Synchronicity

Chapters

Act I – ‘Children’
Act II – ‘Adventure’
Act III – ‘Mystery’
Act IV – ‘Horror’
Act V – ‘Non-fiction’

Act I – ‘Children’

Synchronicity, Act I – ‘Children’

“...But when she looked back, she saw it stuck there in the wagon’s side, shinin’ in the moonlight. It was…” Applejack angled herself over the flickering light below her, making unnatural shadows grow over her face. “…A hook!”

Not even the appropriately-timed thunder from outside could save the reveal. Five other ponies sat in front of her in silence.

“Ooooh,” she intoned, aiming for ghoulish but clearly falling short, based upon her audience. Outside, rain drummed against the window in a sudden gust of wind.

“I, um…” Fluttershy fidgeted with her hooves and glanced down at her pillow. “I’m sorry Applejack, but I don’t see why a hook is scary.”

“Because the escaped madmare had a hook, in place of a hoof. Remember?” She slashed one of her legs over the candle flame, demonstrating.

“Was she a pirate?” Pinkie asked. She held a hoof over one eye to mimic an eyepatch, and nearly stepped in a mostly-empty bowl of multi-colored popcorn sitting in her blind spot.

“Huh? No! That doctor gave it to her, after she was all burned from the fire that sent her crazy.”

“You never said anything about a hook,” Rainbow Dash said. She glanced at Twilight for confirmation, who shook her head in agreement.

Applejack blinked. “I didn’t?”

“I remember there was a long and gruesome description of just what a pony looks like after being trapped in a barn fire,” Rarity said as she adjusted one of the curlers in her mane, “but I do not recall anything about a hook.”

“I…” Applejack searched for words. “No hooks?”

“No hooks,” Rarity confirmed with an air of finality.

“Dang it.” She sunk to the floor. “I knew I was forgettin’ something.”

“I liked it,” Fluttershy said, smiling at Applejack. “But I guess the end doesn’t make that much sense if there’s pieces missing,” she added.

“My story was the best,” Rainbow crowed. Applejack stuck her tongue out at her.

“Why would she need a hook, anyway?” Twilight asked. She had been following the story with a quiet interest.

“For hooking ponies out on dates in the forest,” Rainbow said, and demonstrated a couple of grisly maneuvers a pony might be able to perform were she to have a hook in place of a hoof. She grimaced over the flickering light at Pinkie, who dissolved into a burst of giggles. “Duh.”

“No, I mean,” Twilight clarified, “why did the doctor give her a hook? It doesn’t seem very practical.”

“Well, he was a mad doctor,” Applejack said.

“Wouldn’t that make it difficult for her to creep around quietly in the forest?”

“I guess, but… uh…”

“And why was she tapping on the back of the wagon for so long anyway, if she was in the forest looking for ponies to kill? It’s not like anypony would have heard anything that far out in the woods.”

“Twilight, it’s just a dumb scary story,” Applejack said, visibly exasperated. “It don’t have to make sense!”

Twilight considered this for a moment as the rain continued to pour. “No,” she said at last, “no, I suppose it doesn’t have to be completely realistic, but it should be…” She tapped her hoof against the floor, thinking.

“Scary?” Fluttershy suggested.

“Good?” Rainbow offered. Applejack shot her a look, which Rainbow pretended to ignore by flicking her mane out of her eyes.

“Internally consistent,” Twilight settled on. “The story has to make some sense, logically.”

“You know mad killers with hooks for hooves ain’t real, right?” Applejack asked. “Any story ‘bout ‘em won’t be especially logical.”

“Well, I meant more that the world inside the story has to all make sense, not that it’s something that could actually happen.” Twilight laughed a little. “So, anypony else have a scary story?”

“Ooh, ooh, I know a story.” Rarity leapt to her hooves and cleared her throat with a soft ‘ahem’. “A story of love gone tragically awry, of passion twisted to murder, and terrible revenge from beyond the grave,” she intoned, and dramatically paused before adding: “…and every word of what I am about to tell you that happened at Maresdon Manor is completely true.”

“Maresdon Manor?” Twilight interrupted. “As in, Winthrop Maresdon?”

“The very same!”

“I know her! Well, I’ve read about her. But she wasn’t part of some ghost story, she developed the theories about the side-effects of concurrent magic that are still in use today.”

“Well, nopony would print anything as ghastly as the murders at Maresdon Manor in a stuffy old textbook,” Rarity explained.

“They would in the newspapers though,” Applejack said. “When I was a little filly I asked Granny Smith once if it all really happened, and she said she could remember all the headlines. Don’t think I slept with the lights off for the rest of that week.”

“So what did happen?” Twilight asked, propping herself up.

“Winthrop Maresdon was the last daughter of the Maresdon family,” Rarity began. “She was a brilliant scholar but did very poorly around other ponies, so she locked herself away in the family house, communicating with the outside world only through letters for decades. The gardens at the Manor grew wild and untamed from years of neglect-“

“That’s not the way I heard things,” Applejack interjected. “The way I know the story, the gardens were kept all neat but nopony ever saw anypony tending to ‘em.”

“Then why would Winthrop Maresdon have hired a gardener just before she was killed?” Rarity asked.

“That’s part of the mystery,” Applejack said smugly.

“I don’t want to say you’re wrong, or anything…” Fluttershy spoke up; she had crawled underneath her blanket to the point that her head was hooded, as if this might cause any lurking ghosts to overlook her. “But the way I was told, the gardener worked at the Manor for years, but had never been inside to see Lady Maresdon.”

“But all three versions have a gardener?” Twilight asked, to general assent. “Any other variations? Rainbow, Pinkie?”

“Nope,” said Pinkie, “I only know the one with the freaky frozen foliage.”

“I know Fluttershy’s,” Rainbow said, “with the family gardener. He’s meant to have seen weird stuff in the garden over the years.”

“Like the trees moving just before the sunset when there was no wind,” Fluttershy said in a small voice.

“And digging up things in the flowerbeds,” Rainbow said. “Horseshoes and old saddlebags.”

“Interesting,” Twilight said. “Maybe it’s a regional variation on the story.”

“Anyway,” Rarity said, slightly louder than was required, “regardless of the manner in which he was employed, the gardener grew more and more curious about what went on inside the Manor. All the windows always had the curtains drawn so nopony could ever see inside, but as he worked in the garden-”

“Or didn’t,” Applejack said.

“As he went about his business in the garden,” Rarity continued, “he would always feel like there was something watching him from the topmost window. Day in, day out, he would feel the invisible gaze upon him, until he could stand it no more. He-”

“I thought it was sounds coming from the house,” Rainbow Dash said. “Like wood scraping together, branches cracking, that kinda stuff.”

“And breathing,” Fluttershy added from under her blanket.

“Yeah, long deep breaths.” She leaned close to Twilight and demonstrated with her hooves cupped over her mouth. Twilight laughed and playfully pushed her away. “All day. That’s what made him go knock on the door.”

Rarity sighed at Rainbow. “He marched up to the door and knocked-” She stomped her hoof three times, the knocks loud enough to echo faintly. “-And to his surprise, the door opened. Standing in the shadows was a mare. He couldn’t see her properly, but it had to be Lady Maresdon. And he asked her if it had been her watching him every day-”

“Or making the-” Rainbow began.

“Or making the noises!” Rarity snapped. She took a breath. “And she stepped out from the shadows… and she was beautiful! The gardener had never seen a pony quite like her before, and it was in that moment that he fell in love with her.”

Twilight snorted.

“What?” Rarity asked.

“Come on, Rarity, it takes more than just one look for a pony to fall in love.”

“She’s making that part up,” Rainbow said. “She’s supposed to have looked way younger than she should have been.”

“The gardener goes inside with her because he’s getting older, and she tells him she can make him young again,” Fluttershy added.

“Nopony knows why he went into Maresdon Manor,” Applejack said, “’cause he didn’t get to live long enough to tell anypony.”

“So what happened?” Twilight asked.

“He went to the tavern a little way down the road just after sunset and stayed there into the night,” Rarity said, “never saying a word to anypony, just drinking cider and looking pale, staring into the distance.”

“He found out why she had lived alone in such a big house for so many years,” Applejack said. “One of her spells went wrong-”

“She became a monster!” Pinkie exclaimed with relish, “who had to eat other ponies to stay alive.” Pinkie let out a low moan and let her mouth droop open slightly. The effect in the candlelight was more unnerving than it should have been.

“And she was usin’ her magic to make herself look normal, but she let the spell slip for a second. He had to pretend she was still, y’know, normal for the rest of their dinner, until she turned away and he stabbed her with his knife.”

“Nah,” Rainbow said, “he found out how Winthrop Maresdon was staying young. She would use her magic to teleport ponies to the Manor and feed them to her mutant plants growing in the basement, and eat the fruit. He tore the plant out of the ground and she fell dead to the floor.”

“She rejected the gardener’s advances, laughing that somepony with her lineage would never be associated with a gardener,” Rarity said, looking mildly queasy, “and passion turned him momentarily mad. He pushed her down a flight of stairs and she broke her neck.” She eyed Rainbow and Applejack. “I don’t know where you get these positively gruesome stories from.”

“Wait, so the gardener killed Winthrop Maresdon?” Twilight asked. “I thought she killed him.”

“That’s the ‘ghost’ part of the story,” Applejack said plainly, “she did.”

“The gardener left the tavern in the dead of night,” Pinkie intoned. Rarity made a motion as if she was about to object to Pinkie picking up the retelling, then (perhaps deciding she had no desire to be interrupted any more) stifled herself. “He was found in the morning in the gardens of Maresdon Manor, lying beneath a tree.” She told the story with a suppressed manic energy; Pinkie thoroughly enjoyed everything she did, including scaring her friends. “All the blood had been drained from his body, leaving him pale as a ghost. And his eyes… his eyes had been turned completely white. He went blind just before he died. Some ponies say it was Winthrop Maresdon’s price for him seeing her, others say that her ghost took his eyes to watch over Maresdon Manor now that she no longer could. But other ponies claim that the sight of Winthrop Maresdon’s ghost was so furious and terrible that the gardener went blind out of terror, so he couldn’t see what she was going to do as revenge for killing her.” Pinkie glanced down at the candle below her face, then looked up with a feverish intensity.

“These ponies say that, in the middle of the night, if you walk down the road that passes Maresdon Manor, you might see a strange light coming from behind the curtain in the highest room, but you should never stop to look at that light. If you do, after a moment the whole world will go black, and then…”

She took a deep breath as if preparing to say something. Instead, she puffed out the candle. In the following second a flash of lightning lit the room, revealing Pinkie’s glassy blank eyes to the other five ponies. This time the thunderclap outside had a dramatic and drastic effect on the slumber party. Fluttershy darted behind her pillow and Rarity let out an undignified high-pitched squeal. Rainbow launched into a coughing fit and a noisy effort to clear her throat, but it was difficult for her to hide how close she had suddenly leapt towards Twilight. Applejack made a sudden jerk away from Pinkie and collided with a stack of unshelved books, causing the books to spill across the floor and Pinkie to break into a fresh round of giggles. Twilight let out a nervous laugh and turned the lights up, revealing Pinkie had done nothing more than roll her eyes back in her head.

“You planned that,” Applejack accused.

“Who,” Pinkie asked, “me? How could I have known the exact perfect moment there would be a lightning strike right outside the window to blow the candle out so you’d think the ghost of Winthrop Maresdon got me?”

“If anypony could, it’d be you, Pinkie.”

“Wait,” Rarity said, “it’s not Winthrop Maresdon who gets anypony.”

“Then, um,” Fluttershy asked, “who does?”

“The gardener,” Rarity said, flustered. “Taking vengeance for his terrible death.” Nopony appeared to agree with her.

“I got all of you, though,” Pinkie said, grinning, “especially you, Rainbow!”

Rainbow’s eyes darted left and right. “No, I just have a thing with loud noises. I wasn’t scared, or anything.” She ran a hoof through her mane.

“Oh yeah?” Applejack asked, a mischievous note in her voice.

“Yeah. Scared of ghosts, that’s dumb. Pfft.”

“So you wouldn’t be afraid to go for a walk past Maresdon Manor tonight?” Pinkie added.

“Of course not!”

“Why don’t we go?” Twilight said suddenly.

Rainbow Dash turned to her. “Seriously? There’s a huge storm right outside.”

“Only in Ponyville,” Fluttershy pointed out. “You said that when you arrived.”

“Twilight could teleport us,” Rarity suggested. “Couldn’t you?”

“I suppose I could,” Twilight said, “but I’d need somepony to describe where it is, roughly.”

“I’ve gone past that way a few times to make deliveries with Big Macintosh,” Applejack said. “You just start headin’ north from Sweet Apple Acres, then about halfway to Canterlot there’s a road that branches off and hook back ‘round-”

“Wait, you don’t all actually want to go out there, do you?” Rainbow said, unbelieving. “In the middle of the night?”

“What’s going to be more fun after telling spooky stories than visiting a seriously spooky house?” Pinkie said, and then cocked her head to consider. “Well, I suppose we could see a spook or a spectre or a spirit! That would be super-scary.”

“I want to see the Manor,” Twilight said matter-of-factly. “Maybe there’s a basis for all the different legends about it.”

“But-” Rainbow tried to say.

“Come on, Rainbow.” Twilight looked right at her. “Are you braver than me or not?” she said with a smile.

“I…” Rainbow looked among the expectant faces of her friends, then finally back to Twilight. “I’m not scared. Let’s do this.”

Then the world went dark as Twilight teleported them off into the night.

Act II – ‘Adventure’

Synchronicity, Act II – ‘Adventure’

The six ponies appeared under one of the streetlights that lit the road between Ponyville and Canterlot. Islands of light were strewn up and down the road in either direction, but all the attention went to a path diverging from the main road lined with the shifting silhouettes of trees rather than safe lamps.

“Is this the way?” Twilight asked.

“Eeeyup,” Applejack said.

Twilight began walking away from the main road. A light erupted from her horn, nearly as bright as the streetlights, showing the way down the side path. “I can’t believe I’m going to see such a historically important site,” she said as her friends followed after her. “I can’t believe I didn’t know that Maresdon Manor was so close to Ponyville.”

“It ain’t a place ponies really like talking about,” Applejack said.

“How come?” Twilight asked. “Winthrop Maresdon’s contributions to modern magical theory are undeniable.”

“Well, ‘cause it’s… haunted.”

Twilight paused in her stride. Then she laughed, and shook her head. “You don’t really believe that, do you Applejack? Ghosts aren’t real.”

“Maybe they are and maybe they ain’t,” Applejack said, “but I got no cause to go finding out one way or the other.”

“So you’re not going to take a look inside?” Twilight asked, confused.

“Inside? Twilight, that’s something I’d expect outta Rainbow, not you.”

“Is that because I’m not afraid of anything?” Rainbow asked, flying down low beside Applejack.

“It’s ‘cause you’re too fool to be frightened of anything,” Applejack retorted, although there was nothing but friendly ribbing in her voice.

“What could possibly be in there to be frightened of?” Twilight asked before anything could escalate.

“Rats,” Rarity said, “and bats, and cobwebs, and decades’ worth of dust. I’m sorry Twilight, but my mane doesn’t need to be subjected to anything else after this dreadful wind.” She paused to check the scarf holding her mane in place.

“It’s unfair the way ponies treat bats,” Fluttershy said suddenly, “they’re very cute and sweet and don’t want to hurt anything.”

“So you’ll come in with me, right, Fluttershy?” Twilight asked.

“Oh, no. I, um, just wanted to see the gardens.”

Twilight sighed. “Pinkie?”

“Seeing inside a scary super-spooky mansion seems swell, buuut…”

“But?”

“I’m not going in with you,” Pinkie said solemnly, “because you dared Rainbow to go, not me.”

“Huh?” Rainbow Dash said. “What?”

“It technically wasn’t a formal dare, since Twilight didn’t say ‘I dare you’, but you did say you weren’t scared to go, so…”

Rainbow puffed up her chest. “Well, I’m not! It’s like Twilight says, there’s no such thing as ghosts, so there’s nothing to be afraid of!”

“Yeah!” Twilight agreed.

“Yeah!” Rainbow echoed. “Wait, why’d you stop?”

“Because,” Twilight said, “there’s Maresdon Manor.”

The curved path had terminated at the crest of a long sloping hill. Down a short set of stairs lay a tangled hedge wall marking the edge of the grounds, which spanned all the way into the shallow valley. Moonlight shone over the expansive estate, revealing the garden was made of bare branches and dried vines, skeletons left to rattle in the wind. In the center of the hollow garden was the Manor itself, an austere construction that looked as lifeless as the plants that surrounded it. It towered over the pale trees like a solitary tombstone.

The six ponies descended the stairs to be met by a tall gate made of heavy iron rods set into the dead hedge. Twilight teleported past the gate in a flash of light, then turned back to look at Rainbow through the bars.

“Coming?” she asked.

Rainbow nodded and flew over the hedge. She glanced back to see Rarity produce a light source from her horn similar to Twilight’s, though hers was a shifting purple hue instead of pure white. She turned back towards the Manor, following Twilight along the straight path between rows of leafless trees and bushes to the steps that led up to the front door.

Twilight opened the thick oak door onto a sparse, wide room dominated by a double staircase. Pedestals holding objects hidden under white sheets stood sentinel along the walls like pantomime ghosts. In the day, they would have appeared harmless, maybe even a little silly. In the single stark light source that came from Twilight’s horn and faded quickly in the dancehall-sized room, the wind shaking the dead branches behind them and urging them inside, the shrouded objects were a little eerie.

“Wow,” Twilight said, stepping on to the smooth wooden floor. Enough polish remained to reflect her light, a floating twin in the floor tracking her movements. “And I thought it looked big on the outside.” She turned back to Rainbow and grinned. “Scared yet?”

Rainbow took a couple of tentative steps inside. “No way. It takes more than an old house to frighten Rainbow Dash.”

Just as she finished speaking, a booming noise exploded from the doorway. Rainbow was in the air in the blink of an eye. She spun around and saw the door had shut on its own. A prickling chill crept over her whole body.

“Rainbow? What’s wrong?” Twilight asked, seemingly unconcerned with what had just happened.

“We’re…” Rainbow swallowed. “We’re trapped.”

Twilight blinked. “What? No we’re not.” She pushed the door open with her magic, revealing the night, the gardens outside, and the path to Applejack, Pinkie Pie, Fluttershy, and Rarity watching beyond the gate. Pinkie waved.

“It was the wind,” Twilight said with a weak smile. She waved back to Pinkie, then walked to the door to close it before it could slam itself shut again.

Rainbow let out a long breath. “So, I may have been a little startled.” She purposefully avoided looking at Twilight when she said this. “Not scared, though,” she hastily added.

“I was startled too,” Twilight confided, “it is kinda spooky in here. But it’s not like there’s anything that can, you know, hurt us.”

“I know. But if we do see any ghosts,” Rainbow said with the shadow of a smile, “I’m counting on you to do all the magic to drive them off.”

Twilight laughed, and Rainbow joined her. “Deal,” she said.

-/-

They went systematically from room to room on the first floor. At first Rainbow was on guard in case they encountered something out of the ordinary, but all there seemed to be in any of the rooms were sheet-covered furniture and little details of architecture or old paintings that Twilight studied with intense focus before moving on to the next thing covered in dust. She made comments about how old everything was and how things weren’t made that way now. It reminded Rainbow a little of taking a trip in school to any one of dozens of ancient structures that were within twenty minutes flying distance from Cloudsdale, but Twilight’s endless supply of random facts were more interesting that anything she could remember from any school trip. She put this down to not being expected to complete a quiz on what she had learned when she got back to the library. After checking out all of the rooms on the first floor – the highlight to Rainbow being the massive ancient stove in the kitchen, but that may have been because she was starting to get hungry – and deciding the door that led to the basement should probably stay locked if it was bolted closed with such a large padlock, they eventually took the huge staircase in the entrance to the second floor.

“So, Rainbow,” Twilight said as she walked, pivoting her head to see inside another room stacked with furniture shrouded in white cloth, “I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

Rainbow walked behind Twilight, watching her. She was less interested in exploring the Manor, now that that they had been inside for a while without anything really spooky or awesome happening; conversation was welcome. “Sure. What’s up?”

“I’ve been thinking about the three versions of the Maresdon Manor story everypony knows, and I can’t quite figure out what your version means.”

“What do you mean, what it means? It’s just meant to be a scary story.”

“Well, yes.” Twilight stopped to examine a painting on the wall. Rainbow saw it was of the gardens in full spring bloom. “But what makes something scary varies, especially local legends that are passed from pony to pony without ever being written down anywhere. These kinds of stories often can tell you a lot about the ponies telling them.”

“You sound like you’ve been reading a book about this, or something,” Rainbow said, looking at the way Twilight’s light caught in the pictureframe.

Twilight smiled. “Well, I have been looking into folklore recently, for fun. Where local stories come from, how they change over time, the common themes that show up in areas that had almost no contact with each other. It’s interesting. It’s kinda like fairytales for grown-ups.”

This made Rainbow Dash snort laughter. “Yeah, I guess it is, kinda,” she said. “So what sort of thing should my story mean? What’s it supposed to say about me?”

“Well, Applejack and Pinkie’s version was easy enough to understand. There’s often a strong current of distrust for magic that runs through earth pony legends.” Twilight moved on from the picture, and Rainbow followed.

“You mean Applejack and Pinkie Pie distrust magic?”

“Not really. It’s just a part of the earth pony experience. Most earth ponies don’t tend to grow up around advanced unicorn magic – most unicorns don’t tend to either, to be honest – so it’s always going to be a little unfamiliar. I guess I feel the same way about flying; it’s still a little unusual for me to balloon to somewhere and get to see so much of the area from so high up.”

“I get it. What about Rarity’s story?”

“That one had me wondering until the end, when she said it was the gardener ponies were supposed to be frightened of afterwards instead of Winthrop Maresdon. Unicorns have their own hang-ups about magic that come out in stories.” Twilight paused in a doorway to an empty room with a fireplace at the far end.

Rainbow stood beside her and asked, “Like what?”

“Guilt,” Twilight said. “For hundreds of years unicorns believed they were superior to earth ponies and pegasi because of their magic, so there are many variations on stories that warn against using your magic against other ponies, or where a unicorn thinks other ponies are beneath her and that becomes her undoing in the end.”

“But,” Rainbow said, “but that was all so long ago! I mean, you don’t feel guilty about your magic, do you?”

“Well, I don’t, and I doubt many other unicorns do either, but sometimes the moral of the story stays even when society has moved on. That’s what’s interesting about folktales. Finding how the stories fit into history, where they line up with actual events and what happens to them over time. It gives history a flavor, you know?”

Rainbow had never been very interested in history herself – too many dates and sites of famous battles and names of famous commanders to confuse – but when Twilight spoke about something she was interested in, she had a shine in her eyes and a change to the pace of her voice that made Rainbow reconsider her dismissal of the whole subject for a moment. “Yeah,” she said, “that sounds pretty cool.”

“But what I haven’t been able to figure out,” Twilight said, “is what the pegasus version is about, underneath. It’s similar to the earth pony version, but it’s not quite the same.”

Rainbow thought for a moment, then her eyebrows shot up. “Oh, I know! It’s…” She paused, and she suddenly found looking away slightly difficult due to how close she was to Twilight with them standing together in the doorway. “This is gonna sound kinda dumb.”

“I’m sure it’s not dumb,” Twilight reassured her. “What is it?”

“…Plants.”

“Plants?”

“Pegasi have a thing about plants,” Rainbow said. “Especially plants that do things plants don't normally do. There's something that pegasus parents say to their foals, if they’re going down out of the clouds: stay away from strange plants.”

“That actually seems like pretty good advice,” Twilight said, considering.

“It is,” Rainbow agreed, “but it’s kinda extreme sometimes.” Rainbow lowered her voice, as if someone might overhear what she was about to say. “When I was a filly, I thought that all plants were poisonous. I wouldn’t have eaten anything that wasn’t, y’know, already a meal.”

Twilight giggled a little. “Really?”

“Applejack had to kick an apple out of one of her trees and bite into it right in front of me before I believed anything she grew was safe to eat,” she said with a sheepish smile.

“That’s so…” The smile on Twilight’s face faded. It was replaced by a blank look, as if she was trying to hear a whispered conversation.

“What,” Rainbow asked, a note of panic in her voice, “what is it?”

“Do you…?” Twilight’s eyes were unfocused, staring into a distance beyond the walls of the Manor. She backed out of the room and took a couple of steps sideways down the hall.

“Twilight? This isn’t funny, stop trying to freak me out.”

“I can feel something… I think it’s coming from…” She stepped around a corner in the hallway, and Rainbow trotted to keep her in sight. The corner led to a spiraling staircase tucked halfway behind a wall with a single yellowed potrait hanging on it.

When Twilight put her hoof on the first step, Rainbow had to speak up. “Twilight?” She swallowed. “Are you sure that’s such a good idea?”

“There’s nothing to be worried about,” she said, but her voice was distracted, distant. “I just want to see what’s up here.” She started ascending, and added as an afterthought: “You can stay down there, if you’d like.”

No way. Rainbow had told her share of ghost stories to know that one of the things you did not do under any circumstances with dealing with spirits, shades, or the supernatural was to split up. She rushed up the stairs to fall in one step behind Twilight.

The stairs led up to a single small room with a sloped ceiling on either side and one large window covered with a heavy black curtain at the far end. A desk, which was the first piece of furniture either pony had seen in the Manor not draped in a white sheet, sat in the middle of the room, seeming lonely in the otherwise empty room. Twilight headed straight for the desk, and Rainbow followed. Three objects sat upon it with a queer precision – a candle lamp to the left, complete with an unburnt candle, a quill from some colorful bird to the right, and in the center, a small but thick leatherbound book.

Twilight wasted no time opening the book. Rainbow bit her lip and cringed away, but when nothing happened after Twilight examined the first page, then the second and the third, she relaxed a little.

Twilight flipped rapidly through all the pages. “I don’t understand,” she said, more to herself than to Rainbow Dash, and flipped the pages one more time.

“What is it?”

“This book… it’s giving off some kind of strange magical energy. It’s like it’s been enchanted, but I’ve got no idea what sort of spell feels like this…”

Rainbow looked at the pages of the book as Twilight fanned them back and forth – it looked like all of them were blank. “It looks like a diary,” she said. “Maybe whatever’s written there is, y’know, hidden by some magic or something.” A similar thing had happened in Daring Do and the Submerged City.

“Maybe,” Twilight pondered, “but why make the spell so complicated…?”

“I wouldn’t want anyone reading my diary. Would you?”

Twilight went into deep thought following this question. Rainbow was about to nudge her shoulder when she said, “Or… or, it’s not a diary at all, but notes. Research notes. Mare Winthrop’s research notes!” Twilight turned to Rainbow, her eyes bright and shining. “Mare Winthrop wrote letters to other unicorns living all over Equestria. They were exchanging new magical theories, and just before she died her letters implied she had been right on the edge of a big breakthrough in potioncraft, but nopony ever found any record of what she had discovered! What if this is it? And what if I can decipher it? And what if I can finish her big breakthrough? It might change all of modern magic! There’s been so little advancement in potioneering, not since the Eleventh Law of Exponential Returns was formally recognized… if Mare Winthrop was really on to something, that would be amazing! Don’t you think?”

“I’m sure it would be,” Rainbow Dash said, studying Twilight’s expectant face in the glow from her horn, “if I had any idea what half of what you just said meant.”

It was unclear if Twilight was listening or not. “I’ve got to get back to the library, I have to start work on breaking this spell.”

“Wait!” Rainbow shouted, and grabbed Twilight by the shoulders.

Twilight blinked and furrowed her brow at Rainbow Dash. “What?”

“I thought you were going to teleport away.”

“Well, yeah, I was, until you grabbed me.”

Rainbow realized she was still holding on to Twilight, and put her hooves back on the floor. “Were you planning on taking the rest of us home too, or…?”

Twilight’s eyes went wide. “Oh! Um. Yes.” She glanced at the floor. “Sorry. It’s just, this-” She indicated the book. “-Is kind of… well, potentially-”

“A really big deal?” Rainbow finished for her.

“Yeah.” Twilight smiled, unable to contain her excitement.

“I get it,” Rainbow said. She gently nudged Twilight’s shoulder. “Just don’t, y’know, forget your friends or anything.”

“You remind me, okay?”

“Sure.”

Twilight smiled again, then closed her eyes. A bright flash of light brought them out to the edge of the gardens where the other four were waiting.

“Hi Rainbow! Hi Twilight!” Pinkie exclaimed. “It’s good neither of you were eaten by ghosts!”

“I didn’t say I thought they were eaten by ghosts,” Rarity huffed.

“Then I suppose it was somepony else who was sayin ‘The light, the light, cover your eyes, cover your eyes,’ huh?” Applejack said. Rarity chose to busy herself with tightening the scarf keeping her mane secure rather than answer.

“What did you see?” Fluttershy asked. “Was it interesting?”

“Very,” Twilight said. “We-”

“I hate to be rude and interrupt,” Rarity said, “but could we maybe have this conversation inside?”

“Oh. Yes,” Fluttershy agreed, “that would be nice.”

Twilight took a moment to prepare. “Hold on, everypony.”

The six ponies disappeared in a bright flash. None of them saw the white light – thin and pale compared to the light Twilight had produced, but not dissimilar – coming from behind the curtain of the highest room.

Act III – ‘Mystery’

Synchronicity, Act III – ‘Mystery’

Sunlight glittered through the leaves. Within the inner branches of the tree was a cocoon of shifting green light, with only the occasional random dart of bright white finding its way to Rainbow Dash’s field of vision. She lay sprawled on a bough, a convenient pillow behind her head. She was comfortable. She was warm. Her eyes were heavy and closed off to the world. She was going to get some sleep. Lots and lots of sleep.

In the dream she was back in the Manor with Twilight. Twilight was explaining something that Rainbow already knew, even down to the words Twilight used to explain it, but Rainbow listened anyway. Twilight turned a corner and Rainbow followed her, but then she was rounding another corner at the end of an impossibly long hallway. Rainbow ran to catch up to her, and caught sight of Twilight’s tail disappearing down another turn. She followed left, then right, then… which way? She whipped her head around, but all the hallways in the maze were lined with the same picture of the husk of the gardens. She was about to call for Twilight, had the thought to call for her. She could feel the muscles in her mouth go through the motions, but no sound came out. And that’s when Rainbow Dash realized she wasn’t alone in the Manor.

A great and terrible presence had stirred to life somewhere far away in the Manor. It may have been miles away in the maze, but it knew she was there. She could sense it sweeping through the hallways like night, like smoke, coming for them. For a second she saw through both her eyes and its eyes, saw herself in front of it, and she began to run, but she was impossibly slow. She tried to use her wings, but they stuck in the air as if it were tar. She couldn’t tell how fast the ravenous raving thing behind her was, only that there was no way she would outpace it. She hurled herself at a door and it splintered into a million shards. Twilight was behind the door. Her body had become a tree, dead for years, frozen in place. Rainbow had enough time to understand she had been too late, too late to find her, too late to act, when the nightsmoke engulfed her. She spat a wilted rose out of her mouth. Its petals were black as a starless night.

Rainbow woke with a start, nearly falling out of the tree. Her wings reflexively shot out to right herself, and she took several deep breaths. Then she screwed up her eyes and slammed a hoof into the trunk of the tree.

“I just want to get some sleep!” she moaned, her voice cracking.

It had started after they all got back to the library and everypony was settling down to sleep – everypony except Twilight, who took the first opportunity she got to sneak off into the basement and start running experiments on the blank book. Rainbow had been thinking back to being inside the Manor, how it had been kinda neat to poke around someplace where you weren’t really supposed to be, and how different it was from going on guided (and forced) tours of historical structures around Cloudsdale. She was half-imagining, half-remembering peeking under one of the covered pieces of furniture and Twilight explaining that it was a such-and-such design made from something and something-else-or-other when she fell asleep.

In the first dream she was in the gardens with Twilight. They were trapped in an impossibly tall hedge maze where black roses bloomed from every wall. Twilight insisted they weren’t lost and kept pausing to look at the roses, even though they were all the same. Rainbow kept trying to warn her to stay away from the thorns. Twilight told her the roses didn’t have thorns, and she ate one off the hedge. Then her eyes filled with inky black mist, and she became rooted to the spot. Rainbow tried to get her to move, to respond, but then the world was swallowed in shadow. She was falling and stuck at the same time, with an infinity of nothing surrounding her.

Rainbow had sat bolt upright. She wasn’t floating in nowhere-space, she was on the floor of the library. She tried to pin the bad dream on having one too many of the cupcakes Pinkie had brought with her that had been more frosting than cupcake, and shut her eyes again.

The dreams were different each time, and yet the same. She always dreamed about Twilight, and the Manor, and something terrible that happened. In one they were climbing a staircase that stretched for miles in the sky, the charcoal-black bannisters carved into roses, and at the top stair Twilight slipped and slid backwards out of sight into the black fog that had settled a couple dozen steps behind them. In another she and Twilight had melted through the floor of the hallway and fell through the ground level, through the basement filled with fields of black roses, and beyond, plunging into never-ending darkness. Rainbow tried to shout for Twilight, but her mouth filled up with shadow and she was silenced.

She tried staying awake as long as she could between brief moments of sleep, staring at the clock face standing in a sliver of moonlight, but it didn’t help; the interruptions to her sleep made her more tired, which in turn forced her asleep to have more nightmares. Rainbow Dash was not in the habit of calling her bad dreams nightmares – not the kind everypony has, where they’re going about their business and all of a sudden have no wings and start to fall out of the sky, or they’re back at school for some reason despite being too old – but these were not regular bad dreams that every pony had. When the morning finally came, Rainbow was the first awake, surprising Pinkie who clearly hadn’t been expecting anypony else to be awake with the first rays of the sun. Rainbow played it off as if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep without a proper cloud, which was a kinda lame excuse, but by then all the noise Pinkie was making had woken Applejack, and the whole issue had been forgotten.

When she left, Rainbow had headed straight for her bed, convinced that it would make all the difference to be up in the skies again. Despite everything being safe and comfortable, she dreamed of Twilight Sparkle stirring a cauldron of some nebulous liquid in the entrance of Maresdon Manor with black stains on her hooves and up her forelegs that looked like blood, and when she tried to warn her about the roses growing from the cauldron, the smoke around them turned black and she went blind. Rainbow tried everything, from drinking two full glasses of warm milk to sleeping on her back the wrong way around to pulling Tank into bed with her – none of it was helpful. Now, under the canopy of an apple tree with her eyes screwed up and her face hot, her thoughts started to seem more like Rarity’s or Fluttershy’s than her own. What if this kept happening, forever? What if she never got proper sleep again? What if she couldn’t ever take another nap and slowly went mad? Could that happen? Rainbow was sure that Twilight would know all of the side-effects of not sleeping properly (or ever), and while having that information would bring a certain grim finality, it was almost worse to not know and imagine more and more elaborate ways in which things could get worse.

Twilight would know…

And then Rainbow Dash realized who could help her.

-/-

“Hey, Twilight?” she called. “You around?”

It was clear from glancing around that she wasn’t. The library was neater than it had been when Rainbow had left, but it didn’t seem to be up to Twilight’s usual standards of organization, and it certainly wasn’t like Twilight to half-heartedly organize anything. Spike was away in Canterlot, getting his phoenix registered; his absence had been the reason Twilight invited everypony to her house for a sleepover in the first place. It wasn’t until she spotted a stack of books sorted not by author or subject but the color on the spine that she realized it must have been Rarity who had straightened things up after last night. Rainbow imagined her with one hoof out the door, then turning back to maybe just pick a few things up and put a few things away, and before she knew it she was sorting stuff in ways that were one hundred percent Rarity and zero percent Twilight. This scenario, however, didn’t really allow for Twilight to have emerged from the basement since she went down there last night. Which wasn’t so unusual; Twilight sometimes went unseen for days when she fixated on something especially tricky. There was no reason to worry.

All the same, Rainbow trotted a little quicker to reach the door to the basement.

The stairs that led down from the main area of the library were lit with a pale white light. Rainbow could hear a deep low buzz that got louder with each step down. A crackling sound interrupted the buzzing, and the hallway was lit for a moment in bright green. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, Rainbow poked her head around the corner.

All of the machines Twilight kept in the library’s basement nestled among the tree’s roots were alive and running. A squat one in the corner churned a murky liquid inside of it. Another had a series of lit tubes mounted on its front, the tubes shifting lazily through an array of colors. A large metal box hissed out a burst of steam, only to have the steam sucked up into a tube that led up and away into the ceiling. A complex array of lights and lenses were angled to the center of the room, all pointed at the book recovered from the Manor, resting open on a metal table. Twilight was channeling a yellow light from her horn to one of the lenses, temporarily turning the basement a pleasant lemony color. She let the spell lapse and went to check the book, then let out a groan of frustration.

“Nothing?” she asked. “What am I not doing right? What am I missing? Think, Twilight, think!” She began to pace back and forth. It was only after a couple of moments that she looked up from the floor and realized she wasn’t alone. She approached Rainbow with a fervent gleam in her eyes.

“Wha-” Rainbow began, but was loudly shushed. Twilight scanned her with the same lemony-yellow light, then paced around her and subjected her to a spell that was a pale blue. Rainbow was nudged to stand underneath one of the lenses and bathed in emerald green light. It was at this point that Twilight collapsed to the floor and threw her hooves over her face, defeated.

“Uh… Twilight? What, uh, was all that?” Rainbow asked after a moment when she was sure Twilight was either going to start crying or magically setting things on fire.

“I have been up all night,” Twilight said from beneath her hooves, “trying to make sense of the magical signature coming from that book. I have tried every spell I know and every test I could look up, and I have no idea what it is.” She stood up and moved to stand over the book. “I have only learned three hundred and twelve things the magical signature is not. And now I can feel it on you, too!” She strode towards Rainbow and grabbed her around the shoulders. “Did you go back to the Manor?” she asked in a tone that was nearing accusation.

“No!” Rainbow exclaimed.

Twilight’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure!” She shrugged off Twilight’s hooves. “Just chill out for a second, will you?”

The air went out of Twilight like a deflating balloon. Her eyes softened. “I’m sorry. It’s just, I haven’t-”

“Haven’t slept, yeah,” Rainbow finished for her.

“And I was so sure I would find what that magic was quickly – in an hour or two, at most – and I don’t have anyone to help me organize my experiments, since Spike’s away-”

“What about your owl?” Rainbow asked.

“Owloysius went to sleep hours ago,” Twilight sighed, “and he’s not very good at taking dictation.”

Rainbow Dash studied Twilight’s face to see if she was being serious or not. A ghost of a smile appeared on Twilight’s lips, which made Rainbow break into a full grin, which in turn started Twilight laughing. Soon the pair were stuck in a loop of wild laughter where all it took was a look from one to set the other off again. They ended sprawled on the floor, holding each other for support, gasping for air.

After she was calm enough to speak, Twilight said, “I don’t remember what we were laughing about.”

“Me either.”

Twilight took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I needed that, though. With all this researching and testing and that crazy dream I had, I haven’t been able to-”

“Huh, what?” Rainbow said. “Dream? I thought you hadn’t slept at all.”

“Oh, I fell asleep for a moment at the desk down here while I was waiting for my astrological influence analysis to finish.” She indicated one of the less active machines with a headnod. “It takes a while, and it makes this nice humming sound-”

“What was it about?” Rainbow didn’t know how an astrological influence analysis was performed, and she could find out later if she really wanted to. “The dream. Was it about the Manor?”

“It was, actually.” Twilight’s gaze drifted off as she recalled the memory. “You were with me, and we were looking for something important, but I didn’t quite know what it was, so we had to check all of the rooms to find it. But after we had looked everywhere, it turned out the thing we were looking for had been in your mane the whole time.”

“What was it?”

“A rose,” Twilight said. “A black rose.”

“Twilight,” Rainbow said slowly, “I’ve been having that same dream. Since last night, every time I close my eyes I have a dream about the Manor and you and black roses.”

Twilight’s expression became unreadable. “I know I checked for oneiromancy, but maybe…” She glanced back at the book. For a long moment she stared at it, immobile, then she grabbed the book in a magical bubble and turned back to Rainbow, her eyes bright and active.

“Rainbow, come to bed with me.”

The matter-of-fact way Twilight said this made Rainbow question if she had heard her correctly. “What?” she spluttered.

“I want to have another one of these dreams. And I want to compare our dreams, if you have more.” She strode past Rainbow and started up the stairs. “Coming?”

“And you think this will help?”

“There might be a clue that can point me towards the right spell. And I don’t have much practical experience with dream-based magic, so this is actually kind of exciting!”

As Twilight outlined her theoretical education in dream magic, Rainbow silently followed to the loft of the library. Twilight set the book on top of a short stack of books already occupying her nightstand, climbed into her bed, and set a mask over her eyes. She looked at Rainbow as best she could and said, “Well, come on.”

“Listen, Twilight,” Rainbow said, and searched for a long while for the right words.

“Yes?”

“The dreams I was having… they weren’t exactly good dreams. The reason I kept waking up from them…” She trailed off, unable to finish her sentence. She looked up at Twilight to find her smiling.

“It’s okay, Rainbow,” Twilight said. “One of the first things I learned about magically-influenced dreams is that there’s nothing in them that can hurt you. Whatever happens, whatever you see… it’s just a dream. Harmless.”

“Just a dream,” Rainbow said, slightly uncertain. All the same, she got into the bed beside Twilight.

“You can remind yourself that you’re having a dream. It’s supposed to be easier than when you’re having a normal dream, but you’re less likely to wake up. It’s really like reading a story. So said Oneiromancy and You, anyway.”

“Oh-nero-what?”

“Dream magic. That was the title of the primer I studied out of. There might be a copy in the library too, but it’s not a very common subject ponies want to read about.”

Rainbow lay her head on the pillow and watched Twilight talk. “Why not?” she asked.

“Well, for a start, it’s only really relevant to unicorns, and it’s a very outdated form of magic. Dreams are tricky things to influence, and only a handful of unicorns were ever very good at it. It went through a brief revival as a kind of curiosity branch of magic, but nopony found any serious application for it.”

“How come?”

“Ponies tend to interpret dreams incorrectly, for whatever reason. Mostly unicorns used magical dreams to send silly messages to each other.”

“About how long ago was this, exactly?” Rainbow could feel her eyelids growing heavy again.

“Around the time Winthrop Maresdon was conducting her studies.”

“Do you think that’s a coincidence?”

“Not really.”

Rainbow looked at Twilight’s eyemask, wondering how much she could see through it. “So there’s nothing to worry about?” she asked.

“Nothing at all.”

Rainbow closed her eyes. “G’night, Twilight,” she said, and yawned.

“‘Night, Rainbow.”

Falling asleep in the afternoon sun proved very easy. Rainbow had many dreams that shifted seamlessly from one to the next – she was walking beside Twilight in the Manor gardens under a giant upturned glass vase, then she was in Twilight’s library looking at a book full of pictures of the Manor and her mouth was full of rose petals, then she was on the roof of the Manor while Twilight flew above her and she couldn’t follow because her wings had wilted – but she woke from none of them.

-/-

It was a pale white light brought Rainbow Dash out of sleep. For a moment it seemed like another dream, but finding herself in Twilight’s bed and not the Manor convinced her she was awake. She could hear Twilight breathing; she must have turned over and moved closer to Rainbow during the night.

“Twilight,” Rainbow whispered, and nudged her, “wake up.”

Twilight stirred. “Hm?” she murmured, her expression blank beneath her mask.

“The book.” Rainbow kept her voice low. “Look at the book.”

Twilight slid the mask up her face and turned around. Any traces of the fogginess of sleep vanished when she saw the pale white glow coming from the open pages. She sprang out of bed and paced around the book with an expression of intense scrutiny. “Unbelievable,” she breathed.

Rainbow was about to ask what was unbelievable when the light vanished, leaving them in darkness. Twilight’s horn began to glow, revealing the expression on her face. It wasn’t the mundane look of excitement she wore when reading an interesting passage in a book or passing on a new piece of knowledge to somepony: this was the thrill of being the first to see something, to push into uncharted territory, of pure discovery. She looked how Rainbow Dash felt during her first Sonic Rainboom.

“Rainbow,” she said, “take a look at this.”

Rainbow pulled herself out of the bed to stand next to Twilight. The first page of the book was no longer blank, but covered in spidery writing. She leaned in closer to read.

Today marks the day where this grand old house once again has more than a single occupant. The writing of the instructions left for the gardener was a chore unlike any other, given the specific and demanding needs of all the flora. Is it harsh to wonder if one unfamiliar with the needs of Maresdon’s gardens would be up to the task? unbecoming? Perhaps, yet they are crucial to the work being performed here and it is vital their cultivation proceed in a timely manner. One should be permitted to fret for their well-being in such circumstances.

Spied the gardener at work; seems a rustic sort, the kind that comes with competence borne of year of experience and not years of instruction. I was unsure if he was aware of any observation of his efforts, but he had many an opportunity to notice such. There is work to be done in the basement, but the study seems a more compelling locale, with its fine view of all the grounds. Too much time cannot afford to be misspent…

“What is this?” Rainbow asked.

“You were right, Rainbow,” Twilight said, the triumph in her voice unmistakable. She tapped a hoof on one of the pages that had been blank minutes earlier. “This,” she said, “is Winthrop Maresdon’s diary.”

Act IV – ‘Horror’

Synchronicity, Act IV – ‘Horror’

“I know I checked for temporal distortions,” Twilight said as she paced back and forth, “they leave a huge signature, they’re very easy to trace, so it’s not that…”

Rainbow sat on a cushion, watching Twilight pace. She had seen Twilight brainstorm like this once or twice before, when she was stuck on something that seemed particularly difficult to figure out – there was a lot of walking from one spot to another and a lot of talking to herself, which made it difficult to get any reading done. Usually she sat her book down and observed; she had always had this impression that smart ponies like Twilight did a lot of contemplating in silence and sitting still and other things that would be boring to look at, but Twilight working a problem through was more like a wrestling match. Twilight would attack the problem, assaulting it with logical arguments and deductive reasoning until it could stand no more and tapped out, solved. The fire and passion that went into Twilight’s debates with herself were fascinating to watch.

This fight didn’t seem to be going in Twilight’s favor, however. The sun was lurking below the horizon outside, which meant they had been up for over an hour since being awoken by the light from the diary, and Twilight hadn’t made any headway with finding a link between the dreams and the diary entry that had not been there when they had fallen asleep. It wasn’t unusual for Twilight to take a long time to get anywhere, but Rainbow had never seen her go through three cups of coffee in an hour, and she took that as a bad sign. The mug that sat beside Rainbow was her first, and still mostly full. She picked it up and gently swirled it, watching the dark liquid splash up the sides.

“…I went over every page in the diary for Obfuscation Effects, but maybe I missed a page? I could check it again…”

Rainbow wished an idea would come to Twilight. They had compared dreams, briefly, but other than the common elements of the Manor and the black roses, there was nothing more to be gained by analyzing them, Twilight said. Rainbow thought maybe she was a little dismissive of this dream-magic, and she found herself wanting Twilight to be more open to discussing it further just so there was something for her to do. There was only so much waiting around she could handle. This never happened to characters in stories, she thought, watching a tiny bubble spin on the surface of the coffee. They always knew where to go next.

“You know,” Rainbow said into her mug, “this is a lot like a ghost story.”

“Hm?” Twilight stopped mid-stride, and looked at Rainbow.

“I mean, this is the sort of thing that only happens in stories, you know? Two ponies go into a spooky old building and take out an old book or a statue or something, and then funny things start to happen to them.”

Twilight was staring at Rainbow with an unreadable expression. “Only happens in stories,” she murmured to herself, and then the fire and passion bloomed on her face like the first rays of the morning sun. “Rainbow, you’re brilliant! I could kiss you!”

Rainbow blinked. “Wha-” she began to ask, but Twilight was already busy pulling books off a shelf and piling them into an ever-growing tower.

“Stories!” Twilight shouted, her voice full of glee. “Ghost stories!”

Rainbow glanced at the covers of one of the books: Spooky Stories for Fearless Foals, showing a translucent face grinning outside a bedroom window, all drawn in bright primary colors. Another book dropped on top of it, with only the title (Tales of the Unnaturale: A Compendium) printed on the cover in thin golden letters.

“Twilight,” Rainbow said, furrowing her brow, “aren’t these… fiction? Y’know… not real?”

“It’s just like studying folklore,” Twilight said, somewhat out of breath. “You read the same kind of story from different sources and you piece together the common elements. Where does the idea of ghosts come from? It has to start somewhere. So maybe-”

“Something like this happened to some ponies some time long ago, and they told a story about it and those ended up becoming ghost stories?”

“Exactly!” Twilight seemed satisfied she had gathered enough books; she had a twin stack only slightly shorter than herself. “And maybe we’ll find a solution out of studying the source material. Second-hand source material. Whatever.” She looked at Rainbow, eyes bright. “It all fits so far – unexplainable activity linked to a place where a death occurred, repeated supernatural phenomena…”

“And the creepy house, the violent deaths, weird dreams about the same stuff, somepony dying before they got to finish something major in their life, the glowing lights at night,” Rainbow added.

“I hadn’t thought of some of those, but you’re right,” Twilight said, then tilted her head to the side. “Hey, how do you know all these things about ghost stories? I've only ever seen you reading Daring Do.”

“Not all ghost stories are in books. You’re looking at Cloudsdale’s number one authority on comics.”

Twilight paused, then giggled. “Really?”

That wasn’t the reaction Rainbow had expected. “What?” she asked, slightly deflated.

“Isn’t reading comics kind of… dorky?”

“What? No!”

“I mean, I just can’t imagine somepony as cool as Rainbow Dash reading comic books…”

“Comics are cool!” Rainbow protested.

“But you don’t still read them, right?”

“Well, no, because…” Rainbow was about to say something about that being foal’s stuff, when she realized two things: one, that Twilight had trapped her; and two, that Twilight had been teasing her. She tossed a cushion at Twilight, who batted it to the side with a glob of purple energy and laughed. Rainbow smiled and rubbed the back of her neck. “They were cool when I was a filly, okay?”

“But you were so adamant about not liking reading,” Twilight said, “and it’s pretty much the same thing, isn’t it?”

“No, not really. Comics always go straight to the action. There’s none of that boring stuff like in the beginning of most books where it tells you where the story’s going on and what the main character is like, you just get it in the first couple of pages.”

“Not all books are like that,” Twilight noted.

“I know that now,” Rainbow said, “but the only books I’d ever had to read were all for school, and those were all boring. Well, maybe you wouldn’t have thought they were boring, but I sure did.”

“What was boring about them?”

“I don’t know, everything? Most of the stuff we studied in Literature was all famous old pegasus stories, and all of those are either about a general who loses a war because he didn’t listen to his lower officers or a soldier wondering why she was a part of the war she barely came home from. I know it’s meant to say something deep and meaningful about the pony condition and all, but would it have killed anypony to put in an awesome fight scene or something? I bet old unicorn stories at least have cool magic in them.”

Twilight smiled. “I guess they do. I never studied them. For school, I mean. I learned a lot of magical theory with the Princess, but never went in-depth with any other subject. I read a lot of the classics in my free time, but it always feels like I’m never going to be done with all of them.”

“I think that’s a better way to do it. If I had to study Daring Do and write papers on what the book was saying about the conflict with Germaney in the real world, I’d probably hate those books, too.”

“I like doing things like that,” Twilight said. “Exploring the text further. Finding where a story fits into history.”

“Well, yeah, that’s cool and all, but I didn’t like being made to do it. It’s like, I was told these old boring stories were awesome and then had to learn all the background information that confirmed it was all boring. I would have liked to learn more about stories I thought were cool in the first place. But all those were in comics. Y’know, not serious stories.”

“I think I understand. So, what’s so cool about comics?” Twilight asked with a smile.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you just told me what you didn’t like about books when you were a filly, but why were comics better? Make me see that they’re cool.”

Rainbow paused to consider. It wasn’t a thing she had thought about for a long time. The three big cardboard boxes full of her old comics were sitting in a closet, probably still taped shut from when she moved out of her parents’ house. “I really liked the hero comics, first off. They’re kinda cheesy, but the whole fighting for good against evil thing, that was for me. Before I got my cutie mark, I’d secretly wish my special talent was something I could use to beat up bad guys, save the day, and then say cool one-liners.”

“Well, it almost is,” Twilight said with a wry smile.

“Almost.” The Mare-Do-Well incident flittered briefly though her mind; that was still something that made her cringe a little to think about, so she cast about for a way to shift the subject. “When I got a bit older, I got into horror comics. Ghosts, vampires, ghouls, stuff like that. The spookier the better.”

“So that’s how you got so good at telling ghost stories.”

“Yeah. I think I kept half of flight camp awake at night every year. I was the scary story master.” She laughed. “But I guess I sort of just… stopped. Grew out of it. Reading comics, I mean. I never thought about stopping, it just... changed.”

“It’s funny how that happens, isn’t it?” Twilight said. “How you change.” She looked down at her coffee mug. “I used to really hate the smell of coffee. I’d refuse to go into the kitchen until my dad was done with it. Now it’s what morning smells like.”

“It is funny,” Rainbow agreed. “How much you change.” A short laugh escaped her. “I mean, I’d never in a million years imagine I’d be spending afternoons in a library. Reading. And liking it.” Twilight giggled, but Rainbow maintained a straight face. “I’m serious! I might have had to beat myself up if I’d have done anything that uncool as a filly.”

“What’s so uncool about reading, anyway? I never thought it was uncool, but I’m a big egghead, so I may not understand everything about being cool,” Twilight teased.

“Well, like…” Rainbow glanced at a knot in the library’s floor, then back at Twilight. “So, okay, real talk? You know how I can be a bit… competitive, sometimes?”

“I may have noticed.”

Rainbow ignored Twilight’s deadpanning. “Reading, and Literature, and stuff… it wasn’t something I was very good at. In school, I mean. Like, I could do it, it just…”

“Wasn’t interesting?”

“Right. It wasn’t. Wasn’t what I was interested in, so none of what I was ever supposed to read stuck in my head. But comics…” Rainbow gestured with her hoof. “I knew every detail. Like, issue numbers and back-stories to all the minor characters who were only ever in an issue once and when all the crossovers happened, all of it. Nopony knew more about comics than me. Nobody could beat my knowledge, you know? It’s like…”

“It was something you could win at,” Twilight said.

“Yeah, and reading books wasn’t. So that was for dorks, and comics were for the cool ponies. In Cloudsdale, anyway,” Rainbow added, noting Twilight’s skeptical look. “That’s sort of how everything was. Winners and losers, and I was gonna be a winner no matter what.” Rainbow paused in reflection. “Not everything is like that, though. Like, your folklore stuff. How would you win at that? You're not competing with anypony. It’s just a thing you do for you.”

“I want to show you something the Princess showed me,” Twilight said, and she cast about the library looking for something. Her eyes settled on Rainbow’s coffee mug, long since cool and still mostly full. “Can I borrow that?”

“Sure,” Rainbow said, and nosed it over to her. “I don’t really like coffee that much. Makes me jumpy.” She grinned at Twilight. “You know, for the next time we’re up early trying to figure out how we can be having the same dreams.”

“I’ll try to remember for then” Twilight said, then closed her eyes. A second mug appeared in a bright flash, identical but empty.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” Rainbow said, impressed. “Copy stuff with magic.”

“It’s only a standard replication spell,” Twilight said. “It doesn’t last very long, so it’s not good for very much.”

“Still. It’s cool.”

Twilight smiled, then shifted her attention to the twin mugs. “So, you know what would happen in I poured the coffee from one mug into the other,” she said, and did so, careful not to spill any. “That’s how all matter works, and all magic to some extent. It can move around and change shape and form, but there’s no real way to create or destroy it.”

“Pfft, I could just drink the coffee. Coffee gone.”

“From the mug, yes,” Twilight said, “but it would move through you, change shape and form…”

Rainbow considered this for a moment, then wrinkled her nose when she figured out what Twilight was getting at. “Okay, I guess you’re right.”

“But knowledge doesn’t obey the rules of magic and matter, and that makes it something very special. If you imagine the coffee is knowledge… something that you know that I don’t, for example, and you tell me…”

A soft green light surrounded the full mug. This time when Twilight poured from one to the other, the empty mug filled but the full mug never decreased, leaving Twilight with two cups of coffee.

“Princess Celestia showed me that in my first lesson as her personal pupil. She said all of Equestria was built on the shared knowledge and friendship and love from the ponies that came before us, and the ponies before them, and all back through history. I never forgot that, and I wanted to learn all there was to learn about all that history that brought us to where we are today.” Her serious expression softened a little. “But when the Princess did it, it was with water and clear goblets, not cold coffee.” She concentrated on the copy-mug for a brief moment, and it dissolved in a shower of technicolor lightdrops.

“It was still pretty cool,” Rainbow assured her. A thought crossed her mind, and she voiced it. “You know, I don’t think I would have liked you very much if I knew you as a filly, Twilight. I would have just seen a bookworm, and not seen, y’know, you.” She paused, then added, “I’m glad I didn’t know you when I was a filly.”

She looked up to see Twilight chuckling silently to herself. “I’m glad you didn’t, too,” she said with a smile. Rainbow suddenly found it very difficult to look away from Twilight’s eyes. No more than an extra second or two could have passed to have turned their glance into a long gaze, but that extra second or two made a world of difference.

“Well…” Twilight said, not moving, “we have a lot of reading to get done, so…”

Rainbow blinked. “Right. Yeah. We do. Let’s get to it!” She hastily grabbed the first book from the stack and cracked it open, raising it in front of her face. For no reason she felt warm and jittery, like she had just downed all coffee that sat in front of her instead of letting it slowly cool in the mug. She focused on the book in front of her, forcing herself to start reading the words on the page.

-/-

That day, and the next few that came after it, passed without significant incident. The library was quiet, filled with only the sound of page scraping on page. They would record their findings of what happened in each ghost story, then set it to the side to take a fresh book. Each night the diary of Winthrop Maresdon would glow to life. Twilight would dutifully watch the new entries appear before climbing back into bed. When Spike returned from Canterlot, he seemed unfazed by the mountains of unshelved books and the giant chalkboard set up to one side of the library covered with tally marks with ‘Common Themes of Ghost Stories’ written at the top, but was mildly surprised to see Rainbow helping Twilight research something.

-/-

Rainbow had managed to make it through eleven of the Twelve Tales for After Midnight before she realized the sun had long since sunk below the horizon. Twilight had made a big dent in the stack of books she had prepared for that day. A long roll of parchment marked with neat bullet-pointed notes sat beside her. She held her quill in her mouth as she read.

Rainbow stretched her legs and her wings, then noticed the clock. “Wow, is that the time?” She pulled out a loose feather and tucked it into her book at the beginning of chapter twelve.

Twilight looked up from her parchment. “How did it get that late?” she asked, rubbing stiffness out of her neck.

“Hey, you wanna go get some food?” Rainbow asked, suddenly realizing all she’d had to eat today was a mouthful of coffee and an apple between chapters six and seven.

“Everywhere will be closing by now…”

“Oh yeah,” Rainbow said, dejected.

“I could make us something,” Twilight suggested.

“I didn’t know you could cook, Twilight.”

“Well, I’m learning. I just don’t get much opportunity to practice, since Spike always chases me out of the kitchen. But since he’s asleep…” She trotted to her tiny kitchen and a book followed her, floating down from the loft. Rainbow was able to catch the title as it passed by: Simple Suppers for Two. “I should have everything for at least one recipe in here…”

Ten minutes later they were sat at Twilight’s kitchen table, a bean salad in front of them. “How is it?” Twilight asked.

“Good,” Rainbow managed around a mouthful of food.

“Are you sure?”

“Mm-hm.” She swallowed. “Yes. I wouldn’t say it’s good if it wasn’t.”

“Well, good.” She smiled and took a bite of her own salad. “I think it’s important to always be trying new things.”

“Cooking, folklore… you’re a pony of many talents, Twilight.”

Twilight looked away into her salad at the compliment.

“Hey, um…” It was suddenly very urgent that Rainbow Dash take a large sip of her water. Her mouth felt dry.

“Yes?” Twilight looked at her across the table.

“So… I’ve been thinking…” She glanced back at the chalkboard. “…Do you think we’ll have to go back to the Manor, to sort everything out with the diary?”

“Oh.” Rainbow thought that maybe she saw a strange expression on Twilight’s face for a second… disappointment? “Yes, that was going to be my hypothesis, too.” If she had been disappointed, it was now being masked by a smile. “Just wanted to be completely sure, first.”

“That’s probably safe,” Rainbow agreed.

“I was thinking we should go at night, around the same time new diary entries show up.”

“Makes sense.” None of this came as a surprise.

“And, if you’re ready, maybe we could go tomorrow night.”

“Tomorrow?” All of a sudden, that seemed too close. Too soon. Tomorrow was… well, there was barely anything left in today.

“If you’re ready, that is.” Twilight looked at Rainbow, her expression unreadable.

“Sure,” Rainbow said after a moment’s pause, “sure, I’m ready.”

“Alright,” Twilight said, “tomorrow night.” She nodded to herself.

“It’s a date,” Rainbow said, then took a large mouthful of beans. When she looked back up at Twilight, she was smiling.

“Yeah,” she said.

-/-

Rainbow found herself missing whole sentences Twilight spoke as she finished her meal. When she tried to read the last chapter of Twelve Tales for After Midnight, she found herself re-reading sentences over and over without taking them in. When she lay down in bed for the night, she hoped she would be able to concentrate after some sleep. It was going days reading without a break for a nap or two that did it. That and the coffee in the morning. Must have been.

Sleep was hard to find. Half-formed thoughts from the past few days ran through her head, collided, merged. It was like skimming through a thousand dreams. Twilight said it was funny how much a pony changed. Coffee poured from one mug to another without emptying. Rainbow said she was afraid to eat apples from trees. A question came to mind over a bean salad, but a different question was asked. Rarity said Winthrop Maresdon was a brilliant scholar but did very poorly around other ponies. Facts about old furniture were recited. Rainbow asked how you won at folklore.

In Rainbow’s dreams that night, she was standing on a rope bridge suspended over a bubbling lava flow. The bridge was old, the rope fraying, but if it broke she could fly away. Or could she? In some of her dreams she lost her ability to fly. If the bridge broke, she would find out.

Behind her lay Ponyville, the bridge leading right into the town square. There wasn’t a single cloud in the sky. The sun shone down. It was a perfect day. In the other direction, the bridge led to a pair of iron gates. Beyond them, shrouded in mist, lay the shape of the Manor.

She was carrying the diary in her mouth. She could continue across the bridge and finish things there, but the bridge only looked like it got worse from where she was standing. She could go back to the safety of Ponyville, but she might hit a rotten plank in the bridge and fall. Even if she made it back, she would still have the diary with her. She looked down at the swirling lava. She could drop the diary into it and fly off. But that seemed wrong, too. The dream wouldn’t let her do either of those things. So she watched the lava flow under the bridge, waiting for something to happen.

The dream seemed to last forever.

Act V – ‘Non-fiction’

Synchronicity, Act V – ‘Non-fiction’

“So,” Twilight said, looking up at the chalkboard, "we agree that we have to go back to the Manor?”

Rainbow turned away from the window and the night outside to look at Twilight. “Yep. Location of Death Significant.”

Twilight marked a little cross next to the Location of Death Significant heading, under which was the largest amount of tally marks.

“Plus," Rainbow added, “we keep dreaming about the Manor.”

“We do,” Twilight said, then turned her attention back to the board. “We should go back there at the same time new entries appear in the diary. That's...” She scanned the categories of common themes in ghost stories with a floating piece of chalk. “Repetition of Supernatural Phenomena at Specific Times.”

“Yeah.” Twilight marked it with a cross.

“And when that happens, we'll get the final piece of information we need to Help the Ghost Cross Over.” Twilight put a third cross next to Protagonist(s) Must Help Ghost 'Cross Over'. “Based upon the numerous references to the importance of completing her potion experiment and how often she focuses on the basement at the Manor, I think it's a safe bet that Winthrop Maresdon needs us to let the world know about what she discovered. Rainbow?”

“Hm? Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right.”

Rainbow was looking out the window again. In truth, she did not think that sounded completely right. She was thinking of how the gardener factored into the story. Winthrop Maresdon wrote a lot about him, too – about watching him from her study, about thinking of him when she was toiling away in the basement. He was a big factor in all three versions of the ghost story surrounding the Manor, and once or twice Rainbow had dreamed she was wearing a broad straw hat, the kind a farmer might have worn a generation or two ago. He had a part to play, Rainbow was sure...

“Rainbow?”

...and what about the roses, how did they...

“Rainbow!”

“Hm?” Rainbow snapped back to the library. Twilight was giving her a look: some frustration, a little concern.

“I asked if you were ready to go.”

“Oh.” She shook her head a little, as if to clear it of stray thoughts. “I am. I'm ready.”

“Okay then.” Twilight closed her eyes, and the bright flash of light enveloped them both.

-/-

The Manor was everything Rainbow remembered, and yet at the same time different. Dreaming of it every night, even in distorted and exaggerated dimensions, had given her a familiarity with the old house that felt strange for it being only her second time seeing it in the real world. It was no longer the stereotypical spookhouse standing abandoned while a thunderstorm rumbled in the distance. Now it seemed to be waiting for them, calm and patient in the still night. Welcoming them in. It was just a house, it would say if it could speak to them in direct words. There’s nothing dangerous in here. Nothing dangerous at all.

A chill ran up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold night air. A nervous panicky voice spoke up in her mind – You could just leave, there’s no reason to be here, it said – and Rainbow tried her best to ignore it.

“Ready?” Twilight asked.

“Yeah,” Rainbow replied. She hoped it wouldn’t be too obvious of a lie.

Twilight dropped the diary in her saddlebag. “Let’s go.”

They walked between the wide path that split the two halves of the front gardens. Rainbow’s eyes moved between the naked trees and dead bushes, searching for anything out of the ordinary. Her gaze flicked to Twilight, who seemed to be focused on the front door of the Manor and nothing else.

“So, Twilight,” Rainbow said, not wanting there to be silence when they entered, “nervous?”

“A little,” she said, although she didn’t sound it. “We could be on the edge of discovering something no pony’s ever seen before! Who wouldn’t be nervous?”

Oh. It was that kind of nervous. “Yeah,” she agreed with a shaky breath, following Twilight into the entrance room with the grand staircase.

“”I mean, it’s not like we’ll actually see a ghost, like in a story. Some kind of resonance, maybe, something that’s left an imprint in the world. But not a glowing transparent pony with chains on or anything. It might be that you won’t notice anything at all.”

The panicked voice came to life once again, clanging about her head. She’s not taking this seriously! it wailed. She read all those stories and she’s still not. Taking. It. Seriously!

“So,” Rainbow said, thinking of how best to phrase her question, “what do you think will happen, when the last entry appears?”

“I’m not sure,” Twilight said, “but it shouldn’t be dangerous. There’s nothing to worry about, Rainbow.”

Rainbow glanced back at the front door from the top stair. It wasn’t too late to leave. It wouldn’t be too late to grab the diary out of Twilight’s saddlebag and slam it on the floor and hustle Twilight out the door. This was what the clammy voice in her head wanted to do.

Instead she kept pace with Twilight. Twilight wasn’t take the threat of dealing with a ghost seriously, so she had to. She certainly wasn’t going to abandon her. Who was the expert here, anyway? Twilight needed her. There was a reason for her to be here.

She hoped that reason would keep the nervous voice quiet.

The small study was also unchanged: desk in the center of the room, heavy black curtain shutting out the moonlight. Twilight carefully placed the diary where she had found it, opened it to the last revealed entry, and took a step back.

“Now?” Rainbow asked.

“Now I guess we wait,” Twilight said.

They didn’t need to wait long. The glow came from the diary, a bright pure light that equaled the light from Twilight’s horn. A concentrated locus that was difficult to look directly at danced across the blank page, and in its wake came Winthrop Maresdon’s words. Rainbow stood beside Twilight to follow along as she read aloud.

Is there value to a life unlived? If one becomes shut off from the world, never touches another with either spirit or flesh, can such an existence truly be called a life? Even if this manner of exile is undertaken with the noblest of intentions…

There lies a crossroads. The path ahead is the life of solitude, and it is dark but not unfamiliar. Odd, that the dark should seem so comforting and safe. Laying ‘cross it is the path that leads to the rest of the world, its mess, its confusion, its many other occupants. Would it be a grievous undertaking to place a single hoof upon that crowded path? One could always find the way back. I tell myself this, yet I am not certain.

So many things different tonight. The candles burn in rooms that are not the study. Two places wait at the table that has been unused for many and many years. Drawers filled with knickknacks and baubles long forgotten have opened, closed, opened. So many niceties and little rituals to remember. It could all go so terribly wrong; even if all were to go right, all could be ruined. Would it not be wiser to keep the gardener in the garden until… no. He is too persistent, too persuasive, too pervasive. One cannot continue to work under these conditions. Better to invite in ruin. Better to shine a light and wonder no longer of missed opportunities, of lives unlived.

Afraid. Nervous. Afraid.

As Twilight spoke, Rainbow found she could for the first time picture the pony that Winthrop Maresdon had been. She could see her sitting at the chair in front of her, pausing to ink her quill and to think between sentences. This pony in her imagination didn’t seem like anything to be feared, ghost or not. Rainbow suddenly felt like she was very familiar with her.

“This is the night when she invited the gardener in,” Rainbow said to herself.

“I don’t understand,” Twilight said, “there’s nothing here. I was sure Winthrop Maresdon’s unfinished research was what was keeping her from crossing over…” She turned to Rainbow. “Did we do something wrong?”

No sooner had she spoken, there was a sound that echoed through the whole Manor. Rainbow knew it right away: it was the door banging open, then slamming shut. Twilight flinched and whispered, “What was that?” – Rainbow wondered if Twilight had been expecting nothing to happen. She still didn’t really believe they were dealing with a ghost, but Rainbow knew better. A strange feeling of calm washed over her as the hoofsteps sounded downstairs across the polished floor and up the stairs. It had all come together in her mind. It all made sense now.

It did not appear to have all made sense to Twilight. All the color had drained from her face. “Oh, no…” she moaned in a low voice.

“Twilight, it-” Rainbow tried to say, but Twilight cut her off.

“We were wrong! We were wrong and Rarity was right!”

“No, it’s-”

“The gardener!” Twilight hissed. “It was never Winthrop Maresdon, it was the gardener and he’s coming now!” She gripped Rainbow’s shoulders tight enough for it to hurt a little. The hoofbeats grew closer, louder despite there being a carpeted hallway leading to the tiny study.

“Twilight,” Rainbow said with all the force she could manage without shouting, “it’s okay. It’s not the gardener.”

“How can you know that?” Twilight was moving towards the door, all composure lost. “The diary-”

There were so many things she wanted to say, wanted to explain to Twilight. But the echoing hoofbeats were now sounding up the stairs and there was no time to say them all. Rainbow blocked Twilight's path to the study door, looked into her frightened eyes and said, “It will be okay. Just trust me.”

The door to the study opened with a stuttering creak. Standing on the other side was the figure of a pony. She was a pale stark white. Rainbow could see the faint outline of the banister through her. This could only be Winthrop Maresdon – or her spirit, or shade, or whatever you wanted to call it. Rainbow felt no fear. All of a sudden, she didn’t feel like she was part of a ghost story any more. It was like she was visiting an old friend.

The ghost of Winthrop Maresdon floated across the study, Rainbow and Twilight’s heads swiveling with synchronized precision to follow her. She touched the open diary with a transparent hoof, and the pages glowed with the same pale light that was throbbing out of her like a heartbeat. She then floated back and gazed at Twilight and Rainbow.

“I think we should go read,” Rainbow said, and Winthrop nodded. Her movements were slow, her expression blank, but her eyes were sharp and alive.

Twilight and Rainbow walked to the desk in lockstep with each other. They read from the diary, glowing with its own white light.

He brought black roses to the door and held them in his mouth, under the assumption that the black variety was my favorite by virtue of there being no other color among the roses in the gardens. That is the way I have remembered him. That image I can see clearly, even after such a long time.

The weeks that followed our dinner were like nothing else. All the qualities I had feared of common ponies – of all other ponies – none of these were present in Sour Patch. His soft-spoken manner belied no ill intent, his meaning always simple and pure. Yet he was possessed with an internal energy, the spark that was lacking in all others I had discarded in favor of my research. I desired to experience this spark more, desired to spend more of my time in his company. I desired.

Yet, it was still my grand experiment that occupied my mind in the moments I was not near him. I made rationalizations, I convinced myself that, once I had been successful, then time would never be a factor for us. There would be an eternity of time awaiting us. This made it possible to continue to work, but it did not make it simple. He would speak to me of marriage, of abandoning the Manor and the name that came with it to live a simple life, far from other ponies and free from anything that would chain us to this place. It tempted me, tempted me sorely. How I wish every night it had tempted me more.

At every step of the process of developing the potion, the potion I so foolishly named after the black roses, I was constantly mindful that its creation should not be understood by the wrong parties. I never for a moment ever thought the wrong party could be me. All the testing, all the study, all for naught. I had not brewed a method to mimic the most prized and elusive gift of the Princess, but merely had distilled a most toxic poison.

Twilight breathed in awe. “Of course she kept no notes.”

“What?” Rainbow asked. “What gift is she talking about?”

“The gift of eternal life,” Twilight said. “It’s something impossible to replicate through normal magic. If it could be put into a potion-”

“Wait, so Winthrop Maresdon found a way to make herself immortal?”

“She thought she did,” Twilight said, and looked back down to continue reading.

The Black Rose Potion – Black Rose Poison – worked quickly. I faded in a matter of mere days. Sour Patch stayed by my side for every hour, listening to my lifetime to regrets and apologies. When I grew too weak to voice them, I would look into his eyes, and he would understand.

Passing was like descending into a sleep from which one knows one will never wake…

“Wait…” Rainbow said, “does that mean what I think it means? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Rainbow,” Twilight said in a hushed whisper, “we’re standing in a room with an honest-to-goodness ghost, and this is what doesn’t make sense?”

“Good point,” she said, and kept reading.

Passing was like descending into a sleep from which one knows one will never wake. I saw no endless rolling light when I could see again, no place beyond the realm of mortals. I was confined to the Manor in death as I had been in life. I saw my gardener grieve, but could not console him. Saw him weep, but could not touch him. When I saw him imbibe of the Poison that had ended me, I could not stop him. In the moment he did, I did not want him to. It is my shame that I felt joy for the first time since being freed of my fleshy shell. If we could not be joined in life, then let us be joined in death!

This was not the way of things. His place in the afterlife was the gardens he had tended so diligently for me, cultivating the roses that would be the method of our passing. He was barred from me by the drawn curtains and locked doors I myself had placed while I lived. I could feel his presence, but it was little more than a whisper, a memory of a memory that served to remind me of my choice nightly.

I chose unwisely. I shut myself away from the world in life and so remain shut away from it in the afterlife. If there is any legacy I will have in the world, it will not be for any great discovery; it shall be for a truth I should not have been blind to. Do not isolate yourself out of fear. Do not use the thoughts of what could be to build a prison. Live a life full of hurt, of risk, of ill-conceived notions. Live a non-pristine life, for one cannot live a life without having these experiences. Live a life, because the only other choice is to not, and for all the pain and misery life will bring, it is the better choice.

When Rainbow finished reading, she glanced up at Winthrop. She was still gazing her impassive gaze. There must be something more. One more step. One last thing.

And then she knew what it was.

Rainbow turned to the heavy curtain over the window that overlooked the gardens, and yanked it to the side. She looked for the latch to the window and tried to turn it. Years of disuse made it reluctant to turn, but Rainbow refused to give up. She put all the strength of her legs into getting the little clasp to move, and finally it snapped open with a clack! Rainbow flung open the study window and turned back to Winthrop. She was smiling. A single tear, glittering like moonlight, ran down her cheek.

“Come on!” Rainbow shouted, rushing to the stairs. “We’ve got a lot of windows to open!”

-/-

When the last curtain was torn back and the final window forced open, the sun was lighting the sky from just beneath the horizon. “Are we done?” Twilight asked, tossing a heavy curtain over the bannister of the grand staircase.

“Almost,” Rainbow said, looking out into the garden. “Come look.”

Twilight stood beside her and peered out the window. In the first rays of morning stood two ponies, barely visible in the light. One was Winthrop Maresdon; the other a broad-shouldered stallion with a straw hat. They walked side by side into the sunrise, through trees and hedges, and slowly faded from view.

Rainbow and Twilight watched the garden for a moment longer. “I guess none of the stories were really true,” Rainbow said.

Twilight nodded, agreeing. “No, she wasn't anything to be afraid of. She was just... lonely.”

“Not any more,” Rainbow pointed out.

“No,” Twilight said with a smile, “not any more.” Rainbow saw a sudden thought appear on Twilight's face. She reached into her saddlebag for the diary she had once again taken from the study. It looked worn, the pages yellowed, the cover scratched and dented. “I can't feel anything from this any more.” She flipped through the pages, now filled with spidery writing. “It stops on the night Sour Patch had dinner with her, too. The last entry's gone.”

“That makes sense,” Rainbow said. “Protagonists Left Unsure of Legitimacy of Events,” she quoted from the chalkboard back in Twilight's library.

“Hm.” Twilight regarded the old book for a moment. “It would have been nice to have some proof.”

“Do you need proof? I mean, you know what happened.”

“That might be enough,” she said after some brief consideration.

A long moment of calm silence passed between the two ponies, broken by a lone bird singing to the morning.

“Hey, Twilight...” Rainbow said.

“Yes Rainbow?”

“I...”

A loud metallic thud made them both jump. They both spun to check what had made the noise, and when Rainbow saw what had been responsible, she felt a little silly. She walked over to the heavy padlock that had barred the door to the basement lying on the floor and nudged it with her nose. It had rusted in the sun.

“Wanna check it out?” Rainbow asked, indicating the door.

“Are you sure?” Twilight responded.

"I think so," Rainbow said.

-/-

They descended into the basement, Twilight lighting the open empty space with her horn. Rainbow’s first thought was of a wine cellar, because of all the barrels. That didn’t seem quite right, though, and there was an odd smell in the air.

Her hoof splashed in a shallow puddle. “What’s…” she started to ask, and then she saw the label on the side of one of the leaking barrels: a stencil of a black rose. She took a rapid step backwards and bumped into Twilight. “The barrels,” Rainbow said, “they must be full of…”

“The Potion,” Twilight finished, then corrected herself: "Poison. Sour Patch must have come down here before he... Well, he must have locked the basement off, so nopony else would come down here.”

“It’s leaking all over the place…” Rainbow said, eyeing the floor. She hovered a short distance off the ground. “Can we do something about it?”

Twilight considered for a moment. Then the aura around her horn changed color, from plain white to deep blue. All the barrels and all of the spilled poison on the floor glowed in the blue light for a moment, and then vanished with a pop!

“Awesome,” Rainbow said, setting herself down on the now-dry basement floor, “where’d it go?”

“I put it in a crater on the far side of the moon,” Twilight said without hesitation. “I don’t think anypony will find it there for a long time.”

Rainbow laughed. “No, I guess not. Now maybe the garden will start to grow back.”

"I hope so," Twilight said.

Rainbow looked at Twilight in the dim basement, her face lit by the soft glow from her horn. The memory of eating dinner and being unable to ask an important question came to her, strong as if she had been transported back to that moment. She looked into Twilight’s eyes, and found she had no trouble asking it now.

It turned out there was nothing to have been afraid of.

-/-

They walked through the garden towards the heavy gates just as Winthrop Maresdon and Sour Patch had done minutes before. Two birds sang, playing call-and-answer from the dormant trees. Rainbow and Twilight passed the remains of a low bush. On the end of one branch, waving back and forth in the breeze, was a single green leaf. In time, it would be joined by others, and after the bush came to life with the rest of the garden, it would also bloom with black roses.