was still an introvert, and being in a crowd for any significant time exhausted her.

The other reason for her relief was that her closest friends, even though they were overjoyed to see her, felt like strangers. They were so old. Most of them were married. They had children (In the case of Pinkie Pie, lots of them)!

Twilight realized that the years she had spent with them were now only a tiny fraction of their lives, a brief span now idealized by them into old stories that she could hardly recognise.

She maintained an iron self-control until everypony had been ushered out, and then she burst into tears. Spike, who had simply ignored the order to clear the room and had curled up in a corner, was at her side instantly.

"What is it, Twi?" he asked. "What's wrong? Should I call the doctor?"

Twilight couldn't speak for a while, but shook her head and grabbed Spike's claws with her hooves, and hung on to keep him from leaving or summoning anypony.

Finally, she quieted down and levitated over a box of tissues, going through most of it in order to make herself presentable again.

Spike sat and watched her patiently. "Overload?" he asked, when she seemed ready and able to talk again.

She nodded. After a while, she quietly said, "Everything's changed."

After another long silence, she said, "It will never be the same again."

Spike didn't say anything for a while, but then asked, "You came back from the future. That's what you said to Rainbow Dash, right? So, can't you go back in time again? Back to before you got foalnapped?"

Twilight drew in a sharp breath. "No! No, I couldn't do that to all of you! You've had lives, children, accomplishments, and if I went back, all that would never have happened. Things would be different if I went back and became princess. It would be like I… Like I killed all of you!"

Spike frowned at her. "Maybe some of us would like a second chance. A chance to grow up with our sister."

Twilight almost started crying again. She pulled Spike into an awkward hug and began to mumble out apologies to him.

"No, Twi, it isn't your fault. But, I wouldn't blame you at all if you decided to erase the last twenty five years."

Twilight released him and shook her head. "I can't, Spike. All those ponies…"

Spike hesitated a moment. He didn't want to upset her any more, but he had to ask. "But you did it once. You tried to go all the way back, so…?"

She sighed. "By entering the timestream here, I made you real. I solidified the change, collapsed the probability waveform, and... "

Spike shook his head. "No, I mean all those future ponies. The same thing happened to them, right? They won't exist now. Not in the same way, at least."

Twilight blinked in surprise. Then she gave him a sickly grin and a gentle punch on the shoulder. "Look at you! The voice of reason!" Then her grin disappeared. "But it's different. Everypony seems so happy now, and those future ponies… Well, they were… Something was wrong with them, and it wasn't just the insane supervillain that was their princess!"

"All of them?" Spike asked. "Not all of us are exactly—"

But Twilight had stopped listening, and had sat up straight in her bed. "Help me up! I just realized something."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm fine, just weak. Help me over to the window."

Spike did better than that, he lifted Twilight bodily out of the bed and carried her to the wide window that overlooked a swath of the old city of Canterlot.

Twilight stared intently out of the window. "I knew it! Ponies, zebras, kirin, dragons, hippogriffs, changelings, diamond dogs, some I don't even recognise." She turned her head back to her brother. "In the future, Canterlot covered the entire mountain and the valley and the hills. It stretched so far that I couldn't see the edge of it. But, I never saw a single creature that wasn't a pony!"

"Huh. Yeah, that's kinda creepy, I guess."

"I can't go back. It's not just that I can't risk turning into her, I can't risk Equestria—maybe the whole world—turning into that horrible place. No cutie marks, no purpose, no control when the Oracle takes over—"

Spike knew the signs. Even a quarter century since the last time he'd seen her, he could tell when Twilight was working herself into a stress-induced meltdown. "Then don't," he said forcefully. "Don't go back. Stay here with me—with all of us, I mean."

Twilight stopped, took a deep breath and nodded. "Right. Okay. I guess I don't have a choice."

Spike turned to carry her back to bed, but she stopped him. "Put me down, Spike. I want to stretch my legs."

"Are you sure?"

"Honestly, I'm fine. Well, fine-ish. I can stand on my own four hooves, at least."

He knelt and gently put her down, staying there to catch her if necessary. She wobbled a bit, but soon took a solid stance and stretched out her legs one by one. Then she rolled her neck around and swayed again before stopping. "Not too, bad. Celestia said Cadance, Shiny, and the kids will be here tomorrow, right? I'd like to meet them in the lounge instead of my room. No need to worry them, and I don't want to meet my nephew for the first time lying in a hospital bed."

"Right," Spike said doubtfully. "You might want to be sitting down, though. It's been a while, and ponies change…"

Twilight realized that she had been picturing Shining Armor as he had been before her coronation. Her older brother would be much older now. And there were some other ponies who hadn't visited that day. "Spike?" She tried to keep her voice level and calm. "Mom and Dad…?"

"We'll go see them as soon as possible," he hurried to reassure her. "They know you're back, but it's a long train trip from their place in the south, and they're… They're not up to it."

Twilight let out a breath that she hadn't realized she was holding in. Her parents, old and fragile, but at least she would see them again. Then another thought struck her. "Oh, poor Windfall! Her friends will… we have to find them. Contact her old outfit… Something! She'll be so disappointed."

"That pegasus that was with you?"

"Yes."

"I don't think she's even conscious yet, She was pretty banged up. Some deep cuts, busted wing and a bunch of ribs. The doc said they wanted to keep her knocked out until the bones had a chance to solidly knit. It'll probably be another couple of days."

"Alright then. I want to be there when she wakes up. I owe her that." Twilight snorted. "I owe her a lot more than that. Maybe I can arrange for a stipend from the Treasury… Oh, wait. I can't do that anymore can I? I can't even ask Celestia. Do you think Princess Sunrise..."

Twilight trailed off because Spike was vigorously shaking his head.

"What?"

Spike shrugged. "She had a rough start. Not too bad at magic, but good with ponies. The thing is, every time she made a mistake, or some crabby noble thought she made a mistake, or even a less than perfect decision, they kind of…"

"Oh, no…"

"Yeah. 'Twilight Sparkle would have…' or 'You're no Twilight Sparkle' or crap like that. Twi, she had barely been born before you went away and everypony threw your memory at her like a… I don't know, but she isn't exactly keen on getting to know you."

"Understatement?"

Spike laughed. "You can still read me pretty good, Twi. Yeah, I tried to explain to her that you were just a pony, that you had your flaws just like anypony else, but she… All you were to her was the name she associated with being attacked over her shortcomings."

Twilight groaned and sat down, lowering her face to her forehooves. "So… Chances of Friendship turning this situation around are slim?"

Spike cleared his throat. "I've been living in the Crystal Empire when I haven't been travelling, because… Uh… I'm technically banished from Equestria."

"What?!"

The young dragon shrugged his huge shoulders, making his wings flop outwards for a second. "She got snippy. I got snippy. There may have been some harsh words and some flaming tapestries involved. But she's the Princess, so… Anyway, I'm here by special permission right now. I have three days, and then the Royal Guards will start whacking me with sneeze trees or something."

"Spike, that is outrageous!"

He chuckled. "They gotta resort to cheap shots, Twi! My scales are too thick now for a spear to do much—"

"No! It's not funny! I won't stand for it! I will—eep!"

"You're not standing for anything. You're gonna lie down!" Spike said as he easily lifted her up and carried her back to the bed. "The doc would do that frowny thing at me if I let you get all upset when you're supposed to be resting."

Twi struggled for a second. Just long enough to realize how strong her "little" brother had gotten. "You're right," she said as she relaxed and let him tuck her in. "Of course you're right. So… Where does that leave me? I guess the Empire isn't a bad place to live."

Spike chuckled again. "You aren't banished, Twi!"

"I might as well be! If that's the way she treated my brother, then I'm certainly not going to stay here!" Twilight took a few deep breaths until she felt calmer. Then she looked up at Spike and gave him a sly grin. "Are you sure you don't want me to depose her for you? I could totally take her."

Spike laughed so loudly that the guard and an orderly stuck their heads in the door to see what was going on.

= = =

On the far side of the hospital, a battered pegasus mare groaned and tried to roll over. She fought her way to consciousness long enough to take a brief look at the small, dark room, and the shackles connecting her to the solid iron frame of her bed.

The irises of her eyes flicked a strange metallic gold for an instant before she sank back into unconsciousness.

= = =

=

Author's Notes:

How about a little immortality angst turned on its head?

Here in the Twilight of the world, there yet remains one great mystery that utterly baffles me. Why do I always type "alicon" instead of "alicorn?" Good thing I have an eagle-eyed editor as well as a commissioner in Archangel of the Silent.

17 Replacement Parts

Three doctors gathered around a thaumic scan of Windfall's body and made a variety of non-committal noises.

"Her bones are healing well," one of them said. It was obvious to all of them, and he knew it was obvious, but the observation gave them all a welcome opportunity to make some sort of supportable comments about the glowing image that hung in the air over their puzzling patient.

What none of them had the slightest clue about was the large, growing mass deep within her right shoulder. They were all fairly certain what it wasn't. It wasn't a cancerous mass or a cyst. Too fast-growing for that. It wasn't a hematoma. Too solid for that.

At last the doctor who specialized in magical illnesses spoke up. "The original set of scans showed something in the same location, didn't they? A bone fragment, I believe?" she asked the stallion next to her. He was an osteopath who had been on ER duty the night the ambulance had arrived.

He nodded. "Looked like a bone chip from her avian scapula. Might have been spalled off by whatever it was that caused the deep puncture. Considering her other injuries it was a minor thing. We decided not to cause more trauma by trying to remove it."

The Thaumopath nodded as she spoke and then ventured a wild speculation. "Perhaps the chip is misguiding her flight magic somehow, and that's causing the growth? There is some aural dispersion here." She poked her hoof at the scan where little filaments of light seemed to emanate from the dark blob.

"Wouldn't that be normal on a pegasus wing?"

"Only if she were awake and thinking about flying."

"Maybe she was dreaming of flying at the time the scan was taken?"

The Thaumopath rolled her eyes at the younger doctor. "Induced coma. She can't dream." He should have known better.

"Ah. Well." He cleared his throat. "So—another surgery, then? Remove the mass and the chip at the same time?"

The Osteopath spoke up again. "That mass is a very large chunk of tissue to remove, and will impact quite a lot of the muscle surrounding it. I would suggest a targeted teleport of the chip, and insertion of a couple stents to drain the area. Without the influence of magic, the growth may shrink on its own, or at least respond to typical treatments."

"I think it's worth a try." The Thaumopath glanced up at the clock on the wall. "We can schedule her for tomorrow afternoon if you're free to assist me?"

He nodded. "I only have one consultation, and I can move that easily enough if need be. Shouldn't be more than an hour or so, right?"

She nodded. "Let's hope this works, because otherwise, I'm stumped."

Windfall had been unshackled and moved into a nice private room, after Twilight had assured the Guard and the hospital staff that the pegasus had been aiding rather than opposing her. She was hooked up to the usual sort of monitors, somewhat advanced and smaller than those used in Twilight's time, and a nurse stopped by her room every couple of hours to do a visual check.

The nurse that came on duty at midnight was working her way down the corridor, peeping in at each doorway when the explosion hit.

= = =

Twilight had a bitter-sweet day, visiting with old friends and acquaintances in the hospital lounge. She felt physically much better and strolled up and down the open air terrace that adjoined the lounge when Fluttershy and Discord showed up.

"No really, Twilight!" Discord said as he related the more interesting (from his point of view) aspects of her disappearance. "Bowling balls, bombs, balloon bazookas! The Twilight you describe doesn't sound like she had much of a sense of humor. Are you sure I wasn't around somewhere in this distinct dystopia?"

Twilight winced a bit. "No. Nopony but her."

"Well, that sounds boring!"

On impulse, she threw her forelegs sound Discord's middle and gave him a fierce hug. "It was. It really, really was!"

Discord and Fluttershy exchanged glances. For once, the draconequis was at a loss for words.

The arrival of the crystal air chariot carrying Cadance, Shining Armor, and their family cut the stroll, and the conversation short.

Twilight spent the rest of the day catching up with her family. Cadence was slightly more mature looking, and Shiny had gone gray, but it was an aristocratic silver-gray that made him look elegant and distinguished rather than old, and he seemed to be quite fit for his age. Flurry Heart was… Well, stunning was the only word Twilight could think of, and Golden Shield was a handsome young stallion who tried very hard to cover his natural exuberance beneath proper courtly manners, and mostly succeeded. The Crystal Empire was in very good hooves, it seemed.

Someone had arranged for a sumptuous gourmet meal to be brought in for them all at dinnertime. Among the silver serving dishes was a pink, grease-stained paper box that had "Twilite" scrawled on it in blue marker.

When Twilight opened it to find three double-decker burgers and a huge mound of hay fries, all thoughts of blue ribbon cuisine went out of her head, and she barely restrained herself from plunging her muzzle right into the box. Nopony present admitted to ordering the Ox Box from Perfect Grill's Burger Palace, but Twilight strongly suspected Pinkie's hoof in the business.

The after-dinner conversation slowly wound down. Twilight, exhausted from a day of extroverting and stuffed with a heavy meal, began to lose the struggle to keep her eyes open. Her family said their goodbyes and promised to return the next day, and a nurse led Twilight back to her room, where Spike was already curled up by her bed. When all was said and done, she got a good two hours sleep before the side of the hospital erupted in a shower of glass and marble.

= = =

"What happened? Where is Windfall?" Twilight demanded as she shoved her way through the crowd in the half ruined corridor. "Is any pony hurt?"

If she had been an ordinary pony, the medics and guards on the scene would have told her to stand back and let them do their work. As it was, Twilight unconsciously used her "princess-who-is-getting-stuff-done" voice and cleared the corridor of rubble and debris in a split-second burst of magic. The ponies present were actually a bit relieved to have somepony unequivocally take charge.

"The nurse got knocked croup over poll, but she's okay, and we moved the patients in the adjoining rooms out," an intern told her. "But the pony in that room?" He cleared his throat nervously. "There isn't even a floor in there, anymore."

Twilight looked through the doorway and saw that the skittish pony wasn't indulging in hyperbole. The floor of the room ended a few spans inside the threshold and the outside wall was completely gone.

"We're lucky there are only storage rooms under this floor or—"

The intern was interrupted by the approach of a flight of pegasus guards, scanning the damage with their searchlights from outside. At the same time, a squad of heavily armored guards came down the staircase and caught sight of Twilight and Spike.

"Princess Twilight!" The guard lieutenant called out to her. "We have orders from Her Highness to make sure that you are secure."

Windfall had once told Twilight a darkly humorous story about the conflicting definitions of "secure" that the different branches of service used. Judging from the lieutenant's tone of voice, she thought it highly likely that these ponies used a definition that she wouldn't much care for.

Then, the lieutenant produced a large, thick suppressor ring and removed all doubt.

The sound of Spike's knuckles popping as he squeezed his hands into fists was like hammer blows on granite.

Twilight took the iron ring in her magic, squeezed it down into a small, perfect sphere, and returned it to the lieutenant's magic field. "You may tell Her Highness that I am quite secure, thank you. Oh, and be careful with that. It's very hot." She stepped to the edge of the ruined floor and spread her wings. "Now, you will have to excuse us, but we need to find my friend."

Spike followed her out into the night and the pegasus patrol got out of their way without protest.

Twilight quickly searched the rubble that lay scattered at the base of the wall. There was no body. There was no blood. Twilight scanned the area for magical traces. The hospital itself was lit up like a Hearthswarming decoration, as was half the city, but there was one strong trail that led away in a wide climbing turn. The mana was ragged and uneven, but despite that, it had a familiar feel.

"No!" Twilight hissed in a furious whisper. "Not her. Not again."

The trail was almost undetectable by the time they followed it up to the cavern opening on the side of the Canterhorn. In the future, it had been expanded and fronted by a large, luxurious building, but in the time of Princess Sunrise Aura, it was only covered by a granite arch and a heavy oak double door.

Or, it had been. The arch was still present when Twilight and Spike arrived, but all that was left of the doors were a few splintered planks dangling from twisted iron hinges. Magical light flickered from within the cavern.

As Twilight paused, trying to assess just what the situation was before plunging in, three flights of armed pegasus guards surrounded her. One of them with a captain's insignia on his armor ordered her to land immediately.

"There is a monster in that cave that could level the entire city without blinking!" Twilight angrily shouted at the captain. She didn't actually know that for certain, but she would have been willing to bet her wings on it. "I'm the only chance you've got against her!"

Spike dipped near enough to her to whisper, "Those tubes are sneeze-pollen throwers. They can take me out if they get a good hit. I won't be able to fly or fight if I can't see or breathe."

Twilight nodded and wrenched the dozen or so weapons off the harnesses of the specialist pegasi. The tubes crumpled and dropped out of sight.

"You dare to attack my guards? I knew I shouldn't have trusted you!" came an imperious, outraged voice from behind and above them.

Spike rolled his eyes. "Oh boy, here we go!"

Twilight didn't even bother looking back when she called out, "If you can fight, then help us. If you can't, then stay out of the way—" There was only the slightest of pauses before she added, "—Your Highness."

However that black-hearted mare has done it, it has taken her some time, Twilight thought. That may mean that she isn't at full strength yet, and every moment I delay will only let her get stronger.

A huge blast of magical force erupted from behind, and sizzled downward at her and Spike. It twisted and fragmented as she almost reflexively added disruptive resonance to it. The pegasi around her cried out as the discordant wave of mana briefly interfered with their flight magic. Spike made a retching sound.

"We're going in!" Twilight called to her brother. "Watch my back, and land as soon as we get inside. I may have to do that again, and it'll probably be worse."

"Gotcha," Spike said.

They dived for the cavern's entrance. Spike caught the edges of the doorway in his claws and spun himself around to face the charging pegasi. He spit a long streamer of green flame to warn them away and yelled, "You're covered, Twi!"

Twilight skidded to a landing on the smooth stone floor of the cavern, facing the large dark figure that hunched over the glowing mass of blue crystals near the rear wall. She could sense the complex spell building up and the feeding loop being connected to the massive power stored in the crystals.

"Oh, no you don't," she growled between her clenched teeth, and hit the matrix with a strong disruptive blast.

Nothing happened.

A low and raspy chuckle came from the twisted silhouette in front of the crystals. "Do you think you are the only pony in existence who can duplicate a spell after seeing it done once?" The laugh that followed sounded torturous, as if it came from a terribly damaged throat. "Well… Maybe you are."

Twilight tried again. She didn't expect it to work, but she paid careful attention to what happened to her spell. The disruptive, unequal "legs" she added to the matrix immediately balanced out at a light touch of mana from the monster.

"You're a genius, Twilight Sparkle—but so am I," The thing gave a choking laugh once again. "Of course."

From behind her, Twilight heard several heavy impacts and another burst of dragon fire, along with some cries of pain. She had no time to waste. She had to know what she was dealing with. She cast a ball of light high overhead to illuminate the scene and almost screamed.

It was Windfall.

It was The Monster.

It was both, one growing out of the other.

Twilight's first thought was that her evil future self was consuming Windfall somehow, using the body of the pegasus to build one of her own. During the three deep breaths it took to push her incandescent rage and horror to the back of her mind, Twilight saw that this was not the case. It looked as if the two were fused somehow and were slowly being separated.

She had no idea what sort of magic was at work, but she realized that her friend might survive it. Might—under the right conditions. Twilight lit her horn and passed a beam over the two of them. The Monster didn't interfere with the passive scan, and kept working on her own complex spell.

"You won't find a weakness, you know," the other alicorn rasped. "You don't have enough time, and even as—unfinished as I am, I am still strong enough to fend you off for long enough to escape into your past, particularly when I can now harmonize or de-harmonize magic at will. Clever little spell, that. I wonder why I never thought of it?"

"Back to before I was born, I assume?" Twilight tried to keep her voice calm, but more than a little of a snarl crept in.

"Oh, no!" The thing gave a nearly normal laugh. "Not quite. Just before Luna's return, I think. Little Twilight and her friends go into the Everfree, and out they come with the ascended Alicorn Princess! I imagine the kingdom will stumble over its hooves to replace foolish old Celestia."

Twilight thought furiously for several moments and then she relaxed and stood tall, her face relaxing into a neutral expression.

"Well, if I can't hurt you, I suppose I should help you."

The three simultaneous, astonished cries might have been humorous at any other time.

Spike lay sprawled out on the cavern floor, stuck to it with some substance that looked like slightly glowing amber. "Sorry, Twi. I couldn't hold the Princess off any longer. You're not really going to help that thing, are you?"

Princess Sunrise Aura stood on the cavern floor, her legs splayed and shaking with exhaustion. Her mane and coat were in terrible disarray and slightly singed. Her crown hung over one ear. "You villain! What evil are you plotting? I will—"

Twilight's horn blazed and the Princess found herself encased in a huge lavender crystal that also blocked the doorway and held the pegasi guards at bay.

Twilight's elder self managed to combine an expression of surprise with a condescending sneer. "Help me? Are you mad? I won't spare you, you know."

"I know." Twilight nodded. "But even if I can't stop you, I can give you the strength to easily separate from my friend. She might survive this, at least."

The ancient alicorn paused, considering. "There's no way you can disrupt this spell." She jerked her head at the other head that hung loosely by her side from a nearly separated neck.

Twilight sighed. "I know. Every approach I could think of had a high chance of harming my friend and a nearly zero chance of doing anything useful. Windfall doesn't deserve to die. Let me lend you my strength."

Her horn began to glow and a tendril of magic floated over and touched the conjoined ponies. The Monster scowled suspiciously, but when her pain lessened and the process of separation sped up, she relaxed.

It was like watching a double-exposure film speeding up. Within moments, the alicorn stood, free and whole, on her own legs.

The pegasus dropped limply to the floor, unconscious, but breathing steadily.

"I can't believe you helped her, Twi!" Spike shouted as he wrenched at the amber goo, trying to free himself.

"I had to, Spike," Twilight said and she took several smooth steps to the side and carefully positioned herself. "I didn't want to hurt Windfall when I attacked."

The Monster actually smiled. "I knew it! You idiot! You can't hurt me!"

Twilight smiled back and said, "We'll see." Her horn blazed into life, a sizzling sphere, shot through with scintillating rays of heat blossomed at its tip. Flakes of granite spalled off the cavern walls where the rays struck them and a howling vortex of burning air spun the thaumic pressure barrier into a blinding whirlwind.

The Monster sneered. "The more power you put into it, the worse the backlash will be for you, fool!" Her own sword-like horn lit. Just a light shimmer of aura surrounded it before the de-harmonizing magic lashed out and struck Twilight's spell.

The blast shook the mountain. The twisting and ripping of shattered thaumic pulses crushed Twilight to the floor and shattered both the imprisoning crystal and the sticky amber that held Sunrise and Spike prisoner.

The Monster had just enough time to begin a triumphant smile before her entire body blazed into an inferno of burning tissue. She died before she could even begin to feel any pain, and there was nothing left of her but a smoking pile of ash.

Twilight tried to climb to her hooves, coughed, and fell. Spike caught her before she could hit the floor and cradled her in his arms.

Princess Sunrise Aura shook her way out of a big pile of crystal shards, and looked around for her crown. She unsteadily settled it onto her head before turning to gesture for the pegasus squad to stand down.

"What… Pardon me, Princess Twilight but… I could feel how strong she was, and yet you… How did you do that?"

Twilight grinned at her. "You think I could overwhelm an ancient evil alicorn? No, that's Elements of Harmony territory! You see… I had help."

"H-help? But who…?"

Twilight insisted that Spike put her down and then she used a light touch of her magic to clear the dense smoke over the pile of ashes.

"C'mon out and take a bow—Twilight."

A tall, elegant alicorn stepped out of the darkness of the cavern. She was smiling softly. "You certainly had a good deal of confidence in me, Little Twi."

Sunrise gaped at her. "You… You're Twilight! I mean…"

The tallest alicorn in the room laughed. "I am! Just a bit older, and hopefully wiser."

"I… I don't understand." The young monarch seemed to be on the verge of tears.

Twilight gestured to the ashes with her horn. "She was me, too. She was going to go back into the past and reshape the world to her liking. Why can't I do the same?"

"I thought of it just as soon as she revealed her plan," the elder Twilight said. "Spike asked me why I just didn't go back to the time I disappeared, and I explained that it would change the world too much for the timestream to persist into this future if I went back and became Princess of Equestria. But the Hocking's Exclusion Principle would work just fine—"

"—if I went back and didn't become monarch," The lesser of the Twilight's finished. "Twenty five years living incognito gave me the time to grow stronger and find a way around the re-harmonizing magic!"

Big and little Twilghts gave each other a hoof bump.

Princess Sunrise swayed a bit on her hooves. "It… it's so strange and complex. She's you, but from the future?"

"Uhmn… No, she's from… Well, now, actually," the shorter of the two Twilights explained. "I'll use the crystals to go back in time and prepare for tonight. Then I'll be her. I sneak in through a secret tunnel—" She paused and looked up at her larger self. "Diamond dogs?"

The big alicorn nodded. "Quite nice, when you get to know them."

"And then, I'll be in the perfect position to ambush—myself."

"I… I'm…" The confused royal princess swayed so much that everypony thought she was going to fall over. A pegasus guard put out a hoof to steady her.

Spike chuckled. "If you're going to hang around Twilight for any length of time, you'll get used to this sort of stuff," he said, kindly.

= = =

=

18 Job Security

A few weeks later, Twilight told herself that she would have been a terrible sovereign.

"Not right away," she said in her deeper, more mature voice. "You might have been fine for a generation or two, but then you'd be bored by the routine and wouldn't have been able to resist meddling."

"I—" The younger Twilight's voice cracked a bit. She paused and cleared her throat, feeling a bit envious of the older Twilight's silky tones. She decided to mentally refer to her other self as Old Twilight to compensate. "I might have done just fine. Particularly now that I know how Evil Twilight went off the rails."

The elder alicorn shook her head slowly, sending lines of shimmering reflected lamplight cascading down her gently waving mane. Young Twilight decided to think of her as Decrepit Old Twilight. "You know how, but not why," the elder corrected her.

Young Twilight glanced at Spike for support. He shrugged. "I'm always ready to back you up, Twi," he said, poking at the last few gems left on his plate. "But…" He gestured toward both alicorns with an upraised palm and then shrugged again.

The elder Twilight blew him a playful kiss, which somewhat shocked the younger.

"Well, then," Twilight said, trying to keep her voice level and calm. "Do you know why? Maybe you could explain it to me."

Decrepit Old Twilight teleported the remains of their dinner off the table. There was no flash and crackle of wasted magical energy, no pop of inrushing air. The dishes and silverware vanished with a slight ripple, leaving only their cider goblets behind. The display of masterful magical subtlety was just one more reason for young Twilight to be pointlessly jealous. A glowing diagram appeared on the surface of the table. "This is the structure of a moyo crystal. They are only found in deep caverns beneath the Masimarea Rift where a very rare set minerals combine in unusual conditions to form them over the course of eons."

Young and Foolish Twilight studied the diagram closely. "It seems to have an inherently fractal structure. How large do these crystals grow? Can they be used for magical purposes? Do the—"

The diagram abruptly vanished. "There, you see? That is why you would make an awful ruler."

Twilight frowned. "Because I'm curious?"

"Yes. Curious, inventive, extremely intelligent, introverted, empathic, not just talented, but an actual polymath, and these are all horrible qualities for a politician. The best rulers are honest and hard working, true, but they also need to have the sort of mindset of a big, placid Earth Pony whose job is to turn a grain mill all day long… One who likes it. Otherwise, the job will drive them insane sooner or later."

Young Twilight felt a flush of anger, which she had to admit was an indication that her opponent had scored a point. "But Celestia is intelligent, far more intelligent that most ponies give her credit for, and for over a thousand years, she—"

"And how long did it take for the cracks to appear after her obsessive, millenia-long quest to save her sister was fulfilled, hmn? The risky and irresponsible way she let things fall out in the years after Luna returned wasn't exactly good stewardship, was it? She knew it. She wouldn't have nearly thrown the crown at you if she wasn't desperate to escape. She's a good pony. Moreover, she's a wise pony, and she knew she had to relinquish power before she caused or allowed some terrible disaster."

The dining hall was silent for a long while. The only sounds were those made by Spike as he drained and refilled his cider cup.

Finally, Twilight said, quietly, "You're not wrong, I suppose. In any case, the point is moot, now. Do you think Sunrise Aura will be a good princess?"

Elder Twilight smiled and sipped at her cider. "Well, you've had some time to get to know her. Imaginative and clever, is she?"

Twilight hesitated. She didn't like to speak ill of anypony. "She's—nice. A bit overwhelmed at the moment, and she hasn't had the easiest time of it, but she's truly good-hearted."

"And boring. Yes, she should be ideal."

"You're mean."

"And right."

"Am I really going to become this insufferable?"

"You always have been, and you know it."

"I—" Young Twilight gave up and refilled her own goblet, then took a deep draught.

The deep rumble of Spike's chuckle rolled through the room. "I love you guys," he said.

Both Twilights smiled at him.

After a bit of companionable silence, Young Twilight said, "I suppose it's time for me to get ready to go—back. I've said all my goodbyes, Windfall is set up for life, and now that you're here—"

"Ah, about that…" Old Twilight gave her the side-eye.

"What?"

"I sabotaged the power crystals. In fact, I set up a network of crystalline booby traps along most of the major ley lines on the planet. From now on, anypony attempting time magic is in for a big shock." She grinned. It wasn't exactly a pleasant expression. "Literally."

"Wait, what? Then how do I go back?"

"I already did that. There's no reason you have to duplicate my effort."

"B-but, if I don't, you won't… Wait. You're here because of my intention to go back, but once we both existed in the same chronic hypermanifold..." She trailed off, lost in furious thought.

The elder Twilight leaned over the table and whispered to Spike, "I love time travel. You can get away with such awful shenanigans! Just watch. I'll bet you a five pound emerald that she'll be drawing diagrams any second now."

Spike took another pull from his cider mug. "I don't take sucker bets."

Sure enough, soon glowing lines began to form in the air in front of the younger alicorn. After a quarter hour of checking and rechecking her calculations, she was forced to admit, "It is possible. The inciting incident can form an unstable loop that—"

"Been there, done that, had the paper peer-reviewed and published," Decrepit Old Smug Twilight interrupted.

That jolted Young Twilight out of lecture mode. "Really?"

She gave a throaty chuckle that sounded the way that hot chocolate tasted. "No, it's knowledge that I don't want to be generally available, and besides—" She leaned over until her muzzle was almost touching that of her other self. "I don't have any peers."

"Modest, much?"

"And right." Decrepit Old Smug but Admittedly More Experienced Twilight leaned back into her cushions. "I've spent the last quarter century learning the most arcane details of the magical arts, and I just happened to discover the Secret of Life along the way. I am an exceptional pony."

"The Secret of Life? Is that some sort of mystical mumbo-jumbo?"

"Oh, I will freely admit that I spent a few years looking into that sort of thing. But after I climbed Mount Everhoof on hoof and without magic, only to be told by the ancient Yak sage that lives in a cave there at the summit that the Secret is 'squeeze and relax,' I felt disinclined to any further questing in that direction. No, I just happened to realize it one day while I was relaxing and watching a sunset."

"And the Secret is…?"

Older Twilight gave her a silent, infuriating grin. "Since there's no need for you to go back in time now, you could become my student and wander the world with me. I could pass on my hard-won knowledge to you, and then, someday, I would have a peer. And you might also learn the Secret of Life for yourself. Believe me, I could tell you in a very few words, but until you're ready to know it, to believe it, you wont get any good out of it."

From anypony else, Twilight would have dismissed the offer as manipulative nonsense, but despite her recent struggle against a twisted and evil version of herself, she felt certain that this version had nothing but good intentions behind her offer. More importantly, she felt that there was some deep wisdom hidden within her that would cause everything to work out for the best.

"Well—it would be a situation likely to afford some mutual checks and balances on our power that would reduce the possibility of a future Mad Scientist situation, I suppose," said Twilight cautiously. "And someone to share the long centuries ahead with, who could appreciate a certain perspective, shall we say…?"

"Most long-winded, nerdiest 'yes' I ever heard," quipped Spike from across the table.

The Twilight Who Knew the Secret of Life smiled. "I am certain we are going to enjoy ourselves," she said.

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Author's Notes:

I'd like to give a profound Thank You to Archangel of the Silent, not just for commissioning the story, but for being a willing and damned good editor!

I also want to thank everyone who upvoted, left a kind comment, or simply read and enjoyed.

For the Secret of Life™, subscribe to my Patreon at the "Seeker of Truth" level. ($85 per month, no refunds!)

But honestly, it is "squeeze and relax!" Just ask your heart.