Once upon a time there was a strange purple pony known as Twilight Sparkle.
She had always been something of an odd duck. Her friends were were all well aware of her various eccentricities, from her obsession with Princess Celestia’s approval to her insatiable demands for organization, but they accepted and loved her despite them. She was a good friend, after all, and her quirks seemed mostly harmless.
One day, though, Twilight Sparkle began to hear voices in her head. She claimed that they tormented her. She claimed that they mocked her. And—most strangely of all—she claimed that they sounded like the sophisticated and handsome draconequus, Discord. For some peculiar reason, she had managed to get ahold of the thought that it was he who was behind the voices in her head, and she was determined to stop him.
She begged and pleaded with her good friend, Fluttershy, to intercede with Discord for this. She wanted Fluttershy to reprimand him for his vile schemes, and to stop the voices that tortured her so. And, at first, Fluttershy believed her. She agreed to speak with Discord on Twilight’s behalf, and for a moment Twilight thought that this would stop the voices. Fluttershy was, after all, friends with Discord, and he would quickly submit if she demanded that he stop.
But, to Fluttershy’s great surprise, Discord denied any wrongdoing. It seemed a great shock to him that Twilight Sparkle would accuse him of these things. After all, he was good now, redeemed by his friendship with Fluttershy. And, really, what could he have done? He hadn’t gone near Twilight all day—an alibi which Fluttershy could confirm.
What proof was there that he was behind these voices in Twilight’s head?
None, really.
Oh, Twilight ranted that he was clearly up to no good, but Fluttershy was no longer sure who to believe. Both Twilight and Discord were good friends with her, and though she might have been slightly better friends with Twilight, she wouldn’t abide by using the Elements of Harmony on Discord. Not unless there was proof that Discord had done something wrong.
Defeated, Twilight could do little but sigh and return home—all the while arguing with the voices in her head. For a long while after, she tried to prove that the voices were Discord’s doing. She wrote to Princess Celestia, she wrote to Princess Luna, she wrote to each and every friend she had who cared to listen. She tried to spy on Discord, even, watching his each and every move in an effort to catch him in the act. But to no avail. There was simply no way to prove that he was behind her insanity, not that this fact stopped her from trying. She continued to rail against him for his supposed crimes, and the more she spoke about it, the more her friends wondered if—perhaps, maybe, or possibly—she really had gone mad.
“But you have to believe me!” she begged them. “It’s him! I know it is! I swear!”
“And we want to believe you,” said Rarity. “But he hasn’t been near you at all. We’ve kept track of him, and he’s been nothing but a perfect gentlecolt lately.” She bit her lip. “Perhaps—and I say this as a friend, Twilight—perhaps it’s just... you?”
To which Twilight had no answer. What else could she say, if her own friends believed she’d gone crazy?
Day in and day out, the voices remained with her, constantly talking, taunting, and narrating. She heard them at her greatest triumphs and in her most vulnerable moments. She even claimed that she could hear the voices in her sleep, and it seemed that hardly a moment passed for her that they weren’t talking to her in some fashion.
Time passed. She learned not to speak of the voices, for she still had no proof against Discord, and she dared not stoke the fires of her friends’ concern. In some ways, she had almost grown used to them. They hardly even seemed to interfere with her daily routine, and even their mockery had become familiar—just another part of an otherwise-dull life as Twilight Sparkle.
She lived with them until the day came that the voices left her—bored, perhaps, now that she was no longer bothered by it. At first she rejoiced, overjoyed that the voices had left her, and intolerably smug that she had survived “Discord’s” torment. Then, at last, when her cheering stopped and her laughter died, she realized that all was quiet.
Too quiet.
Twilight tried to put on some music, but that didn’t help. She asked Pinkie to talk at her for a bit, but even that was a poor substitute for the noises that had been in her head for ages. She was alone now, with naught but her thoughts, and no matter what she did, she couldn’t seem to fix that.
A pony with as many friends as Twilight Sparkle doesn’t handle being alone very well.
She tossed and turned in her bed that night, no longer comfortable without the voices’s deep, soothing tones to lull her to sleep. She lay awake in her bed, eyes wide open, and she realized for the first time that she’d become dependent on the voices she had once so despised. For so long she’d dreamed of the day when the voices no longer tormented her, and now that the day had come, she almost—she almost... missed them.
And, at precisely that moment, Twilight realized that she might have truly gone mad.
Wonderfully, beautifully, gloriously mad.
